Re: Christchurch and the Dark Social Web by Luke Munn

[Nick]

Quoth Geert Lovink: 
> we have just published this essay on our blog: Algorithmic Hate: Brenton 
> Tarrant and the Dark Social Web, an analysis on the role of social media in 
> the Christchurch killings, by Luke Munn, writing from Auckland/NZ:
> 
> .

Thanks for sharing Geert, I found the article very interesting 
indeed.

One interesting tension is between the more algorithmically complex 
and opaque sites more in the mainstream (twitter, facebook, youtube) 
compared to things like 8chan, which as far as I'm aware basically 
just promote what's most popularly re-shared and posted. So while 
sites like facebook can (as well described in the article) 
"effortlessly" change the sort of content one sees in mysterious 
ways that can gradually alter the social and political norms that 
are present, sites like 8chan don't facilitate the same sort of 
movement, beyond the sort of entrenchment that comes with 
desensitisation and repetition.
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Re: de Jong, Lovink, and Riemens: 10 Bitcoin

[Nick]

Quoth John Hopkins:

> I wonder, though, about the personal lives of the miners. Are
> they enjoying the fruits of their labor?, what are their daily
> living conditions?, what kinds of stresses are incurred by their
> activities?

Vice did an interesting short film about a bitcoin mine in China a 
few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I


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Re: Jody Ribtot: The Hostile Email Landscape

[Nick]

Quoth nettime's_landscaper:

> If you were to launch a new mail server right now, many networks would
> simply refuse to speak to you. The problem: reputation.

It is a sad state of affairs indeed. Bradley Kuhn recently wrote 
about very similar issues he had running his own mail server: 
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/15/email.html

It sucks in particular because email is already in a more precarious 
state than it should be with people relying more on surveillance-as-
a-business services for communication (admittedly gmail is also in 
that category, but at least it's a distributed system enough that 
one doesn't have to accept its terms to communicate with people who 
use it.) I am finding that the proportion of my friends I can write 
to electronically is gradually diminishing as a result. I find it 
sad.

Maybe some new service that is actually engineered to respect people 
(there are several reasonable looking candidates) will get popular 
enough that it will take the place email had. Maybe.


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Re: nettime nottime: the end of nettime

[Nick]

Quoth David Garica: 

 One other thought though there is much talk of 'sharing' nettime 
 writers used to share (and risk) far more. I may be mistaken but as the 
 community (dangerous word) and its discourse has developed it has also 
 professionalised and not always in a good way. Where once writers would 
 have rehearsed their ideas here in rough form I suspect that the 
 pressures around academic/publishing commodification creates a greater a 
 reluctance expose the ideas before publication. Could this be why it 
 feels a less risky, energetic and generous space or am I (as usual) 
 being nostalgic.

I'd guess this is mostly due to it being archived and easily 
searchable. I certainly find it harder to take risks and admit 
vulnerablility in such an environment. Though archiving and 
searchability are certainly useful. One answer is pseudonymity, but 
that brings its own limitations.


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nettime Will Self: The novel is dead (this time it's for real)

[Nick]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction/print

The novel is dead (this time it's for real)
 
Will Self
The Guardian, Friday 2 May 2014 13.00 BST

If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having 
children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own 
canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these 
little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the 
extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we 
might call progress. A few months ago, one of my canaries, who's in 
his mid-teens and harbours a laudable ambition to be the world's 
greatest ever rock musician, was messing about on his electric 
guitar. Breaking off from a particularly jagged and angry riff, 
he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the gist of which was 
already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done 
before, and usually those who'd done it first had done it best.  
Besides, the instant availability of almost everything that had ever 
been done stifled his creativity, and made him feel it was all 
hopeless.

A miner, if he has any sense, treats his canary well, so I began 
gently remonstrating with him. Yes, I said, it's true that the web 
and the internet have created a permanent Now, eliminating our sense 
of musical eras; it's also the case that the queered demographics of 
our longer-living, lower-birthing population means that the 
middle-aged squat on top of the pyramid of endeavour, crushing 
the young with our nostalgic tastes. What's more, the decimation of 
the revenue streams once generated by analogues of recorded music 
have put paid to many a musician's income. But my canary had to 
appreciate this: if you took the long view, the advent of the 78rpm 
shellac disc had also been a disaster for musicians who in the teens 
and 20s of the last century made their daily bread by live 
performance. I repeated one of my favourite anecdotes: when the 
first wax cylinder recording of Feodor Chaliapin singing The Song 
of the Volga Boatmen was played, its listeners, despite a lowness 
of fidelity that would seem laughable to us (imagine a man holding 
forth from a giant bowl of snapping, crackling and popping Rice 
Krispies), were nonetheless convinced the portly Russian must be in 
the room, and searched behind drapes and underneath chaise longues 
for him.

So recorded sound blew away the nimbus of authenticity surrounding 
live performers -- but it did worse things. My canaries have often 
heard me tell how back in the 1970s heyday of the pop charts, all 
you needed was a writing credit on some loathsome 
chirpy-chirpy-cheep-cheeping ditty in order to spend the rest of 
your born days lying by a guitar-shaped pool in the Hollywood Hills 
hoovering up cocaine. Surely if there's one thing we have to be 
grateful for it's that the web has put paid to such an egregious 
financial multiplier being applied to raw talentlessness. Put paid 
to it, and also returned musicians to the domain of live performance 
and, arguably, reinvigorated musicianship in the process. Anyway, I 
was saying all of this to my canary when I was suddenly overtaken by 
a great wave of noxiousness only I could smell. I faltered, 
I fell silent, then I said: sod you and your creative anxieties, 
what about me? How do you think it feels to have dedicated your 
entire adult life to an art form only to see the bloody thing dying 
before your eyes?

My canary is a perceptive songbird -- he immediately ceased his own 
cheeping, except to chirrup: I see what you mean. The literary novel 
as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is 
indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean 
narrative prose fiction tout court is dying -- the kidult 
boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are 
clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels 
will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no 
longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young 
man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second 
half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the 
prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of 
creative endeavour. The capability words have when arranged 
sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and 
investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking 
subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of 
either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and 
the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any 
other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other 
aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general 
acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

This is not to say that everyone walked the streets with their head 
buried in Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, or 

Re: nettime Attack on homoentropy [Re: Ippolita Collective, In the

[Nick]

Quoth morlockel...@yahoo.com:

 The intended analogy is, of course, the quality time alone, where
 one can tap into thermal noise of synapses, or that flu virus
 screwing with your immune system, to generate new snippets of
 thoughts that the outside world simply cannot predict.
 
 Lowering the entropy of humans will have interesting consequences.

This is a very interesting thought indeed, thank you for sharing.

At a very simplistic level it can refer to advertising, but really 
it's more relevant to the whole algorithmically precise attention 
demanding crap that the biggest and most economically powerful 
websites specialise in.

And Patrice, thanks so much for your work translating and posting 
Ippolita Collective's works. I am getting a great deal from them.


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Re: nettime Harassing People for Watching a Movie in a Cinema

[Nick]

Quoth William Waites:

 It's disappointing that the writer was intimidated into giving up all of
 his memories to the police in order to clear his name under a presumption
 of guilt.

It's also disappointing to hear that being told he was not under 
arrest he didn't just ask for his stuff back and leave.

But really police intimidation is designed exactly to ensure that 
you give them more power over you than they actually have. I don't 
blame him at all, I probably would have done the same thing, despite 
knowing it was wrong.


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nettime Snowden and the Future talks by Eben Moglen

[Nick]

Hi Nettimers,

I just listened to Eben Moglen's recent talks, Snowden and the 
Future. They're fantastic; I can't recommend them highly enough.  
Recordings are available in several good audio and video formats.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/

 From the About page 

Please join the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia Law School 
for a series of talks by Eben Moglen that will address the following 
questions:

- What has Edward Snowden done to change the course of human 
  history?
- How does the evolution of surveillance since World War II threaten 
  democracy?
- What does it mean that information can be both so powerful and so 
  easily spread? In a network embracing all of humanity, how does 
  democracy survive our desire for security?


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Re: nettime Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[Nick]

Quoth morlockel...@yahoo.com:

 The corollary is that the future belongs to the few, not to the
 masses, because high tech is centralized by nature, as it requires
 understanding, and those capabilities are scarce. The rest are
 fucked ... I mean 'users'.

 There are only competing elites.

I basically agree with this, but don't you contradict yourself by
saying earlier that knowledge won't save you? Granted knowledge of
being fucked over by a system is not enough, but actually working to
gain the knowledge to help shape and control the technology could be
liberatory. Maybe people by their nature are mostly uninterested (I
should say 'probably'), in which case you're wholly correct.

I suppose the important distinction is between a Marxist 'awareness'
and the practical knowledge to actually (re)build.

Free software is important as it allows those who are willing and able
to gain the skills to effectively control their environment.





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Re: nettime Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[Nick]

Quoth Felix Stalder:

 The concept of the panopticon has been very popular ever since
 Foucault elevated it to the rank of a central metaphor for modernity
 in Discipline and Punishment (1975). And the NSA revelations seem
 to confirm its usefulness once again.

It seems to me that the term panopticon is now used at such a far
remove from Bentham's idea that it's just a way of scoring style
points and making the author sound erudite.

The author of this article talks about predicting and preventing bad
actions, but that really isn't what the panopticon was designed
to do (except rather indirectly). It was about the possibility of
surveillance moderating the behaviour of its subjects, not about
prediction at all.

Felix, thanks for the reference to Bauman. I haven't read him, but
it certainly sounds like a good way of conceptualising the present
condition, so I'll surely rectify that soon.

Nick





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Re: nettime The Unconscious Performance of Identity: A Review of Johannes P. Osterhoff’s “Google”

[Nick]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 09:30:51AM -0400, Owen Mundy wrote:

 I wrote a review of an online performance staged during Transmediale this
 year. Here is an excerpt and link:

Thanks a lot for sharing this, Owen, it was very thought-provoking;
it was wonderfully framed. Issues of privacy and data sharing can
easily become lost in a morass of muddy words, but this is clear and
strong.

As ever with this kind of work, though, the conclusion is
(perhaps necessarily) unsatisfying;

 ...inspire them to regard the issue enough to do something about
 it: To not allow themselves to be tracked; To use anti-tracking
 software when they browse online, or a browser that supports Do
 Not Track; To make an artwork or write software that raises or
 frames these issues for others to consider: Or just to be aware,
 and make decisions which change the culture of the Web2.0, and
 influence it, slowly, but surely, to respect privacy. And to know
 that, in this techno-utopian-neoliberal wet dream that is dripping
 with app stores, computer waste, and rampant consumerism of binary
 data under the blanket of the good-natured term, “free market
 economy,” that “freedom” stated another way, means “do not track
 me without my consent.”

I can't see how mainstream web use today could be altered a little
in a way that respects privacy. If do not track and similar
proposals actually worked (which in their current incarnations they
do not,) 96% (say) of Google's revenue would dry up, with a similar
amount for Facebook. Leaving a fundamentally different landscape of
web use. Don't get me wrong, I use privoxy and similar tools to
strongly limit the amount of surveillance that these companies do, and
believe in doing so strongly. But the issue of what the web would
look like if everybody succeeded in taking their privacy seriously
is not a simple one.

Personally I have for a little while switched to using Wikipedia as
my launching point for many questions I had previously asked of
Google, throwing my support behind an organisation and knowledge
system I have fewer issues with. It's interesting to see the
difference; knowledge is generally presented more contextually, and
prioritises different parts of the web to those which dominate
Google. But it isn't as instant and immediately gratifying as
search engine based web interaction.

Anyway, thanks again Owen for the article, it was nicely provocotive
in a way that I need more of.

Nick


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Re: nettime Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

[Nick]

Thanks for that Dmytri. I find the way Jake Appelbaum frames these 
issues very accessible and clarifying for my own thinking, and what 
you wrote here continued to do that for me.

Jaromil, can you add to what you're writing here? I feel that I 
could learn a lot from you, but am missing enough context and
maybe history that I'm having trouble understanding what you're 
saying. I too am far more inclined away from macro-, grand, 
sociological analyses, towards the micro, personal, ethnographic, 
and would be most happy for you to send me away with reading to 
sharpen me up ;)

Nick


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Re: nettime What do you think about .art?

[Nick]

I don't think the domain name system is the place to be fighting for 
the small, independent artist. Leave it to go to the enormous 
corporations, and create stuff whereever; in the cracks, the unseen 
places, darknets etc, as well as wherever in the public. Names are 
as valuable as what they represent.

I don't think a co-operative controlling and charging for particular 
domain names is a very good system of artist funding.


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Re: nettime some more nuanced thoughts on SWARTZ

[Nick]

Quoth Marco Ricci:

 library.nu), i consider them the heroes of our times, and when i think about
 the amount of information freely available to anyone willing to use it, when
 i think that i can now learn almost any topic at an academic level, spending
 only my own time and energy, i feel moved and excited, i feel like knowledge
 and wisdom are becoming less elitarian, like people can finally open their
 minds (if they are willing to or not, is another question).

Don't forget, though, that only my own time and energy is itself 
quite contingent on economic realities. While, of course, free 
access to knowledge is a great boon, it is not necessarily much use 
to people who have to spend the vast majority of their time and 
energy in order to make ends meet.

Nick


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