Monocultured

It was a bargain. We will give you our lives; we will spend our lives obediently doing things we wouldn’t choose, things that probably do not really matter to anyone. And in return we will get money. And money will take care of us
→ Shareable.net, Benjamin Rosenbaum: The guy who worked for money

Dead bodies alone, are not that fascinating or scary or whatever you think they might be. They are just what they look like, lifeless skin suitcases. Without the life in them, they’re nothing. I think a person needs life and a body to be a human being. Without one of the two they are just meat furniture that needs to be moved before it starts to stink, or starts to rot, or starts to rot any more in any case.

→ My life with death: mylifewithdeath.blogspot.com

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

→ Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, ‘Our art is potty-training for adults.’ He got that about right.” The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? “We’re not here to help,” he giggles. “We certainly don’t care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier.”

→ Guardian.co.uk, Stuart Jeffreys: How the Chapman brothers became the brothers grim

Moreover, “57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely. Slightly more than half agreed that ‘there is too much freedom of expression’ in Israel. The poll also found that most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.”

→ Judy’s world, Judy Mandelbaum: Yes, it can happen there: Artists envision “Israel fascism”

I consider myself a reasonably bright person, who works hard to make something people like. When I’m old and crumbling, I want to be able to feel that I had a successful life in which my work brought happiness to a lot of people.

→ The bottom feeder, Jeff Vogel: Sometimes it’s OK to pirate my games

So, yes, there is reason for Israelis, and for Jews generally, to think long and hard about the dark Hitler era at this particular time. For the significance of the Gaza Flotilla incident lies not in the questions raised about violations of international law on the high seas, or even about “who assaulted who” first on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but in the larger questions raised about our common human condition by Israel’s occupation policies and its devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.

→ Haaretz, Henry Siegman: Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination

“Every time I drop a bomb and kill one innocent Afghan, I set the war back — even if I killed 100 Taliban,” he says. And maybe, Grasso admits, he was a little overeager to drop bombs last year. “When you’ve got a truckload of food, everyone looks hungry. So when everything looks suspicious, when you’re looking for suspicious stuff, you almost want it to be suspicious.”

→ Wired, Noah Shachtman: How the Afghanistan Air War Got Stuck in the Sky

PRIMAL 31 (HARRIER) DROPPED (1) GBU-12 ON THE COMPOUND EFFECTIVELY SUPRESSING THE EN THREAT. EN FORCES RE-ENGAGED THE MARINES FROM THE BUILDING THAT WAS THE TARGET OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL HIMARS MISSION. E/2/8 ENGAGED WITH 81 AND 60 MM MORTARS. AT 1304, ENEMY FIRES CEASED.

→ Wikileaks Wardiary: (ENEMY ACTION) DIRECT FIRE RPT (Small Arms) 2/8 USMC : 0 INJ/DAM

Avoidance speech, or “mother-in-law languages”, is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu languages of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be used.

→ Wikipedia: Avoidance Speech

This is, perhaps, the most troublesome use of a generally troublesome mark. That said, the basic rule for possessives is quite straightfoward: to denote possession, put an apostrophe and a lower-case ‘s’ at the end of the noun (ie person, place or thing) which owns. So we have: Somebody else’s thoughts on the subject of possessive apostrophes.

→ Between Borders, Brian Forte: Mind Your Apostrophes

More than half of the semicolons one sees, I would estimate, should be periods, and probably another quarter should be commas. Far too often, semicolons, like colons, are used to gloss over an imprecise thought. They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.

→ Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, Paul Robinson: The Philosophy of Punctuation

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”.

→ Serial Consign, Greg Smith: Urban screens: The schematic city in gaming and architectural representation

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

→ Newsweek, Patrick Symmes: History in the Remaking

The first of two fingernails found at the site suggests Ötzi may have been ill. Characteristic lines across the nail suggest his immune system was compromised three times in the months prior to his death. The second nail has yet to be analysed.

→ Cosmos, John Pickrell: Who killed the iceman?

In his spare time Professor Nas is a magician. The magic he’s working for the car companies is to devise the right voice to make driving safest, certainly, but also a voice that gives the car a character that you like, so it seems like your friend, or the other half of your driving team; You and the car. As he puts it: A team-mate bucks you up when you’re down, A team-mate takes over when you need it to take over, and people looove team-mates.

→ BBC, From Our Own Correspondents, Steven Evans: Future of back-seat drivers

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For the benefit of the less technically inclined among you, I recorded a short video on how to recover lost data on a dead harddrive. When I tell you that I “need some supplies” before helping you out with your busted computer, it is likely beer, incense and occasionally a screwdriver.

With this insider information you can now go forth and repair any harddrive out there, and you’ll totally be the boss of anyone with hardware failure. You’re welcome! And in order not to be too snarky, below is an article on the fallibility of even technically competent people. Go read.

If there’s a niche, a parasite will fill it. There’s a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only way to eliminate unfilled niches is to keep everything simple to the point of insignificance.

→ Locus online, Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites

We told the R&D guys they could come up with anything they wanted, as long as it could be thrown together from existing ingredients, cost less than 40 cents to make, and looked enough like dog shit that impressionable lardbutts like you would get a food boner the first time its commercial ran on whatever basic cable reality show keeps you from killing yourself for a week.

→ Kung Fu Grippe, Merlin Mann: A new brown thing you’ll totally eat

Crappy Taxidermy is a visual blog dedicated to exploring the bizarre world of taxidermy. The pictures within are exceptional examples of the strange, the grotesque, and the awful. Though our title may say “crappy” we respect the dedication and talent of the taxidermists who created the works pictured within.

→ About: Crappy Taxidermy

I would kindly like to inform you that I’ve been a vegan for ten years. Unless you count the Snickers bars I ate out of economic necessity when living on in Iceland (where vegetables are paid in installments) in which case I have one more year to go before reaching ten. Ok, let’s rephrase: I decided to switch to a vegan diet ten years ago, and initial Snickers bars notwithstanding, I’m doing well.

To recap: When studying in Karlstad I ran a weekly radio show modeled on Frispel (mentioned previously) where I’d put together a one hour show on a whatever topic I pulled out of my arse. I interviewed a dentist who did hypnosis, a priest about the onthological proof of Gods existence, and this one time I started doing one on milk.

I had spoken to a chef who mentioned that unless the lactal enzyme in our guts have a constant supply of lactose, they disappear and you’re left intolerant. This, he argued, explains why proportionally large number of people in parts of the world are lactose intolerant — milk and other dairy isn’t widely consumed and we producing the enzyme as a result

This is more of less accurate. The enzymes are developed by you own body when you’re young, but with age you stop producing them. Supposedly, this is so that we can be breast-fed as babes, but with the anticipation that we stop drinking milk after we’re weened off it. Historically, milk hasn’t been a staple of human diet so intolerance is common. A majority of all adults in the world are lactose intolerant as a result of the stuff just not being in the food chain.

The first dietician I tried to interview scolded me for not knowing the difference between allergy and intolerance, so I plowed through two books on nutrition and health and return two days later for the interview. I called the Swedish Milk Council (Mjölkfrämjanded, a pro-milk lobby. Originally, named “The Swedish Milk Propaganda” — Wikipedia: Mjölkpropagandan) as well as the National Food Administration and had them comment on a study of osteoporosis prevalence among a group of nurses. Seeing as the report was hosted on MilkSucks.com their reaction was predictably not favourable. (I think they criticized poor methodology)

I barely touched on the whole animal rights issue. As so many others I hadn’t given the question much thought, and found the environmental and health aspects of dairy more interesting. Somewhere in the process of doing the show I came to the conclusion that the only environmentally conscientious thing to do was to switch to a vegetable based diet, which also seemed to be a healthy way of eating.

Of course, now I know that “vegetable” doesn’t always equate “environmentally sound” nor necessarily “healthy” if you take processed foodstuffs into account — even skirting the necessity of B12 supplements. If you are an omnivore who eats with moderation you might not experience the adverse effects of cholesterol and whatnot, and locally raised beef you might have a smaller environmental impact than a soybean transported halfway across the globe.

The question of food and where it comes from is very complex, and if you are so inclined I encourage you to read the The State of Food and Agriculture 2009, the yearly report from FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) or why not just skim Wikipedia: Environmental effects of meat production. Of course, once these folks get in vitro meat going we might satisfy the tastes of everyone except those bent on organic food.

Having written that, today it’s the animal rights issue which is the deciding factor for me. There’s overwhelming proof that we’re causing suffering and pain to animals directly by using them for food or other products, and there’s secondary misery caused by the environmental impact of rearing animals. You could do worse than to read All animals are equal, by Peter Singer as a more well-put introduction to “animal rights” than I could give.

It took me 21 years before reaching the conclusion that veganism is a step in the right direction, and I don’t remember anyone else influencing me one way or another, so I try not to preach, but every once in a while I get into a debate on animal rights. It can be fun, but is more often a losing proposition, as illustrated by a thread over in Metafilter, where the subject usually turns into an anti-vegan dogpile for some reason: Operation Pancake.

Also, I have a standing bet with a chef friend that if he can make me a human steak out of someone who hasn’t suffered and the eating of which wouldn’t cause anyone grief, I’d eat it. Rather disgusting, but that’s what you get when debating veganism drunk.

Over at We Make Money Not Art, there’s a brief description of the work Hello Process which is being exhibited at the Process Becomes Paradigm show. In a related vein, Rhizome just published an editorial by Jacob Gaboury on the art collective JOGGING which are all about process instead of product. JOGGING are indeed mostly interesting in terms of process, as most of the documentation / made for net / performance, is undistinguishable from a Onion parody of art, or perhaps a Mcsweeneys piece.

While each piece may seem unimportant on its own, when viewed as part of a growing collection of work unconcerned with the materiality, permanence, or the importance of the individual piece, any insistence on the auratic quality of the object itself falls away. Indeed the content of each piece is doubly immaterial. Not only do they exist in passing, as documentation, or not at all, they are also unconcerned with the question of quality or importance, and are relevant as process rather than as product.

→ Rhizome, Jacob Gaboury: Immaterial Incoherence: Art Collective JOGGING

It’s through editing we make something beautiful appear. This Youtube choir, bringing together 185 individuals in a performance is inspiring — despite the slightly cheesy look of the stage and conductor Eric Whitacre — not because it resulted in this particular musical arrangement, but because there is a sense of universality to the participant’s ambitions. There’s a common denominator which becomes visible exactly because it’s mediated through a webcam, each video independently recorded. It’s the audience performing for itself.

The arrangement of the singers and panning over their individual videos in faux 3D also changes the interpretation of the piece; Compare the feeling of this version to the previous experiment he did, Sleep, in which all videos are arranged on a flat grid. The edit of Sleep creates a monumental feeling of the choir, whereas Lux Aurumque seems made up of individuals acting in concert. [Via The Technium]

As an aside, my name appears in an Excel file at one of the largest dairy producers in Sweden, Arla, since I sent in a bogus recipe containing cottage cheese to a competition. I don’t know if I’ve won anything, but judging from the other entries (all visible in the same document) I’m not the only one who’ve fibbed a love to that product. Twohundredandeightysix other people filled sent in their recipes to win whatever it was one could win. Imagine if you could get 287 people to spend those five minutes working doing some work for you, paying all of them fractionally more for their time than they stand to gain on average from a competition and thereby creating a win-win! What would you do with those 24 hours of labour? Or is an XLS-file with slogans enough?

A couple of months ago there was a outrage and general brouhaha over an how ACORN — an organisation which helps underclass folk in US with getting bank loans and such — supposedly was advising a pimp & hooker couple on how to start a child prostitution business. It turned into a giant shitstorm, and it’s only now that the dust has settled and the source material has been examined that a more true version of the story is emerging.

→ MSNBC: Rachel Maddow explains how Fox News bought and sold the ACORN story. [Via Media Matters]

“This place,” says Bahram, shouting somewhat, it’s amazing. You can’t imagine! The schools, the hospitals, the way they live! And nothing is done by hand, even the baking, even cleaning the street. They have these little carts, just press a button. The police, they smile at you and say “hej.”

→ From our own correspondents, Monica Whitlock: Adjusting to Swedish life after the Andjian massacre

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I do not want to prescribe a means of viewing images of Fabienne’s death. I am interested in informing the public about the photographers who witnessed and recorded the event.

→ Prison Photography, Pete Brook: Fabienne Cherisma [via A Photo Editor]

But what makes it all such good fun is the element of surprise. No matter how much you practise or prepare, many of your best mammal behaviour shots will be of moments you hardly remember – because they happened so fast. These are the ones that make all that effort worthwhile.

→ BBC Wildlife Magazine, Mark Carwardine: Mammal Behaviour [scroll down for individual PDF]

Thomas Bey William Bailey over at Vague Terrain has an analysis of Modern Warfare 2. It’s a bit too uptight for my taste, but it balances the lavish superlatives I’ve heaped on the game quite nicely. His objection is that because of the extremely compelling narrative of games like these, we’re fed a bunch of propaganda and taught a manufactured history of the world. This is completely true. Thomas critiques isn’t limited to this game but rather highlights the possibilities for nefarious uses which the medium can be put to. The FPS Americas Army is in its third iteration, and they have spun it off into a graphic novel as well — the first story unironically entitled Knowledge is Power — but they get a free pass since it’s an obvious recruitment tool for the US army.

As Walter Benjamin mentions (in an essay you might have noticed lately) film, like architecture, is an art form which you learn to appreciate by habit and osmosis, rather than contemplation. Computer games have the grandiose scenarious of movies, as well as the tactility of architecture (since you’re able to navigate the world and develop an appreciation of the physics of the place.) so they really act as a multiplier of knowledge and narrative. (Regardless of their relationship to fact, mind you)

The exciting thing with photo-realistic games isn’t that we might end up with a Matrix-like scenario where we won’t be able to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘not-reality’ but that our memories of events will be messed up. Are you remembering something which you experienced in the ‘real world’ or the surreal world? We don’t have to mess up our physical perception of things for this technology to be scary, only our remembrance of things. Look at how much importance we place on photography as an external memory, and multiply that.

I know that I have created historical narratives based on nothing else than the tech tree in Civilization, so obviously I give more credence to a story than to static statements of fact; And since we experience the stories of computer games first hand, we might absorb the sentiments expressed even more readily. MW2 is a kick-ass game exactly because it fits within the narrative which the West has spun, and which countless action movies has reinforced — it’s “as close to reality as you get” exactly because it’s a narrative which is fictionalized from start to finish.

To paraphrase: Guns don’t kill people. People who live in a world where guns are seen as necessary responses to certain crises, kill people. Political action is necessary if we’d like to change the story, and it would be awesome if computer games could be a change for good, instead of only mirroring an already dominant narrative of how the world works and who we are as humans.

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A more upbeat rider to this story comes from the podcasting world, where fictional parallel universes are less flat and predictable than in MW2:

Myke Bartlet has continued writing and podcasting stories in the Salmon & Dusk universe. The latest short story, Yesterday came too soon, is a nice introduction to his stuff if you don’t feel like starting on a longer series. As previously mentioned, Mykes reading is half the enjoyment of his podcast, not cause the stories are so-so, but cause his tempo and timbre is excellent. Go listen.

Bruce Sterling allowed Starship Sofa to podcast his novella The Kiosk the other day, and it’s two hours well spent if you’re in the least interested in the (possible) disruptive tendencies of fabbing and rapid manufacturing. Go listen to it before it disappears, then come back here. (You can skip the first ten minutes to get to the story)

Skip the first ten or so minutes, which are of more interest to sci-fi people rather than you, and take notes on which predictions you agree with. Having listened to the story, I had to remind myself that rapid prototyping is still in its infancy and not a foregone conclusion, lest I give up on it in favour of something more bleeding edge.

A couple of weeks ago The Pirate Factory in Malmö demonstrated their RepRap. There’s Flickr pool of the event up here with a shaky video at the end of it. They’re using a spruced up version from Bits from Bytes which looks slightly less dingy than the RepRap usually does (also, it uses a more powerful microcontroller for driving the printer independently of a computer — apparently an SD card is enough) and judging from the pictures there was a bunch of people present. I wonder which of the pictures are going to be used in Swedish school-books in the future, as illustrations of the fabbing revolution and micro-production…

Speaking of which, Wired has an article up on the current state of how manufacturing companies have become accessible to anyone with a credit card, lowering the cost of admission into mass production to more or less zero. Atoms are the new bits is worth your time if you’re the least interested in these matters, or the future in general. It’s full of interesting links, like the one to alibaba.com, an enormous portal of Chinese manufacturers.

I wonder what the environmental costs will be of bespoke production; To some extent you’ll have less hit-and-miss toys occupying landfills, but this gain might well be offset by increased packaging and shipping, or some other corollary. Also, I wonder if these long-tail manufacturing plants will go global or if China and such countries will retain their head start; We in the west will only ever manufacture wars.

If intellectual properties will become impossible to enforce — something which isn’t certain, given the oppressive laws which are passed to counter transparency and openness — this would indeed shift not only the knowledge of how to do something but also the rational for the existence of a specific company. If you can download the plans for a SAAB, you just need someone to manufacture it. In the end, just as globalization has killed the connection between brand and production — after all, the cheap manufacturing plants exist exactly because of the Export Processing Zones in Vietnam and China — it might well kill the last remnant of Company with a capital “c,” the brand with an address.

These realizations are not lost on industry folk, but no-one wants to admit their own obsolescence, thus there’s no hurry to come up with new business models. The exceptions are Threadless of the world, but those start from the bottom up and don’t have to reinvent themselves; Let’s see how well Apple handles the transition — if at all.

Joren De Wachter has written a summation of the coming upheavals — The Return of the Public Domain — and it’s a text targeting those in the manufacturing & design industry. Even though he’s hopeful, or rather, not fearful, of the technological changes which will change intellectual property as we understand it, his text is very thin on the details of how companies will cope, and focus rather on the knowledge workers themselves. (Proffesional Idea Generators, he calls us, which might actually go as an acronym on my next business card)

However, there is also a very clear positive side to the new developments described above for Professional Idea Generators. The new business models that become necessary will clearly provide them with significant competitive advantages for doing business in an environment where the Public Domain is important. Knowledge and expertise, cost effectiveness, continued innovation and networking are key competences of Professional Idea Generators. This puts them in a very strong position in respect of the new developments.

The sentiment seems to be that “someone will still make money, if they just figure out how to add their own knowledge as a value which can be commodified.” As things stand, only those who make stuff will be needed, those who actually have the tools and raw material to manufacture something. Everyone else is part of the Public Domain. And not only figuratively as someone who designs webpages or new pens, but they themselves become part of the commons, and last time I checked there was a tragedy involved in the commons under any scarcity-driven economic model.

You’re going to need a special secret sauce, armed guards keeping it safe for long enough to sell it. And even then you’re either competing for a nieche audience which wants the exclusive, or your elbowing for space with other companies, competing on price.

And here’s a narrative which might seem familiar: Over at The Millions, there’s an interview with a guy who pirates books, and in the comments section some people are upset over a lack of morals. In ten years time, when your kids are printing modified pirated Nikes, maybe the kneejerk debate will be different, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Home fabbing is killing Nike!