Disinformation » klintron

This Weekend in Portland, OR: 5th Annual EsoZone Alternative Culture and Thought Festival

klintron — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:32:09 +0000

The fifth annual EsoZone Portland event will be held this weekend at p:ear, Friday evening November 18th and Saturday November 19th (see the website for schedule and location information).

EsoZone is festival celebrating alternative culture and thought. It follows a hybrid unconference/conference model, meaning that in addition to pre-programmed content, participants can propose their own sessions to share their own ideas, projects and skills with the group.

This years presentations include:

Tom Henderson, author of the forthcoming book Punk Rock Mathematics, on illusory nature of self.
Eric Schiller of Beyond Growth on “digital hipsterism” and the rise of anti-intellectualism in social media.
Yoga for Slackers lead by Loren mccRory.
Grant Writing for Artists and Other Alien Beings lead by Amanda Sledz.
Anarcho-Sewing lead by Jillian Ordes-Finley.

Plus music and performances, and whatever sessions are proposed by this year’s participants.

Joe Knucklehead on the Occupy Movement, Faux-Populism and More

klintron — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 17:43:01 +0000

Via Technoccult:

Joe Knucklehead, the host of the podcast American Knucklehead, is just your average American bowling alley technician. But he has a few things to say about the state of the USA. I recently interviewed him on the Occupy Movement, the 53% and more:

You’ve been talking a bit lately about the Occupy movement. There’s this online counter-movement of conservatives called the “53%” who claim to be subsidizing the Occupy movement via taxes. They say that the protesters need to “stop whining.” What do you think about this — is it a real populist sentiment, or just more divisiveness?

Naw, it’s a total PR ploy. The guy that dreamed it up, Erick Erickson, is a woofer blogger, CNN talking head, and radio talk show host. I’d say he’s been amazingly effective at providing a pointless distraction.

I talked to one of the organizers of Occupy Portland in the last show. He was very eloquent in dismissing the 53% movement as a divisive right-wing talking point.

Well, sure Erickson dreamed it up — but all those people sending in their pictures can’t just be paid actors can they?

Sure, they could be paid actors or just liars. Don’t trust the Internets!

OK — maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive. It’s pretty easy to whip up anti-Occupy sentiment by resorting to old prejudices and bigotry. Things are scary right now, and people can behave oddly when they’re scared. I’m sure the Occupy movement seems real scary to plenty of Knuckleheads out there.

Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking The Consensus Reality Habit

klintron — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:07:51 +0000

Doug Rushkoff. Photo by Paul May (CC)

An interview with Douglas Rushkoff via Technoccult:

“When Video Toaster for the Amiga came out everyone was really excited,” he Rushkoff said. “We believed that we could use it to create deeply alternative states of consciousness using lights and colors and things.”

“Today, those technologies are used by companies like Fox News to make you pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to, or to make your eye fall on a particular ad. Stuff like that.”

But he says if you know how the program works, you’re less likely to be hypnotized by it. “There’s two ways to experience magic,” he says. “And I don’t mean stage magic.” You can either experience it as a spectator, watching a priest or guru. Or you can participate. “Having a guru will only take you so far,” he said. “You have to become the guru.”

But it’s not easy. Rushkoff admits he’s been having trouble participating in magic these days. “My sense is that the suppositional conditioning that I’ve undergone – making a living, raising a kid, keeping a house in working order, paying a mortgage – I’ve expended a lot of energy in less efficient ways,” he said. “I’ve become less trusting of the more subtle ways of influencing the world around me.”

Interview with ‘Selections From the Dream Manual’ Artist Michael Skrtic

klintron — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:23:14 +0000

Via Technoccult:

Klint Finley: What possessed you to undertake this process of creating a collage painting for every line of Bill’s original Dream Manual?

Michael Skrtic: The Dream Manual appeared first in 1984 or 1985 in a magazine called The Negentropy Express, which was an APA (an amateur press association) by the Society for Creative Thought. I was one of the founding members of the Society for Creative Thought and I was immediately taken with Bill’s original text and the original short little collage things that he did to accompany the text. It sort of followed me around since then. In the early 90s, I had just moved to Stockholm and I was looking for a project. I thought, ah, I know what I’ll do, I’ll colorize Bill’s original collages, so I blew them up and I colorized a couple of pages, and then I got involved with something else. Fast forward to 2003. I had a new studio and I’d just finished painting strange diagrams on the floor to get the mojo right, so I started thinking about the Dream Manual as a possible thing to do. I started looking at it and realized that I actually could – that’s basically it.

I started thinking about all the places I’ve been, collecting collage material. I’ve been collecting collage material for many, many years. Each of the Dream Manual images has touchstones to everywhere I’ve been and all the other images I’ve gathered, so I started putting them together to see where I’d end up. That’s how it started. It took seven years of work from the second time I started. I started painting and spent about six years painting and another year with Megalithica Press getting the book ready for publication. That’s the physical story of the Dream Manual.

Erik Davis on ‘Nomad Codes’

klintron — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:09:22 +0000

From Technoccult:

Erik Davis has been covering fringe spiritual movements, underground music and subcultures for magazines like Wired, Arthur and Spin for the past two decades. He’s probably best known for books his books TechGnosis and Visionary State. He’s currently a contributor to several publications, including Reality Sandwich and HiLobrow. His web site is here and you can follow him on Twitter.

Erik’s latest book, Nomad Codes, is a collection of several of his articles and essays. I talked with Erik about the new book, the changing American spiritual landscape, and why he’s now pursuing academia.

Klint Finley: Over the last few years, while writing the essays that comprise this book, have you seen any significant shift in American spirituality? Has much changed since the publication of TechGnosis?

Erik Davis: Spirituality is always changing, because “spirituality” itself is almost defined by its informality, at least in contrast to those more organized movements we call “religion.” And even religions are always changing. Since the 1990s, there have been some intriguing developments, some cool, some odd.

One has been the extraordinary popularity of yoga, and what makes yoga particularly interesting is that it bridges between spirituality and a purely secular world of exercise and keeping fit. People don’t go to yoga for gurus like they did in the 70s — it’s about the “practice.” That shows some healthy pragmatism in some ways, but it also represents how easily spirituality gets commodified in America. I mean, yoga is pretty cheap when you boil it down–you on a mat on a floor. And yet it has become a whole industry.

Yeah, the brouhaha over Bikram yoga really exemplifies that.

Then there’s the 2012 thing, which has really grown tremendously, right on schedule. I have been tracking that for years, a combination of archaic dreaming and very contemporary apocalypticism. I knew some folks in British Columbia that all decided to adopt the 13 moon calendar for a while, and they lived their lives partly in that alternate calendrical frame. Pretty outside stuff! Then a year ago, my sister, who is not a freak by any stretch of the imagination, started talking about 2012 and what it meant. That represents quite a shift. Even Christian fundamentalists are talking 2012 these days. Everyone on the bandwagon!

Where does the title of the book, Nomad Codes, come from?

For me the phrase Nomad Codes really captures something about the 1990s culture that really influenced me and most of the writing in the book, even the later stuff…

[read the full interview at Technoccult]

EsoZone Portland 2010 Starts This Weekend

klintron — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 23:20:40 +0000

EsoZone Portland is back for another year! Once it again, the event is an unconference — an event in which the schedule is set by the participants on the fly at the event. Anything can happen, but some of the possible subjects include:

Outsider Art • Discordia • SubGenius
The Occult • Satanism • Conspiracy Analysis
Life Extension • Intelligence Enhancement
Space Migration • Psychedelic Futurism
Consciousness Expansion • R/evolutionary Living
Renegade Metaphysics • Radical Psychotherapy
Aliens • Neo-Shamanism • Temporary Autonomous Zones
Body Modification • Alternative Sexuality • Fringe Culture
Human-Dolphin Communication • DIY Media
Cybernetics and Systems Theory • Pranks
Atheism • Zen • Martial Arts • Recession Hacking

There will also be performances by artists such as Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion and Psychetect in the evenings.

Interview With ‘The American Book of the Dead’ Author Henry Baum

klintron — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:33:24 +0000

Via Technoccult:

How much do you buy the fringe ideas that have influenced the The American Book of the Dead novels? For example, do you really think the world is in need of a mass die-off to curb over population?

Baum: It’s a disturbing concept and one I’m still exploring. I look at the recent mosque controversy and wonder, for instance, what would happen if there was UFO disclosure. If people think Obama’s a socialist Hitler terrorist now, they might be turned into David Ickean conspiracy theorists at that point – he’s a reptilian. There’s just so much volatility that seems like it could end in violence. People are crazy – how do we introduce new radical ideas into the culture if a centrist like Obama is seen as a radical? I’m not advocating genocide of any kind – but metaphorically at least, many different types of thought need to die, especially different aspects of fundamentalism. And now it seems fundamentalism is getting a louder and louder voice in the mainstream. It’s like the culture is primed to create mass conflict. So while it’s not something I desire, it does seem inevitable.

It can suck to be prescient sometimes, huh? You started the novel, what, 8 yeas ago? Those seemed like dark times then, but fundamentalist rhetoric just seems to be getting worse and worse.

Baum: Sarah Palin didn’t even exist when I started this book. I was fearing the Bush/Cheney cabal and what they were capable. Sarah Palin makes Bush look like, I don’t know, Bill Clinton.

[continues at Technoccult]

Why the Web Isn’t Dead – A Few More Points

klintron — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:43:19 +0000

Last week Wired’s incendiary cover story The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet stirred up quite a bit of debate. Wired ran a debate between its editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, FM Media founder John Battelle, and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly that was particularly illuminating. I made a few points here, and have a few more to make at Mediapunk:

First it was getting listed by Yahoo!, then it was getting a good ranking in Google, now it’s getting into the Apple App Store. In each case, the platform owner benefited more than the person trying to get listed. This is not new. That certain sites – like Facebook at YouTube – have become large platforms is certainly interesting. That Apple, Facebook and Google have a disproportionate say over what gets seen on the Internet is problematic, definitely. But there was never any golden age when the Net was truly open. The physical infrastructure is owned by giant corporations, and ICANN is loosely controlled by the US government. And the biggest threat to openness on the Internet is international agreement that has nothing to do with the shift to apps.

Furthermore, even the App Store is open in a certain sense. It’s important to remember that Apple didn’t invent the app store – or even the mobile app store. They’ve been around for quite a while. I had a plain non-smart phone on Verizon that had access to an app store. Part of what made Apple’s app store successful though is that anyone could buy the SDK and submit apps to it. You didn’t have to be invited, and the cost wasn’t prohibitive. Very few developers could develop apps for that old Verizon store. In that sense, the app store is extremely “open.”

Indie Game Designers Talk About Their Transhumanist RPG FreeMarket

klintron — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:52:01 +0000

Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen talk about their new science fiction role playing game FreeMarket. Via Technoccult:

It also sounds like it’s a more intellectual game than most – you’ve said you can, for instance, play the role of a philosopher and have that be meaningful within the game.

Luke: Yeah, but don’t think you can’t play Soulshitter Killfuck and have fun, too. But, unlike many other games that I’ve played, you can play an artist and have serious conflict about what you do. It’s impossible to just make a piece of art in this game and have it sit there, inert. Art is controversial.

Jared: And conflicts (especially philosophical, critical and artistic) are both internal and external and can have wide-reaching and unplanned repercussions.

Right. So you could do a more typical hack and slash scenario, or you could do something where you’re dealing with post-scarcity speculation. Or maybe both.

Luke: Yes. But the “typical” scenario is also turned on its ear.

Jared: Definitely. “Death artists” is a common FreeMarket trope we see in our games.

Luke: You can kill the living shit out of something in the game. In fact, when you get into a fight, someone is going to die, period. But that is very costly, so you better be ready to have another side to your character. You better be ready to cooperate and give gifts. Otherwise, you’re not going to survive.

Jared: Some of the nicest people on FreeMarket Station are killers… because they have to be nice in order to remain viable members of society.

Binaural Beats with SbaGen Developer Jim Peters

klintron — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:44:13 +0000

Bavsa: binaural beat visual analysis tool

An interview with Jim Peters, developer of SbaGen, who’s source code was used without permission for the notorious I-Doser. Via Technoccult:

Technoccult: Do you believe that I-Doser can actually deliver on their promise of providing a variety of discrete recreational psychoactive experiences? My own experience working with SbaGen, Brainwave Generator, and sound and light machines is that it does feel like “something happens,” but I haven’t found that the specific experience each one is aiming for (“relaxation,” “creativity,” “stimulation,” etc.) In fact, I actually conducted some controlled experiments with classmates as a research project in college. We investigated whether the “intelligence enhancement” setting of a particular sound and light machine was effective at improving MENSA test exam scores. We didn’t get statistically significant results.

Peters: No, I don’t believe that I-Doser can deliver on their promise. If I hit you over the head with a mallet you will see stars, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve had a marvellous journey through the universe. However with a good enough sales pitch maybe I can make you believe that you have.

I-Doser uses quite high-amplitude binaural beats, much higher than is recommended by organizations such as The Monroe Institute or CenterPointe, where the beats are generally only just audible under the soundtrack. [...]

The applications of binaural beats are varied, but they will never be a ‘silver bullet’ to instantly give you high MENSA scores or whatever.

I’ve heard from Buddhist monks who found that binaural beats took them to places in consciousness that required years of meditation to reach by normal means. But again this sounds better than it is — they were
practiced meditators, so they could follow the guide provided by the beats to reach those places. Someone who is not practiced in meditation would fall asleep or pop out of entrainment under the same conditions. Meditation takes time to learn, but binaural beats can be used as a guide for practice.

The late Robert Monroe used binaural beats, sometimes combined with flotation chambers and sensory deprivation, to guide people to places he knew from his journeys out-of-body. This could be seen as another
form of meditation.

Social Physics with Kyle Findlay

klintron — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:44:17 +0000

Via Technoccult:

Klint Finley: What, as a “social physicist,” do you actually do?

Kyle Findlay: Well, at the moment I’m on my own in this “field,” if you can call it that. It just seems like the best description of what I do and what interests me so hopefully it sticks.

Basically, my interest is in understanding how people act as groups. As emergent entities that have their own (hopefully) predictable and describable topological forms. That’s the lofty idea anyway. And the tools of chaos theory, systems theory, network theory, physics, mathematics, etc. help describe this.

Do you have a background in physical sciences?

None at all. I studied “business science” at the University of Cape Town. My first job was for a company with a strong academic background, started by a professor of religion and a professor of statistics. They used a 5-dimensional catastrophe cusp model to describe people’s relationships with ideas.

The moment I was exposed to this thinking, something clicked. A lot of contradictions that I saw in the world around me were resolved. Ever since I have had an insatiable desire to understand these areas. Which led me to interact with experts in many disciplines from neuroscience to economics, math, physics, AI, ecology, biology, etc. Every field has a piece of the puzzle. I am lucky to work in an environment that gives me free rein to indulge my passion.

Pi, Plato, And The Language of Nature

klintron — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:17:29 +0000

After I posted an article about technical analysis – an investment method that looks for patterns in the stock market – a couple people commented that it reminded them of the film Pi, about a renegade mathematician somehow using Pi to search for patters in the stock market with a homemade supercomputer in his crummy Manhatten apartment.

Technical analysis was probably the inspiration for the stock market portion of the film, but did you know that the part about renegade mathematicians building supercomputers in their living rooms to calculate Pi is actually based on a true story? Aronofsky almost certainly took the inspiration from a 1992 New Yorker story about the Brothers Chudnovsky.

Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion Talk About Their New Album

klintron — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:17:36 +0000

Cult of Zir and Ogo Eion talk about their new album Shortwave Ministry for Theatre Noir. Via Technoccult:

Ogo: I brought my “trademark” shortwave radio, which i scored at a thrift store some ten years ago maybe – it’s seen much use since then. It’s a Sony FM/AM multi-band receiver ICF-5900W. It never breaks and keep battery charge for years. And I’ve always been quite impressed by the variety of sounds I can conjure up from this little beast. [...]

Is the shortwave radio modified in any way?

Ogo: It’s not circuit bent, no. Though it’s seen some wear over the years that has seemed to affect it.

Nolon: I ran it through the same filters and delays and reverbs as everything else. There was some ham radio christian we tapped that night a few times. Something about homosexuality, a real bigot.

Ogo: Right. Mostly I ride those “sweet spots” between channels – static frequency sweeps and whatnot. But there’s some real interesting stuff that happens when a channel starts to bleed through and intermix with that. Sometimes I swear it’s channeling alien transmissions.

No “Kill Switch” in Lieberman-Collins Bill, But There’s Been One Since 1934

klintron — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:51:51 +0000

Via ReadWriteWeb:

It doesn’t sound like a “kill switch.” The bill would require the President to submit a report describing, among other things, “The actions necessary to preserve the reliable operation and mitigate the consequences of the potential disruption of covered critical infrastructure” (pg. 84 lines 1-4). That sounds like the opposite of a kill switch: this legislation describes a process by which the president is expected to take action to ensure access to “critical infrastructure” -including the Internet.

There’s plenty of room to debate the merits of the federal government dictating the security policies of private companies, the ability of the president to continually extend any provisions beyond 30 days, the value of establishing new cyber security departments within the government, and the vagueness of the language in the bill. But this is nothing nearly so radical as some are making it out to be.

In fact, as Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ web site for the bill points out, the President already has a legislative (but of course, not technological) “kill switch.” The Communications Act of 1934 gave the president power to shut down “wire communications.”

[Full story at ReadWriteWeb]

Interview With BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz

klintron — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:03:41 +0000

BoingBoing’s David “Pesco” Pescovitz talks to Technoccult about his lifelong interest in the weird and the wonderful:

What is the most far-out, fringe or incredible idea that you think might actually be correct?

From the very first time I encountered Jacques Vallee’s idea that we’re living in a Control System, and also read similar ideas from John Keel, Hans Moravec, Rudy Rucker, and others, I’ve always gone back to that notion whenever I want to blow my own mind.And this was decades before The Matrix.

Could you elaborate on that idea?

In recent years, mathematicians, phlosophers, and physicists like Nick Bostrom, Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Seth Lloyd, and others have explored the idea that we’re living in a simulation or that the universe is a quantum computer.

Now, I don’t pretend to understand the physics or math underlying these theories, and I recognize that they are just theories and difficult to prove, but the very fact that so many brilliant people from a variety of disciplines are seriously asking these questions delights me to no end.

Can We Make a Less Brain Damaging Internet?

klintron — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:41:31 +0000

Via Mediapunk:

If you haven’t heard, information technology iconoclast Nicholas Carr has a new book coming up called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The basic case he makes is this: the Internet is altering our brains and making our thinking wider but more shallow.

Carr makes a compelling case, and it’s time for web professionals to start thinking about how we can fix the problem.

Carr lays out his argument in a new piece in the Wall Street Journal. He’s also made the case in this Wired article.

The WSJ is also running Clay Shirkey’s response to Carr – or actually, they may have just asked him whether the Internet was making us stupid, because Shirkey’s piece doesn’t seem to specifically address Carr’s arguments and it doesn’t mention Carr at all.

Jonah Lehrer has a review of Carr’s book as well.

I haven’t read Carr’s book yet, so I’m having to go on reviews and Carr’s Wired and WSJ pieces. But I haven’t seen any critic of Carr’s yet make substantial argument that Carr is wrong about what’s happening to us. Lehrer compares Carr’s concerns about the Internet to Socrates’s concerns about writing. But Socrates didn’t have the sort of evidence Carr does. Nor was Socrates making quite the same sort of argument Carr is…

What strategies, short of complete dis-engagement from the Internet (which I don’t think Carr advocates) can we adopt to preserve our attention spans? Periodic disengagement? Deliberate, daily monotasking? Zazen? More disciplined web surfing strategies? People in the “lifehacking” community have been working on things like this for years.

What can those of us involved in creating the web – as writers, designers, developers, publishers, etc. do to improve the experience of reading online. Can we makes sites and write content that actually help people focus?

For example, Carr suggested putting links at the bottom of articles instead of inline. I think that’s an over simplistic solution, but I think we can be more strategic, more mindful of how we integrate links into our texts (for this article, I put background info at the top, and added in the occasional additional link as necessary, and will include a few things at the end). I don’t know yet what the best solution will be, but I do believe that we ignore Carr’s research at our own peril.

21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford Interview

klintron — Thu, 20 May 2010 14:26:08 +0000

Ashley Crawford is the editor of the recently revived cyberculture magazine 21C (Richard Metzger called it “probably the best magazine of the ‘90s”) Via Mediapunk:

In 1994 I was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. I accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly I ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given we were suddenly international in scope I made the most of it and approached folk I’d been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others. To my utter amazement they all responded enthusiastically.

How different was the 1990-93 version from the 1994-1999 version?

Extremely. The earlier version was extremely parochial with a strong Australian flavor. We changed the format and structure entirely. The earlier version had a strong socio-political flavor whereas the second version, while maintaining some of that eg; covering Noam Chomsky, tended towards the more speculative which you can see in the selection on that archive site up now. The posthuman, cyberpunk etc.

In the newer material we tend to be going weirdly post-cyber. Where once it was replicants and cyborgs now it seems to be zombies. Where once it was the glittering on-line (albeit wonderfully gritty) world of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, today it seems to be the blasted wilderness of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson and Brian Conn or the strange, fantastical but distinctly visceral rituals of Ben Marcus or Matthew Derby…

[continues at Mediapunk]

5 Media Trends To Watch

klintron — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:53:24 +0000

Via Mediapunk:

Here are the five media trends I’m watching and will focus on in future articles on this site:

Sources and advertisers going direct

Context is King

Journalist as brand

Reporting as service

Media companies as technology companies

I have a heavy emphasis on journalism, but most of these actually apply to other media fields as well.

Sources and advertisers going direct

Dave Winer coined the the phrase “sources go direct” to describe how organizations and individuals are routing around traditional media by using their own web sites and social media. Jay Rosen, as I recall, used the phrase “advertisers going direct” as well.

Another expression of this trend comes from Tom Foremski: Every Company is a Media Company.

But this is by no means limited to companies – activists, watchdog groups, whistle blowers, politicians, sporting leagues (which I guess are usually companies), etc. are now media organizations and all individuals are now media personalities.

[continues at Mediapunk]

…

Virtual Reality Veteran FSK1138 Talks About His New Low-Tech Lifestyle

klintron — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:30:25 +0000

Via Technoccult:

You say now use the Internet for less than 3 hours a week and do not own a TV, phone, or stove. What brought you to the point that you decided you had to unplug like that?

I lived in Guyana for 4 years. You can have days when you have no power, and I survived. I feel that people think that the Internet will always be there. I feel it will not and the day is coming soon. I have seen the Internet change over the years – it has changed alot. The day is coming, I feel, that the can not remain a free utility.

Life really is not hard without technology if you learn to live without it. But if you’re addicted – what then?

When did you decide to cut back your use of technology?

When I realized it was taking up so much of my time – 2007 – I started closing down websites that I was using. I cut back to Myspace and YouTube – there were so many. And I cut my surfing – I use RSS now, I do not surf. By 2008 I did not have a landline or cell or Internet at home.

A Critical Look At The Personal Development Industry

klintron — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:06:12 +0000

Beyond Growth – Technoccult interviews Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller:

Duff: Ok. Well, from what I understand it largely emerged in the early 20th century when New Thought religious ideas became popular and were applied to worldly success. The basic idea was contained in such books as Think and Grow Rich and As a Man Thinketh.

The notion was that you could create stuff with the power of your mind. The correlary is that if you aren’t getting what you want, you need to do a kind of mental hygeine and clean up your stinkin’ thinkin’ (to quote Zig Ziglar).

So you have people like Napolean Hill, who died broke by the way, writing books on how to get rich by visualizing and affirming one’s future wealth.

Eric: In Douglas Rushkoff’s book Life Inc. he argues that ‘personal development’ or self help found its place in corporations, in order to help the remaining staff become more efficient after job cuts.

Thus personal development has deep capitalistic roots, based in becoming more useful for society, and or your particular corporate persuasion.

Juggalos, Media Scares, and the West Memphis 3

klintron — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:22:28 +0000

Klint Finley writes on Mediapunk:

It’s difficult to estimate the total number of Juggalos. The 2009 Gathering of Juggalos had 20,000 people in attendence. The most recent ICP album sold about 50,000 copies in the first week. But let’s be conservative and go with the 20,000 estimate. (I actually suspect it’s much higher than this.)

Nightline cites only 3 instances of reported Juggalos actually murdering anyone. To be charitable, let’s assume there are 10 people who are both Juggalos and murderers.

That would mean AT MOST .05% of Juggalos are murderers. Granted that’s a significantly higher percentage than the US population at large (there were 16,272 murders in 2008 and the US had a population of about 305 million). But less than 1%, at most, isn’t exactly cause for alarm. And I would think Arizona’s finest would be better served by realizing that 99.94 percent of murders are committed by non-Juggalos and adjusting their law enforcement priorities accordingly. (As I write this, the number of murders committed per year by Toby Keith fans is currently unavailable.)

Technoccult Dossiers: William S. Burroughs, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison

klintron — Sun, 09 May 2010 05:10:06 +0000

Technoccult is now running dossiers like those of Disinfo-Past. The first three up are: William S. Burroughs, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Enjoy!

Is There A Real-Life Dharma Initiative?

klintron — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:27:57 +0000

Editor’s note: Congrats to regular disinfo.com contributor klintron on the interview! Henry Hanks writes on CNN’s SciTech Blog:

Much of their research does exist in the real world, leading one to another question: Are there organizations from history that may have inspired the idea of the Dharma Initiative?

Ask many who have pondered that question, and one answer you often hear (aside from Skinner, obviously) is DARPA. DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is often credited with creating the internet and has researched and developed some pretty advanced stuff, especially in the area of robotics. DARPA even sounds like “Dharma,” but as tempting as it is to draw conclusions about the two, the similarities start and end there (for one thing, Dharma is a private organization).

One person who has thought about this quite a bit is blogger Klint “Klintron” Finley, who has written about the concept of “real-life Dharma initiatives” extensively at Hatch23.com. “I think it stems from various trends and movements from the ’60s and ’70s,” he said. “More specifically, anywhere that two or more of the following intersected: Eastern spirituality, fringe science, defense spending, disturbing psychological research, experiments in utopian/communal living and experiments social control.”

Pan Sonic’s Mika Vainio Interview

klintron — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:51:18 +0000

Via Technoccult:

Klint Finley: I guess I’ll start with, just to get it out of the way, the announcement has been put out that Pan Sonic has split up, so was this an amicable split?

Mika Vainio: Well, let’s say that we don’t have any plans to start again, but maybe we do one day. It’s still open, but I don’t think, at least for a couple years, we will not do it.

So are you willing to talk anymore about the reasons behind the split or do you want to leave it at that?

Yeah, why not. There has been no argument or bad spirit or anything like that. It’s just that after, we’ve been doing this for over 15 years, it’s time to stop and concentrate on our own solo things. [...]

The record business has been going through a lot of transitions lately through music piracy through the Internet and there’s also the economic crash that makes it harder for people who might want to pay for music to actually pay for music. Has than been effecting you at all? Do you have any thoughts on that?

No it’s not effecting me that much, I think it’s only a problem of the record labels and big major artists. But for smaller artists and people like me we get very little money from the record sales altogether. The main source is playing live, that’s where the income is coming from. And I possibly think the music is available on the net because there are a lot of people, for example in South America, who could not afford to buy any CDs but this way they can hear the music, the music is available.

Bill Ayers On Radical Parenting

klintron — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:07:39 +0000

Bill Ayers. Photo: Supercomputer12 (CC)

Pirate Papa interviews Bill Ayers, Professor at the University of Illinois and former member of the infamous Weather Underground:

PP: As a father, what were your personal reasons for having kids and how did this decision alter or reinforce your political ideals?

BA: Reason isn’t the exact register. Passion, desire, ecstasy, exuberance, awe…But raising these children was the best thing we’ve ever done, the least conflicted and the purest, the most astonishing and energizing, surprising and humanizing (followed by the experience of caring for our elderly and finally dying parents in our home for many years after our kids had left home).

PP: What were those last few years like living underground with kids? What were some of the ways this affected your family? I would imagine you had strict guidelines that all parties had to live by, structured fictions to deliver under certain circumstances? What else? What was your support community like? What resources were available to you? Did you both have good, steady jobs and sources of income or were you relying on the help of friends and family?

BA: No, none of that. We were quite poor really, sketchy incomes, work in the shadow economy mostly. But we had lots of friends and family, many of whom knew our former identities, some who didn’t. We were who we were, living in the margins but with our values and commitments intact, avoiding political demonstrations, of course, but open about everything but a few delicate details. And being focused on the lives of your children does not require money or equipment or stuff. We hung out in parks and museums and felt we owned them. The only investment the kids want is emotional, thoughtful attention, and money can actually obfuscate that…

The Post-Scarcity Economy: What Is It And How Do We Get There?

klintron — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:02:19 +0000

An interview with Jason Stoddard, writer, blogger, and self-proclaimed “evil marketer,” via Edge of Tomorrow:

EOT: Hi there, Jason. Could you please define a scarcity economy and how it might differ from a post-scarcity economy?

Stoddard: Well, I can be flip and say, “A scarcity economy is when you have to work to buy some things you want, and a post-scarcity economy is where you don’t have to work to have everything you want.”

But it hides the nuances. Right now we all think we’re living in a scarcity economy: you have to work to get money, which there never seems to be enough of, and then you have to use your money to buy stuff, which always has a price tag, and even after you buy stuff, you might wonder how your consumption is going to affect the environment. Everything is presupposed to be scarce: money, things, resources.

If you step back and look around, you might be surprised. Even today, there are point examples of a de facto post-scarcity economy; we produce so many technological gewgaws that if you’re OK with being a couple of generations back in computers or phones, your effective cost could easily be zero. Manufacturing efficiency has soared to points undreamed-of only a generation ago. Prices have cratered, even in non-constant (inflationary) dollars–and even in light of significantly higher energy costs.

Of course, these are only point examples. Nobody is going to leave their job because they can get an old computer for free. And that’s probably the primary difference between a scarcity and post-scarcity economy: the need to keep working to live. When the time comes that we’re unshackled from traditional work and income, and can have all the things we reasonably want, and not have to worry about whether or not our consumption is sustainable, we’re in a post-scarcity economy…

WikiLeaks, The Future Of Journalism And Government 2.0, With David Forbes

klintron — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:16:06 +0000

Via Technoccult:

David Forbes is an Asheville, NC based journalist and blogger. He’s a senior journalist at The Mountain Xpress, a regular contributor to Coilhouse (both print and online), and runs his own blog The Breaking Time. You can find him on Twitter here. As a fellow media-geek I asked David to chat with me about WikiLeaks, the future of journalism, and Government 2.0.

Klint Finley: Personally I don’t think there’s one single future for journalism, but many different futures. I think WikiLeaks is one of journalism’s futures – what do you think?

David Forbes: I would agree that there’s not one single future, just as there’s not one single past for journalism — is made up of many different methods of pursuing and conveying information. WikiLeaks represents that raw, juicy information aspect, and there is a role for that, though it’s more limited in impact that some of its apostles may think.

There’s also a desperate thirst for analysis and context, for putting information together in ways that Wikileaks can rarely do…

Resilient Communities with Jeremy O’Leary

klintron — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:57:54 +0000

Photo by Audrey Eschright / CC

Via Technoccult:

What can individuals do to improve their community’s resilience — whether that be in Portland or elsewhere?

I would suggest one of the 1st steps is to re-enforce the school buildings to withstand an earthquake, use the food certified kitchens in the schools to process locally grown food, and store emergency provisions at the schools.

If you mount solar PV panels on the roofs and place HAM radios there you can be fairly sure of having islands of communication even if things go really sideways.

You would need to have rain water cisterns at the schools, which could also be used for the urban orchards and the veggie gardens.

More broadly speaking, knowing your neighbors and being on good terms with them is possibly the 1st thing to do. It’s only then that conversations about sharing resources can be possible.

It sounds like you’ve picked schools as the epicenter for resilience in communities. Why?

At least in the case of Portland, they are arranged so there is usually a school within a 1/2 mile of you at any point in town. Community centers, churches, a mall…. these would of course work as well.

Revolution: History and Praxis. Technoccult Interviews Johnny Brainwash

klintron — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:30:03 +0000

Via Technoccult:

Klint Finley: I suppose you should start by defining what you mean when you say “revolution.”

Johnny Brainwash: Well, it’s one of those slippery words, like freedom or democracy, that gets used a lot of different ways. I’m assuming here a political and social aspect, and really focusing on what are sometimes called “social revolutions” or “the Great Revolutions.”

The basic definition for me is a rapid and fundamental change in not only political leadership, but also economic and social relations.

So the American Revolution or the various colored revolutions (like Georgia’s Rose Revolution) don’t make the cut, but the French or Russian Revolutions do.

What made you decide to study the revolutions and their history?

I was an Earth First! activist in the 90s, and had been involved in various other causes as well. We talked a lot about revolution, but never had a solid foundation to build on. It was always based on the world as we thought it ought to be, but rarely took into account the world as it is.

When I bailed on that type of activism, I went back to school to finish my history degree with the pretty clear intention of learning how it had actually worked in the past. I’m drawing especially on a poli-sci class called “Political Violence and Revolutions,” but also on a broad range of other sources I’ve encountered both in school and out.

Remembering Mac Tonnies

klintron — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:02:59 +0000

Art by Isoban

Via Technoccult:

Mac Tonnies was a ufologist, the author of After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cryptoterrestrials, and the blogger behind Posthuman Blues. He died on October 19th, 2009 due to heart complications.

The Cryptoterrestrials was released posthumously on March 15th, 2010. Fortunately, Mac gave numerous interviews on the subject of his book prior to his death, including this one with the Ballardian and an interview on Coast to Coast AM.

Since his death, a dedicated community of friends and readers has been working to preserve his legacy. Blazingbetta (aka Sarah Multiverse) has started a Mac Tonnies tribute site, and Capn Marrrk has been hard at work archiving Posthuman Blues. I talked to both of them via instant message.