klintron
Can We Make a Less Brain Damaging Internet?
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…
21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford Interview
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…
5 Media Trends To Watch
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
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…
A Critical Look At The Personal Development Industry
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…
Juggalos, Media Scares, and the West Memphis 3
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.…
Technoccult Dossiers: William S. Burroughs, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison
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?
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
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…
Bill Ayers On Radical Parenting
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…
The Post-Scarcity Economy: What Is It And How Do We Get There?
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…
WikiLeaks, The Future Of Journalism And Government 2.0, With David Forbes
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…
Resilient Communities with Jeremy O’Leary
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…
Revolution: History and Praxis. Technoccult Interviews Johnny Brainwash
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.
Remembering Mac Tonnies
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.
An Introduction to Some of the Most Deranged Comics of the Golden Age
Via Technoccult:
Occult author Bill Whitcomb introduces some of the most deranged comics of the golden age:
Dr. Mortal — The monster building mad scientist
711 — Inmate by day, superhero by night
Madame Fatal — The first cross-dressing superhero.
Electronic Musician HipGnosis Talks About Mind-Altering Music
Electronic musician HipGnosis talks about his techniqiues for making consciousness altering music. Via Technoccult:
I know you use binaural beats and other methods to enhance your music by making it consciousness altering. Can you describe some of the methods you use?
Well, much of my music is a sort of “hypersigil” imbued with specific frequencies designed to induce altered states. When combined with psychedelics, it can be intense. I have done much research on cymatics/sound healing/binaurual tones.
I started making acid house as the first electonic music i did, and binaurals were first introduced to that music. I am heavily influenced by Coil, who also did much work w/ frequencies to transmit information/altered states-specific qualities. Psychic TV is an early influence as well, which was less about traditional sound-mind altering, but more about raw feeling/energy.
And as a raver since the early 90’s UK hardcore/jungle/garage, “techno” and old-school “trance” play huge roles in the type…
Resources For Thinking About Systems
Futurist Chris Arkenberg shares some resources for beginning systems thinkers. Via Technoccult:
In some respects, this way of thinking is a natural part of simply paying attention to things. In other ways, it’s a challenging and sometimes overwhelming course of study that can easily move from Aha! moments to a very dis-empowering sense of total non-determinism. In the face of such huge complexity it can seem impossible to make any actionable sense of things. Finding the balance and determining the appropriate scope of research in analyzing a domain is a critical skill that must be developed individually through practice, lest you tug on that thread and find you’ve unraveled the entire sweater.
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics
Tom Henderson, a/k/a Mathpunk
Tom Henderson explains his philosophy of punk rock mathematics. Via Technoccult:
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.
2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.
Nick Pell on the Gspot
Nick Pell
Frequent Disinfo contributor Nick P is on the Gspot in conversation with Joseph Matheny. Via Alterati:
Nick Pell has been a professional writer for more than half his life. He has written about culture, arts, spirituality, and politics for “Maximumrocknroll,” “Just Out,” “The Hit List,” and “Key 64.” He has also been an editor for Immanion Press and London PA.
