Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links

Week 4

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:50:00 -0500

Last week I totally forgot to write about an amazing part of Wednesday: the wreath laying ceremony to celebrate Peter Cooper’s birthday. In protest of how much Jamshed sucks Kylie and Rachel were going to put a plexiglass box around the Peter statue, blocking him from the stupid ceremonial wreath laying. But that didn’t work out because the scepter sticks out diagonally.

I passive-agressively put post-it letters on the event sign:

(they were taken down so fast)

Lena and Jasmine took off their shirts!

(via Friends of Cooper Union)

The administration was pretty effectively made uncomfortable. Apparently they cut the alma mater song (that this guy was singing) short a few verses to get it over with and say goodbye to everyone.

Maybe Jambashed will be the solution to Cooper’s financial problems?

On Friday morning I sent off a paper proposal for censorship about how money has essentially been dematerialized into form of centrally held information that can be censored. Not exactly censorship…but excited to try connecting The Handmaid’s Tale with ubiquitous computing forewarnings from Adam Greenfield’s Everyware.

Walked up to Madison Square Park for lunch at Shake Shack with David, which was delicious. We shouted in catch-up-y excitement about monomania and all or something projects and New York Startups™. He told me about how things work infrastructurally in India vs. the US (rearchitecting vs. bandaids) which sounds like insanity.

Afterwards walked up to MoMA. Normally don’t sit through videos (especially on loops) but watched a good amount of Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma.

Ate a Félix González-Torres candy, while is always a strange relief when museum-fatigued. There is a DRONE in the rotating contemporary art section. Noticed they are installing Rikrit’s annoying curry thing in a big way. Loved these video pedestals from 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (Sharon Hayes and co.) because they feel almost exactly like sitting at a computer alone at night.

Walked(!) back to school. (That’s like 8 miles in one day! But who’s counting? Fitness is kind of my new thing.) A flyer-person in the gold-buying-district(?) practically shouted me down about how his gold buying establishment will fill my pockets with so much money I won’t even know what to do with myself. Goofy. Had a great call about a freelance web project I’m excited to be starting. Headed back into the city and played video games with friends into the night. Not as good as I remember myself to be from growing up. In fact, I am terrible. But the city is a bigger pond.

Saturday headed home for a doctor’s appointment. Finished a final round of tweaks on the Girl Walk site. Watched South Park with Niki. Woke up just as I was falling asleep and scribbled things down, a little bit about photography and a lot about systems (for which my grade re-evaluation presentation is fast approaching).

Sunday, pulled together a cover letter, updated résumé, and references for a summer internship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard!! Already wishing I could rewrite the cover letter because I could so do a better job and I REALLY hope I get this. Would be incredible to spend a summer at metaLab (their research areas map uncannily to my obsessions) or the Youth and Media lab.

Then went out to a too-expensive dinner at Porsena with Alex and he talked to me about painting. Which must’ve been like trying to explain to an alien how to open a door knob.

Monday morning I got coffee and perused the internet for a long time:

Kelli’s TEDx Talk:

Timehop makes you want to use social media more.

Surrealist politics by Sexpigeon (which is maybe the best website): “It is predicted that total spending on television advertising in the Presidential race will reach two billion dollars. Two billion dollars! Do you know what you could do with that kind of money? Abort every fetus, embryo, and zygote in the nation AND marry every gay person in the United States AND still have $4 million left over.”

Tumblr’s architecture, which I only understand a little bit, makes my head spin. In other NYC Startup Hubris news, DY is the winner of captioning this photo of David Karp: “I’m King of Midtown!”

Also via DY, the seed of a really important convo on Flickr.

I must’ve subscribed to Cornell’s robotics lab on YouTube a while ago, because I received this incredible video in my inbox.

The internet, interface design, and social networks were on my mind. Left a long comment on Brad’s post and kind of felt like my work for the day was done.

Walked to school over the bridge and asked lots of questions at an informal Work Makes Work meeting. Tried to finish a proposal for Triple Canopy based on long-unresolved Notes on Forgetting, Archiving, Existing on the Internet, but ADD’d out, deciding instead to walk over the bridge (again!), home, with Alex, which was worth it. Anyway, I wasn’t totally sure if the notes made sense or how to pitch it as an essay proposal (with a budget, etc?!) at the last minute (obviously). But loooord knows an editor (ideally following me around all day) would help. Regardless, the deadline proved to be a helpful reminder to work on this.

Tuesday, Shakira got attacked by a sea lion. I, on the other hand, sort of merged the Forgetting notes in my head with thinking for Systems about the social network as a future city, and the speculative fictional plot to assassinate Zuckerberg upon his appointment as president of the US. (Maybe a stretch? Though I think if I were Zuckerberg, I would be driven to kill myself from the pressure of being that rich and powerful.) Jaron Lanier writes: “[Technologists] tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed.”

I re-read Zuckerberg’s post-IPO Letter and found a lot of the bits about “a social mission — to make the world more open and connected” to be pretty specious, considering it was originally a version of Hot-or-Not. And still, essentially, is.

Downloaded b-roll and saved news clippings. Learned that Facebook flies the flags of state, country, and social network. Can’t help but imagining them merge… (via wired)

Facebook’s internal tools are interesting. Engineers have “push karma” which starts at 4 stars on their first day of work and can only go down if their code breaks things. If an engineer has low push karma their work is scrutinized much more carefully before being allowed to go into the daily pushes (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and especially the big weekly push (Tuesday), which includes thousands of changes. Check out that dislike button!

Stumbled on some ADHD self-help from an old notebook (lol):

And experimented with Pomodoro, an app that mandates 25 minute timed and named sprints of focused work with 5 minutes breaks. It plays a ticking clock sound too. While it’s kind of helpful to do a Pomodoro if I’m sitting on my ass, I kept putting off starting the next one because it’s kind of a displeasurable way of working for me, so didn’t even manage to do two sprints in a row.

Grabbed spicy noodles at Szechuan Gourmet, then wandered around the NYPL’s gorgeous Schwarzman Building before meeting Christine’s class there to look at a history of photo prints. The library collects a ton and is happy to show them to the public if you ask nicely and arrange ahead of time. Definitely going back.

Walked back to school! And surfed the internet for a while.

Cowbird, which just became an official company instead of just a side-project, is so well designed. The interface feels really springy and just fun to interact with. The site also manages to make the complications of linked data seem ridiculously friendly and intuitive. Jonathan Harris is talented. While the tools are incredible and they’re doing a good job cultivating a specific kind of community, I’m not terribly interested in most of the content that’s there so far.

The site is also full of great little moments, like this from their FAQ:

Finally got around to finishing the readings Christine gave me, though I have to take a closer look at them. This is Gustave Flaubert in 1881:

“ART It makes you ill. What use is it? since it can be replaced by machines that do it better and faster.

ARTISTS You have to laugh at everything they say. All jokers. Boast about their disinterestedness. Are astonished that they are dressed like everyone else. Earn ridiculous amounts of money, but throw it all away. What they do can’t be called ‘working’. Often invited out to dinner.”

Maybe a predecessor to this. (via Sofia Leiby)

Later had Censorship, which was good. We read Howl by Ginsburg and excerpts of the trial, all of which I loved. We were then subjected to Franco’s embarrasing film adaptation. It wasn’t so bad, but the animation sequences were a little barf-inducing. All in all it does a disservice to the writing, I’d say.

Next week we are moving on to Mapplethorpe and visual art, which is exciting:

It was Valentines day:

But, far from playing some suave move, I basically declared Words bankruptcy:

Hung out at home and went to bed early but woke up and scribbled, photoshopped, and wrote from 2am to sunrise.

The rant below, based on this strange graphic I threw together during Systems last semester is meant to be recited in a screaming voice, in protest:

I am not a vessel for genetic information.

Saying that you don’t believe in genetics is like saying that you don’t believe in dinosaurs. But maybe I don’t.

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? It doesn’t matter, writes Richard Dawkins, eggs are raw genetic information, genetic information simply wants to multiply, and chickens are a means to make more eggs. Humans, he writes, are also just vessels for genetic information. Maybe he doesn’t say “just” but you’re being a softie if you don’t reduce his arguments to this purpose, the multiplication of genetic information. At some point we became sentient blah blah and here we are.

I’m sick and tired of things so vast I can’t understand them. Genetics. Capitalism. International relations.

Fucking is comedic on a grand level because it starts to look like a multiplication sign.

Where did this growth curve come from?

We are going to wipe ourselves out and there was never any reason we had to be sentient to worry about it anyway.

What we’ve uncovered is a problem of language. We have no words to describe intention without mind.

Genius, in an earlier time, was thought to be external. It descended from the heavens and passed through our bodies. We could inhale it and hold it inside of us momentarily at most.

Today genius is internalized, inseparable from persons.

Everything in my experience confirms that I am here. I stretch almost compulsively, feeling out my body’s physicality.

Pass the torch to the next generation. None of this matters so I’m going to light up a candy cigarette.

In between the people who don’t believe in dinosaurs and Richard Dawkins there are interventionists. Those who know that the world probably isn’t in God’s hands, but it also probably isn’t a meaningless void.

I can fuck with this abstraction.

I’m against thinking that these abstractions are real. I want to drop out of the race for power. Blow up the exponential curve. Because its just an idea we invented. Studying ourselves. Is the stupidest thing. I don’t want to settle into some benign role on the spectrum, and I don’t want to rule the world. A healthy but not megalomaniacal appetite. It’s functionally incompatible. Our realities. (I don’t believe in God or god.)

It’s existential!

Something sweet and funny about wanting to validate ones existence. Why am I doing this? I want to connect with people. I want to advance ideas.

If there is a primal instinct I’m a poor genetic specimen. So far I have not managed to reproduce. I would apologize but to whom?

Somehow I have landed in a nunnery. Dedicated the the advancement of science and art. There should just be a fucking school, where people go to learn multiplication in the reproductive sense.

We are the scum of the earth. The thought leaders. There is some debauchery, but in comparison this is a place of rigor. Home of chaste workers.

What’s disturbing is that the educated go out and control the world. I met a consultant who has broken trust down to a science, which she sells to corporations. Trust, she says, is good for business. And what about business? What’s that good for? I asked her. She smiled smart-but-dead-like and said, you have to believe that growing the economy is good for the world. Consulting is a desired job — maybe the quintessential job — of the educated class.

The world, as seen by consultants, is represented by metaphors or graphs. Broken down into her science or spun into his story. And then we ask, how can we make tomorrow better for our children! I’m inclined to say that genetic information doesn’t give a fuck about the human race. It has no fucks to give. But if we allocate our resources: food, violence, sex, ideas, ego, entertainment, correctly we may be able to stall the implosion of the human species.

I have to ask if smarter DNA is better DNA. Perhaps the meta cognizant come more tightly coiled. If I am wrong, then I surrender. I want to know the most efficient expression. I want to know the end but I don’t think this has one because it’s not a story with a plot, it’s a system. A line with an arrow indicating up up up up up up up…

Thes a sick quantification in all of this. I want to question the quality of the information on which systemic decisions are based. In Points at Which to Intervene in a System Donella Meadows describes a spectrum. From adjusting the levers of a faucet to showing the pipe

The first time Kevin diagrammed a system on the board: inputs, outputs, I was blown away. But what started to sicken me is that this isn’t some game. This is how people in charge make choices?!

After I took a class on color theory I could never do my laundry the same way again. Stacking shirts became an exercise of hue and value relationships.

In my systems class I received a D for not turning in work (this protest is part of making amends before the grade adjustment period is over) but I couldn’t bring myself to make a move all semester. I was struck by paralysis, which I’m just now coming to terms with. A heightened experience of color is cool but a heightened experience of systems is TERRIFYING.

There are different ways to depict a system, for example, Pirates in Somalia. One is long-form journalism that runs through the economic reasoning tied in with narrative. Another emerging form is something called a newsgame. It doesn’t tell the story or even necessarily explain itself, but leaves the player with a simulated first-hand understanding of the dynamics of Somali piracy: input, output, risk, strategy, conditions of chance, loops. A kind of understanding that transcends content.

What follows is my TOTALLY FICTIONAL (was scared to put this on dropbox for a minute while I was writing in case they are scanning for crazies) future Zuckerberg assassination. It’s embarrasing stuff, at this point.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, was assasinated on Tuesday near his home in Palo Alto. He was out walking his dog, Beast, when he was hit with a single bullet. Neighbors, who heard the shot, alerted the police. He will be succeeded at the company by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Anchor 1:

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the ubiquitous social networking website Facebook, was found dead last Tuesday at his home in Palo Alto. While the exact nature of the death has yet to be disclosed, the county coroner has ruled it a suicide. This news comes shortly on the eve of Facebook’s multi-billion dollar IPO, entering the company into public trading, and making Zuckerburg one of the world’s richest and most powerful political figures. Political Figure isn’t the job title you expect to hear for a college dropout who founded a social network, but Facebook’s political presence became undeniable.

The capital was relocated to Palo Alto, with additional political offices at the company’s data center in Prineville, Oregon.

Shortly after their Initial Public Offering in 2012, Facebook updated politics. In early forms of theocratic government, belief in God’s word was used by political leaders for undisputed control. Secular-ish democracy enforced order with trust in the government and punishment by the justice system. Government 3.0 is more insidious because it exists inside your head.

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama spoke of “cyber threats.” He was likely referring to hacking from China or terrorism in the form of disabling network infrastructure so critical to the functioning of today’s world, but little did he know that the hearts and minds of American citizens (and others around the globe — though less so) were already enlisted in a nation called Facebook.

Activism was replaced by Liketivism. Or as some old-timers in the transition period disparagingly referred to it, “Slacktivism.” (These comments were hidden from Top News via an upgrade to the Edge-Rank algorithm in late 2012.)

Cities were replaced by information-space, which in the latest Facebook release, argued Zuckerberg, finally enabled communication which surpassed physical f2f (face-to-face) interaction. Those who were born “before” seemed to remember something else, though it was a vague feeling and no tagged photos, posts, or pages for this idea could be located. Historians looking at the state’s formation criticized Zuckerberg’s valiant statements about improving communication, waving disintegrating paper documents — olde inkjet printouts of a conversation scraped off of the Internet (as they used to call it) where Zuckerberg calls the site’s first users quote “suckers” end quote. A testimony from someone who was ostensibly in the dorm room at Old Harvard in the early days (who can know if it’s true) claimed that Facebook was first invented to compare women. Yet technological innovation has consistently trickled from the porn industry or the military — and by extension technological means for sex or violence. What was only beginning to be predicted was technology’s close pairing with control. Zuckerberg’s role at the center of all this was, perhaps, foreshadowed by investor Warren Buffet, who came closest to Facebook’s present scope of info-power in the naughts (00-09) when he was widely known to have better, more realtime information than the government itself, thanks to stakes at leading corporations in nearly every industry. His genius, it was seen, was connecting otherwise privileged data from trains, planes, and ships with otherwise privileged data from energy companies, with otherwise privileged data from the financial sector into some throbbing graph of unprecedented accuracy, timeliness, and fidelity. The map of the world that came closest (in its time) to approaching the size of the world itself, yet fit in the palm of a hand. It was Zuckerberg who applied this same panoptic form of infopower to everyday life, and therefore citizenry. Users became subjects. A social network became the first social government.

And then there’s this, sort of riffing on the sketch of alternative interfaces and channeling the heavy-handed internet-y aesthetic:

Like I said, EMBARRASING STUFF. Like, seriously just bad. But at least fast moving, at this point.

Wednesday all my classes were cancelled and I had stayed up late, so I did a little bit of work on the freelance project in the morning and then basically read the internet for the rest of the day.

LOTS OF ROBOTS:

Look, I love small businesses. And I prefer to do business with them. But the sad fact is that when it comes to data, your information is likely more secure in the hands of a giant MegaCorp than with an individual. Because, after all, what happens if that individual goes away? Who will protect your data? The internet is simply a way to connect people. But what happens when a person, who forms a vital link in that chain, disconnects? Im about to find out. Im hoping my host will pop back up. That hes simply going to pay to renew his registration, and that all of this will go away. But in the meantime, Im backing up all my data and shopping for a new host. One with a staff. And robots. Lots of robots. Because human beings tend to fail.

Fuck content. Another surprisingly awesome tangentially required reading for Publication Design. I’m still not working hard enough for that class.

An e-cigarette explodes in somebody’s mouth! (via david carr)

Cartographies of time (now in paperback, on my list to-buy):

Twinkie Circuitry, apropos all these speculative futures:

A picture of swimsuit models ringing a bell so that a bunch of computers can start trading autonomously in empty rooms. (via Kevin):

I’ve always had a sneaking feeling that I hate the PDF file format, but never had a good reason. THIS. This means war:

An alternative way to punish companies sucking up all your iOS contacts: (via)

Be angry now (via austin kleon):

Awesome early Mac OS graphics (via David Cole):

and Raul

And, well, this is TERRIFYING. A day after I wrote my terrible screed about Facebook as a future government, Facebook is launching verified accounts, for which they are collecting scans of government-issed photo IDs. (via)

Walked to school and home again over the bridge. Is it possible to be addicted to a bridge?? Also, there is a Momofuku Milk Bar between home and school, at which I get cookies. That might be part of it. But the bridge is even better than nature, I think. Reminds me of why living in a city is so badass. Some days I listen to Philip Glass and other days I listen to Britney Spears, both excellent choices of bridge music.

Thursday, today. Western Theories was good, although I sort of zoned out after a little while. Short attention span really takes a toll on me in theoretical situations.

Milled around, scanned notes, and strung links together for this weeknote for a few hours. Got drinks with Aaron and Alex and then went to sculpture. Testing this theory although I consider Jonah Lehrer a hack. Sculpture class has been consistently bad this semester with a lack of work — especially work that requires or demands conversation, but Niki is hilarious so it’s just disappointing not painful. Had a great studio visit with her after where we talked about almost everything I’m working on and mad about and scared about and she joked that the workmakeswork show is “like santa’s factory” (which kind of says it all), and I went home confused and excited about making things. Tempted to walk the bridge but took the subway.

On deck (yes I am one of the a-holes using that amazing new to-do list app):

I weep for us all. “an amazing new app for list-keeping that is unbelievably simple, quick and satisfying to use”
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) February 16, 2012

Bonus pic from the future:

Week 3

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:19:00 -0500

Had lots of fun this week(!) but it was lousy work-wise. A getting-sick mixed with spring-fever-y lull to last week’s mania.

Thursday I was tired and in a weird mood from staying up all night. Didn’t really manage to read Kant or Hegel so that was a painful Western Theories of Art class discussion. Sculpture was okay, flapped my gums without saying anything smart about the work.

Audrey linked me to this great essay by Joe Scanlan on social space and relational aesthetics.

Relational aesthetics set out to tap the creative potential of social space. But now—more than ever—social space is responsible for suppressing most of what is worthwhile about making art in the first place: Narcissism. Solipsism. Delusion. Perversion. Dedication. Fantasy. Absurdity. And while relational aesthetics might have changed the kinds of conversations we have about art, to include questions such as what an artwork might be made of, who could be involved, or where it might begin and end, rarely have these ideas been acute enough in practice to overcome common decency. And that’s a shame. Because if there’s one thing we need less of in the United States right now, it’s common decency—or at least Bill Frist’s idea of common decency. These days, both politically and aesthetically, I prefer to adhere to Martin Kippenberger’s creed: “Keiner hilft keinem.” Every man for himself. For better and worse, Kippy’s iconoclasm affords a greater range of expression than tacit collaboration ever could. What’s more, it just feels better. For all relational aesthetics’ claims to utopia and tomorrow being another fine day, an aesthetic that can’t allow anything bad to happen sounds more like anesthesia to me.

But I sort of lost steam on whatever I was mad about last week regarding social practice and that-kaila-show.

Friday went to Chelsea for the first time in maybe a year. Aaron picked up a Pwr Paper at Printed Matter then we went to wait in line for Doug Wheeler. Spent maybe 45 minutes waiting outside the gallery. It was cold. Aaron had to leave for class before we even got in (ha), but I sat there and sat there and sat there. The two sort of old ladies in front of me were funny because one was really calm and the other one kept saying things like, “if I wanted to see a blank room I could just go into my bathroom!” After getting inside there was another hour of waiting but I finished The Handmaid’s Tale, which I had to read for school that weekend anyway. The waiting room scene was as much of a spectacle as the thing itself. A group of school kids who waited more patiently than I would’ve been able to at that age. Listening to the gallerina repeat instructions to everyone. She asked the kids not to run up the curved wall. Some of the kids came out like OMG and others were like WASTE OF TIME. I stayed in for just over a full cycle, taking my glasses off and putting them on, walking around and standing still, noticing dust or flaws in the paint and spacing out, trying to remember if my eyes were open or closed. It was pretty similar to seeing this Olafur piece at SF MOMA a few years ago. The weirdest part was that I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to clip my eyelashes. They were causing vignetting!

Walked back to school and then met Niki in Chinatown for porkbuns, bubble tea, and Xi’an, but I was too exhausted (maybe from having my eyes/brain blasted with light) and made for bad company. Went to a fun party later.

Saturday did nothing but take a walk and make the best ravioli ever, which we bought from some ludicrously authentic smoky garage.

Saw a wheelchair dog!

Saw the Rite Aid in Greenpoint that used to be some kind of roller disco and still has a disco ball! (Highly recommended.)

Sunday did the superbowl thing and that was fun. Not sure why the ads were so bad this year or how they turned the entire field into a screen in 10 minutes but it looked awesome. Especially when they dropped Madonna in a hole and flashed this message out of nowhere:

Sunday was also my one year anniversary of following myself-a-year-ago on various social networks (weird!) thanks to twitshift and more recently timehop. It’s always crazy seeing what was going on a year ago. And I love rediscovering old gems like this:

I’m jealous of people that can write computer code and chicas with no cellulite.What u jealous of?
— Tyra Banks (@tyrabanks) January 9, 2011

Monday I bought a giant pad of newsprint and screwed it into the wall of my studio, but have yet to write on it. Sort of like buying a too-nice notebook. Filed under: failed motivational techniques. Rejiggered the Girl Walk events page for them before they head out to the west coast. Still some work to do on that site. Had a good burrito.

Tuesday had five minutes of photo because Christine was doing studio visits for the next two days. Censorship was good, although I felt the pain of having to repeat a lower-level class when sitting through a lesson on how to use academic databases and cite your sources. Sort of blacked out on my desk and the librarian lecturing us publicly shamed me. Cool. Went home feeling sick, took NyQuil, fell asleep.

The highlight of a rather slooow and braindead week was a studio visit with Christine on Wednesday. She showed up with readings and questions based on the introduce-yourselves-survey we had taken on the first day. It’s exciting to take such a structure-less class where the teacher’s only agenda is to help you move your work forward. Words I scribbled down in my notebook: whimsy, (dark) humor, telling a joke until it’s no longer funny, people who hang on to youth culture until they’re 70, discomfort, photo archive, if I went blind, the problem is the content.

Other than that spent all of Wednesday doing my Publication Design homework that I didn’t get around to doing. Mad at myself for waiting until the day it was due to start. That shouldn’t happen. That class makes me feel REALLY BAD at design, in a good way. It feels a lot like having a graphic design job (which is annoying) but I can tell I’m getting better faster than I was at work. He’s a great teacher.

We had to read + respond to Jeff Keedy’s The Rules of Typography According to ~~Crackpots~~ Experts in which he quotes Beatrice Warde’s famous crystal goblet:

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain… Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a “modernist” in the sense in which I am going to use the term. That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not “How should it look?” but “What must it do?” and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

But then Keedy is all like, “Beatrice Warde did not imagine her crystal goblet would contain PEPSI-COLA, but some vessel has to do it.” It’s a liberating read, sticking it to stodgy old typographers. His golden rule is: pay attention. (The opposite of following or reacting to rules.) For the illustration portion of my response I photographed this horrendously cheesy goblet of alphabet soup.

I have a hard time getting excited and feeling good about graphic design. I pretty much always want to be like I DIDN’T MAKE THAT. There’s a better way, which I need to figure out, that’s not just getting it done.

This morning I gave a nervous little presentation on Riegel’s history of ornament and we talked about that and Wolflinn. It was better than last week but by the end I was still writhing in my seat with spring fever!!!! Went outside for a long time and stretched and climbed on the building like a maniac until a security guard came outside and was like STOP. It was really fun. Sculpture was just-okay. Had a funny conversation about a boring piece. Tried to remember other times where we had good conversations about bad work, it’s possible but today sucked.

If I had my way I would just play outside all day. Christine joked that people think of art school as this place where people are drugged out and painting with tempera but it’s really rigorous and hard. Tons of self-motivation required. Spartan work ethics! Which most of the time is hard to pull off. I have a bunch of Writer windows open on my computer of things that need to get written, sent, done. Hoping for a few quiet, productive days. And not getting sicker. Going to manage my huge amounts of time better and stop waiting for the mood to strike to do work. In conclusion: ice cream, NyQuil, goodnight.

Weeknote 2.428571429

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:44:00 -0500

(a.k.a. week-and-almost-a-half note)

Basically too tired to write this, want to keep putting it off, but the longer I wait the harder it gets to remember what I even did all day on those glorious fridays and mondays off. It wasn’t nothing.

Tuesday had our first class for photo. Christine is great. We talked for a while and she gave us some readings and a pep-talk about failure. (Everyone wants to give us that, Niki’s was about how Cooper students aren’t lazy, like some people — cough visiting artists cough — think, but that there’s this intense anxiety about what to do next. I will accept all pep-talks. They help.)

Then Global Censorship, which is a lower-level class I have to take because I failed my Beckett class for not turning in essays. (Beckett would be proud?) Anyway the Beckett class sucked and Censorship turns out to be the class I wanted all along! It’s fascinating to think about, especially in the hyper-expanded definition of censorship that we’re working with. Some examples that came to mind were Julian Assange’s ideas for using cryptographic hashes to combat internet censorship, how censorship is built into products and toys (like life-like dolls for children that are programmed to shut off rather than cry, when they are being hit or turned upside down), how the best way to communicate to people 100,000 years in the future not to dig up our nuclear waste might not be to educate them but to erase its very existence from cultural memory, the relationship between censorship (in the sense of content) and bias in computer systems. Excited to explore all this more. Have been eye-ing Berkman summer internships for Internet research.

Wednesday had art issues and publication design. Art issues was bad, we talked about signs, signifiers, and other bullshit that no one cares about and may actually bear no relation to art. Publication design is dry but good, luckily Warren is hilarious. Design classes feel like a struggle to believe in graphic design and keep myself interested. I have so much to learn but the sharpening that happens in design classes feels so disconnected from everything else. And the work gives me office flashbacks. Don’t even feel like writing about it here.

Thursday had art history and sculpture. Skimmed Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

I need to get used to reading old things and dry things, not just stoopid blog posts. While I was reading Kant I couldn’t help pausing to tweet a pic:

LUCKY! RT @youngna: @CaseyG Twitpic definitely didn’t exist when I was forced to read Kant.
— Casey A. Gollan (@CaseyG) January 24, 2012

But I actually want to read all of it more closely after our class discussion. Weinstein is a great teacher.

In sculpture Aaron was the only one who showed. It was this and one other thing:

People said it looked like it was made for the internet, and here it is on Flickr a few days later with likes and comments. I’m scared for the world after school because we can spend an hour picking something apart and the same thing goes down so smoothly on the internet. We need to do better.

I started to write a response to Louis’s essay on Likes a while ago that really boils down to this: mythical future interfaces, better tools for which you (and I) can “offer no concretized” vision, will not solve uncriticality and info-consumerism online. Aaron, the day before, said something like, “nobody switches to less addictive tools, you have to destroy what’s out there.”

On the Facebook IPO, Alex Galloway wrote (on Facebook!!):

“The basic question: Is Facebook more like a newspaper or more like a factory? The liberal answer: it’s a newspaper in that it gathers stories about people and circulates those stories back to its readers while leveraging reader attention for advertising dollars. Profit flows in from advertisers and the value of the company is determined by the marketplace. The progressive answer: it’s a factory in that it demands unpaid micro labor from its users, extracting surplus value from such labor. Profit flows from commons-based peer production and thus value is ultimately produced by users (making the ads merely the “last mile” of valorization). NYT claims the former, obviously. But it’s very important that we understand FB as a factory, not just another form of mass media.”

On Friday I went home for the weekend, pushed pixels around trying to actually act on my complaint to Louis about how annoying I find the pool website. Launching something improved still feels far off, and made of a lot of small tweaks re: annoyances, but I had fun playing with CSS transforms. Doodling in HTML.

Saturday and Sunday I read half of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, for Censorship. Experimented with tracking my reading of a printed book with this fancy little app and Readmill, which gave me funny little estimates about how many more time’s I’d need to sit down and read to finish the book. Cumbersome and novel. I like new stuff. Dystopian books fuck with my emotions because I A) start to confuse books with reality, always (did that happen in the book or IRL!?) and B) just kind of get sad and contemplative if that’s what the characters are up to. Fixed that by playing Kirby with Niki for a little!

Returned to Brooklyn on Sunday night and made smores at a bonfire! In Brooklyn! Backyard fires in the city always feel illegal. Somebody threw in an old lacquered chair and other random crap from the backyard and the fire basically exploded.

Monday (maybe getting the order wrong here) watched a few bits from this talk at DLD on post-internet art, and Aaron and I got talking REALLY INTENSELY:

This youtube comment makes me embarrassed to think about it. Good job, troll.

Karen seemed really nervous giving her introduction (but, jesus, I would be too). I wonder if I will ever be able to speak in front of people without losing my shit.

Haven’t watched it all, but it was pretty exciting when Daniel Keller went on (at 37 minutes in) and reminded everyone that animated gifs run on burnt coal and computers are built by slaves! Read this article about Apple and outsourcing of manufacturing. Maybe silly but I made this my phone background after hearing about somebody who received their phone with pictures from the factory left on it. Insane reminder that humans put these things together halfway across the world, also just a great photo.

Looked at a little of Daniel Keller/Aids-3D’s work after the talk:

Berserker

Styrofoam, acrylic, USB memory stick with 3D file

A Von Neumann probe arrives on an alien world from earth with a single message —Reproduce me. It appears to be some sort of idol. It’s image is its form, Its word is its flesh, its seed is information on a solid-state universal serial bus memory stick, It’s essence encoded in binary. Is it an emissary of peace or a mindless virus programmed to dominate its surroundings?

It reminded me of Talk to Me / my systems class with Kevin / design-y art crossover shit (but A3D is way more on the art side, aesthetically…it just looks like art) / social practice.

There isn’t a hard line between (for lack of a better term) a “traditional studio practice” — visual artists thinking primarily about things like composition and pushing around forms in space (which seems like the way Aaron was working on that wheatpasted piece of furniture) and all of the above. The offshoots or bastard children of research-based conceptual art, advertising, product design aren’t just noodling with materials, they’re intent on communicating something. There’s something exciting and essential! about this, how these people are dealing directly with the world: e.g. reality check on you people who are obsessed with immateriality because it’s abstract and these things are very real and vast and powerful and (in my opinion) totally fucking terrifying! (sublime?! lol).

commercial break, this again:

BUT there’s something that is deeply unsatisfying about this kind of work. It’s too clever. It’s a good illustration for some essay but doesn’t open up. Leaves me cold. I feel like I have almost no relationship with making the noodly material work but can’t articulate why I hate the clever stuff so much. (Talk to Me left me DEPRESSED.) You could talk about the A3D alien the way we talk about sculptures built in the shop, but it almost seems to be asking to backburner that discussion. After all, there is a coal burning slave factory churning out iPads somewhere. A world to attend to! This is product design not sculpture.

Started to collect drafts, thoughts, and ideas to flesh out: forgetting.info, a Field Guide to Skeueomorphism (if only for myself, to collate my obsessive collection), post-internet antagonism (why won’t people be ~~mean to~~ “CRITICAL of” eachother online (hai claire bishop), something about robot teachers, something about that crazy discussion I can’t even fully recollect about capitalism and computing old art and new art. Github, most important startup of 2011, examples of it used for things besides coding.

A few weeks ago Kaila sent around a ridiculously open yet specific call for ~collaborations~ that quickly morphed into an “experimental” social practicey event thing with a student run coffee bar, radio station, newspaper published form within, chalkboards, someone planning to camp out, etc and so on ad infinitum.

I’m a jerk so I replied-all:

But a week later stayed up all night / woke up in a fever about the show. Those things all seem to parody themselves. I started to sketch out an identical exhibition (in form) that is somehow a joke, even borrowing the same coffee stand (if possible!). Sketchup is fun, it’s kind of like shopping.

It’s not done but you can download the show here. Their proposed title is WORK MAKES WORK, a sort of collaborative studio space, but the word on the tip of my tongue is IDEA ECONOMY. A sort of retro (peaked in 1995?) term calling into play both this bullshit: “The primary product of the Idea Economy is ideas. You and I can and must produce ideas just as those who prospered in previous economies had to produce crops, manufactured goods, and most recently, services.” but also the tone of economy, as in economical (cut-rate), efficient (factory!) is kind of a sad undertone. A collaborative workspace/group under the pretense of an exhibition is encumbered! Precious!

Photo, on Tuesday, was great. We talked about a reading on ruins that reminded me of these [1, 2, 3]. Everybody showed old things and talked about where they’re coming from / at / going. Starting with my psychotic breakdown last time I took a photo class:

Dawit wasn’t interested in ideas. Only pretty projects. And I was thinking big and scary.

Then decided to go after sensitive photographers, many of whom are friends. It wasn’t the things in books that angered me, it was the people around me.

Took the sexy studio art portraits, resulting in a D and an admonishment to be compassionate, constructive, and ethical:

Decent advice but that group needed to be shaken up much more than I was able to.

Told a story about the two sides of my family. On my dad’s side and back a few generations they were prolific recreational photographers. I found a box of beautiful glass negatives at granny & grandpas.

Family (dad’s side) with guns:

One night at dinner my mom was telling me about her grandmother with long silver hair and bright blue eyes. I said I had never seen a picture of her. That’s because, I learned, she considered photography to be a SIN. A SIN! So she was never photographed. I was overjoyed when I heard that. It made sense in some weird hereditary-we-take-issue-with-this way. ME. TOO. GRANNY.

Photograph of my great grandma (mom’s side):

Anyway, the stories are fun, but most people are more interesting than their work, said Christine. The goal, I think, this time around — going forward — is to do something with all these problems that isn’t so much of a direct reaction or disparaging to a certain group. Even if I’m saying the same thing essentially, Dawit’s little trio of advice still makes me wrinkle my nose because it’s about being nice in all the wrong (fake!) ways.

Wednesday I had a conversation with Troy pegging the current internet-y aesthetic to dutch typography.

I sat through half of my Contemporary Art Issues class, grumbling and glaring at people for all the bullshit that was being spouted. It seems like not even the teacher (a nice guy!) wants to talk about art in these shitty, shitty LOVELESS words.

When I was a freshman I had another run-in with Rosalind Krauss. When I told Martha I was no longer going to make things, she made me look at the expanded field diagram and attend a lecture-y symposium thing at The New School with her on UN-UN-sculpture vs. NOT-NOT-sculpture. Both of us were skin-crawling-ly ready to get the hell out of that room after about 10 minutes, after which I promised her I would never think again.

There’s something interesting but MEH about it all, theory. During break from Art Issues, in a Rosalind-Krauss-induced stabby panic I sprinted across the street to the office and dropped the class. It even cost $25 to drop (since the ARBITRARY free period ended on Monday) but it is well worth it to not sit through that. I ran back in, grabbed my bag, and walked straight out of the room. I was all like:

Except totally silent. I sat in the sunshine(!) had a conversation with Kaila about the show and why I hate it, and finished my design homework. Pub design was excellent.

I am grateful for a schedule that allows for me to totally mess up my sleeping patterns (or lack thereof) for a few late night and early nights. This week: still thinking about those systems projects (keep not doing that) but made headway on explaining what I don’t like, publication design homework (I have a lot to learn), freelance design work dealings, thinking about a cover letter for the Berkman internship (though I might have to stay in New York and do summer classes as a consequence for dropping art issues, ha), reading hegel by 10am, thinking about kailas show and my own (sculpture?), lots of reading, and fleshing out some of those draft ideas mentioned above to keep myself writing.

In conclusion, this weird song by Laurie Anderson that I want to hate but looove where she raps about bailouts and Oprah.

Subway at a US Military Base in Iraq

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:49:00 -0500

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:51:59 -0500

Weeknotesandlinks 1

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:54:33 -0500

I’ve always wanted to keep weeknotes like Berg London. Snarkmarket once posted about why they’re so great. I guess I am late to writing this, my first weeknote, not just because it’s the 4th week of the year, but it’s also a Monday, not a Friday. However my schedule is a little kooky this semester: Mondays and Fridays off(!!!) so I’m disoriented about what constitutes a “week” or the end of one.

Monday was MLK day, so we had no school. Aaron and I came across two apartments in the same glass building projecting blond ladies on their wall:

And watched a talk by Lawrence Lessig:

Tuesday was rescheduled to have Monday classes for some reason so I was off again. Went to school and felt butterflies and excitement. Ate at Japadog (finally open on St. Marks!) which was a lifechanging experience. Later we bought mousetraps for our house mouse. There were a few different brands at the dollar store, each with their own morose cartoon of a crying mouse.

On second thought, buying the cheapest traps (4 for $1!) might’ve been a stupid idea because no mouse has been stupid enough to step into them yet and I failed to think about what happens after the mouse gets stuck. Kelli informs me that you can just put some vegetable oil on the adhesive to release the poor thing…once you figure out how to take it outside. In all likelihood this will end up going down like the David Sedaris story where he drowns a rat in his bathtub with a spray bottle of Windex.

Wednesday I went to the SOPA/PIPA protest with Alex. My phone was dead which felt so wrong at an internet rally. Joel Spolsky said it best:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online. The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for: * Elimination of software patents * Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits * Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary “to promote the useful arts.” Maybe 10 years? * Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech * And ponies. We want ponies. We don’t have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the “compromise” position.

My art issues class was cancelled because the teacher was unexpectedly out of the country(?). It wasn’t so bad because we all hung out for an hour and ate free cake that was auspiciously available in the building. The class was supposed to be taught by Litia Perta, of Why Cooper Matters fame, but she (understandably) backed out after this administrative bullshit happened:

I was hired to teach at Cooper in 2006 when I was a doctoral candidate and my semester’s fee for 14 weeks was $4,500. Sometime later, after completing my Ph.D. and spending a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, I returned to Cooper Union. It was the fall of 2009 and I was re-hired by the college’s dean of the humanities at the exact same rate I was paid in 2006. I was told at the time that the budget could not accommodate any fee increase for having received my Ph.D., nor could it afford paying any increase for the standard annual rates of inflation. That same year, the dean who hired me received a compensation package valued at $239,724.

Instead I sat in on a performance class with Emily Roysdon which was fun. We listed all sorts of words that relate to performance: presence, time, etc…I said that I like how HOKEY performance is but it didn’t even make the board. Hokey is in fact a real word, according to the OED:

And not only is it a word, it is the PERFECT WORD. This reading was given to us from Peformance: a critical introduction by Marvin Carlson:

As it turns out, I can’t even be in this performance class anyway because it conflicts with art issues.

Wednesday night I had a short introduction to my Publication Design class, where I learned we would be dealing exclusively with print. Working on assignments based on designing coffee table books and commercial magazines feels like barking up a dying tree, but the class is supposed to be amazing and I know there’s a lot of skills to be developed in working with printed matter that aren’t necessarily locked in to the collapse of that industry.

Thursday had an excellent art history class, which will actually be about Western Theories of Art. Meta! Sculpture in the evening with Niki was great as always.

Friday was a makeup class for art issues, which was alright. Too much theory makes Jack a dull boy.

On Saturday I was served this suspiciously well-targeted ad while watching a Beyonce video…

…and read this amazing article by Matthew Battles on the fallacy of Apple’s iPad textbooks actually reinventing education.

As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a big red X.

but!

Interactivity doesn’t exist. More properly, everything is interactive. We use the catch-all term “interactivity” to brand as novel the qualities exhibited by digital objects striving to be like real-world objects. But chairs, raindrops, sandwiches, and envelopes are also interactive — in their own evolved ways. Books in fact exhibit rich interactive habits, evolved to engage us in peculiar ways (and increasingly, these very features are counted as bugs).

The whole Niemanlab site is awesome, never really poked around there before, but their projects like Fuego (a twitter link aggregator) and Encyclo (a wiki for the future of journalism) are great resources.

Sunday was an amazing food day. Had lunch at The Meatball Shop and dinner at Daisy’s BBQ, with coffee at Blue Bottle in between over which I met Louis Doulas IRL and we talked about redesigning Pool. Read a great article about Danah Boyd that makes me want to finish Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (a little over halfway through). I can’t shake this one particular interview from my head of some teens who call adolescence “the years of profile writing.” So freaky.

I watched a lot of weird robot videos this week. Incredibly creepy and kind of funny. They’re getting so much better but also not at all.

I want to see this movie, Robot and Frank:

From the director:

I suppose it’s possible that some actors might have had trouble working against a robot, but to some degree all those ideas are built into the script. We purposefully designed the robot to be faceless, so that it could appear either creepy or cute, depending on what point we were at in the film. Any discomfort Frank might have felt could only help that early awkward part of their relationship. Getting the emotional connection that develops to feel honest is probably a lot harder, and something that very few other actors could pull off.

Can’t wait until this is a thing:

A good interview with Zoe Strauss, who is keeping office hours at her show in Philadelphia. The people she photographs can’t afford to see her work, though.

Despite all the good that comes out of it, I have a morbid obsession with failed Kickstarter projects and the limitations of the site’s populism. Matt Haughey has a good writeup of one such horror story. Marco Arment, another.

Best/worst article title of the week award goes to The Rattomorphism of Gamification. In plainspeak, gamification turns users into rats. Interesting psychological take on why gamification will eventually fail:

the logic of gamification is the logic of corrosion…over the long run operant conditioning saps and undermines any intrinsic motivation a person has. It is this intrinsic motivation that gamification seeks to engage (or exploit) and which operant conditioning seems to activate in the short term, but this game apparently doesn’t end well….the design techniques that are appropriated by gamification will become objects of resentment given their omnipresence in the new media ecology. Game designers would be forced innovate, rejecting the rattomorphism they inadvertently inspired.

Brent Simmons wrote a great thing on gamification and Lukas Mathis reponds:

There are many problems with «gamification», but I don’t think [manipulation] is one of them. Essentially, all UI design is about manipulating users, whether you’re coming up with the most easily understood button labels that will get people to click on the correct button, the most readable typeface that will get people to read your essay, or design ideas taken from videogames. The goal of UI design is to get people to use our products successfully. That’s «manipulating people». I suspect that «gamification» makes people uncomfortable because it’s associated with Skinner box type games like FarmVille and World of Warcraft, games that can be actively harmful to their players, and manipulate them into doing things that go against their own best interests. But the idea of taking design hints from games itself is value-neutral.

Enjoyed Ben Jackson’s excerpt from his upcoming essay of game ethics in Distance. And of course there’s the great Wired piece on Ian Bogost and Cow Clicker. “It is very interesting, clicking nothing. We were clicking nothing the whole time. It just looked like cows.”

Three best things about MegaUpload (I didn’t even know the site by name before it was taken down):

1 — KIM KARDASHIAN?

2 — Kim Dotcom’s lifestyle: “Kim Dotcom has a car with the license plate: “GUILTY”. He also had a Rolls Royce with the license plate: “GOD”. Other luxury cars have plates that say: “MAFIA,” “EVIL,” and “STONED.”“

3 — The landing page that the U.S. district court replaced MegaUpload.com with:

Finally, my first post for Rhizome hit the internet today! So excited to be writing for them. I reviewed Wendy Chun’s mindboggling book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.

On deck this week? Fixing bugs and moving things around on the Girl Walk site before they hit the road for a massive west coast dance tour. Thinking about systems (binary, genetics, the city) for some projects I failed to get done last semester and still have to turn in!! Readings lots of theory. Doing research for a coffee table book on the Hudson Valley. Thinking about sculptures. Mocking up ideas for Pool. Sending New Years cards that I letterpressed, wrote, and completely failed to send at the start of 2011.

Anne Trubek on how Twitter works as a new literary form...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:20:00 -0500

Anne Trubek on how Twitter works as a new literary form (Associative, not narrative. Helps resist the curse of paragraphism.):

Twitter may have some odd analogy to a compositor’s stick. Compositors would select type and put letters in their stick, upside down and backwards, before laying them on a galley. The average length of the type in a stick before laying down (or “publishing”) is not too far from 140 characters.

(via ★tcarmody, img)

Iranian State radio stated on Tuesday that it will send a model...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:29:00 -0500

Iranian State radio stated on Tuesday that it will send a model of the Beast of Kandahar that dropped into their lap last month. They will also create 70,000 copies of the model to be sold in Iran for around $4 or 70,000 rials. The miniature of the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone will be sent to the Obama administration in response to a formal request from Washington last month asking Tehran to return the aircraft that went down over Iran in December.

Oof.

(via new-aesthetic, sUAS News)

"Zugzwang (German for “compulsion to move”, pronounced [ˈtsuːktsvaŋ]) is a term usually used in chess..."

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:08:29 -0500

“

Zugzwang (German for “compulsion to move”, pronounced [ˈtsuːktsvaŋ]) is a term usually used in chess which also applies to various other games. The term finds its formal definition in combinatorial game theory, and it describes a situation where one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move when he would prefer to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it was his opponent’s turn to move.

In game theory, it specifically means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. The term is used less precisely in games such as chess; i.e., the game theory definition is not necessarily used in chess. For instance, it may be defined loosely as “a player to move cannot do anything without making an important concession”. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game. In some cases it is necessary to make the win possible.

”

- Caterina.net » Blog Archive » Zugzwang

"The present becomes intelligible as it is aligned with a past moment with which it has a secret..."

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:04:38 -0500

“The present becomes intelligible as it is aligned with a past moment with which it has a secret affinity. There is a simultaneity not only across space, but across time as well. The Roman Republic and the French Revolution, though nearly two millennia apart, are more closely linked than 1788 and 1789, separated by only a year…History works not in a solely linear way but by being arranged into various constellations.”

- John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air (pg. 3)

Reblogging this from a year ago because history works not in a solely linear way but by being arranged into various constellations.

TorrentFreak: YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 21:37:05 -0500

TorrentFreak:

YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based service that claims to track about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads. However, they go a step further than just collecting IP-addresses and file-names by exposing all the harvested information to the public on their website…The Russian developers created the site partly as a wake-up call. Those who don’t want this kind of information to be public should take steps to anonymize their traffic, and do that right. This message is also reflected in the site’s ‘privacy policy‘.

“Baby, this is the Internet. There is no such thing as privacy around here. You are sitting in the privacy of your own house, clicking links, reading stuff, watching movies. It may seem like you are pretty much alone, but smart nerds are watching you. They watch your every move. You are not human to them. You are a target — a consumer,” it reads.

"On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People..."

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:04:50 -0500

“

On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

…

Here’s a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe “I downloaded but didn’t share” will be the new “I smoked, but didn’t inhale.”)

”

- Andy Baio, No Copyright Intended

"The taste correlation between friends may be greater than between two random strangers, but it’s..."

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:11:02 -0500

“

The taste correlation between friends may be greater than between two random strangers, but it’s still not very high in most cases.

There’s a better way to expose people to new experiences and I think we’ll start to see more of it in the future. It may already have a name, but I’ll call it “phantom friending”.

…

the phantom friend doesn’t represent someone you like to socialize with — as your real friends do — but rather someone who watches movies the same way you do. They have your same tolerance for violence, same appreciation for special effects, and same patience for heavy dialogue. In other words, they may be unlike you in every other way, but their brain consumes movies the same way yours does.

…

I don’t want a computer telling me what people similar to me like. I want a computer matching me up with someone and then letting me know what else they like. There is a difference there.

”

- Mike Davidson, You Aren’t Who You Hang Out With

James Bridle: I went all the way to Foam in Amsterdam for...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:34:45 -0500

James Bridle:

I went all the way to Foam in Amsterdam for this:

“Erik Kessels (KesselsKramer, Amsterdam) | Photography in abundance: “Through the digitalisation of photography and the rise of sites such as Flickr and Facebook, everyone now takes photos, and distributes and shares them with the world - the result is countless photos at our disposal. Kessels visualises ‘drowning in pictures of the experiences of others’, by printing all the images that were posted on Flickr during a 24-hour period and dumping them in the exhibition space. The end result is an overwhelming presentation of a million prints.”

And those mounds are fake: there are built mounds underneath them, and the photos are stuck to them, a thin layer that is nowhere near a million photos. This is sad. We don’t know how many photos are actually uploaded each day, and this is a totally unreliable visualisation, undermining its entire point.

Oh well.

Filed under: sculptures made for the internet.

CooperUnion.biz is the new Cooper.edu

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:03:00 -0500

CooperUnion.biz is the new Cooper.edu

"Whether or not we happen to agree with this proposition ourselves, we should consider it likely that..."

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 02:33:00 -0500

“Whether or not we happen to agree with this proposition ourselves, we should consider it likely that over the next few years we’ll see computing appear in a very great number of places (and kinds of places) previously inaccessible to it.”

- Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

His list of places (and kind of places) by device category:

personal computers: office, libraries, dorm rooms, dens, and classrooms

laptops: coffee houses, transit lounges, airliner sears, hotel rooms, airport concourses

smartphones: sidewalks, cars, waiting rooms, supermarkets, bus stops, civic plazas, commuter trains

everyware: refrigerators, elevators, closets, toilets, pens, tollbooths, eye-glasses, utility conduits, architectural surfaces, pets, sneakers, subway turnstiles, handbags, HVAC equipment, coffee mugs, credit cards

Carolyn Hopkins is an American public service announcer....

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:27:14 -0500

Carolyn Hopkins is an American public service announcer. Hopkins’ recorded voice announcements are heard in major transportation systems…such as the New York City Subway, the Staten Island Ferry and the few English language announcements on the Paris Métro. She is also heard in multiple airport public address systems such as in LaGuardia Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Incheon International Airport and Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. According to Hopkins, she has ridden the New York Subway once in 1957. Hopkins is from Louisville, Kentucky and currently lives in Maine.

“What is a computer?” Sesame Street, 1984. (via lonelysandwich,...

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:27:19 -0400

“What is a computer?” Sesame Street, 1984.

(via lonelysandwich, Daring Fireball)

Humans.

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:49:27 -0400

Jonathon Rentzch:

At first glance it seems excessive that Google would charge you $256/year for an extra 1TB of storage when raw 1TB drives run ~$60-80 on Amazon today.

But you need to keep in mind a lot of extra factors:

Redundancy. You’ll need at least two drives to match google’s data safety. Probably more like three with offsite rotation.

Energy. Those Amazon drives are bare. Spin them for a year and see what it costs you on your electricity bill. Not to mention that i5 machine you have wrapped around it.

Bandwidth. Data’s gotta hit the platters, and that will go over wires Google pays for. Both ways.

Humans. Maintaining all of Google’s servers and hard drives takes world-leading sysadmin skills and raw headcount. Part of that $256/year are humans watching monitors at 3:30 in the morning on your behalf.

All that said, I’m not saying purchasing an extra 1TB/year for $256 is a good deal, I’m just saying it’s not as bad a deal as it may seem initially.

Derek Sivers:

When we yell at our car or coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances.

So when we yell at a website or company, using our computer or phone appliance, we forget it’s not an appliance, but a person that’s affected.

It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if they were sitting next to us.

It’s too overwhelming to remember that at the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and is personally affected by what you say.

Even if you remember it right now, will you remember it next time you’re overwhelmed, or perhaps never forget it again?

I came across this graphic on the Gmail blog last week:

For everyone’s sanity, customer support tries to create a one-to-one relationship in assigning each troubled customer to a human representative. Cloud storage, in contrast, has been architected for efficiency and scale technologically, and this plays into how we interact within this storage system socially. You will never know your sysadmins on a personal level. You’ll never have a chance to offend them like Sivers fears. While your data has to fall under somebody’s jurisdiction, chances are that no single Google employee is responsible for any single person’s data. Data, in this context, has to be seen more as a massive distributed concept to be handled efficiently and without error than content that belongs to somebody like you. Administering servers based on social relationships would be terribly inefficient even at a small scale, at Google’s scale it would be nearly impossible. As Google centralizes business servers, the bumbling IT professionals who were once behind computers A, B, C, D, E and F will disappear from offices. Instead Google employs people X, Y and Z to watch your terabytes at 3:30am. They probably don’t know much about you and you don’t really exist to each other but sometimes you remember the other is there.

Facebook introduces profile subscriptions. This much requested...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 04:07:00 -0400

Facebook introduces profile subscriptions. This much requested feature is brilliant (just brilliant!) from a product / features / technological advancement / digital life simplification perspective — and intuitively designed to boot. But they’ve gone done what I had hoped they’d never do: it’s now possible to subscribe to a person without being their friend, or unsubscribe from certain aspects of a friend like, say, “LIFE EVENTS.”

Even if they haven’t activated it yet, Internet power users have been waiting for such a slick execution of this feature…and the rest of the world is about to catch on to the have-my-cake-and-eat-it-to-itiveness of selectively muting ones friends. This quote from John Taylor Gatto explains why I think introducing this capability is a step in the wrong direction for Facebook if they hope to foster whatever communities have managed to be carried by the previous, dumber version of the site:

A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: the good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible — lives of engagement and participation….An example might clarify this. Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants, but a community will think of its vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave, or Marty — a community will call its bums by their names.

If a network composed of status updates ever had a fighting chance at being a “community” in Gatto’s sense, this is eroded by the dehumanizing abstraction of people into facets that can be turned on and off at will.

As a bonafide content-creator I’m made anxious by how this forces me to think of myself as both a person with “friends” and as an entity that can be selectively subscribed to. Nothing about my profile was ever supposed to be that “real” anyway, but I’m suddenly encouraged to think granularly about what is being revealed to whom with each update. Facebook finally rivals Google Plus in the flexibility of its privacy controls, its refined design articulating my muddled discomfort with Plus’s circles. Too much control over privacy supposes distinctions in how I post to, in the simplest setting, friends versus followers that I think too much about already and I’d rather not have to think about at all.