The documentary, written and directed by Jason Barker, uses interviews with philosophers, Marxists, post-Marxists, economists, and even the head of the conservative, free-market-oriented Adam Smith society. It returns frequently to the topic of the recent global economic crash as well as the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism, and features 're-loaded' Matrix animation sequences such as one involving Marx, Trotsky, and a blue and a red pill, as well as a 'Neo'-Marxian transformation scene. Figures interviewed for the film include Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano, and Slavoj Zizek. (Zizek observes: "We are in deep shit, and we know it.") Numerous questions posted in comments to the documentay's trailer on YouTube about an English-language version received a response from Medea Film: "We are working on an english version. We will all inform you when it's finished!" At present, the film's official website not only has information in English, French, and German, but also in Serbian.

According to the Reuters article, Steven Spielberg is not expected to be directly involved in the film, should it ever be made. A DreamWorks spokesperson said that Holly Bario and Mark Sourian, co-presidents of production at DreamWorks Studios, had optioned the books. The projected film has not been assigned a director or screenwriter yet. The Reuters article also referred to a Guardian article from the same day which announced that a book written by its journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding) had been optioned. The Guardian piece suggested that the film might specifically detail the relationship between Julian Assange and the Guardian newspaper. According to the Guardian,

The picture is the most prominent of a number of WikiLeaks movies at various stages of development. These include a documentary by award-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and a mooted biopic based on a New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian, co-produced by HBO and the BBC.

A piece from 1 March 2011 by Mike Fleming, the Hollywood reporter for the Deadline website, speculates that the filmmakers might attempt to use materials which go beyond the books, such as court records, in order to circumvent having to negotiate with Julian Assange when they write the film. He reports that this was a strategy used in the making of the Facebook movie, The Social Network.  

"Yes you are right. The Speculative Turn crashed our system. In short it has been downloaded a massive amount of times. In fact it was downloaded over 2000 times in one night which is about what most titles would get in a year."

Words related to pleasure, such as "pleasure", "happiness", and even "suffering", appear to show a curious rise around 1790-1810 in Google Labs Ngrams graphs from scanned books. I discovered that the apparent rise was actually caused by changes in printing conventions.

Eventually I realized what the cause was for the apparent change. The secret was not that people suddenly began using different words, or the same words with a much higher frequency, but rather that they used different letters to represent the same words. The real culprit here was the move from using a long 's', also known as a medial or descending 's' (ſ) — which to many eyes looks almost the same as an 'f' — to using a regular, or short 's'.

Google Labs had mentioned this change in typography on their Ngrams info page, but only said that it could lead to some misspellings in their data, due to the OCR programs' frequently taking the long 's' for an 'f' (a mistake an untrained human reader can also make!).

Google Labs did not however mention the corollary that this quirk might lead to apparent increases in word usage in Ngrams graphs. But the move from long 's' to short 's' did explain the graphs I'd gotten from Google Labs Ngrams: all the words I had seen apparently rising ("pleasure", "happiness", "suffering", etc.) involved a long 's'. When I took the further step of running graphs simply comparing words such as the mis-OCR-ed "fuffering" and "suffering", it was certain: the graphs showed a simultaneous sudden drop of the non-word "fuffering" coincident with a rapid rise in the use of the 'new' word "suffering" — which of course only meant that the word "suffering" had consistently been in use all along, only printed in two different ways. 

Nonetheless, taking that change in printing conventions into account, there still remain some differences in the frequency of use for these pleasure-related terms which might bear explaining, albeit they no longer no longer any drastic, coordinated changes such as the ones I had at first thought were in effect. (For an example of one possibly still-to-be-explained change in word use, see the apparently drastic slump at around 1715 — taking into account the use of long 's' — in the frequency of the word "happiness" in books scanned by Google). Finally, if nothing else, this weakness in Google Labs' OCR does give graphic evidence of not merely the exact time that the long 's' was abandoned, namely, very close to 1800, but also that the changeover was almost complete within a few years. [pictures hosted on Flickr.]

MORE INFORMATION.

Andrew West's BabelStone blog post, "The Rules for Long S", is a detailed and handsomely illustrated analysis of the ins and outs of long 's'. It also explains the change from long to short 's'. West not only made use of contemporary grammars and guides, but also took advantage of the Google Books Search function, which accesses Google Book's OCR texts. He has now appended evidence made available by Google Labs Ngrams.

UPDATES.

Giles Thomas's blog post, "Long S Is Long" (17 Dec 2010), provides more information on the long 's' quirk, as well as a "fun set of Google Books long S comparisons".

Language Log has two recent posts on Google's Ngrams graphs:

"Humanities Research with the Google Books Corpus"
16 Dec 2010 | Filed by Geoff Nunberg

and "More on 'Culturomics'"
17 Dec 2010 | Filed by Mark Liberman

RELATED multitude.tv CONTENT.

Metadata Plagues Google Books: Many Books, But Some Hard to Find (4 Oct 2009) 

"There has been plenty of venom spewed about the recently arrested Julian Assange, ranging from calls for his assassination to claims that he is an anarchist and even (according to Newt Gingrich) that he runs a terrorist organization. On the other side there have been those who view him positively as a prophet of the 'information wants to be free' hacker ethic. I used to agree with the latter group, but I now understand that this is a gross oversimplification of his views."

"...you try to change the subject, maybe by vilifying opposing counsel. That changes the subject. Now we talk about whether, you know, opposing counsel did or did not commit this iniquity. And the tactic is a very good one, because you win, even if you lose. Suppose your charges against [your opponent] are all refuted. You've still won" ("Noam Chomsky Accuses Alan Dershowitz of Launching a 'Jihad' to Block Norman Finkelstein From Getting Tenure at Depaul University", April 17, 2007). [video and transcript here]

"Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. [...] mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance".

Ludlow points out, however, that this evolutionary perspective allows for less optimistic outcomes. A 'conspiracy', like a virus, may adapt to attacks and become even stronger — or, as Ludlow puts it, attacks may push a 'conspiracy' to "become more secretive and more draconian".

Ludlow closes his analysis with a series of questions about the assumptions — implicit or explicit — in Assange's writings.

For anyone interested in pursing these ideas further, it should be noted that the main document to which Ludlow refers, namely Assange's "Conspiracy as Governance " (Dec. 3, 2006), is itself a short document (less than 2,000 words); that document does not explicitly focus on the tactic of leaking as much as Ludlow's overview. On Dec. 11, 2010, John D posted a further analysis on his "Philosophical Disquisitions" blog; Ludlow wrote on his FaceBook page that John D's post was a "really nice analysis of the argument structure of Assange's theory of conspiracies as I spelled it out in my essay". John D's post further questions certain premises (in particular the implication that all 'conspiracies' are bad) and also remarks on the relation between Assange's ideas (as presented in Ludlow's analysis) and the latest scholarship. The concern that Assange assumes all closed networks or 'conspiracies' are harmful seems less pressing when one has read his "Conspiracy as Governance" essay, since there the context is clearly political, and the target is governments which seek to weaken democratic processes.

[Note: This article has been revised.]

As of August 2010, the latest 6 issues (2005-2009 = numbers 31-38) are available in the journal's online archive. 

The journal finds it home with the Nordic Society of Aesthetics, which in addition sponsors annual aesthetics conferences. Some conference themes have been "Aesthetics and Art Research"; "Aesthetic Experience: Concept and Example"; "Aesthetics and the History of the Arts"; "Nature, Art, Aesthetics"; "The Work of Art: Concept and Ontology"; and "Art and Value." 

Number 36 (2009), the first part of a two-part double issue, is dedicated to considerations springing from Kant's aesthetics, and includes an interview with Thierry de Duve.

Number 37 (2009), the second part of a two-part double issue, features "Magnitudo aesthetica," in effect a condensed English presentation of Dagmar Mirbach's introduction to her new, complete translation of Baumgarten's Aesthetica (facing Latin|German, Meiner Verlag). In addition there is a somewhat heated debate over Richard Shusterman's ideas on media and popular culture—a debate which continues in the next issue (Number 38).

In its stupor, the parser fancies as author names (parts of) section titles, article titles, journal names, company names, and addresses, such as Methods (42,700 records), Evaluation (43,900), Population (23,300), Contents (25,200), Technique(s) (30,000), Results (17,900), Background (10,500), or—in a whopping number of records—Limited (234,000) and Ltd (452,000). The numbers kept growing by several hundred thousands hits for the cumulative total of the above "authors" during the few days this paper was being written.

The New York Observer reports that "the beloved left-wing magazine of business and culture," The Baffler, will begin publication again. According to Leon Neyfakh's article, "Color Me Baffled! Thomas Frank's Magazine Lives Again" (June 23, 2009), Thomas Frank has paired with Clio Society founder Conor O’Neil to revive The Baffler, enlisting

Hermenaut founder Joshua Glenn, n+1 editor Mark Greif, BookForum editor Chris Lehmann, University of Illinois at Chicago professor and cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels, Zizek! director Astra Taylor and freelancers Christine Smallwood and Moe Tkacik.

[...] 

One big thing that will be different for this new iteration of The Baffler, Mr. Frank said, is the world its writers will be describing.

“We developed this critique of consumer culture and business culture, and lo and behold, a lot of the things that we were saying, instead of being this out-there stuff from the fringes of self-publishing land—it’s stuff that I think will make sense to everybody nowadays,” Mr. Frank said. “The world has come a lot closer to our way of seeing things. It’s funny how obvious it is now!”

Where does that leave a magazine that had opposition built into its DNA?

“We did very well in the Clinton years, when you had a president and an administration in Washington that seemed on the surface to be very liberal, but that in fact wasn’t, that in fact was as pro-business as any Democratic administration ever,” Mr. Frank said. “That environment was really good for us—all that fake rebellion. That’s all still going on. I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble finding targets to rebel against.”

Look forward to seeing The Baffler in October of 2009.

UPDATE (March 2010): The Baffler is officially back in print. See the coverage in the Chicago Tribune's piece, "The Baffler is Back, Relevant as ever: 1990s Literary Journal never really Went away" (7 Feb 2010) [requires registration for access--free]. More information is available at the Baffler's official web site.

 [IMAGE: The Baffler, Volume 2 No. 1, (Chicago Tribune photo by Bill Hogan / January 25, 2010, via mediaite)]

UPDATE 2 (May 2011): The Baffler's return suffered a lengthy hiccough (after the inaugural issue of the new Baffler, no further issues appeared), but appears to be breathing again. Bookforum (David O'Neill, "Viva la Baffler!" May 9) reports that, after a derailing of the re-vamp, the re-vamp has been re-vamped, and it should be full steam ahead for The Baffler. History PhD John Summers will steer the journal, assisted by Thomas Frank and other Baffler alumni. 

UPDATE 3 (October 2011): The Baffler's official web site announced on October 26, 2011 that it has "signed a five-year, fifteen-issue publishing contract with the MIT Press." The editors reassure current subscribers that the MIT Press will be contacting them about picking up subscriptions put on hold, and provides some information on the content and timetable for new issues:

"The next issue is due in March [2012]. It will feature new writing from Baffler editors Thomas Frank and Chris Lehmann, as well as essays from Barbara Ehrenreich, David Graeber, Aaron Swartz, and fiction from Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.  The second and third issues, to be released in both print and digital editions, will appear in June and October [2012]."

The web site also issues a cheeky apology: 

"We’re sorry we went away. But we’ll try not to hurt you again."

Further information can be found in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Baffler Will Reappear via MIT Press" (October 26, 2011). 

Editor B. explains: "I think it’s worth a listen, not because of our lame attempts at humor, but for what it reveals about how people viewed the internet and the web back in 1995. Times sure have changed."

The ROX website is definitely worth exploring. Not only does it have 'content' all the way back to the earliest broadcasts, but also text, photos, postings, and many other sundry cultural outpourings interconnected on multiple levels.

More information:

What is ROX, anyway?

A Brief History of ROX