MonthNovember 2003

Old Manuel DeLanda Interview

Now I know why Abe’s always talking about this guy:

“Instead of the peasant that shows up to the market to sell a certain amount of corn, here you have a wholesaler with a huge warehouse where he stores all the corn he can. If the prices are too low, he can always with drawn certain amounts from the market, put them in the warehouse, and artificially make the prices go up. When the prices go up, he then sells the rest of the corn at these high prices and he makes a lot of money. But, of course, he is manipulating demand and supply. He is not being governed by these anonymous forces. He is not being subject to self-organization; he is organizing everything in a planned cunning way. And so, because economists use the word “market” to describe both, that is one of the main confusions I see in contemporary thought.

We need another word to describe these organizations that are large enough to manipulate markets. A word has been suggested by historian Fernand Braudel and it is a very simple one: “anti-market.” Why? Because they manipulate markets. And so today, in the United States, there is a very strong political movement, mostly by the right wing, and Newt Gingrich is perhaps the most well known politician in this regards, who are trying, as they say, shrink the size of the government, let market forces have more room to operate. But, of course, translated into the terms we?ve just introduced, what they really want to do is let anti-market forces run wild. They don?t really want small producers and small manufacturers and bakers and printers and mom-and-pop shops to have more room to manoeuver and make money. They want national and international corporations to have more room to manoeuver. They want to shrink government so that there are less regulations to keep international and national corporations from doing what they want.

Zero News Datapool: An Interview with Manuel de Landa

Tobias on Adbusters

Just the other day I was flipping through an issue of Adbusters and thinking maybe I should start reading it (I’ve looked though many issues, but never read any of the text). Maybe I shouldn’t bother:

Adbusters is rotating itself endlessly. The corporations are already one step ahead, already having appropriated the aesthetics of culture jamming and jammed billboards in particular. Appropriation of appropriation, sampling of sampling. Sometimes I think Adbusters? tactic is to increase their circulation to the limit, to the absolute global limit, then drop the purest of revolutionary propaganda in a global swoop, at the right time, the perfect time… certainly there is this romanticism lurking in the closets of this West Coast ?zine. But it will never happen: it?s already been appropriated, meaning that all is left is the anger & vicousness of a burnt-out activist, yelling at everyone & no-one, trying to find the enemy on all sides rather than realising that there is a place to begin, without hate, cynicism, anger, and what it leads to: authoritarianism

Margin Walker debate on transhumanism

There’s a discussion about transhumanism going on Margin Walker right now.

Where do you stand? Imagine our world a few hundred years in the future. Are you more or less wired in? Would you become a holdout, a rebel in Zion as it were? What is your threshold for humanity? Do you define yourself by your physicality?

Margin Walker: More than human.

(comments disababled to encourage discussion at MW)

Audience participation in music

Einsturzende Neubauten had a subscription program through their web site through which subscribers could watch and listen to the band’s studio sessions and then leave comments in a forum. So essentially they were letting their fans have a say in the album before it was completed. This wouldn’t work for a lot of bands, but it makes sense for Neabauten. Pigface should do this as well.

Some things Pigface have done: let audience members call up and leave messages on the office answering machine for use in an album (Feels Like Heaven, Smells Like Shit) and more recently let fans send in tapes and CD-Rs of them saying “fuck [something]” to be collaged on a Pigface record (not sure if that stuff ever got used). Also, they let fans vote online for which songs they wanted to hear on the “best of” album.

I was thinking, someone could setup an audblog and have people upload sounds form their cell phone to be used in collage or glitch projects. Or, mixed live at a laptop gig. I don’t know how modern programs like Buzz or Fruity Loops work, but it would be pretty simple to use an old tracking program (like Impulse Tracker or Mod Plug Tracker) and create some “patterns” in advance and then download samples using a venue’s wifi connection during the show and then plug them into the song. A soundtrack of the world in almost real time.

Proto-webs: Paul Otlet’s Universal Book

Box and Arrows article on Paul Otlet:

In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term ?hypertext,? Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.

via Bill Seitz

Pow Wow

Zen Werewolf says: “I’m struck by how similiar Pow Wow is to Hoo Doo, Santeria, or (possibly) Rastafarian – folk beliefs masked behind rituals that mimic the dominant religious form out of fear of persecution.”

Wikipedia: Pow Wow

(via Lycurgus.

Large collection of chaos magic rituals

Here’s a big archive of techniques to cause change in conformity with will. Neatly organized into the categories Peter Carroll defined in Liber KKK.

(Lycurgus)

Cyborg Democracy

Hell yeah:

A collaborative blog for democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians – transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future.

Cyborg Democracy blog

(via Three River Tech Review).

You can own a machine gun, if you build it yourself

A federal appeals court on Thursday reversed an Arizona man’s federal conviction for unlawful possession of five homemade machine guns, ruling that his weapons did not affect interstate commerce. Regulation of interstate commerce was the basis of the federal ban on machine gun possession.

Full Story: Sacramento Bee: Machine gun conviction tossed

I need to read the Plastic discussion.

Geeking that matters

Here are a few sources for tech and design related volunteer work, either virtual or based around Seattle (mostly for my reference):

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