Intonarumoron is a music blog founded by Trevor Blake with contributions from Walter Alter, Waldo Ham, SKot Kirkwood, Jack Winslow and myself.
Here are a couple videos I’ve embedded there recently:
Be sure to wait through/skip past the intro on this one:
I don’t believe I’ve linked to Innovation Patterns here yet. It’s a new link blog from former Technoccult guest editor Justin Boland of Brainsturbator and Skilluminati. Every day there’s a nice big plate of brain food all prepared for you and ready to consume and digest.
Anywhoo, I guest curated the latest post. Some of these links will look familiar to regular readers here, but there’s some new stuff in there as well.
Editor of the late Mondo 2000 and current (?) editor of H+ R.U. Sirius is running a new group blog on transhumanism called Acceler8or. This post is a good introduction to the new site.
R.U. was also recently interviewed by Vice:
Do you think it is good that we’ve reached a point where anyone can say or write/make whatever they want and post it for the world to see?
It’s a huge, complicated, evolutionary step. The average person actually having a voice in the world!? Even if the value of that voice is minimized by inflation, it’s still a whole new relationship to the social. If things go well and life becomes increasingly participatory and open communication oriented, we’ll be figuring out the psychology and sociology of this for the rest of the century. It’s rough on writers, definitely. Our specialization has become the cultural oxygen.
So you think it devalues as well as democratizes?
Canadian internet seer Marshall McLuhan said that with every human enhancement comes an amputation. For an elite (when considered on a global scale) class of literate people, the diminution of power of real literary or even journalistic talent feels like an amputation. But for people who never had the opportunity to speak before, it’s the beginning of something else. Ultimately, we’ll give opportunity for more geniuses of expression to emerge.
Vice: Mondo 2000 and Gonzo Anthropology
(via Dangerous Minds)
This reminds me of what Jason Calacanis said yesterday at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY summit: that writing as a skill in and of itself will no longer be enough. You’ve got to have deep expertise in a particular area. People will choose to read experts who aren’t great writers over great writers without deep expertise.
Me: You’ve said your advice for entrepreneurs is to avoid venture capital. Can you explain that a bit?
Matt: I have so many friends in the technology industry who are so obsessed with getting funded. And they’re confusing that with getting paid and it being money. People see it as free money, and it’s not. A lot of people obsessed with venture capital see Metafilter as a lifestyle business, but in my mind, it’s a mature business. It works really well and yet nobody aspires to do something like this and I don’t know why. Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.
Don’t take any money, don’t owe anything to anyone, build [your business] how you want instead of constantly being on that treadmill of growth growth growth.
Sood: Conversation with Metafilter Founder Matt Haughey
(via Tomorrow Museum)
“Dangerousmeme is a subversive art project with a coterie of followers on the fringe.”
We are naturally drawn to hyperbole. I take furtive pleasure assuming the role of Cassandra or a ‘ Henny Penny‘. I ask people to question the source of their beliefs. We live in a soundbite-sized world where complex ideas are distilled as reductio ad absurdum. While my overarching themes tend to be dramatic, I also see humor in the outrageous, ominous ideas in our midst. I hope my followers they can muster a smile in the face of this dire information, have a better understanding of when it matters, and formulate their own informed opinions about the true nature of things.
I find irony in the number of people who follow me because they quickly read my tweets and accept them as truth, at face value. This is the tiny conceit in my concept. The net is wide, much greater than it would naturally be if I simply tweeted my own personal beliefs. However, by catching these ideological sleepers and gradually exposing them to a breadth of ideas, I hope I am ultimately not only preaching to the converted.
Globatron: Interview with @dangerousmeme
This sounds a lot like my philosophical approach to Technoccult for a long period of its existence. For various reasons, this has become more and more untenable and I’ve started to editorialized more and more.
What are some of your favorite blogs?
I was just catching up on tweets and learned, via Captain Marrrk, that Mac Tonnies has passed away. I’m in shock. This is just so sad:
Nick just called to tell me that our friend and colleague Mac Tonnies was found in his apartment this (Thursday) afternoon, apparently dead of natural causes. There was no evidence of foul play or suicide according to a close friend.
It is hard to find the right words to describe my feelings at this moment.
The last time we talked was just after his appearance on Coast To Coast on September 28th. He asked if I thought he had done a good job. I said he hit one over the fence. Tentatively, I asked if he would consider collaborating on a fiction project, and he liked the idea. Now, I don’t really know what to do or say.
The manuscript of Mac’s last book was apparently complete and ready to be delivered to the publisher.
Nick will have his feelings and more details to follow, but Mac’s family have been informed, and we wanted to get the news out to people who either knew Mac, or were inspired by his original and highly intelligent contributions to the study of UFOs and other anomalies, as well as many aspects of leading-edge science and technology.
Just an indescribable loss. In the next day or so, perhaps I’ll have more to say.
Dangerous Minds now has a web site, including a group blog.
Once again, speaking in defense of those of us who publish original news in blog format:
Yes, we have cultivated sources. Not “just” the community members who kindly turn to us when they see a crash or a fire or a crime, because they know we will cover it NOW, but also politicians, community leaders, government employees, other ‘insiders’ who know we understand that if they feel something is important enough to check out, chances are it matters to thousands of community members, so off we go to dig in.
And yes, we sit through never-ending community meetings. Almost every night of the week. Some afternoons too. From design review, to Hearing Examiner appeals, to hearings scheduled just as formalities for some ongoing government process – buried in published public notices – and we go to City Hall and the County Council Chambers and the courthouse downtown.
We cover important stories that others don’t bother with. No paper in our area, big or small, saw fit to bother with a murder trial last year that started with a shooting in an area of our neighborhood where “that just doesn’t happen” and led through a story of stalking and self-defense, with the teenage suspect ultimately exonerated after a year behind bars. They all read our work so they knew it was happening and chose to ignore it.
I paid a reporter to cover it daily — it lasted a few weeks — even though at the time I couldn’t really afford it — just knew it had to be done and I couldn’t do a full day of court justice while also managing the rest of the site. Now, months later, we have the revenue to pay more journalists to work with us – freelance for starters but I hope more permanent soon – including two veterans whose jobs were cut at local papers big and small for $ reasons.
So, dear old-media folks who I understand are acting out of pain and fear – I have been through layoffs myself — please stop attacking and dismissing everything with “blog” attached to it – it is only a publishing format. If there is a specific writer you are upset about, call them out by name/site, but get educated and learn that the “blog” world has a surprising amount of REAL JOURNALISM going on, produced by REAL JOURNALISTS, and since some of us small operations seem to be showing signs of sustainability, this just may be the way a lot of REAL JOURNALISM is produced for the foreseeable future – you are welcome to buy a domain, install a CMS, and get after it yourselves, too.
–Tracy Record, editor/co-publisher, West Seattle Blog
(Seattle, WA, 650,000 pageviews/mo., 20,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once weekly)
Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner have teamed up to provide users with a new service that gives them access to anonymized content posted through the Tor network.
Although users have always been able to publish content anonymously on Tor, the content has been available only to people who download the Tor software. Swartz wanted to free-up the content to make it available to anyone. The result is tor2web, which is essentially a kind of Google for the hidden “underweb.”
Tor is a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet and with whom a user communicates. It’s endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses.
© 2024 Technoccult
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑