commentary

Brad Pitt’s latest movie, which opens today, is being described as an attack on capitalism, at least as it’s currently practiced in America.

When “Killing Them Softly” premiered at Cannes last spring, an article in the Los Angeles Times called it a “post-Occupy” film and “what the documentary ‘Inside Job’ might look like if it was a fictional feature.”

“Inside Job,” you may recall, is director Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning examination of how Wall Street speculation and duplicity led to our current economic crisis. The action in “Killing Them Softly” takes place during the stock and housing market crashes that got the current crisis rolling; visible in the background are clips of presidential candidates Obama and McCain making promises (still unfulfilled) of economic reform. Director Andrew Dominik’s underlying theme, according to the Times, “is that U.S. capitalism is deeply flawed, and that government, whether Democrat or Republican, has let down its people.” more...

  *12/01/2012: SEE UPDATE BELOW ORIGINAL POST*

Today (Thursday November 29, 2012), Syria’s internet shut down. This is a serious situation with literal life and death implications. We have been following the situation on the Cyborgology Facebook page since the story broke (largely, this consisted of seeing what was going on with Andy Carvin @acarvin). Much of this story has yet to play out, and we will certainly continue to follow/write about it as events progress and we learn more. Right now, I want to take a moment to explore one aspect of what this all means. Namely, I want to explore the question: why did the internet shut off now? To do so, I turn to Derrick Bell’s interest convergence theory. more...

I hear there are people out there (though I’ve never been acquainted with one, so far as I know) who really believe high school was the best period of their lives. It’s a privilege to say so, but this position remains unfathomable to me. This isn’t to say I haven’t developed a retroactive appreciation for certain aspects of my teenage life; in high school I had no overhead, all of my income was discretionary, necessities (and sometimes luxuries) were provided for me, and activities like singing, debating, working on theatrical productions, shooting photography, and writing/editing for the school newspaper (awww, analogue blogging!) were considered “productive” uses of my time, all of which add up to a pretty cushy existence. Material and structural privilege can’t necessarily buy happiness, however, and it’s an understatement when I say that I’m presently happy to have left the affective experience of my teenage years in the past.

Recently, my Internet neighborhood has been revisiting high school through the lens of ‘What if we’d had Facebook Back In The Day?’ On Monday, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) wrote about why we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the Facebooklessness of our adolescence; yesterday, Rob Horning (@marginalutility) posted his well-considered response. Below I consider both pieces, and add my own thoughts about the hypothetical intersections of present day Facebook and the pre-Facebook past. All three of us examine identity and “digital dirt,” but where Jurgenson considers embarrassment and stigma, and Horning considers context and narrative control, I consider temporality and affective experience. more...

“I’m so thankful the internet was not in wide use when I was in high school”, this article begins, a common refrain among people who grew up without social media sites from Friendster to Facebook, Photobucket to Instagram. Even those using email, chatrooms, Livejournal, multiplayer games and the like did not have the full-on use-your-real-name-ultra-public Facebook-like experience.

Behind many of the “thank God I didn’t have Facebook back then!” statements is the worry that a less-refined past-self would be exposed to current, different, perhaps hipper or more professional networks. Silly music tastes, less-informed political statements, embarrassing photos of the 15-year-old you: digital dirt from long ago would threaten to debase today’s impeccably curated identity project. The discomfort of having past indiscretions in the full light of the present generates the knee-jerk thankfulness of not having high-school digital dirt to manage. The sentiment is almost common enough to be a truism within some groups, but I wonder if we should continue saying it so nonchalantly?

“Glad we didn’t have Facebook then!” isn’t always wrong, but the statement makes at least two very arguable suppositions and it also carries the implicit belief that identity-change is something that should be hidden, reinforcing the stigma that generates the phrase to begin with. more...

I’ve been meaning to write for a while now about Ben Grosser’s (@bengrosser) project the Facebook Demetricator. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Demetricator is a browser extension that removes all the overt quantification from your experience of Facebook. With Facebook Demetricator installed and toggled ON, it doesn’t matter if 2, 20, or 20,000 people like your most recent status update (for example); when you view that status update, you see simply “people like this.” Visit someone’s profile, and you see that they have “Friends”—not “Friends 450” or “Friends 4,500.” “View all 6 comments” becomes “View all comments,” and “n hours ago” becomes either “recently” or “a while ago.

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This is a re-post from George Ritzer’s newly-launched blog. George’s original post was derived from a plenary talk given in 2011 at the first Theorizing the Web conference at the University of Maryland, and he returned to these thoughts in anticipation of the third Theorizing the Web conference scheduled for early 2013 at the City University of New York.

Our understanding of the Internet, social networking, and the role of the prosumer in them is greatly enhanced by analyzing them through the lens of a number of ideas associated with postmodern theory.

There is, for example, the argument that the goal in any conversation, including those that characterize science, is not to find the “truth” but simply to keep the conversation going. The Internet is a site of such conversations. It is a world in which there is rarely, if ever, an answer, a conclusion, a finished product, a truth. Instead, there are lots of ongoing conversations and many new ideas and insights. Prime examples of this on the Internet include wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular, blogs and social networking sites. Google’s index is continually evolving and a complete iteration online content is impossible. All such sites involve open-ended processes that admit of no final conclusion. more...

“Silicon Valley doesn’t just reflect social norms — it actively shapes them in ways that are, for the most part, imperceptible”

“Perhaps it won’t be long before Google, not Gallup, is the most trusted name in polling”

“I took pictures of the panopticon while watching other tourists take pictures of the panopticon”

“the skeumorphic has begun to feel – in Lyotard’s terms – pornographic”

“styles change hands so quickly it is ludicrous to discuss who “thought of it” first, but simply who did it best”

“the Internet lets us say more, but what we actually end up saying is more distracting than informative”

“Think of our password problem as being like polio”

“the system they’d developed could raise $3 million from a single email”

“Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A”

Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson

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In the 1993 film Demolition Man, a not-so-sensitive ‘90s guy (a cop named John Spartan, played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out of cryoprison in the year 2032. Halfway through the film, Spartan’s new partner on the San Angeles police force (Lenina Huxley, played by Sandra Bullock) asks Spartan if he would like to have sex—to which he unsurprisingly responds, “Oh yeah.”

Sex, however, isn’t what it used to be. It turns out that by 2032, “fluid transfer” has been outlawed and, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, Huxley and Spartan “make love” by sitting 10 feet away from each other and transmitting brain waves via specialized helmets. If you’re into that  mind/body dualism thing (I’m not, but bear with me), the sex they have is decorporealized; it bypasses the cumbersome interface of human biology to create pleasurable brain waves in a more pure and efficient way. Spartan is first nonplussed, then aroused, then entirely freaked out, and removes his helmet at a very inopportune moment for Huxley. Their night ends badly.When it comes to law according to this mesothelioma lawsuit in illinois Mesothelioma attorneys can help you get the settlement you deserve. Have you been trying your hardest to lose a few pounds of fat from your body? With so many weight loss supplements springing up every day, you might have realized that you aren’t the only one with this problem. hopefully, our review of Ultra Omega Burn can help you. Ultra Omega Burn is made from Omega 7 fatty acid made from cold press technique. At Leigh Brain & Spine, our goal is to ensure you are at the highest level of safety and comfort while you are at our facility in Chapel Hill finding the proper solution to improve your life. To ensure your safety and comfort, we offer complimentary consultations to discover the root of your symptoms and the best non-medication methods of treatment. you can visit the site to know more about the top rated chiropractor in Chapel Hill. Whether you need a chiropractor for relief from physical pain, disc injuries, or neurofeedback for help with the symptoms of ADHD, head injury, and stress, you can trust Dr. Cosmas and Trish Leigh, each Board Certified with 20+ years of experience in their respective areas of expertise. Fall asleep faster and wake up refreshed with Medterra having CBD. Before moving to any conclusion of the buying Medterra from any store, we will recommend you to check the Medterra review of the best store.

This scene popped into my head earlier this week, as I sat in my living room with a pair of headphones on listening to strange sounds that were supposedly going to get me high by bypassing (the rest of) my biological interface to go straight for my brain waves. more...

As many have noted, technology – specifically, email accounts – played a central role in the ongoing scandal involving the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. “Harassing” emails sent to socialite Jill Kelley led to the FBI’s discovery of emails that revealed Petraeus’ affair with Paula Broadwell; other emails led to the discovery of questionable exchanges between Kelly and another top-ranking official, General John R. Allen; subsequent searches found classified documents on the hard drives of individuals who weren’t authorized to have them.

With the indispensible assistance of the media, reverberations have been ricocheting furiously up and down the corridors of power and gossip from Washington and Langley to Florida, Afghanistan, and Libya since the scandal broke last Friday. It’s not the first time these elements have combined to produce a sensation, but it’s the messiest we’ve seen lately. more...

The right to petition the government for redress of grievances is a significant part of the Constitution of the United States. Not only is it yet another way in which citizens can shape the form that governance takes, but it specifies a particular relationship between those citizens and that government, one that – along with several other specified rights – legally establishes a public sphere as an arena within issues of politics can be debated and potentially translated into changes in policy. But petitions didn’t start with the Constitution. Nor are they abstract components of an abstract set of rights. Rather, they’re grounded in the history of technology – specifically communications technology – and are arguably an intrinsic part of the development of what we understand as an augmented society. Moreover, the birth of petitions as an intrinsic part of the construction of the public sphere has implications for how we understand contemporary augmented social movements (Occupy being a particular example).

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