Submitting to the Swarm

it has been well known and documented for sometime that the larger a group of humans is, the more likely they are to make rash, foolish, ill-informed decisions.
we are aiming to surpass 7 billion people on the planet by 2012.
if the internet is any measure, we’re on course to be completely unable to function within […]

physical resistance in digital culture

so ive been hearing a lot lately about the end of the internet as we know it.
in this desolate post-internet world of 2012, will the people truly sit back and let much of the functionality of the most important communications device conceived be taken away from them so easily?
considering recent attacks on prominent internet companies, […]

Short Term Profits of Dunbar’s Number

When considering the strategies of the two competing national parties in America during the last eight years of discourse, its good to recall Dunbar’s Number to help explain many of the actions taken, while they seem out of context.
Pre-dating this tumultuous period following 9/11, the Democrats had seemed like a group who actually had strategic […]

On Heroism

So, John McCain is labelled a “war hero” for having been a POW for about five years.
I guess being a POW for a long time is all you need to become a “war hero.”
One would think being tortured for so long would not make one a better candidate to be a President, but then, logic […]

Participatory Culture, or, the Cultural Logic of Prosumer Capitalism

If modernism begins from a criticism of tradition, and postmodernism begins from the tearing of cultural fragments (memes) from their foundations to be used in new, playful, and sometimes ironic contexts (remixing), then what comes next and how does it begin?
(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only […]

Pinochet and Pokemones: Deleuze and Late Capitalism

When Slavoj Zizek writes that, “There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism,” we should take him seriously. Deleuze, much like Marx, wrote against capitalism, but at the same time was fascinated by its ability to blow apart social formations and forge new ones. Deleuze, in his later writing on […]

The Birth of the Security-Information Complex: Beyond Surveillance and Control

The following article is a very rough draft of something that may turn into an actual article, but I decided to go ahead and prematurely publish it anyway in an attempt to get some feedback.
The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, in which capitalism “con­stantly overcom[es] its own limitations,” has shown itself to be accurate in […]

Hugs, Thugs, Googlebomb

RIAA

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” by Gilles Deleuze

I. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Wal-Mart is the new “Big Apple”

Living in Portland for a while now, I’d almost forgotten about that mega-store, Wal-Mart.
Update on Wally World’s status:
According to Good Magazine Wal-Mart’s total store acreage is now greater than that of all of Manhattan, which is about 15,000 acres. Wal-Mart covers a total of 18,810 acres.
My first thought goes to the giant Costco city […]