in a way, this is a way for change.

the change that is an inevitable reaction to the failing of the international market created by the globalization of the last two decades may or may not be good for our ilk.

those who follow the these of illogical post operationalization.

perhaps, anyone who follows any ideals outside mainstream religion or politics.

the biggest question is: what kind era are we opening to?

—

this era is ending with rampant disillusionment. while it began with a few of us, who saw the crippling nature of our society long ago, ranting into the wind with no one paying attention, it is ending with us almost feeling smug and happy to finally watch it crumble.

we (in america especially) live in a society driven by entitlement and creature comfort. days after borrowing 85 billion from the Federal Reserve, AIG was found to be spending that money on golf retreats, facials, massages, and other things i will never have enough money to do in my entire life. while the stocks for companies like google, yahoo, and facebook were tanking, many of their respective members were too busy hanging out in a mansion on the Turkish coastline making drunk and stupid online videos to realize that all the people in their companies were going to be extremely fucking pissed when they got back into the good old u. s. of a.

—

so my question is this:

how do we direct the conversation of this change to focus on what labor is really worth. it seems that while many of these people made their fortunes with hard work, once the fortune was in their hands, they spent their days piddling around wasting money and expecting people who were being paid fuck-all to keep making money for them (surprisingly, Kevin Rose doesn’t spring to mind as he actually seems to still work on his website a good bit on a personal level.).

how do we really make people understand, that even with a great person running a company/corporation/what-have-you, who had great ideas and their ideas spurred this massive profit-producing behemoth; that these people, in their capacity to keep the company afloat, are only worth as much as those who work for them. would any one of these individuals be able to have built their financial empires completely on their own without ever having anyone elses help?

of course not.

in a way, it brings to mind Marx’s critical history of technology. it seems at this point, we need another Marx. what we need is simply a man, who can make us realize that none of us is inherently “better” than anyone else, nor are we inherently “worse.” we all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our successes, our failures, some are big, some are small, and some are things only we as individuals will ever know about but will treasure until our deaths.

—

as i pen this, drowsily, lazily, not even really sure what or why im writing, all i know is that things are changing, there is a shift.
i know that maybe its time for our ideas to truly come to fruition, but how to expound upon such ideas so they will be understood and digested amongst the regular populace?

regardless.

the shift is happening. whether it will result in a new society founded on reason or it will become our worst nightmare of a police state created by the rich and powerful and corrupt, we can only wait to find out.

we can only spend our time waiting lucratively. speaking out, being daring, crazy, and unpredictable. above all else, we must be able to question our own beliefs and change ourselves accordingly.

if we cannot do that, i fear the worst.

—

by the way,
i finished playing Arcanum.

What is striking about this list is how many of them are really active today in the modern world. We have heavily militarized police forces in American, the EU, China, Russia and Japan [Cop]. We have mega-national corporations who attempt to control the flow of resources. One could specifically reference Monsanto and their attempt to bio-engineer seeds that produce plants with no new seeds, forcing the farming community to purchase all their seeds from Monsanto [Corporate]. With the creation of the blogosphere and less credibility seen in “old media,” bloggers like Alex Jones have brought themselves more credibility and truly do go to great lengths to spread their message [Media]. While we are still only beginning to get the hang of Cybernetics, (we have a few solid experiments.) we definitely have a huge community of “hackers” who constantly produce new tactics to destroy internet barriers [Netrunner]. When it comes to the Solo, the first thing that pops into mind is, of course, Blackwater.

Now we have yet to have any Fixers, Techies, or Nomads in their Cyberpunk defined sense (we have similar things, but not quite close enough.). I think than more than half the list defines us as being in the future. Also, when the book of the game can cause a government raid due to its “dangerous” nature, it shows how far the censorship society has come (from Wikipedia):

“In 1990, in an odd convergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games’s headquarters and confiscated all their computers. This was allegedly because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public’s impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety, which has extended to the book itself as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a tagline on the front cover, which reads “The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service!” Inside, the book provides a summary of the raid and its aftermath.”

Oh, and one more thing.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if Rock and Roll was actually rebellious and revolutionary?

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 doesn’t come easily to humans.

—

Let us consider this another way:

Many “detainees,*” at Guantanamo Bay have been there for six years now.
Does this make them more “heroic” than John McCain?

Considering the circumstances, I believe I’d say yes.

So:

I’m voting for Guantanamo Detainees in 2008.

Those motherfuckers are heroic as shit.

—

*Detainee, is of course, a dehumanizing way to say “POW” and make people feel less bad about the torture they endure.

(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only to watch the film Moulin Rouge! (2001). The film ingeniously tells the story of the birth of modernism using the strategies of postmodernism in both its cinematography and its soundtrack.)

If postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson claims, then we should look to capitalism, with its constant cultural remixing for what comes next.

What characterizes a possible shift into something new? It is the tension in capitalism between its need to constantly remix and its need to mark property. With the internet, everyone is invited to participate in this grand remixing project. However, this would sooner or later have to run up against property. The question is asked: who owns the culture?

As the old way of looking at property has its last fits and death throws, we should be looking at what is now replacing it. Gilles Deleuze had the foresight to know that, while self-organization holds great promise for human activity, it could also be a new mode of control. His concept of the control society, in short, revolves around extracting free labor from self-organizing groups. This is precisely the logic behind Web 2.0.

The follow-up to modernism and postmodernism is the moment at which everyone is encouraged to participate in the remix — prosumers of participatory culture. What is going unsaid in the hype machine of the internet is the collapse of the distinction between information sharing and free labor (both “free” as in unpaid and “free” as in leisure activity). The multitude may be building a participatory culture, but it does not own it, and so far, attempts to build a commons have not solved the problem of property.

What then, poses any real threat to property? The concept of the swarm has been linked to the concept of noise by Alexander Galloway in his article “Starcraft, or, Balance” His argument is basically that noise is what cybernetic systems attempt to control. How they control is defined by the noise itself, the noise and the system are tied together in an immanent relationship of coevolution. Please forgive the following long quote:

“This leads to a second claim: the swarm is synonymous with organization and control. This is what is meant by the various references thus far to “balance.” In StarCraft, balance refers to the recuperation of the swarm as a set of variables and processes in algorithmic relation to the other members in the system. Cybernetic systems have always been defined, from Norbert Wiener forward, using the language of normativity, equilibrium, and homeostasis. (What happens when cybernetic systems skitter out of control? They go “offline.”) And this is why I may make the observation at the outset, perhaps offensive at first glance, that cybernetic systems are essentially sadistic in that they derive pleasure—they are affective, they are expressive—via the subduction of objects in their domain. It is no coincidence that one of the best simulations of swarm presence, StarCraft, is also one of the best examples of the RTS genre, the very genre that deals most strongly with normative, machinic management of complex systems. (Consider where StarCraft falls on the World of Warcraft/Counter-Strike gradient.) Thus with StarCraft there exists the swarm as the very exemplar of optimal flow and efficiency management. Balance then reemerges as the “virtue” of the cybernetic network. But it is a distinctly nefarious virtue bent on the subsumption of difference, be it the racial asymmetry of the Zerg swarm or the offline import of race itself. The game is, like Wikipedia or any number of contemporary digital phenomena, a “self-correcting text” in all senses of the phrase, politically reactionary and otherwise. This is where StarCraft becomes useful as allegory. The notion is not that the Zerg is a stand-in for this or that political force or that the Terrans refer to a certain terrestrial political formation to which one can point. Rather one must take the systemic equilibrium of these various political modes in sum: power today may leverage a variety of different formal modes (the sovereign fiat, modern disciplinary power, or informatic distributed control), all of which are eventually integrated and, via informatic simulation, brought into some sort of ecological balance such that the singular divisions of them are held up as utterly significant only to be denuded in the final calculation as completely inessential,” (101-2).

In the informal terminology of Web 2.0, the signal-to-noise ratio refers to the ratio between rational discussion and that which disrupts discussion. To deal with noise, once again, free labor is elicited from users to organize the content in such a way to reduce noise. Not only are we called upon to remix information to entertain ourselves, but also to organize that information so that others may also be entertained.

The noise is treated as a non-rational interruption — nonhuman, if you will. Which brings me to another long quote from Alexander Galloway’s often coauthor Eugene Thacker. Since I’m not sure how to end this piece or where this project is going exactly, I’ll take the easy way out by quoting him, especially because it refers nicely to my previous post, “The Autonomy of the Unhuman“:

“If the multitude, the many-as-many, is indeed `bottom up’ or self-organized, and if it does indeed refuse transcendental models of organization (the State, representational politics, institutions), to what degree is it centrally a human affair? Is there a presumption that the multitude reinscribes the agency of the individual subject by meta-individualizing it. But if the `life’ of the multitude is constituted at many levels - not the least being the relation between multitude, milieu and `world’ (to use Heidegger’s terms) - then to what degree is it centrally human? Are there `accidental multitudes’ or `nonhuman multitudes’? How to the social and political issues raised by `emerging infectious disease’, `natural disasters’ and environmentalism relate to the many-as-many? It ultimately leads to a consideration of the multitude as being nonhuman, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.”

Chris: yeah, the site is made by w.t. snacks. the ex 4chan mod that was banned for being to crazy.
—
now you and bob odenkirk can tell anyone “Great Job!”

and then, in the last few days, we’ve lost demonoid.com as well as the ever useful oink.me.uk

now, demonoid claims the timing is a coincidence, and has ‘blog’ messages updated daily on their status of migrating to a new system.

oink, on the other hand, does not resolve at all.

why should i be worried about this?

shit like this happens to metafilter all the time.

well.

metafilter doesnt host torrents to pirated content.
—-

on a semi-related note. exxon (this is an assumption as to who did it.) got the exxon parody site the yes men set up taken down, and had their main email shut down. it was over a ‘complaint’.
unfortunately, at the moment, i cannot find the original article. i am also tired, so i will instead direct you to the vivoleum site.
note that theyve been required to remove any mention of exxon from their page to be able to have their email reinstated. the domain they had registered for the vivoleum website, however, has not been released or re-enabled.
—-

on a more similar note to the subject we just touched on:

http://yesmen.org/ (link)

this web address is owned by ‘netster.com’ and seems to be ‘parked’ for advertising. this means that the domain is possibly up for sale.

should we detourn the modern detourners?

or perhaps the yes men have been sitting on this opportunity for some recuperation retaliation.

EDIT: nevermind, after a quick check of the WHOIS database, this domain seems to be parked specifically for advertising. it is owned by these guys. they buy domains based on traffic generated from ‘mistaken identity’ web traffic. props to the yes men if they sold yesmen.org to them to generate traffic.

boo, if its some other jerkhole who owned yesmen.org and decided to make a quick buck off of it.