Category: Tech

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Xanadu

Ghosts of Xanadu

The behavior of ants has been likened to a distributed mind, a demonstration of collective intelligence. In Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach an ant colony is even used as a main character to drive home the point that the actions of dumb individuals can add up to a smart collective. Xanadu was supposed to enhance the intelligence of the human race, too, but a new feature in your web browser is unlikely to have ramifications that profound. Yet in both language and art the act of linking nouns together creates new meaning, which is a nice bonus we’re sure can be pulled off with a few hours of surfing.

Smart Mobs? Does linking and back linking and networking make a mob more intelligent? I don’t know.

OK, I have done it, will this happen:

Link to this page and it will link back to you automatically
Have a response to something said on this page? Want others to see it after reading this article? This page can detect where a visitor is coming from and provide a permanent link back to it that all other visitors can see. Link to this article from the page where you’ve posted your response, and a reciprocal link to your page will be made automatically and for free.

Later: But it won’t happen… only the top 20 referrers get listed! Could I make my weblog do this?

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Immediast Manifesto

Seizing The Media
The Immediast Underground Pamphlet Series – Spring 1992 – Immediast International – New York City / Amsterdam / Seattle – Version 1.1 N © Copyright; 1992. Public Domain.

Towards An Ecology Of Information – The Immediast Approach

0. Participating in the proliferation, crosspollination, and consolidation of counter-commercial print, audio, visual, modem, activist, and correspondence media.

1. Documenting the basic sources, dynamics, and effects of corporate and State media control. Exposing methods of mind control, behavior modification, and image embedding.

2. Openly discussing tools and methods that strengthen immunization and freedom from deceptive, disinforming, and subliminal media exposures.
Upgrading public media literacy to decode, produce, and broadcast in all communications media.

3. Open cultural expressions, education, networking and resistance.

4. Reclaiming public sovereignty of the airwaves.

5. The liberation of all public space from government, corporate, and business messages.

6. Public takeover of all airborne commercial broadcast media and the creation of public production libraries.

7. Liberation as glasnost: the emergence of democratic public communications and media networks.

What a noble manifesto.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

added a copy of the whole page for posterity:

seize_it.htm

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Firefox, Evhead

EVHEAD
Evan Williams, president/CEO of Pyra Labs, the creators and operators of Blogger, writes:

By the way, I was starting to dig Mozilla a while back and using it quite a bit, but now I’ve found I’ve migrated back to IE. The main reasons: IE opens when I click a link from email (this could be changed, I know). And IE starts quicker.

I’m still with Mozilla and loving it. Why? Tabs Browsing. Set up the tabs so they open in the background and so that you can use the middle button (wheel) to open them on a link in web page, and use the middle button to shut the tabs when you are done. I bet IE will ape this real soon, as it is just impossible for me to go back.

I have not found a way to open emails as a new tab in an open browser, but my email does go to Mozilla. Fast enough for me, faster I think than IE?

But Evan, the Edit this Post box is tiny in Blogger on my screen in Mozilla…

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Sociometry of the Internet

Web Intersections Later: Sunday, 7 September, 2008 – dead – I can’t make much sense of the Archive either.

I am having an exploration of the blog indexing situation. This site seems to provide some overview. Headlines of a sort, but they emerge sociometrically from the world, well, in this case from a handful of bloggers via tomandian. Moreno called it a Matrix a long time ago. The tools for tapping into the global sociometry – search engines do it but now the finest mesh of the net is being carefully analysed – by tools and humans.

Amazing to see how popular the Mozilla release 1.0 is today! This is great news.

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James Hillman – Luddite

The Cyberwork: The archetypal imagination in new realms of ensoulment. From the C.G. Jung Page: An article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology

In some ways, this paper represents the recanting of some of my own positions or at least an effort to situate myself with more clarity in cyberspace. It is also an effort to establish some kind of rapprochement between cyber – thinking and the archetypal imagination. This is important to me because among the archetypal Luddites seems to be James Hillman himself. I have heard him dismiss cyberspace in public talks.

The quality of images

The dismissal of cyberspace by so many archetypal psychologists intrigues me because, as I said, the medium is purely imagistic and, according to the Hillmanian view, images are the foundation of psyche. Of course, images have varying character. Images can be degraded in their representation and, certainly, the images in cyberspace vary wildly in that respect. But one does not dismiss all art on the basis of bad painting.

Have I already linked to this? I have some of Cliff’s stuff linked BUT atomz Search is not working! I’m fixing it. This article is of great interest because it addresses the *exact* field of my interest. And yes – many whose psychology I like miss the psyberside.

later: Saturday, March 6, 2010 Entire text follows to prevent link decay.

Continue reading “James Hillman – Luddite”

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Free software and psyche

Free Software and the Psyche

What are all these posts on open source and free software doing on my weblog? What is the link with psyche?

Well there is a link with my psyche, in that I gravitate to the of edge. Free software is on the edge of some sort of cultural social advance. It may peter out like the “counterculture” or it may actually be a continuation of something of that spirit.

More directly there is a psychological side: identity in a virtual realm relates to ownership. In the early says of the well there was the phase You Own Your Own Words. The theme has a powerful presence on the Net, relates right back to notion of “free speech” with its elevated, sacred, archetypal complexities.

I’m not all that clear, I know. I just have a sense that probing the noosphere here involves fully grasping the free software phenomena, with its associated stories of cathedrals and bazaars etc. Anyway, I run Linux for that reason, to travel into the different realms of the cyber-world. I think of it as a journey into the psyche!

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Open Source Software: A History

Open Source Software: A History

David Bretthauer

The Open Source Definition allows greater liberties with licensing than the GPL does. In particular, the Open Source Definition allows greater promiscuity when mixing proprietary and open-source software.”38 This is Richard Stallman’s objection to OSS – that it allows the inclusion of proprietary software and ignores the philosophical issue of software freedom. Without these freedoms, there is no philosophical imperative to improve one’s community. Nevertheless, “[w]e disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as the enemy.39

This is a point reiterated by many who are active in various competing open source and free software packages. While this article has focused on a number of differences between operating systems, approaches to collaboration, and the evolution of various license agreements, this focus is at the micro level. At the macro level, nearly everyone mentioned in this article would prefer a competing open source or free package to a proprietary software package. In the future those who have blazed new trails will continue to argue the finer distinctions between their respective works. However, the various groups involved are willing to work with and support one another’s right to choose a different approach to solving a problem. And it is clear these individuals look forward to another generation building upon the successes of the past thirty years.

A useful history – with a valuable conclusion which I have quoted above. Another item from the Information Technology and Libraries site. This link is to a special issue of the magazine: Volume 21, Number 1, March 2002 – SPECIAL ISSUE: Open Source Software – JEREMY FRUMKIN, Guest Editor.

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Cyber-Marx

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism

Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (1999) provides an analysis of information-age capitalism and the movements currently dissolving it. The text version is available from University of Illinois Press, and can be purchased from the UWO Bookstore or on-line book stores.

The book is online, each chapter in one pdf file. The opening is intriguing. Nick Dyer-Witheford (the author) refers to the sf book The Difference Engine by Gibson and Stirling. Babbage’s mechanical computer in this alternate history works – and is steam driven. Here is a quote from Chapter 1:

For in the world of The Difference Engine, Karl Marx is
alive and well. His employment by the New York Daily Tribune (for whom the actual
Marx worked during the 1850s as a foreign correspondent in the biggest `information
industry’ of his day) has clearly resulted in migration to the United States–a visit yielding momentous consequence. For, in a North America wracked by regional separatism and
civil war, revolutionaries have seized the “means of information and production” of the
largest city of the New World.2 And the Manhattan Communards now provide a nucleus for
an international ferment of dissidence which, combining re-emerged Luddites, renegade
clackers, anarcho-feminists, Blakean-situationist artists and immiserated proletarians,
boils beneath the surface of the bourgeois universe, waiting for the next calamity to burst
into revolt.

In what follows, I propose a Marxism for the Marx of The Difference Engine. That
is to say, I analyse how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict
between capital and its labouring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their
encounter; how the new high technologies–computers, telecommunications, and genetic
engineering–are shaped and deployed as instruments of an unprecedented, world wide
order of general commodification; and how, paradoxically, arising out of this process
appear forces which could produce a different future based on the common sharing of
wealth–a twenty-first century communism.

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