Easter Saturday 2000 recycled
I was looking for something in the old EditThisPage weblog I kept and was struck by a lovely (if I say so myself) sequence of posts, I have reproduced them here more or less as they were there. I like to keep a series of great pix going in the links. I did that even in the old links pages. I’d never post one I do not like. Aesthetics count and I like to keep tweaking the look. The photo from the Chester Street garden is nostalgic, we moved out last November!
www.oreilly.com — Animal Magnetism: Making O’Reilly Animals
”From start to finish, an O’Reilly animal requires anywhere from 8 to 20 hours of manual labor. And for reasons no one can fully explain, hand-drawn animals on high-tech computer books became a wild success.”
I think it is because computers were never about the thing itself… the fetish is about the living and organic thing they do. I feel an affinity with the O’Reilly images as I have used the William Morris tapestry in as a logo for years, I see a similarity… the same idea, something, in this case, hand crafted, beautiful and symbolic of the Psybernet work… (tree of) life work contained in the (circle) groups.
With that in mind I kept looking. How is this for something Psybernet, more Morris stuff, the harvesting of our work?
TalkAboutTheNews.com
(Note: the site has since gone)
“Welcome to the first test MP3 audio webcast from TalkAboutTheNews.com.
This is a recording of interviews and conversations at the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington DC.
Please subscribe to our newsletter for updates and how you can create your own MP3 news/talk webcasts in the near future. TalkAboutTheNews.com will be providing free webspace, discussion boards, polls, and a whole lot more! Stay in touch! Listen to the unedited MP3 WebCast streamed by Live365.com “
Well if this was a test it worked beautifully and it seems great to be able to get the feel from people on the spot… as it is right there. What a contrast the sounds of a demonstration are with my autumn shot in the garden today.
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:
Lake Pedder – Tasmania Australia
Lake Pedder – Tasmania Australia
I found myself grieving this lake today. I walked and camped on its shores in the 60s before it was flooded. This came up as I feared the loss of the Net to greed. I am actually an optimist with regard to the Net. It is a Net and so it is hard to knock holes in it, and new webs are woven all the time. Still, there is already a great loss of the ethos that I found here in the early 90s, where anything commercial was unacceptable, including my own Psychotherapy Online. I held that back for a while as a result of that ethos. If I could go back to 1972 I would lie in front of the tractors. I doubt this damage can be undone.
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.
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.
The Political Economy of Free Software
The Political Economy of Free Software
A link to my own writing:
If my proposition about this fundamental nature of the Free Software Movement has merit it certainly puts the struggle around its survival against the commercial and legal opposition into a context with very high stakes.
Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique
Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist critique
Abstract
“Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx’s concept of a ‘general intellect’, suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information.”
Now that is along the same lines as the thing I wrote after the discussions with Josh – will link to ot in the next item. It all sounds plausible to me, but nothing is a sure thing.
Ivan Illich Transcript
WTP – Ivan Illich Transcript van Illich with Jerry Browe We the People, KPFA – March 22, 1996
“Brown: This hour we have a very special privilege and opportunity. We have here in the studio in Los Angeles Ivan Illich and Carl Mitchum, two friends of mine who I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation. Listen in. You’ll find it instructive. Ivan Illich is the author of a book, very famous in the 1970s, called Deschooling Society, another book called Medical Nemesis. He’s also the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, Gender, and now his most recent book called In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on a 12th century scholar and saint, Hugh of St. Victor. Along with us here in the studio is Carl Mitchum, a professor of humanities, presently Visiting Scholar at the Colorado School of Mines and on a more permanent basis a professor at Penn State where Ivan Illich and his friends and fellow scholars meet every year for a few months to study these ideas that over the next hour we’re going to do our best to elucidate and share. Ivan, why don’t we just start with the book that I first encountered when I became aware of you, and that is the book Deschooling. Can you reflect on what you were thinking about when you wrote it and how you might see that reality today because we’re still struggling with schools in this society. There’s still a dependency on professionals that seems to have control of how we learn or don’t learn and I just have to wonder have we made any progress in creating the context where people get the sense that they are in charge of their own learning?”
Interesting discussion. Does the world a context sensitive help? Not in schools which subvert that. Xenos – Zeus and hospitality? Acedia the inactivity which results from seeing how enormously difficult it is to do the right thing – is it a sin?
There is also insight into the interface – the pupil of the eye which takes in with its psychopods the other person. But they do not really grasp the potential of the medium for – conviviality and friendship.
Later Saturday, 7 May, 2011
I don’t understand a word of my own comments either.
The link above does not work, but I’ve put the whole item below. Found here:
http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/ivan_illich_jerry.html
Continue reading “Ivan Illich Transcript”
Jim Kent & the Genome Data
O’Reilly Network: Keeping Genome Data Open [Apr. 05, 2002]
“Jim Kent was a graduate student in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), when he wrote the program that allowed the public human genome team to assemble its fragments just before Celera’s private, commercial effort. His program ensured that the human genome data would remain in the public domain. Kent wrote the 10,000-line program in a month, because he didn’t want to see the genome data locked up by commercial patents.”
A hero indeed! One of the spin-offs from now using GNU/Linux is that it is easier to see how locking away human knowledge for the benefit of the rich is just evil!