Psyberspace

What Price the American Empire?

Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire isn’t even a close second.

Strange to be quoting the RIGHT here, but he can see clearly that all this about imperialism. We are in for an new Empire that will take a lot to defeat.

Guardian
Indian writer Arundhati Roy argues that it is the demands of global capitalism that are driving the West to war with Iraq

Interview

On the publication of his new book, Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life, Andrew Samuels is interviewed by psychotherapist Ruth Williams.

Hollywood and Baudrillard

The Matrix and Baudrillard’s Concept of Simulation

Evil Demons, Saviors, and Simulacra in The Matrix

by Doug Mann & Heidi Hochenedel. This essay is well done. Looks at the themes as three distinct entities: Christian, Descartian, and Baudrillardian. Convincing, apart from its conclusion, which may be because of the bankruptsy of The Matrix themes themselves, after all the movie is itself part of the hyperreal Hollywood machine. Or it may be that they have some strange pomo ideology?

I went to the hyper website and used copy, paste-into-editor, print, to get an accademic looking paper from the unreadable mess (including irritating sound!) on the screen. This process was like returning to a welcome desert of the real – I like it better in black and white.

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dive into mark/October 4, 2002
I love this sort of stuff. This Mark does thorough items and is ALWAYS in the Daypop Top 40 Links.

J. G. Ballard – www.contemporarywriters.com Critical Perspective
‘We live inside an enormous novel’, observes Ballard in the introduction to his most controversial novel Crash (1973), ‘The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality’.

The Matrix – Simulacra and Dystopia – Planet Papers

Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)

You’ve been living in a dream world Neo. This, is the world, as it exists today: Welcome to the desert – of the real. (Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix)

MIT OpenCourseWare | Home

MIT and the OpenCourseWare team are excited to share with you a first sampling of course materials from MIT’s Faculty. We invite educators around the world to draw upon the materials for their own curricula, and we encourage all learners to use the materials for self-study.

This has to be phenomenal. Whatever their motives, whatever the actual use of it by the masses, somewhere somehow this can tip the balance… though of course for sheer access to knowledge the Internet has already made this transformation in the world.

I wonder what restrictions apply? What if I offer a course based on the material? What if other Unis do that?

See also the Wired item: All the World’s an MIT Campus

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Life’s not so complicated web

As in social groups, cliques tend to form in which every member knows all or most of the other members. The researchers used a measure called the clustering coefficient that describes how clique-like a network is.