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Promising Linux development? No.

ZDNet |UK| – News – Story – Linux vendors move to standard platform

Four Linux distributors – Caldera, SuSE, Turbolinux and Conectiva – are to back a standard software distribution, as a way of encouraging application development and battling the dominant position of Red Hat

This is an exciting development! I have Mandrake on my machine and so I can now read this stuff and at least have some grasp – none of it easy without a background in IT etc. Just downloaded & printed the white paper off the http://www.unitedlinux.com site. The implications of that will be interesting.

The thing is that once the UnitedLinux is there it is still free. Red Hat, anyone can use it. It takes a bit of getting your head around!

Update Monday, 3, June

RMS has called for people not to support it. It is driven by the Ransom Love who is not pro free software. They will not be distributing the binaries on their CDs. Selling the trademark is the business model. What seemed promising now does not.

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Archetypal psychology

Archetypal Psychology

Archetypal Psychology is . . . an innately diverse and complex style of psychological imagination. It can be seen as a broad, cross-cultural movement whose main thrust is to grant “psyche” or “soul” its legitimate place in modern cultural imagination.

OK. That fits.

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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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NY Arts magazine item by Scott Weiland

Virtual 2
NY Arts magazine item by Scott Weiland

In Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, Levy presents the notion that art virtualizes the virtual. That is, it is possible to become structured by those virtual aspects of the real which in their function bear agency upon us as objects. If it is possible to understand the virtual through media theory, it is the artist in Levy…

Somehow the soul has to be mediated. In that way it is like or is information. Art is one way and the NET is another – that may be a starting point for my essay!

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Suzi Gablik

The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art

Suzi Gablik has discussions with Thomas Moor and James Hillman.

Here is an excerpt.

Suzi: In our culture, the notion of art being in service to anything is anathema. Aesthetics doesn’t serve anything but itself and its own ends.

I would like that to change. When Hilton Kramer says that the minute you try to make art serve anything, you’re in a fascistic mode’well, I don’t believe that.

Hillman: I’d like to defend the cleaning of the river, for a moment. I’m going back to what you said a little earlier: it’s the attempt to put art in the service of something.

Suzi: Yes, that’s where the issue is.

Hillman: Art in the service of something. If we say that it’s life, and if we think, for instance, of the Balinese village where everything is made to be functional and useful, for celebrations or ceremonies… you’re still in service to the gods, somehow. Now we don’t have that we’ve wiped the gods out… So the god that art now serves is the god that dominates the culture, which is the god of commodity, of money. So it is in service, it’s in service to gods we don’t approve of… Now suppose the question doesn’t become what art should do, but rather how do we find that which art should serve? Art is already in service, so we could perhaps change that to which it is in service?

Suzi: So the question is what could art better serve than the things it has been serving, like bourgeois capitalism, throughout our lifetimes?

Hillman: Right! And I think the artist in the river is serving a different god.

To relate it back to the themes here, what it we replaced the word Art with Net? I see them as both mediating soul. However for it to be of the sort of art they are advocating here it is not all the net that works this way… have we wiped the gods out of the Net?

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Web Links

A Virtual Place is No Place At All – Hermes, the wing-footed Greek god of swift communication, has evolved into the messenger of the internet, intoxicating users but playing games with western civilization, author and psychologist James Hillman told a crowd of 350 at Ure Lecture Hall last night.

The link in the paragraph above does not work. Has ayone got a copy of this somewhere?

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Singularity

Staring Into The Singularity

by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

The short version:
If computing power doubles every two years,
what happens when computers are doing the research?
Computing power doubles every two years.
Computing power doubles every two years of work.
Computing power doubles every two subjective years of work.
Two years after computers reach human equivalence, their power doubles again. One year later, their speed doubles again.
Six months – three months – 1.5 months … Singularity.
It’s expected in 2035. (Oops, make that 2025.)

Ok, so that is what it’s about. There is an old idea that the soul is infinite. Things can go at any damn rate they like the soul will match it. In fact these perhaps dubious scientific notions have more power as a metaphorical expression of our psyche than they do as actual events in the world. Hence we have Carl Jung writing about UFOs. If they did not exist we’d have to invent them! Singularity is like that too. Or is it?

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