February 2012
3 posts
For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea.
Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview. If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack...
Those crazy signs of virility...
The visiting Ahly fans displayed a sign questioning the virility of Port Said fans, and the game was halted temporarily because of scuffles in the stands.
After El Masry came from behind to win in a 3-1 upset, its fans stormed the field, chasing Al Ahly’s players back to their locker room and attacking its fans with knives, clubs and stones.
When folks ask me why a civil society is so...
January 2012
8 posts
“The key to these systems is that they take an action (which could be a wild...”
– Feedback Systems are Counterrevolutionary
An Ambitious Plan For Putting Kickstarter Out of... →
The remaining question is: what accounts for Kickstarter’s popularity among the hip progressive left? How can we account for the strange coincidence of left countercultural values with a business model that would make all but the most hardened Objectivist blush? The short answer is that Kickstarter embodies what I want to call “Good™ values”.
The critique of Good™ is priceless.
On Jobs...
“Contrary to the president’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs—what a fitting name he had—created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”
—Mitch Daniels
“Yo, they probably call him Steve Jobs cause he got ‘em / He can give a job...
“Having a market economy is really different from having a market society. What...”
– Student Protests Rile Chile - NYTimes.com
“In a brilliant paper titled ‘Forking Free Sofware’, delivered at the...”
– Managerial_Authorship
December 2011
25 posts
WatchCNBC: “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?”
Google: “Well, I think judgement matters. If you have something you don’t want anybody to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some...
“Ed’s approach from the start has been that face-to-face is overwhelmingly...”
– John Thackara: How Do You Make a Website for Transition?: Observers Room: Design Observer
I like my music with some techno-politics mixed... →
Amazon.com is a Cyberspace Warlord not just because they sell every flavor of pop-tart (tons of which I guarantee you’ve never heard of before), but because they also own a large piece of The Cloud. Mad websites hoist themselves upon the Amazon Web Zeppelin. The Internet Movie Database, Second life, tons of shit related to Twitter and a big portion of Apple’s upcoming iCloud take residence in...
I Heart M15! →
Two SVA MFA students make a bus driver appreciation seat cushion—awesome project, and great response from the drivers. Good work!
“If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re...”
– Margin Call (2011)
“We are interested in the ways in which Facebook and government, Facebook and...”
Lacan At the Scene: CRT TV Set Edition
I’ve loved reading parts of Lacan At the Scene—and so I present a related project idea: the analysis, in a Lacanian-sense, of broken CRT TV sets on the curbs of New York.
It seems every TV I see on the curb waiting for pickup has been smashed in—some are face down and smashed in on the back, some have acute punctures on the screen itself; others appear to have been dropped. Some...
Finite and Infinite Games →
Recommended to me.
Observed: key switch on projector screen
Recently observed at a state office building in lower Manhattan: a key switch to raise or lower the projector screen in a conference room. To move the screen, one needs to call the “AV Technician”. An in-efficiency designed to create a role for everyone…
Broken (in) jeans
A friend and past colleague, Nathan Martin, had a project a few years ago (who’s name I just can’t seem to recall!) where one would buy jeans from a manual laborer—jeans that had been broken in and been made “authentic”; the revenue from this, of course, being used to buy the worker a new pair of “commodity”/”in-authentic” jeans to...
The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley... →
Lottofication: a new way to work?
New York Magazine reports that Sex and the City slot machines are a big hit at the new Queens racino. Besides being completely fascinated by the whole “Sex and the City” empire here in New York, the article cheekily points out (among other things!) the new reality of gaming: button pushing, and “swinging wildly” with ones eyes closed at the screen—all fun...
The next natural resource mine: landfills
What’s the next coveted natural resource mine? Landfills.
After we’ve mined all of the Earth’s natural resources, processed them into consumer goods, and then eventually discarded them, I think it will be cheaper to recover and reprocess the already removed-from-the-earth resources from the man-made “mines” we call landfills.
That’s why I’m buying Waste...
Transportation 2030--minus 91 years?
I recently attended Transportation 2030: A Five Borough Blueprint organized, in part, by my colleagues Frank Hebbert and Naama Lissar. I was presenting OpenPlans Transportation’s work with the NY MTA in Brooklyn on the B63.
Among the interesting folks that stopped by the booth, one who particularly stood out was a guy who approached me with the aggressive assertion that buses were dead....
October 2011
3 posts
Dromological Lingerie
“And our discipline must also force us to pursue speed. We must be faster at everything in a world that is accelerating—no one is winning by getting slower. We need to deliver merchandise to our customers faster, think faster, learn faster, decide faster and innovate faster. Our goal is simply to be the fastest brand in the world.”
Holy shit. My head is still spinning from the...
Switchboard Operators
Technology is turning us into switchboard operators in the communication networks of our own lives. […] Why does everything have to arrive through a screen? Does it really make life richer and more interesting? Why not try rejecting the templated experiences, the social media, and the patronizing attempts to involve us in prescribed interactions?
This talk looks awesome! Wish I could...
August 2011
1 post
“Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science...”
July 2011
5 posts
“The boats and the hotel, at the end of the day, it’s like this elaborate scheme...”
Bus-As-Spaceship
Is the female gaze fixed on the world or the bus (and what’s that white “wooshy” stuff coming from the eye)? Or is it the gaze of the satellite that is tracking the bus orbiting the earth?
I love the bus-as-spaceship metaphor, especially with the headlights and interior lights on inside the bus. It’s amazing how many of these bus tracking vendors had their start with...
High Speed Rail as Dromological Threat?
“With the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket, airwaves), penetratIon and destruction become one. The instantaneousness of action at a distance corresponds to the defeat of the unprepared adversary, but also, and especially, to the defeat of the world as a field, as distance, as matter.”
-Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics
I wanted to submit something along these lines to Van Allen...
Debt Rating Agencies as Sovereign Threat?
I’m amazed as I watch how (mostly US-based) “debt rating” agencies are commanding control of how sovereign nations like Portugal and Greece handle their financial woes.
The NY Times reports:
“Ratings agency actions have moved front and center in Europe. Standard & Poor’s said Monday that a proposal by French banks for helping Greece to meet its medium-term financing...
"How Humans React"
“The idea is not to prove the technology — this isn’t rocket science,” Mr. Hulusi said. “It’s to see how humans react.”
…and so true with so many technologies—yet so many people miss this important point.
June 2011
4 posts
Social Capital
“For the first time, we’re all on an even playing field,” said Joe Fernandez, the chief executive and co-founder of Klout. “For the first time, it’s not just how much money you have or what you look like. It’s what you say and how you say it.”
Wow. With no acknowledgement of social “influence” being yet another form of capital. Leveling the playing field, indeed. Or something.
“A joint venture between two American companies, American Bridge and Fluor...”
The Legibility of Audio Announcements on the... →
Personally, I love the difference in approach and voice in subway announcements, but I do acknowledge that the conductors are often difficult to understand when compared to the robots. While one could argue that this change makes the city even more oriented towards tourists, there is still room for “personalization” of practice by train personnel. Like many things, it’ll just...
April 2011
1 post
“One of the fantasies of numerical ranking is that you know how you got there,”...”