"To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century." - László Moholy-Nagy

It really should come as no surprise, but I’ve only just realised that I’m using and enjoying twitter for new (at least for me) and strange things. Gone is nearly all interest in carrying out conversations and discussions via twitter, though arguably I gave up on proper twitter debates a long long time ago, and instead I’m enjoying the vicarious aspects of the platform. Some of my favourite twitter accounts at the moment are robots – scripts and algorithms that do non-ordinary things with the service.

I think it started with TPHD. Theron Jacobs twitter account is a thing that I adore, for reasons I can’t really explain except that he’s always surprising. Right as I started to think I’d had his “schtick” down (tongues, licking, puppies, snakelord – there’s definitely certain themes that he enjoys creating tweets and poems about over others) he goes and surprises everyone with an eBook, “Smell my wild flowers“. (Don’t be fooled, it’s not your high school poetry class waxing lyrical about flora. It’s good for one). Well that’s cool, but then, what’s the last thing you expect after someone puts out a book (pdf) of poetry? BAM it’s a second eBook of poetry – BEAST. Surprise! (Alright, so it doesn’t sound that surprising, but I was slightly shocked. Compressed into a paragraph it loses its impact. Look, you really need to follow TPHD okay).

Come to think of it, I can’t remember if I started following Horse eBooks before or after TPHD. But either way, I did. Also, what they say is true, Horse has changed and he’s gotten too wacky. The aura of magic has dissipated and now it just looks like someone trying to be funny (which is the absolute last thing on the hierarchy of things that are funny).

Actually one of the earliest weird accounts I started following was BARTSIMPSON_REAL which was the typo ridden, delusional output of a strange venn diagram covering only one person – a Bart Simpsons fan and a Slobodan Milosevic apologist. Some of my favourite ever tweets (rivalling even the best of Horse Ebooks) were from this account. It’s current incarnation is Bart_freecialis but that may not last.

There’s also the suitofracoons, though it hasn’t tweeted since December. Baden Pailthorpe’s “Eighty Four Doors” a machine translation of Orwell’s 1984, tweeted at odd intervals. Okershee/OMNIVISION which I have no idea about but which I started following a little while ago just because it’s great. Here’s a great recent tweet from Okershee. And last in this eclectic and incomplete list is BrunoIator (with a capital ‘I’ instead of an L) which just goes to show that Latour would be a great tweeter if he could be arsed.

Twitter has always loved non-sequiters.

Ken Levine on the “1999 mode” in Bioshock Infinite:

So recently I talked at my old college and feeling like Mr Successful, then this guy says “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Levine!” He’s giving me a hard time, he says “the problem was none of the decisions I made had any permanence to them. I didn’t have to commit to any decisions.” And I was like “oh!” The clouds parted for me. Except for the Little Sisters, there’s no permanence in your choices. It hadn’t really crystallised for me before, the difference between games we had made before, like System Shock 2, and BioShock.

‘Nick Srnicek‘ interviewed at Figure/Ground Communication.

By a large margin, most of my academic colleagues are people I first met online, whether through blogging or emailing or tweeting. I’ve since gone on to meet a number of them in the physical world, but the initial connections have almost invariably been via the internet. There’s a pragmatic benefit to this, which commonly goes under the label of ‘networking’ – simply put: the more people you know, the more opportunities arise. Yet on a much deeper and more important level, these connections have truly shaped and developed every one of “my” thoughts. The beauty of the internet – the beauty of philosophical and political communities online – is that one is forced to face up to a simple fact: cognition is collective, extended and embodied. Who “I” am as a scholar – my own process of individuation – has been undertaken and produced only through the medium of online collective thought.

At the same time, in enmeshing oneself in these networks one quickly comes to realize how often you are wrong. Writing on the internet will tend to attract experts on the smallest aspects, and you will inevitably have your claims being torn apart by people who are more knowledgeable in a particular academic corner than you are. As a result, one is forced to take a healthy scientific stance towards your own claims: “I tentatively take this claim X to be true insofar as I believe Y and Z.” Given our own cognitive defects and biases this is the only justifiable stance towards one’s own claims, and the internet effectively mandates that one take such a stance. Again, thought is collective and extended: recognizing our own errors is part of a much larger project of knowledge production.

So if I had one piece of advice for younger students, it would be to get involved in the online communities. It’s been the best intellectual and professional step I’ve taken.

‘new laptop tonight?‘ by Graham Harman at Object-Oriented Philosophy.

The fourth one, on which I am typing this blog post, was purchased in Cairo in late September 2010. It’s still perfectly workable. However, the keys are starting to stick just a little bit due to all the typing of the past year. 15+ months. That’s probably the reasonable lifespan for my laptop these days, given the amount of writing I do. This time I will probably keep this one rather than give it away. It will be nice to carry a beater around to cafés, not worry about spilling tea on it or being robbed while carrying it, and so forth.

Also, writing is my job. It’s what I do. It hardly seems extravagant to have two of these machines.

‘“Law and Order” as cultural artifact‘ by Mark Stewart at Television FTW.

What has struck me, 3-ish seasons in, is the way that L&O operates as an artefact, as a cultural historical record. Early seasons are filled with references to AIDS, to DNA, to mobile phones. Incident reports are being completed on type-writers, a foot cop runs to a pay-phone to call in a crime. Sexual harrassment seems to become a common trope as the series progresses. Females serving in the police force and the military becomes a theme. Homosexuality becomes more and more in the public eye, as does racism. I’m struck by the number of derogatory terms used in the show’s early seasons, especially n***er, which seems to be used in every second episode.

‘We Are All Human Microphones Now‘ by Richard Kim at The Nation.

There’s something inherently pluralistic about the human mic too; it’s almost impossible to demagogue, to interrupt and shout someone down or to hijack the General Assembly for your own sectarian purposes. That’s clearly been a saving grace of this occupation, as the internecine fights over identity and ideology that usually characterize left formations haven’t corrosively bubbled over into blood feuds there—yet. The human mic is also, of course, an egalitarian instrument, and it exudes solidarity over ego. No doubt, a great frenzy erupts when left gods like Michael Moore or Cornel West descend to speak, but many people only hear their words through the human mic, in the horizontal acoustics of the crowd instead of the electrified intimacy of “amplified sound.” Celebrity, charisma, status, even public-speaking ability—they all just matter less over the human microphone.

‘Australian Political Blog Roll – A Call for Help‘ by Greg Jericho at Grog’s Gamut.

As some of you would know, I am writing a book for Scribe publishers on social media and politics, policy and journalism. As part of the project I thought it worthwhile trying to come up with a list of all Australian political blogs. Such a thing is actually rather difficult to accomplish. The fleeting and fluid nature of the blogosphere means that many blogs come and go, some will will about politics but then drop it as a topic.

‘Stories and Games (1): Art‘ by Chris Bateman at iHobo.

Can games be art, and should we care either way? Every culture respects some activities and objects as ‘art’, and grants to these a certain esteem that is entirely apart from their practical uses. Art, as Oscar Wilde suggested, is quite useless, but nonetheless great art, good art, and even interesting art attracts a lot of attention, a lot of praise and criticism, and a lot of money. The question of whether games can be art is usually treated in one of two ways – often by presuming either they must be art (Santiago) or they can’t be art (Ebert). In my book Imaginary Games I take another path: the question of whether games can be art is misguided, because all art is a kind of game. To understand why this is so, there’s no better place to start than looking at the relationship between games and stories.

‘Morozov probes internet’s role in new democracies’ by Marwa Farag for The Stanford Daily.

Morozov began by introducing two perspectives on technology and social change: instrumentalist and ecological.

He summarized the “not particularly intellectually exciting” instrumentalist argument saying, “It all depends on the people. Technology has no impact in itself and it all depends on the human actors.”

In this perspective, the Internet is a neutral tool, an instrument and an amplifier. Morozov used the examples of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, journalist Malcolm Gladwell and New York University professor Clay Shirky to illustrate this position, posing theoretical questions arguing against the instrumentalist position.

Morozov then moved to describe the ecological position, a position he feels is more accurate.

“I’m much closer towards the ecological camp,” he said. “I think of technology tools as having impact and effects that transcend simple usage.”

“The idea is that [the Internet] is more than a tool: It transforms both the environment where politics is made, those who participate in politics and many other keywords in the vocabulary that we use to think about protest and political change,” he added.

…

He also cited a FirstPost article on a hashtag that trended on Twitter following the detainment of Egyptian-American journalist Mona El Tahawy in the Egyptian Interior Ministry. The article’s headline claimed that #FreeMona resulted in El Tahawy’s release, but Morozov quoted a line from his book to raise concerns with this view.

“If a tree falls in the forest and everyone tweets about it, it may not be the tweets that moved it,” he joked, going on to explain. “The fact that everyone tweets about it does not mean it was Twitter or a hashtag that resulted in that particular outcome. Certainly it was part of the story; but how important it was is something to be studied, not something to be assumed.”

‘About Twitter Limits (Update, API, DM and Following)‘ by Twitter Support.

The current technical limits for accounts are:

• Direct Messages: 250 per day.
• Updates: 1,000 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as updates.
• Changes to Account Email: 4 per hour.
• Following (daily): Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior. You can find detailed page describing following limits and prohibited behavior on the Follow Limits and Best Practices Page. The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day.
• Following (account-based): Once an account is following 2,000 other users, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios. The Follow Limits and Best Practices Page has more information.

‘No one cares about property damage‘ by Voyou Desoeuvre at Voyou.org

…the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

‘Deep Intellect‘ by Sy Montgomery at Origin Magazine.

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

‘A woman’s opinion is the min-skirt of the internet‘ by Laurie Penny at The Independent.co.uk.

An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse.

…

The implication that a woman must be sexually appealing to be taken seriously as a thinker did not start with the internet: it’s a charge that has been used to shame and dismiss women’s ideas since long before Mary Wollestonecraft was called “a hyena in petticoats”. The internet, however, makes it easier for boys in lonely bedrooms to become bullies.

‘You and your entire family are full of shit. You’re welcome.‘ by Jonathan McCalmont at Ruthless Culture.

While the internet does feature a lot of bullying and ‘calling people out’, the real mechanics of the blogosphere are those of the social world. If you start doing things that alienate you from the group, chances are that people will not tell you that you are acting strangely, they will simply start ignoring you. In other words, they will exclude you from discussion until you get fed up and go away. As someone who struggles with these sorts of group-dynamics in real life, I admire the internet’s potential for freeing us from passive-aggressive exclusion techniques and so I admire Bbot’s decision to tell a number of bloggers that he simply cannot continue to read them. His explanations as to why he has ditched some of his subscriptions are fascinating as they show how a genuine desire to engage with what another person has to say has lead only to frustration, boredom and annoyance

…

There are times when telling someone that they are wrong, deluded and completely full of shit is the most supportive and generous thing that you can do and the relative anonymity of the internet should free us from the rules of passive-aggressive social interaction that make this sort of honesty so difficult to implement. So next time someone calls you out on the internet, say thank you because having them ignore you until you go away is so much worse.

A little bit short and lite on, but hints at important points worth some further thinking about.

‘Full Cost Accounting & the B53‘ by Jeffrey Lewis at Arms Control Wonk.

It turns out that the nuclear weapons complex simply doesn’t do “full cost accounting.”  If you build a municipal solid waste facility, for example, the “back end” costs are part of the consideration.  After all, part of the cost of any activity is cleaning up after one’s self (or one’s generation).  That’s not, apparently, true for nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons facilities.  The cost estimates for RNEP and RRW, for instance, only described what it might cost to make the weapons.  Not what it might cost to take them apart someday.  The same goes for all the big ticket infrastructure items in the Obama Administration’s modernization of the nuclear weapons complex like the Uranium Processing Facility. The clean-up costs get passed along to the future, quite possibly including individuals born after the weapons or facilities were retired.

Of course, that’s bad management and, from a generational perspective, a little selfish. It is irresponsible for policymakers to simply pay for the construction of nuclear weapons and related facilities, while leaving dismantlement and clean-up costs to future generations.

‘A rough, sprawling take on digital rhetoric and writing‘ by James Schirmer.

These differences are even more apparent in digital and online forms as we write for some kind of audience beyond ourselves, thereby revealing acts of performance. This can be more pronounced when others get involved as not only an audience but also as contributors and even co-authors on a text, which is a term still seeing change in the moves toward online compositions. In moving online, we find other people placing demands, but the technologies we use do, too. Just as page in my Field Notes memo book invites me to write, various and sundry social media tools ask me to create, discuss, promote, and measure.

…

Part of what’s revealed in certain research in digital rhetoric, too, is the impermanence of our discourse. With changes and subsequent questions swirling about the nature of academic and literary publishing, we see plenty of consternation and worry about the future. The recent inclusion of Twitter hashtags in my memo books for archival organizing purposes marks another change, perhaps potential fuel for the fires burning down the English language. Still, I think much of what we have online now is what Sirc hopes for: “writing as assemblage, with a structure based on association and implication; piling stuff on to create a spellbinding, mesmerizing surface” (284).

‘I’m Tired of Being a “Woman in Games.” I’m a Person.‘ by Leigh Alexander at Kotaku.

Sexism in games remains an unsolved problem, it’s clear. Some of you will be nodding along, and some of you will hear the s-word and roll your eyes and go, “oh, this again?” You guys can piss off-–go click on some new screenshots or a trailer consisting of a release date slowly fading into view. You’re hopeless.

‘Uncreative Writing‘ by Kenneth Goldsmith at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term “unoriginal genius” to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one’s mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

Perloff’s notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does. Think, for example, of the collated, note-taking practice of Walter Benjamin’sArcades Project or the mathematically driven constraint-based works by Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians.

‘Avoiding the blogger trap‘ by Marco Arment at Marco dot org.

I’m not just about technology, just as John Gruber’s not just about Apple products and Merlin Mann isn’t just about index cards and Steve Yegge can speak briefly and Jeff Atwood enjoys Rock Band and Paul Graham is a great cook and Ted Dziuba likes stuff and pretty people take shits and maybe, just maybe, there’s an area of Michael Arrington’s life in which he isn’t a dick.

People aren’t so one-sided. Everyone has a life that goes much deeper than the topics on their blogs.

‘You Are Not Facebook’s Customer‘ by Douglas Rushkoff at CNN (reposted).

Of course, if they stopped and thought about it, they would realize that Facebook is work. We are not Facebook’s customers at all. The boardroom discussions at Facebook are not about how to help little Johnny make more and better friendships online; they are about how Facebook can monetize Johnny’s “social graph” — the accumulated data about how Johnny makes friends, shares links and makes consumer decisions. Facebook’s real customers are the companies who actually pay them for this data, and for access to our eyeballs in the form of advertisements. The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

Deep down, most users sense this, which is why every time Facebook makes a change they are awakened from the net trance for long enough to be reminded of what is really going on. They see that their “news feeds” are going to be prioritized by an algorithm they will never understand. They begin to suspect that Facebook is about to become more useful to the companies who want to keep “important” stories from getting lost in the churn — and less useful for the humans.

‘Goatse as Industrial Sobotage‘ by the Deterritorial Support Grouppppp.

The ability for this “in-joke” representation to appear within mainstream advertising and commercial image production relies upon two developments within postfordist capitalism: technological development and the proletarianisation of the creative industries. The first point is obvious– the development of cyberspace as a territory of virtual community, and the development of digital imaging hardware/software, has created a means of recording and disseminating chance observations of advertising hoardings, online and offline material and chance observations. It has also created a relatively lawless, anonymous environment where pornographic and extreme material can be circulated without fear of embarrassment.

…

Within this environment the “in-joke” differs markedly to workplace in-jokes of the past. Today, you might be the only person in your office who gets the joke. But worldwide you’re connecting to thousands of others in a form of exploded solidarity. It’s a dynamic form, a vivid social relationship the marketeers can – for the time being – only dream of invoking with their cosy stock images of friends-coming-together, sharing a joke over a glass of chardonnay. The proletarian – especially within the present conditions, the info-prole – is a force who pushes forward innovation through her resistance to capital, and it is capital who exists on the back-foot, damming the flow of proletarian innovation, demanding enlarged logos in order to harness its power.

In our era of the Internet – an era in which memes and chain emails alike cross from screen to the world and back again  - has the encroachment of snark from the internet undermined our ability to properly mock those deserving of mockery in so-called meatspace?

Compare and contrast two entirely unrelated pieces – the first by John Birmingham at The Sydney Morning Herald suggesting the correct punishment for (convicted racist) Andrew Bolt should not be the imposition of legal punitives, but rather mockery:

People like Bolt do not need to be suppressed. They need – they desperately need – to be mocked. Mocked for their ignorance. Mocked for their paranoia. Mocked for their delusions of adequacy.

And I think there’s something very right and true about it – the law does not persuade opinion, powerful opinion persuades opinion. And so I was left wondering, why isn’t the mockery more forthcoming? I doubt it’s for fear of defamation and reprisals – there’s always a way around such laws in any case, viz. satire, legitimate criticism, etc.

And so it wasn’t until I read the next piece that I began to wonder if our resistance to mockery is actually a cultural one. See how Mel Campbell  reviewing this week’s Q&A episode  for Crikey describes the twitter ‘snark’ culture arrayed around that program:

The Twitter commentariat is possibly the worst thing about Q&A. What began as a well-meant gesture of inclusiveness has deteriorated into a scramble to be zingy enough for one’s tweet to be displayed onscreen. Snark is the enemy of intellectual rigour because it refuses to engage with an idea, preferring to reject it through mockery. It’s quite possible to watch Q&A without properly listening to it, concentrating instead on collecting retweets for your asinine gags about the panellists and questioners.

Which is a relatively common sentiment to see expressed about anything of the internet. When we consider that the net is getting more ‘real’ with every passing day, and that the barrier between ‘the internet’ and ‘the real’ is an increasing permeable one, we’re left with some pretty significant questions about the internet’s cultural effects. When “haters gonna hate” becomes a truth universally acknowledged, whither the ability to mock those like Andrew Bolt? How do we make the mockery stick to those that truly deserve it? Or is the answer that only the truly deserving, accurate criticism and mockery will endure in the wash? But if that’s the case then we might as well throw around whatever we like and see what sticks, which is clearly only going to lead us back into the “haters gonna hate” meme.

So is there a place for tactical mockery? Political mockery? The judicious application of scorn? Does the “haters gonna hate” meme need retiring? We’re steering remarkably close to something like a rhetoric of memes.

Post-script: Look!!!

‘‘Persona_Ebooks’ And Game Community In The Web 2.0 Era‘ by Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra.

What is “Horse_ebooks?” If you’re a high-volume Twitter user, or you participate in some of the more cultish avenues of internet culture, you’re familiar with this feed — it’s just a bot designed to sell ebooks about horses, apparently.

It seems to populate itself automatically, primarily with snippets from the books themselves. Combine that with other inscrutable fan algorithms and the Tweets are surreal and funny enough that “Horse_ebooks” has attained memehood.

Examples of fan-favorite Horse_ebooks Tweets include: “I hope for your sake you are ready for a life WITHOUT back or neck”; “Famous Crab”, and “How to Teach a Horse to Sit, Give a Kiss and Give a Hug,” as well as lines that look more like erectile dysfunction spam than anything one would find in an ebook about horses.

‘Rethinking learning and assessment and the dmlbadges competition‘ by Alex Reid at Alex Reid dot net.

 What do we want to say about real, authentic learning? It marks you. As Frank O’Hara writes in a different context, ”If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” If you learn, you are transformed. Your medals won’t help you run faster or farther, but the hours of running will. As an undergrad, I realized I could take a course, purchase none of the books, show up for half the lectures, and still get a B. Personally, I never cared about the grades or the diplomas that resulted. I just went about learning what I wanted to. If I spent long hours practicing music and learning studio recording by trial and error, which I did, the proof was in the music I produced. If I studied creative writing for my MA, the proof was in the poetry I wrote and the readings I gave. Today, I am still marked by learning and that mark is visible in the writing I publish, the courses I teach, the program I administrate, and so on. As we all know by now, you just do it.

“This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.” by Jay Rosen at his Public Notebook.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it.

“Facebook is a monopoly, so why shouldn’t it be nationalized?” by David Mitchell at The Guardian.

I’m sure Facebook would claim it’s not a monopoly – strictly speaking it isn’t – but it clearly wants to be and, if there are whole sections of society who feel obliged to sign up in order to be able to communicate with one another, then its dreams are coming true. Next there’ll be electric sheep. Facebook isn’t aspiring to be Cable & Wireless or AT&T, major players within a medium; it wants to be the whole telephone network.

In some ways, this works well for everyone. It’s more convenient if we’re all joined up by the same social network, just as Google is more useful as a search engine because almost everyone uses it. It would be different if, like phone providers, different social media sites communicated with one another – if you could send someone a message from your Facebook account that popped up on their LinkedIn or Netlog page (I looked up those names on Yahoo). But you can’t and, while it’s providing its services for free, there’s no pressure on Facebook to rein in its monopolistic urge.