predilection/antipathy

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.

‘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.

So Jenn Frank wrote an astonishingly great piece ‘On games of chance, cheating, and religion’ and JP Grant added some thoughts of his own about the notion of ‘fairness’ in games, in an equally excellent response, ‘Fair Play’. Go read both of them now if you haven’t yet.

But I wanted to add a little something about the notion of determinism, the spectre of which Jenn mentioned in relation to things like the location of gold veins, being able to win at jeopardy or the scratch lottery, the notion of a ‘solved game‘, and the Christian theological tradition following Calvin.

In essence, if anything is ‘solved’ or ‘fated’ or ‘pre-destined’ what we’re saying is that it is determined in advance, usually by some set of rules which may or may not be discoverable. That’s kind of fine – there are some things which can always be determined in advance, like 8 plus 9 or that a (non-contradictory) square will always have four sides, but all these things only happen in the realm of ideas, as abstractions, or in artificially (arbitrarily?) closed systems. Determinism as a philosophy, ideology or religious doctrine concerns the nature of everything. Whether it’s Calvinism, Newtonian physics, belief in the Roman god Fortuna, or a new age sense of fate, they’re really all saying much the same thing – that everything is predestined, predetermined. Why? Because if any part of the universe is ‘out of control’ for whichever force does the determining (even the laws of physics) then the whole thing becomes irredeemable corrupted. One atom left beyond the powerful reach of our Calvinist God’s control could – no, would – undermine the whole basis of determinism. Even if this Calvinist deity is omnipotent and knows what this ‘out of control’ (hello free will) atom will do, the deity reduces the real agency of the free atom utterly and we’re now splitting semantic hairs over our definition of determinism (“If I have ‘free will’ but nothing I do could possibly ever change anything from it’s set course… how is that free again?”). And if it’s left up to “chance”… well, who’s omnipotent now? The point about a philosophy of a determinist universe is that it is so utterly totalising – it’s all or nothing, otherwise it’s not determinism.

But maybe you’re not convinced – after all, how do we know that it’s not deterministic? Well here’s where it get a bit tricky, because we really come to this question with a lot of baggage. Like Jenn says, we worry about the answers to these kinds of questions, and that makes us want to stay away from them, or at least makes us anxious about asking them. It’s also difficult because we’re already treading on the toes of philosophers, who all come with their own historically specific baggage, which in turn is already affecting how we’re even talking about this issue right now…

So if we’ve got all this baggage, where do we start? One way is to start by pinching the best idea that Science ever had, which is to say that we begin from a position of utter, naïve openness to revision – no problem is ever permanently closed to inquiry; no question is beyond asking; no contrary evidence is ever ignored for the sake of preserving our current (even working!) answers. This kind of attitude has actually gotten a bit of a bad rap lately because it’s been perverted and selectively deployed to spectacular effect by people with an agenda other than inquiry-for-inquiry’s-sake. As an aside, in Australia in 2007 over half the population polled in the affirmative when asked whether or not they believed in human influenced climate change. Since then that number has plummeted as tabloid media and right-wingers colluded together to cast unreasonable doubt on issue. We used to believe, but now it’s “not a settled science” once more. That’s not what I’m talking about – these people are no more presenting real challenges to climate science than Ron Paul is really going to take a libertarian position on women’s reproductive rights.

But back to the issue of determinism. What are the odds that the universe is deterministic? Okay, odds is a not a good way to phrase it. How about, ‘What are the possibilities with respect to whether or not the universe is deterministic?’ That’s a much better frame for the question, because now we can see that, actually there’s only two options – either it is, or it isn’t.

Well, actually we’ve already seen a bit of a third option, and that is that derminism is ‘unevenly distributed’ around the cosmos, or occasionally pops up in localised regions of time or space. But as we said at the outset, that’s not determinism – it’s all or nothing baby! Either there’s an actual, real chance that an atomic spec influences the fate of the rest of the cosmos, or there’s not. Implicit within our culturally-overburdened notion of ‘determinism’ is the assumption that all of the universe is consistently deterministic, otherwise… it’s not really determinism! Ta da! So we’re back to two options. The universe and everything in it is either deterministic or it isn’t.

From here we can go in a number of directions – perhaps we can draw on some fancy modern science and apply what we know about popular theories in advanced theoretical physics like string theory, ‘M-theory’ and other quantum mechanical frameworks. Or alternatively we could take the Pratchette-esque route and say that it’s ‘turtles all the way down’, and that rather than having a ‘bottom’, the universe just… keeps on going, all the way down, down, down into the depths of Hades and beyond. It’s hard to imagine such a thing, but it’s really quite difficult to say that it’s beyond the realm of plausibility. Still, it’s just as hard to imagine that this never-ending, fractal-esque universe behaved in anything resembling a determinist manner. Part of the appeal of determinism stems from it’s finitude, in the sense that something starts a chain that is predictable and utterly determined from the very outset.

So whether the universe contains an infinite regress of ‘things’ of increasingly ultra-tiny bits of stuff also impacts our assessment of the question of a determinist universe. If the very bottom level (let’s just say it’s quantum strings) is all irreducibly small and made of the same ‘stuff’ then how that ‘stuff’ behaves makes a difference to the nature of the universe. In fact, all the universe is is that stuff, and if that ‘stuff’ really is strings current thinking (as I understand) is that rather than being deterministic, stings are so weird that they behave based on probability. So whether or not you get out of bed and brush your teeth in the morning is underpinned by strange stringy bits with 26 dimensions all behaving in a probabilistic manner… and by that stage we’re not living in a determinist universe.

But before we go home with our new found suspicion that we’re probably (ah! ahahahahaha!) not living in a determinist universe, we should make one small detour back up to the realm of medium sized-object and remind ourselves where a limited kind of determinism does exist – and that is in abstractions, ideas and in arbitrariness.

And this is where we come back to games, because most games are exactly that – abstractions, rules, ideas, and arbitrariness incarnate. In their ‘pure’ (think platonic) form, every game probably could be deterministic, but games don’t exist as pure thought or rules because games are done, or they are played. Where are they played? In the universe. What is the universe? Probably not deterministic. And despite our best efforts, our lucky or careful organisation, there really is no predicting when the indeterminacy of the universe will intrude. Even these machines – these localised realms of determinacy we call ‘computers’ – depend on other things like the continued operation of the laws of electro-conductance, as well as on the manufacturing standards at Xbox HQ. And while it might even look as though certain ‘universal laws’ like electron conductivity are themselves ‘deterministic’ from the point of view of an engineer or software developer, we would do well to remember that these laws themselves are contingent. That is, at a certain point in the far, far, far, far distant future, at the end of the universe even, according to physicists these laws are going to themselves break down. If they’re  right then the universe will eventually have expanded enough to rip apart even atoms themselves. Try running your Xbox in that kind of an environment.

But hey, these predictions could be wrong – remember we’re not allowing ourselves the option of shutting down necessary revisions early. But at the same time, that’s also kind of appropriate. If we do live in a probabilistic universe, we may never really, truly and necessarily be able to prove it. That’s makes sense, I think, and it seems like a beautiful kind of symmetry, wouldn’t you say?

‘Why women don’t like appearing on TV‘ by Suzanne Moore at The Guardian.

Women, if I have to generalise, are very good at faking some things but not always the things that matter. We want to be liked and are fearful of being judged on our looks. There is a freedom in ageing, trust me, but the media needs fresh meat.

Why, though, are we so afraid of being unlovable and ignorant when every day men ooze these qualities in serious discussions? When I was editing, I would often ask women who I knew had expertise to write for me but they would need so much encouragement that often, yes, I would use a less good man simply to meet a deadline. A man who was prepared to fake it.

We say “no” when we should say “yes” because we don’t feel worth it, we don’t feel we can cover every base. This is a problem of political discourse. You can’t go on Question Time and say, “I am not really sure about the euro”, even though no one is really sure about the euro. Or “Actually, NHS funding is not my area” when you are up against politicians who have had teams briefing them. Your job, as I was told aeons ago when booked to appear on Question Time, is to “represent the average mum”, which I screwed up badly by asking that Myra Hindley be released and all drugs be legalised, while sitting next to David Trimble.

‘10 Things I Hate About Skyrim‘ by Tim Rogers at Kotaku.com.

Skyrim begins most of its proverbial sentences with the names of characters in its made-up dialects. The loading-screen flavor text often catches my eye. The above example is particularly fantastic. It reads:

“Kodlak Whitemane is the Harbinger of the Companions. He does not give orders, [yet] his word is highly respected both inside Jorrvaskr and through all the nine Holds.”

First of all—what? Second of all: okay.

“Kodlak”: a made-up first name in some made-up dialect that is trying to sound Nordic.

“Whitemane”: two familiar words to English speakers, combined into one word. We immediately have the impression of this man having a full head of white hair. Maybe he does. Or . . . maybe he’s a she? (With a name like “Kodlak”?)

“Harbinger of the Companions”: the two capitalized words in this phrase are words we may have encountered before if we’ve ever read a book or leafed through one. A “Harbinger” is something that signals something is coming. A “Companion” is a person or thing that one enjoys being with and escorts or chaperones from place to place. However, as these words are capitalized, a little switch flips in the first-timer’s brain, prompting him to expect these words, in this imaginary world, to represent foreign concepts. Maybe a “Harbinger” is what they call a “Master Elite Warrior”, and the “Companions” are a group of Really Tough Dudes who kill anyone that looks at their shoes. It could be possible that a Harbinger is what citizens of the land of Skyrim call a messenger or an oracle, and the Companions are people who like hanging out with people, though the unfamiliarity of a name like “Kodlak” coupled with a pseudo-familiar name like “Whitemane” persuades us to expect the extraordinary. So it is that writing begins to trick us.

‘In which I don’t try to write like a man‘ by Margaret Robertson at Lookspring.

 General internet rough-and-tumble doesn’t phase me. I’m secretly delighted that the 4th Google result for my name is ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’. It amuses me enough that I’ve bought www.margaretrobertsonisfullofshit.com, even if I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. I think, on the whole, I can make my peace with being called a cunt for what I write, but I find it more daunting to be called a cunt for just having one.

‘History Repeats – Facebook is the new AOL‘ by Jay Baer at ConvinceandConvert.com.

People kvetch about Google and it’s online hegemony. But Google is Urkel compared to Facebook in terms of possession of data. And data = power because data = relevancy.

Imagine if when you went to Google to do a search, you saw a pop-up box that said “To search, first please enter your name; high school; relationship status; favorite movies; birthday; lists all your friends and relatives; and upload some photos of that time you were drunk and did something stupid.”

That’s essentially how Facebook works. Except we GAVE them all that information. They didn’t even have to ask.

But how do we get from “that was a bad idea” to “Reed Hastings doesn’t understand what business he’s in?”  When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don’t understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?

I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day.  It’s possible that he just sort of did this by accident.  But is this really the most likely explanation?  That he didn’t understand the first thing about how people watched movies, or how to run a business?

So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I’ve lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke’s Law (which originally said ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

“At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them.”

Those following along on twitter and Facebook will probably already be aware of the ongoing saga of my somewhat hobbled laptop. For the rest of you, about a month or so ago now my Laptop started malfunctioning, with the likely culprit (or so I thought at the time) some faulty screen part, as the screen was still operational but without the backlight coming on it was nearly impossible to see.

I took it apart, this being my second Toshiba laptop I’ve disassembled, and it was much like the first, but I’d forgotten enough that when confounded sufficiently enough I thought to search for an online guide. And what do you know, there’s a disassembly guide for just about every Toshiba laptop out there. Here’s mine, incidentally. We’ll come back to that in a minute, but suffice to say there didn’t seem to be any loose wires or shonky connections that I could find easily causing the screen to go dark, leaving the rest of the PC running normally.

So I considered alternatives. I thought about going down the apple fanatic route and buying a wireless keyboard for my iPad, or even just adjusting to typing on a glass-screen but I tried the latter for a while and it was less than satisfactory. I also heard reports from people who’d tried the keyboard+iPad technique – in particular Simon Ferrari – but he was emphatic that it was not an ideal solution. I could see his point – switching between apps is a nuisance on the iPad and in terms of formatting or looking up citations you can add that to something that can’t really be done without investing in some rather expensive apps.

So I started hunting for a new laptop. I considered buying a cheap replacement, also contemplated taking an old laptop of my parents’ when they bought a new one (though they were pretty uncertain about whether this would actually happen or not), and finally, earlier this week I asked my housemate if I could try taking apart and fixing his also broken (Toshiba) laptop which had stopped receiving power a few months previous.

So I started disassembling it (following another guide from the same site) and the process struck me as, again, remarkably similar to taking apart my own laptop, despite the fact that they were entirely different models bought 12-18 months apart. The process was so similar that by the end of it I started to feel like I knew the design methodology of Toshiba laptops, or their “best practice” or something – and I guess maybe I do.

It’s kind of like reverse engineering. In a roundabout way I’m getting a feel for how these machines are put together, but in reverse: each time you start with the keyboard bezel – this little strip of plastic with clips that sits over the keyboard looking snug and neat, hiding away the screws that anchor the keyboard in place. It’s a pretty smooth trick though, and the bezel looks and feels solidly attached. Once the keyboard is unscrewed, it can be lifted up and out of the rest of the case, with a springy connector cable attaching the keyboard to the motherboard, held fast by a neat little lock.

There’s a dozen or so screws on the underside that keep the top half of the case attached to the bottom, so we need to flip over and remove them all. But once those are all out (and there is a lot of them) there’s more of those neat little (serial?) cables connecting to the motherboard – one from the touchpad and another from the strip of buttons – the power button, mute button, etc, etc – which all need to be unlocked similar to the keyboard before they can be detached.

So we can get the top off, but the screen is still attached. Underneath some rubber stoppers are about four screws and once they’re off the plastic casing has more of the bezel-type clips that just pop out with a bit of force. It can be disconcertingly difficult the first time, and I worried about breaking the plastic on a number of occasions while disassembling, but the plastic seems to have quite a bit of bend and warp in it before breaking, it’s pretty remarkable stuff but I imagine not very biodegradable.

I did have a point here somewhere that was larger than just a description of how to take apart a Toshiba laptop. But I guess that’s it – you can adapt these set of steps to disassemble any Toshiba laptop (or so I’ve found) and that reflects something of that company’s design or manufacturing process. Or perhaps there’s a connection to be unveiled between ideal laptop design or expectation and these particular arrangement of technical objects. The screen includes hinges, cables, lighting tubes, power cables and DC to AC power converters; motherboards consist of screws, solder, laser etched rows of circuitry, Intel designed and manufactured CPUs with 45 nanometre transistors, capacitors made somewhere in South-East Asia, power coils assembled and wound by machines on a factory floor; cases moulded from the compacted remains of billion year long extinct plants and animals…

It’s an amazing arrangement of objects, and breaking one of them open to see what’s inside is quite the eye-opening exercise. I have more to say about things like this now that my favoured writing implement (this laptop) is back in action. I’ve been reading Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and I plan to summarise my thoughts on it soon, and I’ve also been meaning to re-visit my post ‘Rhetorical Questions’ from roughly a year ago which I feel really needs updating. I remember being extremely proud of it at the time, but a year on it feels… anachronistic. It feels like I was writing against something that never eventuated, or perhaps I wasn’t writing against one thing specifically at all. We’ll see soon enough.

‘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.

On Wednesday the 9th of November I presented a paper to the Knowledge/Culture/Social Change International Conference at UWS Parramatta. The title of my paper was “Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind” and I recorded my talk which you can listen to below. The 29 minute recording includes some questions asked by the audience at the end – the first from Greg Haigne Associate Professor in the School of Languages & Comparitive Cultural Studies at UQ (Who presented a very interesting paper the day previously), and one from Professor Penny Harvey from the University of Manchester)

Direct download.

The phrase “Technospectacularism” is an adapted version of a phrase from the opening pages of Ian Bogost’s How To Do Things With Videogames and I think it’s an incredibly apt phrase to describe our time. The thesis of the paper itself is a reaction to what I see as an upswing in the use of Neuroscientific findings as a blunt weapon of persuasion for academics, journalists and authors outside of – or on the periphery of – the field itself. To counter this dangerous misuse of the unfinished science of the brain I drew on William Uttal’s critically important work suggesting that the brain-mind problem may be intractable. From there I spun out a hypothesis based on the “external mind” thesis, by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, as well as Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy, suggesting that the mind is a real object with just as much reality as the touchable stuff of the brain, despite being made up of  different “stuff” to the brain alone.

I’m very interested to hear your comments or concerns, and will certainly entertain requests for clarification – my email address is on the sidebar.

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