randomWalks

[gallery]

new-aesthetic:

"The Male Gazed: Surveillance, Power, and Gender” By Kate Losse at Model View Culture

Government surveillance within social networks didn’t arise out of nowhere; instead, it is a product of longstanding inequalities in power in technology that have historically privileged white men above all, who have been much more likely to control surveillance technologies than be targeted by them. The outrage over NSA surveillance has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.

I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days — your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything — it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term “Orwellian.” As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …

[gallery]

moviecode:

The anime series Serial Experiments Lain contains a screen shot of Conway’s Game of Life in LISP. (source @nmu102)

In the early 90s I desperately wanted to blow the whistle on racism in the market research industry, but with no Internet, not as easy to do that as it is today. Basically the company that did most of the market research for consumer product advertising (pop tarts, for example) refused to allow us to turn in surveys with more than ten percent black people in the sample. They had no other restrictions, on anything like age or gender. They were 100% clear that 0% would be fine with them, and in fact, preferred. I was doing surveys in a mall with a customer base that was probably 30% black at the time. We often had to tell people that we recruited that we couldn’t use them when the manager told us that we were over quota. The office manager would ask them what their zip code was, and whatever they said, she would say, oh, sorry we’re over quota for that zip code. Then they’d tell us that we couldn’t survey any more ‘zips’. Sometimes black people would directly even stop and ask us why we didn’t survey them, if I ignored them and asked a white person that walked by after them. I never had a good answer.

Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other. They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.

"The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

You may wonder what discrimination and social justice have to do with the technical and economic nature of the web; the short answer is, everything.

[gallery]

(via Dead and Going to Die – The New Inquiry)

When we accuse people of being too lazy to take care of themselves and cook a proper meal, we assume they all have pots, pans, knives, sinks. There are people on social media who get on their high horses and call people who don’t make their own pasta “idiots”. Are you kidding me? My children were used to eating mangoes and avocados for snacks and having unlimited access to the cupboards and refrigerator. Now there is rationing. Woe to the person who eats the last egg I was saving to add protein to the salad. I turn into Mommie Dearest within seconds now, on edge all the time, trying to be the food police.

[gallery]

All hell broke loose when the cover came out. Several advertisers took their money and ran. Subscribers demanded refunds. Angry letters flowed in. Photo History: George Lois Gives America a Black Santa

I almost cried and thought I might, but then didn’t, since I had a way to go before I got home and didn’t want anyone to have to see a 6’3”, 230 pound bearded man running down the street in tears in bright workout gear on their way to work or school.

“It’s cool!” I would have assured them, “I’m just thinking about men and boys kissing each other in the context of fatherhood! Not a big deal.”

I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.

The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about “white people” to a man like Robertson.

Just add “if you’re white” or “because I’m white” to each generalization or anecdote in the article. For instance: “I find when you act confused but polite then people want to help if you’re white. There was a line behind me. I wasn’t fighting or angry. So there was no reason for anyone to get angry at me, because I’m white.”

Standards and practices still insisted on the removal of specific shots, like Mix doing push-ups on the butt, or other really tight butt shots.

Pop culture says that if a black girl is to be taken seriously, she has to assimilate and be as white as possible, to the point of bleaching her hair blonde. But the entire point of the song was the opposite.

There’s a world of possibility in telling me more about my own listening habits. If I could choose only one feature to add to Spotify, it would be play histories. When was the the first time I played a song? When was the last? When did I first add an album to my collection? How many times have I played it? Given my listening history, how likely am I to like a new album? How often do people with similar histories play a given album? How long did it take me to play one album twenty-five times in comparison to the last album I played that often?

In a sense, the most amazing thing about Mr. Mandela is that he is not a fiction. He actually lived in our lifetime.

Some of the questions asked by the incisive audience were polite versions of “What are the dangers of having this much data about so many people?” and “What does Facebook as a company do to help society?” These Zuckerberg dodged so expertly that by the time he was done “answering” (with a hefty & convincing confidence), I had forgotten exactly what the question was.

This leads him to a controversial conclusion: that the saturated fat in butter, cheese and meats does not contribute to the clogging of arteries — and in fact is beneficial in moderate amounts in the context of a healthy diet (lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and other fresh, unprocessed foods). His own diet attests to that. Along with fruits, vegetables and whole grains, he eats red meat several times a week and drinks whole milk daily. He cannot remember the last time he ate anything deep-fried. He has never used margarine, and instead scrambles eggs in butter every morning. He calls eggs one of nature’s most perfect foods, something he has been preaching since the 1970s, when the consumption of cholesterol-laden eggs was thought to be a one-way ticket to heart disease. “Eggs have all of the nine amino acids you need to build cells, plus important vitamins and minerals,” he said. “It’s crazy to just eat egg whites. Not a good practice at all.”

It is on record. Rapes in the dozen. So stop hedging your words and when you tell me what a brilliant ode to pussy Black Panties is, then realize that the next sentence should say: “This, from a man who has committed numerous rapes.” The guy was a monster! Just say it! We do have a justice system and he was acquitted. Ok, fine. And these other women took the civil lawsuit route. He was tried on very narrow grounds. He was tried on a 29 minute, 36 second video tape. He was tried on trading child pornography. He was not tried for rape. He was acquitted of making child pornography. He’s never been tried in court for rape, but look at the statistics. The numbers of rapes that happened, the numbers of rapes that were reported, the numbers of rapes that make it to court and then the conviction rate. I mean, it comes down to something miniscule. He’s never had his day in court as a rapist. It’s fifteen years in the past now, but this record exists. You have to make a choice, as a listener if music matters to you as more than mere entertainment and you and I have spent our entire lives with that conviction. This is not just entertainment, this is our life blood. This matters.

The day will come — sooner than you think — when you’ll want to be able to conduct a security audit on your own sex toys.

Such a strange existential dilemma. I spend hours looking at this hole and poking at it with my fingers. I know that I cannot “have” a hole, as a hole is not a thing that can be had. A hole is an absence. And yet this is supposed to be a list of the things I want, and I want this hole in the hardwood floor the way Gandhi wanted peace. The way the dog wants to lick my face. The way my mother wants me to stop pulling off her eyeglasses.

I cut my teeth on the open web of the early 2000s. It was APIs, and mashups. Mac OS X turned my laptop into a web server and coding machine, just the same as where I hosted the toys and tools that I wrote. This is what the future was going to be like.

And then it didn’t happen. Code is fragile because APIs keep changing and nobody cares about scripting anymore. There are no text and image file formats anymore, practically speaking, because there’s no file interchange. Once photos are on Instagram, that’s it.

We’ve lost the ambition of the early web and early internet to create an inclusive, level playing field. It’s clear what the technical challenges are - HTTP needs micro-payments at the protocol level to support businesses outside advertising, we need portable high level standards for photos, streams and identity - but we’re kinda not thinking like that anymore.

So in reaction I stick with plain text as much as possible, and continue my computing life vaguely resenting the software world we’ve built.