As a teenager, M. E. Thomas — a fittingly egotistic pseudonym — was “so uniquely accomplished, talented and charming that I was naturally included on everyone’s list of people to know.” She went to indie movies and drummed in a rock band. Her friends idolized her. “Musicians are expected to be narcissistic and outrageous,” she writes. “You’re supposed to scream and dance wildly.” Nobody suspected that the screaming and the wild dancing were indicative not of awesomeness but of sociopathy.

In “Confessions of a Sociopath,” Thomas self-identifies “more as a sociopath than by my gender or profession or race.” People like her are “different from the average person, often in very dangerous or scary ways.” It’s startling to read these statements written so bluntly. As a healthy skepticism of mental health labeling grows, some people question whether sociopaths and psychopaths (Thomas is described in an evaluation as a “ ‘socialized’ or ‘successful’ psychopath”) actually exist, beyond being pejorative terms to describe horrible people. This book dispels that myth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/confessions-of-a-sociopath-by-m-e-thomas.html?_r=0

Audiobook

Think of viewing the world through the Terminator’s eyes.  As you scan the scene, data pops up informing you about peoples’ weight, exit routes from a building, the composition of liquid in a jar.

That’s the picture painted by a report from Deloitte Consulting, “Augmented government: Transforming government services through augmented reality.”

As the report notes, the military has led the way in developing augmented reality (AR) devices and applications. As early as 1992, the Air Force developed Virtual Fixtures, a system that an operator could use to work in remote environments.

http://gcn.com/articles/2013/06/19/augmented-reality.aspx?m=1

Using modern technology, Patrick Feaster is on a mission to resurrect long-vanished voices and sounds—many of which were never intended to be revived.

Over the past thousand years, countless images have been created to depict sound in forms that theoretically could be “played” just as though they were modern sound recordings. Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic “pictures of sound” dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio. It contains the world’s oldest known “sound recordings” in the sense of sound vibrations automatically recorded out of the air—the groundbreaking phonautograms recorded in Paris by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in the 1850s and 1860s—as well as the oldest gramophone records available anywhere for listening today, including inventor Emile Berliner’s recitation of Der Handschuh, played back from an illustration in a magazine, which international news media recently proclaimed to be the oldest audible “record” in the tradition of 78s and vintage vinyl. Other highlights include the oldest known recording of identifiable words spoken in the English language (1878) and the world’s oldest surviving “trick recording” (1889). But Pictures of Sound pursues the thread even further into the past than that by “playing” everything from medieval music manuscripts to historic telegrams, and from seventeenth-century barrel organ programs to eighteenth-century “notations” of Shakespearean recitation.

In short, this isn’t just another collection of historical audio—it redefines what “historical audio” is.

Publisher Dust-to-Digital, Atlanta/GA, 2012
144 pages, with 164 images
via prohairesis

review (Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times)

FirstSounds.org initiative
Patrick Feaster discusses Pictures of Sound (video, 36 min)
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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8450

Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle’s mature philosophy.

As well as presenting the method and principles of non-philosophy, it includes a history of the development of non-philosophy, a novel conception of science, a discussion of non-philosophical causality and new theories of the subject and object of thought. Providing an introduction to Laruelle’s novel theory of ‘non-epistemology’ or ‘unified theory of thought’, this volumes challenges the way we think about the traditional philosophical problems.

Bringing together all the elements of his thought developed over twenty years and laying the foundations for his later work, Principles of Non-Philosophy is arguably Laruelle’s magnum opus.

Originally published as Principes de la non-philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996
Translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith
Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, 2013
ISBN 1441177566, 9781441177568
344 pages
via falsedeity

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Sensate is a peer-reviewed, issueless, open-access, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Its mission is to provide a scholarly and artistic forum for experiments in critical media practices that expand academic discourse by taking us beyond the margins of the printed page. Fundamental to this expansion is a re-imagining of what constitutes a work of scholarship or art.

Editors-in-Chief: Lindsey Lodhie, Peter McMurray, Joana Pimenta, and Elizabeth Watkins
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8443

Researchers in Switzerland have created a robot that moves like a housecat and can run faster than all other robots its size.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/17/video-cheetah-cub-robot-runs-like-a-housecat

The term “designer drug” became popular with the acid house and ecstasy boom in the 1990s, but it was never really accurate. The main ingredient in ecstasy pills – MDMA – was first synthesised in 1912 and began its life as a recreational drug in 70s California, years before it became notorious on the rave scene. The drug was never created for the party crowd, but the “designer drug” label stuck as the perfect phrase both to glamorise and demonise the fashionable new high.

There have been some genuine attempts at designer drugs through the years – where people have attempted to create new recreational substances to evade drug laws – but most have been abject failures. In the most notorious example, chemistry student Barry Kidston tried to create a synthetic heroin-like high in 1976 and ended up creating MPTP, a substance so neurotoxic that it gave him Parkinson’s disease days after he injected it. As a grim consolation, Kidston’s only legacy was to create a drug that is still used today in lab experiments to try and understand this debilitating neurological disorder.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/16/why-the-war-on-drugs-has-been-made-redundant/

All video-game makers are minor gods. They are, after all, in the business of world creation. The game creator sets down the mountains and arranges the valleys in his or her world. The creator decides upon the sky’s hue, the water’s viscosity, the pitch of birdsong, and the force of gravity’s pull. The creator types “Let there be light” (or the C# equivalent) and there is light. The creator chooses how and when night falls and whether or not there will be a new dawn. The creator conjures how time works (linear, malleable, or something else entirely) and writes the strands of code that form the incumbent creatures’ DNA. Then, when everything is planned out, the creator clicks “RUN” to execute a Big Bang.

Among such gods, Markus Persson, the Swedish creator of Minecraft—a video game that has, in the four years since its initial release, become a 21st-century sensation, played in bedrooms and classrooms around the world—is something of a Zeus. More than 22 million people have paid to immigrate to his world and settle there (nearly three times as many as live in the gigantic multiplayer game World of Warcraft), be it on PC, smartphone, or video-game console. Released without backing from investors or publishers, Minecraft is inspiring a new generation of independent game makers to strike out on their own, and to approach their medium in new ways. Meanwhile, the profits it’s generated—$86 million in 2012 alone—rival those of the world’s largest entertainment releases.

http://www.technologyreview.com/review/516051/the-secret-to-a-video-game-phenomenon/

The Russian prison service said Monday it had caught a cat being used as a courier to smuggle banned cell phones and chargers into a prison camp in the country’s remote far north.

The prison service in the Komi region said on its website that the cat was detained Friday evening as it climbed the fence of the region’s Number One corrective labour camp with two cell phones, batteries and chargers strapped to its back using tape.moo

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3379023

In 2006, when Edward J. Snowden joined the thousands of computer virtuosos going to work for America’s spy agencies, there were no recent examples of insiders going public as dissidents. But as his doubts about his work for the Central Intelligence Agency and then for the National Security Agency grew, the Obama administration’s campaign against leaks served up one case after another of disillusioned employees refashioning themselves as heroic whistle-blowers.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/for-snowden-a-life-of-ambition-despite-the-drifting.html

Asylum is a 1972 documentary film about a therapeutic community for the mentally ill in London. It features the co-founders of the community, Leon Redler and R. D. Laing.

The New School, a university in New York City, offers distinguished degree, certificate, and continuing education programs in art and design, liberal arts, management and policy, and the performing arts. THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu The documentary film Asylum (Peter Robinson, 1972), a model of cinema verité, commemorates 40 years of its release. The film documents one of the most controversial projects in the history of psychiatry and psychotherapy. At its center is Archway, part of a community founded in London where therapists and patients sought new ways of working and living together. A panel discussion will reflect on the legacy of the late Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s legacy in the era of wonder-drugs, and a glimpse into footage from his 1972 U.S. college campus tour. Speakers: Richard Ware Adams, cameraman/editor of Asylum; Roberta Russell, author, with R. D. Laing, of R. D. Laing and Me: Lessons in Love (1992); Daniel Burston, Ph. D., Chair of Psychology Department, Duquesne University (Pittsburgh), author of The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing (1996) and The Crucible of Experience: R. D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (2000). Sponsored by the Program Committee of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Cabinet Magazine, and The New School. Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall. 03/16/2012 6:00 p.m.

Looking into their crystal ball, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg predicted the imminent arrival of a radically different entertainment landscape, including pricey movie tickets, a vast migration of content to video-on-demand and even programmable dreams.

Speaking on a panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Spielberg and Lucas took a grim view of the future of the majors and predicted theatrical motion pictures will become a niche market.

http://variety.com/2013/digital/news/lucas-spielberg-on-future-of-entertainment-1200496241/

Small but violent protests in several Brazilian cities this week have added to a sense of growing unrest in Brazil at a time when inflation, crime and President Dilma Rousseff’s popularity are all taking a turn for the worse. (link via pomoetry)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/14/us-brazil-protests-idUSBRE95D0J420130614

Meistgenutzte Suchmaschine, weltgrößter Datensammler, teuerstes Medienunternehmen – es liegt nahe, »Google« als Supermacht zu bezeichnen. Und doch greift diese Beschreibung zu kurz.

Unter Bezug auf Michel Foucault sowie die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie entwickelt Theo Röhle ein präzises, relationales Verständnis von Macht, das den Blick auf die vielfältigen Interaktionen der beteiligten Akteure öffnet und ein komplexes System von Verhandlungen zutage fördert.

Eine zeitgemäße Analyse digitaler Medienmacht an der Schnittstelle von Medienwissenschaft, Informationswissenschaft und Surveillance Studies.

Publisher transcript, Bielefeld, 2010
ISBN 9783837614787
266 pages

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8437

Early investors in Bitcoin got rich. Now they are the cryptocurrency’s most powerful gatekeepers.

Every time you spend bitcoins to buy a drink at Evr, a swanky bar in midtown Manhattan that accepts the digital currency, you make its co-owner, Charlie Shrem, a little bit richer.

And that’s not only because a chamomile sour costs $17 (or 0.16 bitcoins). It’s because whenever someone new uses bitcoins, the electronic currency’s value tends to increase. Shrem has bought thousands of bitcoins for about $20 each, starting in 2011. Since then, the digital coins have soared in value to $109.

That’s turned the 23-year-old into a millionaire and into one of a handful of early bitcoin investors who’ve decided to sink their windfalls back into the bitcoin economy — starting their own companies and investing in others.

http://mashable.com/2013/06/13/bitcoin-angel-investors/

Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA’s vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/jun/12/nsa-surveillance-data-terror-attack

“Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce’s life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.”

“The greatest literary biography of the century.” — Anthony Burgess, The Observer

First published in 1959
New and Revised Edition
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1982
887 pages
via mistral13

Review of the first edition (Stephen Spender, The New York Times)
Early film on James Joyce by Pegarty Long (1977) (14 min, incl. interview with Richard Ellmann)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8431

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers—one of today’s leading philosophers of science—goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead’s thought. The product of thirty years’ engagement with the mathematician-philosopher’s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.

Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead’s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead’s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whitehead’s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language.

“To think with Whitehead today,” Stengers writes, “means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.”

First published as Penser avec Whitehead: “Une libre et sauvage création de concepts”, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2002
Translated by Michael Chase
With a Foreword by Bruno Latour
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2011
ISBN 0674048032, 9780674048034
531 pages

review (Bruno Latour, Boundary)
review (Roland Faber, NDPR)

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google books

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Since its first publication more than twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world’s foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great “ideological deformations” of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addresses a broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomings of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism. This second edition contains a new introduction and concluding chapter, both of which make the author’s arguments even more compelling.

French edition
Publisher Anthropos-Economica, Paris, 1988
160 pages

English edition
Translated by Russell Moore and James Membrez
First published in 1989
Publisher Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010
ISBN 1583672079, 9781583672075
288 pages

review (Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books)

publisher (EN)
google books (EN)

L’eurocentrisme: Critique d’une ideologie (French, 1988)
Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, alt link (English, trans. Russell Moore and James Membrez, 2nd edition, 1989/2010)
El eurocentrismo: Crítica de una ideología (Spanish, trans. Rosa Cuminsky de Cendrero, 1989)

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8422

The wormy apple doesn’t fall far from the rotting tree. In saying that, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the Cronenberg family bloodline but only to point out that in his first feature, “Antiviral,” the 33-year-old Brandon Cronenberg exhibits the same obsession with mutilation and infection as his father, David, did in movies like “Crash” and “The Fly.”

Instead of considering “Antiviral” a chip off the old block, you might describe this movie, written and directed by Cronenberg fils, as a skin graft from a zombie. One of the biggest differences between father and son is that the father likes a little mess in his gore. In “Antiviral” the son creates a hypersanitized environment in which the infection spreads from within.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/movies/antiviral-directed-by-brandon-cronenberg.html?_r=1&

A comic of the Bradley Manning trial, produced live from the courtroom, is being created by artist and WikiLeaks activist Clark Stoeckley and will be published in the autumn.

http://m.guardiannews.com/books/2013/jun/11/bradley-manning-trial-comic-book

Rising from the water like rusty invaders out of H.G. Wells, the Maunsell Army Forts in the Thames Estuary are decaying reminders of the darkest days of World War II.

Part of the Thames Estuary defense network, the anti-aircraft tower-forts were constructed in 1942, with each fort consisting of a cluster of seven stilted buildings surrounding a central command tower. When operational, catwalks connected the buildings. Built on land and then transported to their watery homes, the forts were designed by Guy Maunsell, a British civil engineer. Originally there were three of these forts, but only two are left standing: the Redsands Fort and the Shivering Sands Fort.

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/06/12/wwii_maunsell_army_forts_taken_over_by_pirate_radio.html

“This study analyzes four autobiographical accounts written after the fall of the Berlin Wall by former data subjects, i.e., by individuals who have been under the surveillance of the East German Stasi (Staatssicherheit). Following a suggestion by Cornelia Vismann, I refer to these texts as “file-based autobiographies.” The term reflects the fact that they were written in response to the opening of the Stasi archives and the passing of the Stasi Files Act, which allowed data subjects to access their files. By constructing narratives using files written and compiled by informers and secret police officials rather than relying on their own, personal memories, these data subjects challenge the traditional aesthetics of autobiographies and subvert the usual expectations of autobiographical reading. “File-based autobiographies” constitute nothing less than a new autobiographical sub-genre. Rather than offering a personal story that begins in early childhood and ends later in life, data subjects engage in a revision of their lives using files written by a hostile third party. The four case studies show how people under surveillance may need to draw on such documents, even if they are inaccurate, in order to support their claims of authenticity and thus fulfill the autobiographical pact. In this way, these autobiographers acquire and re-functionalize the hostile documents, thus challenging the original purposes for which the files were kept. They show that using their files not only results in unexpected memory processes, but is also a political and literary process that supports their personal agendas and targets particular audiences. Access to and subsequent use of their files gives them the authority to discuss their reaction to the opening of the Stasi files as well as the records themselves.”

Doctoral thesis
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, October 2011
230 pages

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The top-secret world that the government created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become so enormous, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or exactly how many agencies duplicate work being done elsewhere. The result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe may be putting us in greater danger. In Top Secret America, award-winning reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin uncover the enormous size, shape, mission and consequences of this invisible universe of over 1,300 government facilities in every state in America; nearly 2,000 outside companies used as contractors and more than 850,000 people granted ‘Top Secret’ security clearance.

A landmark expose of a new, secret ‘Fourth Branch’ of American government, Top Secret America is a tour de force of investigative reporting-and a book sure to spark national and international alarm.

Publisher Little, Brown and Company, New York/Boston/London, 2011
ISBN 0316194042, 9780316194044
336 pages

review (Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times)
review (Richard Rhodes, The Washington Post)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8400

It began just after dawn on Tuesday: the thud of tear gas fired across Taksim Square in the biggest police operation here for over a week.

Arcs of water cannon were spewed towards protesters, some of whom responded with petrol bombs and bricks.

For 12 days, the central square in Turkey’s biggest city had been under the authority of a growing protest movement. This was the moment that the government decided to retake it.

All through the day, the game of cat and mouse continued.

Once the police retreated, the protesters regrouped. They took refuge in the adjoining Gezi Park, where the unrest was first sparked in response to government plans to redevelop it.

I watched as telecoms trucks were set ablaze, black smoke fusing with the white plumes of tear gas into an acrid mix.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22866043

Bitcoin has experienced a fairly massive drop in value over the weekend and into this week, moving from a peak of $118 on June 7 to a low of $89 on June 9. While precipitous drops and dizzying highs aren’t unusual for the cryptocurrency, BTC watchers are pointing to the PRISM and NSA leaks as a cause for this weekend’s massive dip.

http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/is-prism-precipitating-a-bitcoin-sell-off/

Most of the matter in the universe may be made out of particles that possess an unusual, donut-shaped electromagnetic field called an anapole.

This proposal, which endows dark matter particles with a rare form of electromagnetism, has been strengthened by a detailed analysis performed by a pair of theoretical physicists at Vanderbilt University: Professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho. An article about the research was published online last month by the journal Physics Letters B.

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2013/06/dark-matter/

Sky watchers are crossing their fingers that, early this Tuesday morning, they may witness a brief outburst of a dormant meteor shower that has not been seen in over eight decades.

If astronomers’ predictions hold true, the Gamma Delphinids may undergo a rare outburst that could even equal the famed August Perseids—with rates of meteors reaching as high as one or two shooting stars per minute.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130610-meteor-shower-space-science-gamma-delphinids/#

Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call “terrorism” were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became “terrorism,” and how this transformation ultimately led to the current “war on terror.” Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary – itself increasingly contested – between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state. Despite terrorism now being central to contemporary political discourse, there have been few empirical studies of terrorism experts. This book investigates how the concept of terrorism has been developed and used over recent decades.

• The first empirical study of terrorism experts • Places the ‘war on terror’ in social and historical context in order to provide a new perspective on an important situation • Explains the shifting social construction of ‘terrorism’

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2013
ISBN 1107026636, 9781107026636
242 pages
via amoromar

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Incunabula friend Richard Metzger tears Nestle a new one over at Dangerous Minds.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/maybe_monsanto_isnt_the_worlds_most_evil_corporation_maybe_its_nestle

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/time_of_the_assassins_the_conversation_about_privatizing_water_needs_to_end

It’s like we’ve been saying for a few years  now, water is the new oil.

Do you remember the most Homeric of world trade negotiations, called the Uruguay round, which took place between 1986 and 1994? I was a teenager then and I remember that round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) vividly.
I had taken to reading the austere Le Monde every day and remember the uncouth Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association in Hollywood, who particularly despised European film directors for pleading with their governments to exclude cinema, and the arts in general, from the negotiations. Valenti roared back: “Culture is like chewing-gum, a product like any other.” At the time, France’s President François Mitterrand led the rebellion and, sphinx-like, treated the like of Valenti with hauteur. He retorted: “The mind’s creations are no mere commodities and can’t be treated as such.”
The contrast sums up the opposing views: the US considers cinema and the arts as entertainment industries making profits; Europe considers culture as the product of ideas that go beyond a strict commercial value. In the late 80s, France coined the notion of “cultural exception” which has since morphed into the less arrogant-sounding “cultural diversity”, a principle adopted in October 2005 by Unesco as a legally binding convention passed by 185 states against two. The naysayers were the US and Israel.
Twenty years later, we’re back at it with the opening of talks for a new transatlantic trade agreement. The problem is, this time Europe is in a weaker state. France may have warned this week (paywalled link) that it will not start negotiation if cultural industries are not excluded from trade talks, making its point with a letter signed by 16 European culture ministers, but will it prevail once again? Nothing is less sure. To make the situation even trickier than in 1993, it seems that the EU commission supremo, José Manuel Barroso, is playing a double game. Eager to please Washington – he is said to want to succeed Ban Ki-moon at the UN, he is telling the Europeans to, as we say in French, put water in their wine, ie pacify the Americans. However, Barroso risks appearing incoherent, saying last month, “we should not exclude the audio-visual sector in negotiations with the US,” before adding, “at the same time, we must make it clear that the cultural exception is not negotiable.” Go figure.

http://m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/france-culture-war-united-states

Because of the extraordinary revelations last week by the Guardian, Congress and the American people now know that the Patriot Act is being used by the National Security Agency to collect the phone records of all Americans, every day. There’s no more debate about whether the government, and the military at that, is spying on us: only whether Congress is going to stop them.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to obtain ‘any tangible thing’ relevant to an investigation. According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this authority has been used to collect all phone records in the U.S., even those of law-abiding citizens who have no connection to crime or terrorism whatsoever. The administration and a few members of Congress have confirmed and defended this practice as necessary to protect national security.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/roll-back-the-surveillance-state-92550.html#ixzz2VuwBeRvJ

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/roll-back-the-surveillance-state-92550.html

Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, as stories of communications spying tool PRISM sweep the world, a look back to another PRISM that was firmly, 100% on our side.

http://m.pcgamer.com/2013/06/08/saturday-crapshoot-a-mind-forever-voyaging

What’s in Edward Snowden’s 41-slide PowerPoint deck that’s so hot that nobody dare publish it?

Now that Snowden has revealed himself to the world as the NSA whistleblower, details about his interaction with the press are surfacing. And at the center of the drama is a still mostly-unpublished 41-slide presentation, classified top secret, that Snowden gave to the Washington Post and the Guardianto expose the NSA’s internet spying operation “PRISM”.

Only five slides from the presentation have been published. The other 36 remain a mystery. Both theGuardian’s Glenn Greenwald and the Post’s Barton Gellman have made it clear that the rest of the PowerPoint is dynamite stuff … which we’re not going to be seeing any time soon. “If you saw all the slides you wouldn’t publish them,” wrote Gellman on Twitter, adding in a second tweet: “I know a few absolutists, but most people would want to defer judgment if they didn’t know the full contents.”

Even Greenwald is taking a conservative view of the NSA’s PowerPoint. “I’m not going to discuss our legal advice with you,” Greenwald wrote on Twitter, “but we’re not publishing NSA tech methods.”

To us geeks, the tech methods, of course, are the most interesting part. Snowden evidently wanted the entire presentation published, at least at one point in his discussions with the Post’s Gellman. On May 24, “Snowden asked for a guarantee that the Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of [the] PowerPoint presentation,” Gellman wrote Sunday, in a fascinating account of his interactions with the whistleblower. “I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when.”

That’s when Snowden looped in the Guardian, according to Gellman’s account. On Twitter, Greenwald disputed that timeline, and wrote that he’d been working with Snowden “since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

Regardless of which reporter met Snowden first, both publications wound up handling the PowerPoint roughly the same, publishing only a small portion of the slide deck. The Guardian initially published three slides from the deck. The Post published the same three, plus a fourth slide illustrating the quantity of international internet traffic that flows through the U.S.

It’s strangely incongruent that a PowerPoint deck has taken on such importance. Indeed, the very properties of PowerPoint that make it one of the most hated conveyances of information in the world have contributed to the lingering uncertaintly about PRISM and what it really does. Crude vector art and bullet points leave too much to the imagination, even when it’s the most highly-classified crude vector art and bullet points the public has ever seen. 

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/snowden-powerpoint/

In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

Publisher University of California Press, 2012
ISBN 0520264770, 9780520264779
179 pages
via I. I. Rubin

review (Emily Douglas, Los Angeles Review of Books)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8368

In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

Publisher Basic Books, New York, 1973
ISBN 0465097197, 9780465097197
470 pages
via Sorin Danut

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The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (English, 1973)
Interpretace kultur: Vybrané eseje (Czech, trans. Hana Červinková, Václav Hubinger and Hedvika Humlíčková, 2000)
La interpretación de las culturas (Catalan, trans. Alberto L. Bixio, 2003)

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8364

Seven months ago, Fred Ehrsam pitched his bitcoin-based startup Coinbase to more than a dozen Silicon Valley investors. Although those potential backers were known for being forward-thinking — and they had a lot of money to invest in high-tech ventures — Ehrsam got more than a few blank stares. He spent most of his time explaining the concept of peer-to-peer currency, which is emerging as the world’s default platform for digital money, than he did describing his plans for the company itself.  So, he and his co-founders turned to the Chinese, specifically, to IDG Ventures. To the Beijing-based venture capitalists, the PayPal-like service for buying, selling and accepting bitcoins was a perfect fit.

http://www.ibtimes.com/battle-over-bitcoin-china-backs-us-startup-coinbase-us-falls-behind-virtual-currencies-1297147#

So why is everyone going crazy over the news that the government collected phone records and Internet data? Caitlin Dickson on how far it’s gone, who’s involved—and how Obama just defended it at a press conference.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/07/nsa-surveillance-program-explained-here-s-why-we-re-freaking-out.html

Der erste funktionsfähige Computer wurde von Konrad Zuse gebaut. Er war 1941 betriebsbereit. Der Erfinder dieser ersten vollautomatischen, programmgesteuerten, frei programmierbaren, in binärer Gleitpunktzahlrechnung arbeitenden Rechenanlage wäre am 22. Juni 2010 hundert Jahre alt geworden. In diesem Buch erzählt er die Geschichte seines Lebens, das wie kaum ein anderes mit der Geschichte der bedeutendsten technischen Entwicklung seines Jahrhunderts verbunden ist – einer Entwicklung, die mit der „Abneigung“ des Bauingenieurstudenten Zuse gegen die statischen Rechnungen begonnen hat…

First published by Moderne Industrie, 1970
Publisher Springer, 2007
ISBN 3540731393, 9783540731399
218 pages

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President Obama says he’s not Big Brother. The author who created the concept might disagree.

Addressing the controversy over widespread government surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic Friday, Obama said, “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amuck, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.”

But for many commentators, revelations this week that the federal government is sweeping up records of communications and transactions between millions of Americans sounds uncomfortably like the vision of the British novelist and journalist George Orwell.

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/08/189792140/our-surveillance-society-what-orwell-and-kafka-might-say

 There’s seemingly no limit to the power of Lego, and in this video Hans Rosling uses it with great panache to explain the problems of population growth and climate change.

They’re two of the biggest, most complex subjects we currently face on this planet -but somehow Rosling manages to make it all seem extremely straightforward. Maybe it’s because he used Duplo. 

http://gizmodo.com/population-growth-and-climate-change-explained-using-le-511860061

Four major Internet, technology and privacy stories hit the Web this week.

On Wednesday, Americans learned that the National Security Agency has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of the telecommunication giant Verizon.

On Thursday it was revealed that the NSA claims internally that it has been using a top-secret spying program called PRISM to gain direct access to personal data belonging to customers of top Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo. Many of those companies denied having this relationship with the NSA, but acknowledged, according to The New York Times, that they cooperated “at least a bit.”

On Friday we were told that President Obama has ordered his top national security and intelligence officers to construct an apparatus for global cyberattacks, which includes a list of targets overseas and potentially within the country.

On Saturday it was disclosed that the NSA has a sophisticated tool for recording and analyzing the sources of its collected intelligence, a fact that gives the lie to the agency’s repeated assertions that it cannot keep track of all of the surveillance it performs on Americans’ communications.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_anonymous_nsa_leaker_20130608/

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment—the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling—seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.

I do not, even now, understand this problem well enough to perceive solutions. But two matters seem to have some promise. The first concerns the proliferation of community mental health facilities, of crisis intervention centers, of the human potential movement, and of behavior therapies that, for all of their own problems, tend to avoid psychiatric labels, to focus on specific problems and behaviors, and to retain the individual in a relatively non-pejorative environment. Clearly, to the extent that we refrain from sending the distressed to insane places, our impressions of them are less likely to be distorted. (The risk of distorted perceptions, it seems to me, is always present, since we are much more sensitive to an individual’s behaviors and verbalizations than we are to the subtle contextual stimuli that often promote them. At issue here is a matter of magnitude. And, as I have shown, the magnitude of distortion is exceedingly high in the extreme context that is a psychiatric hospital.)

The second matter that might prove promising speaks to the need to increase the sensitivity of mental health workers and researchers to the Catch 22 position of psychiatric patients. Simply reading materials in this area will be of help to some such workers and researchers. For others, directly experiencing the impact of psychiatric hospitalization will be of enormous use. Clearly, further research into the social psychology of such total institutions will both facilitate treatment and deepen understanding.

I and the other pseudopatients in the psychiatric setting had distinctly negative reactions. We do not pretend to describe the subjective experiences of true patients. Theirs may be different from ours, particularly with the passage of time and the necessary process of adaptation to one’s environment. But we can and do speak to the relatively more objective indices of treatment within the hospital. It could be a mistake, and a very unfortunate one, to consider that what happened to us derived from malice or stupidity on the part of the staff. Quite the contrary, our overwhelming impression of them was of people who really cared, who were committed and who were uncommonly intelligent. Where they failed, as they sometimes did painfully, it would be more accurate to attribute those failures to the environment in which they, too, found themselves than to personal callousness. Their perceptions and behavior were controlled by the situation, rather than being motivated by a malicious disposition. In a more benign environment, one that was less attached to global diagnosis, their behaviors and judgments might have been more benign and effective.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/179/4070/250.short

This thesis follows the life of the art movement known as Constructivism through the turbulent post-revolutionary years, up to the onset of Socialist Realism, a doctrine imposed on the Arts by governmental directives. It focuses on the areas of fashion, textile and theatrical design, which themselves are strongly influenced by extra-artistic factors – economics, sociology and the historical era – as was the ethos of Constructivism.

After a brief introduction giving some background information on the art world and the main artist-designers of the study, the chapters go on to discuss the factors affecting the rise and then the waning popularity of the constructivist ideology, explaining the focal tenets of Constructivism, particularly in relation to fashion, textile and theatrical design. Since the majority of constructivist works were completed during the time span covered by NEP, those chapters relating to NEP have thus been given emphasis. Some biographical details about the main artists of the study are given at the end, and the Glossary lists the most common acronyms and abbreviations used in the text. The illustrations are intended as a companion to the text, since often the artistic effects of designers cannot be described adequately by language alone.

The study focuses on six artist/designers: Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, and Nadezhda Lamanova.

Full title: Constructivist Costume, Textile & Theatrical Design, 1917-1934: A Study of Constructivism Set in the Socio-cultural, Political and Historical Context of Post-Revolutionary Russia
Masters thesis
Durham University
285 pages

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8349

The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of a controversial school of Russian thinkers, led by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and united in the conviction that humanity was entering a new stage of evolution in which it must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. In the first account in English of this fascinating tradition, George M. Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists.

Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals and are now recognized as essential to a native Russian cultural and intellectual tradition. Although they were scientists, theologians, and philosophers, the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Major themes include the indefinite extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the reconstitution of the human organism to enable future generations to live beyond earth; the regulation of nature to bring all manifestations of blind natural force under rational human control; the transition of our biosphere into a “noosphere,” with a sheath of mental activity surrounding the planet; the effect of cosmic rays and currently unrecognized particles of energy on human history; practical steps toward the reversal and eventual human control over the flow of time; and the virtues of human androgyny, autotrophy, and invisibility.

The Russian Cosmists is a crucial contribution to scholarship concerning Russian intellectual history, the future of technology, and the history of western esotericism.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2012
ISBN 0199892946, 9780199892945
280 pages
via falsedeity

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Correspondência trocada entre Lygia Clark e Hélio Oiticica.

“Lygia e Helio são os dois maiores artistas do experimentalismo nas artes plásticas brasileiras.”

Organized and With an Introduction by Luciano Figueiredo
With a Preface by Silviano Santiago
First published in 1996
Publisher Editora UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1998
ISBN 8571081913
264 pages

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8342

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) is an artist’s book by Marcel Broodthaers published November 1969 in Antwerp. The work is a close copy of the first edition of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name, published in 1914, but with all the words removed, replaced by black stripes that correspond directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text.

Often included in exhibitions tracing the history of the artist’s book, the work is seen as a seminal example of the European post-avant-garde. (from Wikipedia)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8336

Before you think that “time cloaks,” or temporal cloaks, have anything to do with the Doctor, think again. They don’t allow users to travel through time like a certain blue box, but they do have a myriad of practical applications. Researchers have recently developed a method for temporal cloaking that could essential hide optical communications and prevent secret eavesdroppers from listening in to telecommunications.

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/7347/20130606/new-time-cloak-hides-optical-communications-secret-eavesdroppers.htm

After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/business/media/anti-surveillance-activist-is-at-center-of-new-leak.html

A homeless man with a history of playing an evil version of the “Sesame Street” character Elmo from coast to coast was charged Wednesday with trying to extort $2 million from the Girl Scouts.
Dan Sandler pleaded not guilty to attempted grand larceny and other charges, and a judge ordered him held on $200,000 bail.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/06/evil-elmo-impersonator-charged-in-girl-scouts-extortion-scheme/#ixzz2VXXTaTG0

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/06/evil-elmo-impersonator-charged-in-girl-scouts-extortion-scheme/