Month: March 2014

When the men with guns can’t tell the difference between you and your social security number, the mechanisms of power have lost vital critical thinking. The IC has become out of touch with lived experience.

New Yorkers first have to stop deluding themselves into believing that today’s hyper-gentrification is the same old thing. We all have to stop saying, “New York always changes, so this is normal.” This is not normal. This is state sponsored, corporate driven, turbo charged, far flung, and impossible to stop in its current form.

We can continue in today’s mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity, or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration-distraction complex that is Silicon Valley. The former approach is reactionary but the latter can lead to emancipation, especially if such acts of refusal give rise to genuine social movements that will make problems of time and attention part of their political agendas—and not just the subject of hand-wringing by the Davos-based spirituality brigades.

Nguyen wanted to make games for people like himself: busy, harried, always on the move. “I pictured how people play,” he says, as he taps his iPhone and reaches his other hand in the air. “One hand holding the train strap.” He’d make a game for them.

And the very idea of games criticism risks balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it. Games criticism is subsistence criticism. There’s not enough land to till in games alone. Nor in literature alone, nor in toasters alone. God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.

It’s time to wake up to the fact that you’re just another avatar in someone else’s MMO. Worse. From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot.

For all its success, the London Review of Books struggles to make money. It owes its continued existence to the generosity of Wilmers herself, who regularly siphons in cash from a family trust fund. […] The family money means the LRB never has to worry about paying back its loans – in January 2010, the magazine was estimated to be £27m in debt to the trust. And yet it still manages to pay its writers at a base-rate of 30p a word (rising by a considerable margin if the article is longer than average). […] Is it sustainable, I ask the LRB’s publisher, Nicholas Spice? He looks vaguely shocked at the suggestion. “Oh no, it’s not sustainable in financial terms,” he says. Spice has a pleasantly straightforward manner and a faintly military demeanour. He is the kind of man you suspect would be incapable of telling a lie, even though sometimes he probably should. “It loses a lot of money,” he continues cheerfully. “The most important thing is that it has always had very generous support from its shareholders. And we’ve had the same shareholders since 1980, which is very unusual – I should think unprecedented – for a literary publication or arts organisation. The great thing is that we have been able to invest in creating a market for a very good editorial product.”

Rumor Monger was conceived as an experiment in distributed, light-weight communication, what today we would call peer-to-peer instant messaging with broadcast. The program sat in the background, continually exchanging messages with other machines. The user could, at any time, bring it to the front and enter a new message, which would then be distributed to every other instance of the program within the company-wide local area network. As an afterthought, I added the option to send messages anonymously. This was done sort of on principle, more than because I thought anyone would actually use it. The test population was Apple Computer employees. To my surprise, Rumor Monger rapidly became very popular within the company. And even more to my surprise, 99% of all messages sent were sent anonymously. This changed it from an experiment in technology into an experiment in sociology.