Items of Interest
October 12, 2010
- How technology is making censorship irrelevant
- A new tool (Feed Over Email) to beat internet censorship
- Google releases censorship tools
- How to record the cops
- Court allows warrantless cell location tracking
- Schneier on wiretapping the internet
- Government uses social networking sites for more than investigation
- Open science as humanity’s best hope
- The Open Source Sensing Initiative
- Another reason to use Tor
- Movements for Climate Action: Towards Utopia or Apocalypse?
- Cheap plastic solar cells — “cheaply produced solar cells have the ability to transform poorer countries and their energy demands.”
- What are reproductive rights?
- More critique of the Singularity University by Cascio
- Religious bioconservatives react to transhumanism
- The conspiracy industry and the lure of fascism
- Cognitive slaves — Facebook, Google, etc profiting off of free labor
Items of Interest 7-30-10
July 30, 2010
- July 31st Call to Action Against Racism and Fascism
- Chomsky’s advice for anarchists
- How politics rely on disgust
- Why misogynists make great informants
- Can technology bring on a worldwide social revolution?
- Free software as part of the anarchist toolkit
- Secure communication for Android
- Two new issues of Hack This Zine
- Why transhumanism is the best bet for avoiding extinction (from 2009, but good)
- Monopolists of the genetic code
- Google and CIA invest in future of web monitoring
- Obama’s Surveillance Power Grab
- Corporate profits return, but there’s zero hiring
Items of Interest 5-22
May 22, 2010
- The Appleseed Project: an open-source distributed social networking project. An alternative to Facebook, and unlike Diaspora, is already running. Originated in anarchist circles. Development. Drumbeat. Beta. Latest Source. Facebook. Twitter.
- IT in Developing Nations Makes Women and Poor Happier.
- Infoladies of Bangladesh Revolutionize Rural Life.
- Afrocyberpunk: “But here in Africa, development has been dangerously asymmetrical. By the time any product hits our soil it’s already fully-developed and ready to be abused by the imagination. Technology designed for vastly different societies invariably trickles down to our streets, re-sprayed, re-labeled, and hacked to fit whatever market will take it. Regulation? You can forget about regulation.”
- James Hughes on Beyond the Human Race — and “Human Racism”
- Nobody Encrypts Their Phone Calls. Some interesting links and talk in the comments.
- Google Launches Encrypted Search
- Twitter’s Role in Bangkok Conflict.
- Leaking Legitimacy. “… it’s become increasingly clear that there is a coordinated information operations campaign in place to downplay the impact of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill … eyt another body blow to the nation-state and the global market system as legitimate organizational constructs.”
- Interview with Meredith Patterson from DIYBio
- Craig Venter Creates Synthetic Life: This is major, major scientific news. The ETC calls for a moratorium on synthetic biology (ain’t going to happen). Ken MacLeod offers commentary.
- Open Letter to Glenn Beck from AK Press. “From what sense we can make of your show, you seem happy with “altering” rather than “abolishing” a screwed-up system. For you, replacing the old boss with a new one (Sarah Palin?) is good enough. We understand that you’re confused–these are confusing times. But, deep down, you and the tea partiers know that you can’t trust any politician, or banker, or corporate hack, or union bureaucrat…or anyone who makes their living sucking power and profit from ordinary people. Which, unfortunately, probably includes multi-millionaires like you.
Items of Interest
April 29, 2010
Various items of interest that have crossed our paths in the last few weeks:
- Somalia: Failed State, Economic Success? An interesting perspective on how Somalia has in some ways done better despite a lack of central government.
- Using social ills of the future to bootstrap networked resilient communities.
- The Internet: Serving the Revolution? The internet as friend and foe.
- Fighting the fascists using direct action hacktivism.
- 1024-bit encryption cracked.
- The Brain Rejects Inequality: Physiological responses to unfairness.
- Using magnets to manipulate morality.
- Why I Won’t Be Buying an iPad, and Why It Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think
- Standing orders for open-source warfare
Items of Interest
March 3, 2010
Here are some collected links that have caught my eye recently:
- Digital Security and Tactics By (and For) Anti-Authoritarians event this March 12th at the 8 Days of Anarchy in the Bay Area
- Latvian “Robin Hood” hacker leaks bank details
- Ultimate griefing: publishing the private info on the rich to fuel public outrage
- The complicated politics of Italian transhumanism Part 1: Stefano Vaj defends against claims that his overhumanism politics are fascist
- The complicated politics of Italian transhumanism Part 2: the critics lay out their evidence for claiming the overhumanists are fascists (see also this and this)
- The MikroKopter: small, cheap, carries a camera, and there are instructions to build your own
- Public reactions to terrorist threats: projecting leadership qualities onto political figures, with serious political consequences
- Survival of the kindest: how evolution drives compassion and collaboration
- Security implications of volume shadow copy in Windows 7/Vista: no secure deletion possible
- Microsoft 7/Vista Law Enforcement Forensics Guides
- Hackers brew code to counter police forensics: COFFEE, meet DECAF
Collected Links 10-27-09
October 27, 2009
So we’ve been too busy elsewhere to post here lately, so until we get back in the game, here are some interesting links that we’ve been perusing over the past couple of weeks/months:
- SentDev on Cognitive Liberty and the Right to One’s Mind
- The democratization of virulence
- How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science
- On sleeplessness, the iphone, and you
- Economics of the singularity
- The economic impact of intelligent machines
- Cascio on three possible economic models: part one, part two (connects to previous talk on economic forecasting we did here)
- Cascio on the desktop manufacturing revolution
- Rebooting environmentalism for the 21st century
- Anarchist Arrested for Twittering (more)
- “Project Gaydar” and Online Privacy
- US Spies Buy Stake In Firm That Monitors Blogs and Tweets
- Oklahoma and Abortion
- Anarchybuntu — project for a new linux version made for anarchists
- Build your own DIY Bedazzler
- Hack your phone to prevent snooping
- “Evil maid” attacks on encrypted hard drives
Quick Links 05-31-09
May 31, 2009
- No warrant needed for GPS tracking
- FCC claims right to search homes with cell phones or wi-fi
- Defeating biometrics with smiles and drugs
- Altruism and upstream reciprocity
- Post-Darwinian ethics
- Ten defenses of transhumanism
- Will designer brains divide humanity?
- Do genetic tests need federal regulation?
- 5 major changes to American life by 2020
- The revolutionary shift coming from poor folks with cell phones
- Mobile communication and political involvement
- Robot warriors get an ethics guide (see also this and this)
- What gender is your roomba?
Looking at the Causes of the Crisis
April 6, 2009
Like many people, I suspect, I’ve been doing lots of reading to try and get a grasp on the current economic crisis. The topic is incredibly important, as we’re look at an unprecedented failure of capitalism and the distinct possibility that capitalism will radically transform — possibly into something post-capitalist (especially if we push it). While economics can be confusing and intimidating, there are a number of good pieces on the subject out there, including some that capture more of the bigger picture, in terms of power relations and potential outcomes. I’m going to suggest a few of my favorites here:
- The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson (The Atlantic)
This article takes particular note of the power plays initiated by the financial section oligarchs — in particular from the perspective of an IMF economist whose job in the past has been to break up such oligarchies in emerging nations.
- Jump! You Fuckers! (PDF) by Dan Hind
A great overview of the historical root causes of the current crisis from a decidedly left perspective.
- The Big Takeover by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
This piece is more of a populist call out, naming names and taking note of specific sleezy actions. Notable as a reflection of current popular sentiment.
Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.
“But wait a minute,” you say to them. “No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?”
But before you even finish saying that, they’re rolling their eyes, because You Don’t Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they’re on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.
- Is Capitalism Finished? by the Internationalist Communists
A solid Marxist/communist analysis of the historical roots of the situation and contradictions within capitalism. Wraps up with the predictable call for a communist worker’s party, of course.
For us the real question was “why did it take so long to come about in the first place?”. Global capitalist growth over the last fifteen years has been largely based on two inter-related features — the exploitation on an enormous scale of cheap labour power in the so-called “emerging economies”, especially China, and the ever burgeoning sums of money produced in the global financial system which seemed to have less and less connection to the production of surplus value. We were using metaphors such as capitalism seems to be defying the law of gravity (as well as the law of value) in that more and more fictitious capital was being created which had less and less relation to the actual production of real commodities. However, like the cartoon characters who can run off cliffs and hang suspended in the air for a time before finally falling to earth, capitalism’s apparent defiance of the law of value has now come to an end.
- Thinking and Acting in Real Time in a Real World by Don Hamerquist
Don’s piece is a far more complex and nuanced view on the crisis, responding to numerous other writings on the subject, and taking particular note of the potential opportunities for more repressive social democracies or insurgent fascism.
Here’s my point. The left is going to have to organize itself, not the working class or the ‘people’. One of the French post structuralists noted that the question isn’t so much why the masses don’t rebel against power as it is why they internalize that power relationship and enforce their own subordination and misery on themselves. At moments of crisis such as we are entering, this internalized acceptance of subordination will break at many points and masses of people will start to think and act in ways that would have seemed irrational to them a short time before. The role of the left is to recognize these elements of epistemological break and attempt to generalize them and incorporate them into an anti-capitalist social bloc. To accomplish this, the left must learn for itself what is to be done and how to do it, before presuming to educate others on these questions. And when we makes a start on this task, it will involve a little boldness, taking a few chances, some might prove to be embarrassingly inadequate; some might fail the risk/benefit analysis; but that’s the path to being a part of a revolutionary process, though it’s not necessarily the path to a comfortable life.
Some follow-up discussion on this article can also be found at the Three-Way Fight blog.
- Navigating the Storm by Kali Akuno
This writer makes an intriguing effort to map out how the crisis will play out over the next few years, making specific note of the likelihood of a resurgence of racism, nationalism, and fascism. I don’t agree with all of the assertions, of course, but it’s well worth reading.
If anyone has other recommendations, please post them in the comments.
Jamais Cascio over at Open the Future notes some similar sources.
Quick Links 3-25-08
March 25, 2008
* Interview with Ursula LeGuin
My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call conscious-raising.
* Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional
Just as important for subversive minds.
* Build Your Own War Bot
A wiki resource for the hacktivists working on the future anarchist air force.
* How to Make Your Phone Untappable
Interview with Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP, about his new Zfone software for encrypting VOIP calls.
So unencrypted VoIP is vulnerable not just to government wiretapping but also to cyber-criminal spying.
With traditional telephony, our threat model was mostly government wiretapping. With VoIP, anyone can wiretap us: the Russian mafia, foreign governments, hackers, disgruntled former employees. Anyone.
Historically, there’s been an asymmetry between government wiretapping and everyone else wiretapping that’s been in the government’s favor. As we migrate to VoIP, that differential collapses. The government itself is just as vulnerable.
* Zfone Project Start/Download Page
* Fake Anarchist Sites
Details on how http://anarchy.net and related sites are not really anarchist at all.
Quick Links
January 23, 2008
* The Great Firewall: China’s Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online
Today, anyone in China can send a sensitive message if they are minimally savvy, and that fact is transforming the political discourse. True, technology has not led to the overthrow of the Communist Party, as some had predicted — the party has even harnessed the Internet for its own purposes. But this does not mean that Beijing has insulated itself against political change driven by technology. Its critics have unfettered access to mass communications, and the Internet — not the Communist Party — is the main influence on public opinion. No shield, golden or otherwise, can protect them from the public. China’s leaders should know this.
Swarm intelligence, not just as a way of coordinating street battles, is a rich field of study for anarchists. The notion that highly complex projects and behaviors can be coordinated without any centralized authority has been an article of faith for anarchists for a long time.
Which scenario is most likely? It depends a bit on how fast the truly disastrous manifestations of climate change hit. Climate catastrophe happening earlier than currently projected would push towards the more proactionary worlds. It also depends a bit on whether governments and corporate leaders continue to lag community and activist groups in terms of willingness to embrace big changes to fight environmental risks. Centralized responses may end up being too little, too late if wide-spread bottom-up models take root.
One of my favorite early pieces for WorldChanging was the essay Greens In Space, arguing that space exploration, particularly robotic exploration, is ultimately in support of the Bright Green future. Of particular importance are the satellite systems used to observe changes on the Earth’s surface.
For the year 2007, the major project of the CRN Task Force was to begin producing a series of professional-quality scenarios of a near-future world in which exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing becomes a reality. The purpose is to offer plausible, logical, understandable “stories” that illustrate the challenge of contending with the implications of advanced nanotechnology. What will that future look like? What can we learn from picturing it now that might help us avoid the worst pitfalls and generate the greatest benefits?
* Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.
Brent is one of a growing number of researchers who believe that a bioterrorist wouldn’t need a team of virologists and state funding. He says advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources could do the job.I decided to call him on it. I hadn’t set foot in a lab since high school. Could I learn to build a bioweapon? What would I need? What would it cost? Could I set up shop without raising suspicions? And, most important, would it work?
* The EDGE Annual Question -2008
This year’s question: What have you changed your mind about? I particularly like the responses by Sam Harris (Mother Nature Is Not Our Friend) and Stewart Brand (Good Stuff Sucks).
Your gender assignment and sense of sexual identity is an imposition. Like many of your other characteristics, you are largely the result of a genetic lottery that happened beyond your control. Consequently, you are in no small way predetermined. Your physical and psychological capabilities are very much constrained and dictated by your genetic constitution.
* DIY Guide to Rebuilding Civilization
A new zine project:
We’ve all wasted enough time reasoning with the primitivists. It’s time for less talk and more action. Say that the Collapse does come–just as hard as Derrick Jensen and John Zerzan have salivated–I don’t want us sitting around, ringing our hands and dumbly staring at suddenly useless anarcho-syndicalist union cards. I want us prepared.
The immediate objective is to upgrade our communications to give transhumanist opinions a stronger voice. The generous matching grant by the Life Extension Foundation and Cartmell Holdings means that if we raise $25,000 independently we will secure a total of $50,000 in funding for the WTA, enabling the organization to shift into a higher gear… Any gift you make to the WTA will be matched dollar-for-dollar until January 31, 2008.
