I Beg You, To Have Patience With Everything Unresolved In Your Heart And To Try To Love The Questions

Technology concentrates power. In the 90’s, it looked like the Internet might be an exception, that it could be a decentralizing, democratizing force. No one controlled it, no one designed it, it was just kind of assembling itself in an appealing, anarchic way. The companies that first tried to centralize the Internet, like AOL and Microsoft, failed risibly. And open source looked ready to slay any dragon. But those days are gone. We’ve centralized the bejesus out of the Internet now. There’s one search engine (plus the one no one uses), one social network (plus the one no one uses), one Twitter. We use one ad network, one analytics suite. Anywhere you look online, one or two giant American companies utterly dominate the field. And there’s the cloud. What a brilliant name! The cloud is the future of online computing, a friendly, fluffy abstraction that we will all ascend into, swaddled in light. But really the cloud is just a large mess of servers somewhere, the property of one American company (plus the clouds no one uses). Orwell imagined a world with a telescreen in every room, always on, always connected, always monitored. An Xbox One vision of dystopia. But we’ve done him one better. Nearly everyone here carries in their pocket a tracking device that knows where you are, who you talk to, what you look at, all these intimate details of your life, and sedulously reports them to private servers where the data is stored in perpetuity. I know I sound like a conspiracy nut framing it like this. I’m not saying we live in an Orwellian nightmare. I love New Zealand! But we have the technology. When I was in grade school, they used to scare us with something called the permanent record. If you threw a spitball at your friend, it would go in your permanent record, and prevent you getting a good job, or marrying well, until eventually you’d die young and friendless and be buried outside the churchyard wall. What a relief when we found out that the permanent record was a fiction. Except now we’ve gone and implemented the damned thing. Each of us leaves an indelible, comet-like trail across the Internet that cannot be erased and that we’re not even allowed to see. The things we really care about seem to disappear from the Internet immediately, but post a stupid YouTube comment (now linked to your real identity) and it will live forever. And we have to track all this stuff, because the economic basis of today’s web is advertising, or the promise of future advertising. The only way we can convince investors to keep the money flowing is by keeping the most detailed records possible, tied to people’s real identities. Apart from a few corners of anonymity, which not by accident are the most culturally vibrant parts of the Internet, everything is tracked and has to be tracked or the edifice collapses. What upsets me isn’t that we created this centralized version of the Internet based on permanent surveillance. What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do. There was no design, forethought, or analysis involved. No one said “hey, this sounds like a great world to live in, let’s make it”. It happened because we couldn’t be bothered. Making things ephemeral is hard. Making things distributed is hard. Making things anonymous is hard. Coming up with a sane business model is really hard—I get tired just thinking about it. So let’s take people’s data, throw it on a server, link it to their Facebook profiles, keep it forever, and if we can’t raise another round of venture funding we’ll just slap Google ads on the thing. "High five, Chad!" "High five, bro!" That is the design process that went into building the Internet of 2014. And of course now we are shocked—shocked!—when, for example, the Ukrainian government uses cell tower data to send scary text messages to protesters in Kiev, in order to try to keep them off the streets. Bad people are using the global surveillance system we built to do something mean! Holy crap! Who could have imagined this? Or when we learn that the American government is reading the email that you send unencrypted to the ad-supported mail service in another country where it gets archived forever. Inconceivable! I’m not saying these abuses aren’t serious. But they’re the opposite of surprising. People will always abuse power. That’s not a new insight. There are cuneiform tablets complaining about it. Yet here we are in 2014, startled because unscrupulous people have started to use the powerful tools we created for them. We put so much care into making the Internet resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political failure. We treat freedom and the rule of law like inexhaustible natural resources, rather than the fragile and precious treasures that they are. And now, of course, it’s time to make the Internet of Things, where we will connect everything to everything else, and build cool apps on top, and nothing can possibly go wrong.

An extract from Our Comrade The Electron, a talk from the Webstock Conference by Maciej Cegłowski, which is worth reading in its entirety. (via new-aesthetic)

The Digital is Political

The Digital is Political

The political ideas we have held for centuries are ill-equipped to respond to today’s challenges.

Source: The Digital is Political

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Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach

Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach

There is still much to learn from the radical legacy of critical theory.

Source: Below the Asphalt Lies the Beach

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It all comes down to that urge to fascism — maybe a big word to use for art, but I think the right word — it comes down to that urge to fascism to know what’s best for people, to know that some people are of the best and some people are of the worst; the urge to separate the good from the bad and to praise oneself; to decide what covers on what books people ought to read, what songs people ought to be moved by, what art they ought to make, an urge that makes art into a set of laws that take away your freedom rather than a kind of activity that creates freedom or reveals it. It all comes down to the notion that, in the end, there is a social explanation for art, which is to say an explanation of what kind of art you should be ashamed of and what kind of art you should be proud of. It’s the reduction of the mystery of art, where it comes from, where it goes… 

The news of Irrfan's death has left both the film industry and his fans in shock and mourning. As we grieve the loss of this extraordinary artiste, we look back at his rich career path that bears a testimony of his struggles, triumphs and consistent brilliance over three decades.

St. Mark’s Square II, Venice, 2007, Guy Sargent

We men are deplorable, dependent creatures. But compared with these women, every one of us is king, for he stands more or less on his own two feet, not constantly waiting for something outside of himself to cling to. They, however, always wait for someone to come along who will use them as he sees fit. If this does not happen, they simply fall to pieces.

-Albert Einstein

The fact the Einstein was a raging misogynist kind of makes sense, given that it is widely speculated his first wife made significant contributions to the Theory of Relativity, but was completely unacknowledged (especially after he left her for his cousin).

There is more and more evidence that Mileva Einstein-Maric (Einstein’s first wife) is the coauthor of “The Theory of Relativity.”  Recently published letters between Mileva Maric and Albert Einstein are shedding light on who is the author(s) of the “Theory of Relativity.”  Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921: he gave all the money from the Nobel Prize to his ex-wife - Mileva Maric- this was the condition for the divorce settlement.  Einstein did not leave any documents which acknowledged the contribution of Mileva Maric to the Theory of Relativity. 

In 1905, several articles bearing the name of Albert Einstein appeared in the Annalen der Physik - a Germans Physics Journal where the Theory of Relativity was published.  The paper dealing with relativity was entitled Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper.  Only Albert Einstein’s name appeared in the journal as author.  According to Abram Fedorovich Joffe, the original paper was signed “Einstein-Marity.”  ”Marity” is a variant of the Serbian “Maric”, Mileva’s maiden name.  Mileva Maric Einstein’s name was left out when publication of the article took place, but Joffe saw the original 1905 manuscript.

- The Tesla Society

"How happy I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion."

A young Albert Einstein wrote these words to his first wife, Mileva, shortly before publishing the Theory of Relativity. The release of letters like this one has scholars arguing over Mileva’s contribution to relativity. They met at Zurich’s prestigious Swiss Polytechnic School: Mileva was the only woman in the class, and only the fifth in the school’s history. The daughter of a wealthy Serbian family, Mileva excelled at physics and math, and was devoted to her studies until she met Albert Einstein. The two brilliant scientists fell in love. They lived and worked together. But more interested in their own work than their classes, both failed their final exams. Einstein passed on a second attempt. Unmarried and pregnant, Mileva failed hers again. Einstein never met his daughter… and no one is sure what happened to the baby. Einstein and Mileva later married and had two sons. Mileva focused her energies on Albert’s career. Some scholars believe Mileva did the math for the Theory of Relativity, others say she corrected Einstein’s math, and still others claim she was even more deeply involved. The paper outlining the theory is signed with a hyphenated name Einstein-Marty, the Hungarian form of her maiden name Maric.

Before the work was published, Albert Einstein left his wife and two sons. He never acknowledged his first wife or her work.

He did, however, give Mileva all of the Nobel Prize money. But, the money didn’t last long: Mileva was sick, and caring for their mentally ill (schizophrenic) son. Einstein went on to great acclaim, but he never again produced physics equal to the work he did while married to his first wife and collaborator, Mileva Maric.

-Women in Science

(via witheringwhiteskies)

The Wayland Rudd Collection A project organized by Yevgeniy Fiks

The Wayland Rudd Collection focuses on the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet visual culture. A point of departure for this project is Fiks’ collection of over 200 Soviet images (paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, etc.) of Africans and African-Americans spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s. Fiks invited contemporary artists as well as activists, historians, sociologists, political theorists, and specialist in cultural studies to select one or more images from this collection and asked them to respond to it either via artwork, performance, lecture, or other forms.

Wayland Rudd was an American actor who began performing in the Hedgerow Theater in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania under the directorship of Jasper Deeter. Rudd first received critical acclaim for his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.” Frustrated over racism in the entertainment industry, Rudd moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 where he began a successful career in Soviet Theater and Film including work with the famed Russian Director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He later received a degree from the Theatrical Art Institute in Moscow and worked at the Stanislavsky Opera and Drama Theater. Rudd died in Moscow in 1952.

During Wayland Rudd’s twenty year-long career in the Soviet Union, he appeared in numerous films, theatrical performances, and plays. He was also used as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters and, in many respects, defined the image of the “Negro” for generations of Soviet people. Although only a small section of the assembled images in The Wayland Rudd Collection are of Wayland Rudd, the project is given his name to commemorate this American-Soviet actor’s personal story as a case in point of the complex intersection of 20th century American-Soviet narrative.

The images in The Wayland Rudd Collection present a very complex and often contradictory mapping of the intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context. The participatory aspect of this project adds the needed dimensions to show this complexity—giving the viewers the capacity to digest this history. This project investigates the promise and reality of Communism vis-à-vis the issue of race in the 20th century through the Soviet experiment. It presents this issue as unresolved, revealing the Soviet legacy on race as a mix bag of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, Communist ideals as well as exoticization, otherness, racist stereotyping, and hypocrisy.

Participants: Suzanne Broughel, Maria Buyondo, Dread Scott, Jenny Polak, Michael Paul Britto, Nikolay Oleynikov, Ivan Brazhkin, Haim Sokol, Kara Lynch, Dr. Allison Blakely, Dr. Romy Taylor, and others

From Laughing Squid, 3D-Printed Paintings of Nanomolecular Structures by Shane Hope.

Shane has a pretty interesting website:

Q: Is your work deliberately trying to be opaque, and if so, what are the benefits of hyper-complexity (both conceptual and aesthetic)?

A: Many have been too hypnotized by technocratic solutionism to see that not all clarity is benevolently about accuracy and not all lack thereof should be immediately suspect. Getting obsessive-compulsive about the future can be counterproductive inasmuch as it often precludes a greater gamut of adaptability. Ambiguity, opacity, allusion, metaphor and semantic slippage can all serve as really important tools when making artwork, or realities for that matter. From the butterfly flap you choose, emerges the superstorm you deserve.

Hm.

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