(via Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss)

Miriam Makeba interview, 1969

Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 – 10 November 2008), nicknamed Mama Africa, was a Grammy Award winning South African singer and civil rights activist. She actively campaigned against the South African system of apartheid. As a result, the South African government revoked her citizenship and right of return. After the end of apartheid she returned home.

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

REVISITING NATIONALISM - 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 4       

Prasanna K Choudhary

TWO VIEWPOINTS

The viewpoint that gets manifested prominently in European nationalism seeks to think in terms of absolutely opposing categories, in terms of dichotomies like God vs Satan, Good vs…

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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)

Lacey Roop - “For Billy” (WoWPS 2014)

"Crack the glowsticks in your halo. Burn so beautiful that if the sun ever looked at you he’d go blind." Performing during prelims at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam.

“With the anointment of Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Narendra Modi’s cunningly crafted ‘development’ mask has been ripped apart. .. There is much more to democracy than elections and legislative majorities. Even outside the realm of politics, battles need to be fought every day in every space to safeguard small freedoms, ensure peace, secure justice. Despair is an indulgence engaged citizens cannot afford - especially in light of the decision in UP.”

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.

The tide at night, murmur of bare feet on the sand.

The tide, at dawn, opens the eyelids of the day.

The tide breathes in the deep night and, sleeping, speaks in dreams.

The tide that licks the corpses that the coast throws at it.

The tide rises, races, howls, knocks down the door, breaks the furniture, and     then, on the shore, softly weeps.

The tide, madwoman writing indecipherable signs on the rocks, signs of death.

The sand guards the secrets of the tide.

Who is the tide talking to, all night long?

—Octavio Paz, from “Target Practice” Art Credit Richard Diebenkorn.

The Empire of ancient Ghana The empire of ancient Ghana created by the Mende (Soninke) with human habitation dating back to at least around 4,000 BC.

Ancient Ghana was located in what is now southeastern Mauritania and western Mali. Today the area around Dar Tichitt in southern Mauritania has been the subject of much archaeological attention, revealing successive layers of settlement near what still were small lakes as late as 1200 BCE. At this time people there built circular compounds, 60-100 feet in diameter, near the beaches of the lakes. (‘Compound’ is the name given to a housing type, still common today, in which several members of related families share space within a wall.) These compounds were arranged into large villages located about 12 miles from each other. Inhabitants fished, herded cattle and planted some millet, which they stored in pottery vessels. This was the last era of reasonable moisture in this part of the Sahara. By 1000 BCE the villages, still made up of compounds, had been relocated to hilltop positions, and were walled. Cattle were still herded, more millet was grown, but there were no more lakes for fishing. From 700-300 BCE the villages decreased in size and farming was reduced at the expense of pastoralism.

Architecturally, the villages of Dar Tichitt resemble those of the modern northern Mande (Soninke), who live in the savanna 300-400 miles to the south. These ancient villagers were not only farmers, but were engaged in trade connected with the salt and copper mines which developed to the north. Horse drawn vehicles passed through the Tichitt valley, bringing trading opportunities, ideas, and opening up the inhabitants to raids from their more nomadic northern neighbors. Development of the social and political organization necessary to handle commerce and defense must have been a factor in the subsequent development of Ghana, the first great Sudanic empire, in this part of West Africa.

It is very plausible to think that the people of antiquity in Ancient Ghana may be connected to the Ancient peoples who lived in the Sahara before it turned into dessert. Additionally Habitation of the region where the Ghana empire existed is much older than Western academics are aware of.