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Mother Earth Mother Board
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Douglas Barnes, an Oakland-based hacker and cypherpunk, looked into this issue a couple of years ago when, inspired by Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, he was doing background research on a project to set up a data haven in the Caribbean. ‘I found out that the idea of the Internet as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a myth,’’ he discovered. ‘Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn’t that great.
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The American Room
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There is an equation between calculated coyness and savage bears. But Pomplamoose has nothing on this video, where a skilled musician who works under the name Kawehi produces and mixes a cover of Heart Shaped Box. The signifiers are pure Pinterest, down to a bottle of wine and some pleasingly ratty lamps. It’s a very old house and a very old table. The camera moves and sweeps but the artist barely meets its gaze.
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Digital Tools I Wish Existed
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Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.
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PearShaped Magazine Archive
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When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed. I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exporting the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever.
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That Accessibility Thing
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Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly. My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals.
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Is The Internet A Rhizome?
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How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet… Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure.