square white world

Subject: Invitation to the Social Swarm

Dear fellow people from the Internet.

We know that social network services changed the way  we handle information and relationships.

But we also know that social network services create certain problems that come with storing  large amounts of personal information.

We are concerned about our privacy on those services. The centralized nature of current social networks forces users to trust third parties that are not trustworthy.

We do not have to surrender to technology as it is.

We have to shape technology in a way that is suited  to human nature.

This is why the goal should be to create a network that enables all of its users to communicate freely.

They must be able to use it in the way they want to, without being hindered by restrictions like censorship or the risk of losing control of their own content.

It is not about creating an alternative to existing social network services – it is about creating something even better.

There are different approaches to bringing this about, and they all have different up- and downsides. You are working on them. We are working on them.

So we ask you to join forces, with us and with each other, to create what we all are hoping for, what is driving us and what we need: A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.

To achieve this, we think the social network must satisfy these requirements:

1. Free software.

2. Good usability.

3. Decentralization.

4. End-to-end encryption.

5. Mandatory privacy: no plaintext data stored on servers.

6. Scalability.

7. Innovation over standards.

8. Better than what we currently have.

We would love to see you on our mailinglist:

https://mail.foebud.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/socialswarm-dev

To have a closer look at the project, go to our wiki:

http://socialswarm.net

Best wishes,

the folks of Social Swarm

Dear Social Swarm owner,

The following message under the subject heading “ignored options” was blocked twice when I tried to send it.

I have removed my hypertext link to squarewhiteworld – so let’s see if it’s that.

I don’t think it is spam. But perhaps you know better.

Best,
…

Dear Social Swarmers,

I find it strange that no option other than “earnest and honest privacy,” as Klaus Schleisiek put it, is being considered. What about open and public discussion and social intercourse with optional anonymity?

I am inspired by the idea of the listserv – and the Wiki – since these forms of interaction are subject- or theme-led and to an extent non-identitarian.

I am negatively inspired by the existing social media: but more for reasons of profiling and boxing of people into homogeneous blocs than for impinging on privacy; my objection is politico-aesthetic, not moral.

I’ve been working since March this year on a website based on these ignored ideas. Unfortunately, where I am in the world, New Zealand, makes it necessary for me to seek private sector funding to build a demonstration model and proof of concept, which is the task I am currently involved in – raising funds, validating need -, rather than public funding.

An irony. Since the idea has to be tangibly realised, needs to have gained sufficient commercial momentum in order that it is tangibly realised, before I can make it open source.

Another aspect of my idea that might interest discussants is that it is determinedly non-anglocentric. It enables multiple languages to be addressed, viewed, engaged with in the same view or browser window.

If you are interested, please contact me.

Best,

…

– Balthus, Still Life, 1937

Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance

The node of resonance analysis seems to me flawed because it takes the image from network theory. Receptive as well as resonant nodes imply a mechanical reduction: they are parts of a mechanism, not machines productive of transversal subjects.

Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward’s piece ignores even Judith Butler’s view of a material transformation effected by Occupy – which is at least suggestive – in favour of advocating a conventional protest movement, involving civil disobedience and non-compliance.

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach

This is where the former analysis actually works, since it points out the difference between Occupy and a protest movement: the former does not Move! Here also the strength in the Cockroaches article is stasis. There is no movement.

What doesn’t happen when we stop? is the question. Not the more familiar: What happens? Or: What happens now that we have stopped here?

So: What or who cannot be excluded? Not: How can I be included?

Which points to Occupy as a simulation. There is an indication, several stories, an anecdote or two, that the Zuccotti Occupation began from an artistic reappropriation of the Tahrir Square Occupation. It was recognisable. People knew how to respond. And there was a sort of romance: maybe we are like Egyptians, fighting an overtly oppressive system.

It involved – and involves still, stillness being all – the putting into play of an aesthetic for which no further instructions were required. Simply occupy! It is this aesthetic phenomenon that the above analyses are trying to reduce to discourse, to analyse, to trace the outlines of, the etiology, the teleology, the origins and ends, and curlicuing, ornamenting out of sheer imaginative will, and failing to analyse, failing even to depict. Because such traditional forms of analysis are afraid of simulation, fakes, the hyperreal, or virtual.

Imagine a serious person finding value in the politically fake! There is an art to writing of such things.

What I would like to point out is that not only is Occupy not a movement, because it does not move, not only is Occupy a simulation, or fake, or play politics (!), but that in the bodies it immoblises it puts its own status – and stasis – at risk.

the future of the arts

is history

20 EU member states are now

under rightwing governments

in different shades

of blue

requiescat in pace Friedrich A. Kittler June 12 1943 – October 18 2011

read Axel Roch’s excellent article here, dated 17 November 2011, the day of

Friedrich Kittler’s funeral

he lies at Dorotheenstadt cemetery

with Heiner Müller, Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, Herbert Marcuse, Bertolt Brecht.

, specifically like a bullet shot from a gun in Steven Pippin’s Quantum Camera

, the soul is like a bullet shot from a gun into a camera

, the soul in death is a bullet shot from a gun into a camera

, a camera which records the precise instant of its destruction

, the soul is caught by death as the bullet is captured by the camera it destroys

visit Mr. Pippin here

spring back

fall forward

in this way you can be having revolution

and regressing

at the same time

NEW CENSORSHOP LAWS

THREATEN THE FREEDOM

(SUCH AS IT IS)

OF WIKILEAKS – SURPRISED?

YOUTUBE – …

AVAAZ – WHY?

AND PRESUMABLY ALL ONLINE

ACTIVISM & ACTIVIST

ORGANISATIONS USING THE

WORLD.WIDE.WEB

ACT NOW TO STOP

PROPOSED

BLACKLISTING

SIGN

HERE

I always wanted to make a brand of chilli chutney and call it Chattanooga Chilli Chutney.
Cherr!
Because in my research I found that the world’s first patented mechanical vibrator was the Chattanooga.
It ran off steam, coal-powered, I think.
It was enormous and as noisy as a railway steam-engine.
The chutney would have boasted a graphic depicting said device in all its industrial era splendour and gloriously inventive impracticality.

It seems the steam-powered part was sheer invention, now that with my interest refreshed, I return to the subject.
It was electromechanical, stood about two metres tall and required two men to operate it.
It was considered a medical treatment to bring “hysterical” women to involuntary orgasm, so relieving them of the symptoms of their hysteria, or womb disease.

No, even this is not true.
It appears that opinion is divided over which of the two early models bore the name Chattanooga, either the steam-powered, coal-fired, or the electromechanical:

The Chattanooga is a particularly famous model; it stood nearly 2m tall and required a couple of men to operate it. Being steam-powered, the engine of the machine was located in a small room and two men shoveled coal into the furnace and monitored the steam temperature, pressure, and thrust required to drive the Chattanooga. The engine room was separated from the doctor’s room by a wall which had a hole in it. A mechanical arm extended from the engine through the wall and into the consulting room where the doctor controlled it and used the vibrating arm to administer the appropriate genital massage to the grateful patient.

– from here

George Taylor, who must be one of my predecessors, I will claim him as one, was the inventor.
See the attached images for the two models.
The table version is merely the ‘interface’ and not the engine itself.
The standard version is the electromechanical.

Housefires were not uncommon where the latter was deployed, since the gentle art of insulation had not yet been brought to any common level of acceptance, so that the wires powering the device were left dangerously bare.

– fig. 1, the electromechanical

– fig. 2, the interface to the steam-powered, coal-fired

I was watching television

Neil Jordan’s Borgias

And the Franciscan brother said

Something like:

You are a man

You have sinned

And in many things

You have no doubt failed

…

But you must not fail in this:

The office for which

God

Has chosen you.

…

What a relief!