Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Easter Gothic

For your Easter weekend, enjoy it the Gothic way!

First, a church stages the Passion using a bunny for Christ, complete with whipping.  Second, read an Easter Bunny Lovecraft story (thanks, Steve).  And, third, behold an Infocult flashback: bunnies reenact The Exorcist.

"So it really is some kind of... rabbit... demon... thing?"

Installing Linux on the dead

Installing Linux on the dead - a logical application, really.

Minimum Installation Requirements:


   1. one (1) pocketknife

   2. one (1) screwdriver, flathead, to install Duppy card (see item 4. below)

   3. computer with:

          *CD drive

          *USB, Ethernet, or a free slot for wireless networking card

          *Telnet or SSH client installed

          *cyberspiritual controller program such as FleshGolem (MacOSX and Linux), Phranken (Windows 98, ME, 2000), or ItzaLive (MacOS 8.1-9.x and Amiga)

   4. one (1) Duppy card (available in CardBus and PCI models) or SpiritInTheSky external adapter (available in ethernet and USB models)

   5. VüDü Linux (available from Twisted Faces Software)...

"Free Culture", notes from the first week of April

Further notes on reading Free Culture:

Lessig carefully splits our valuation of creative work into two forms. One form sees creative work as like physical property, inherently valued, and owned by someone with decision-making power over it. However, this is not in the thrust of our legal tradition. The second sees IP as "an instrument."
Listen to the first model closely, ventriloquized:

Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value. Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission.

This is a compressed argument, with three items in a logical sequence: value, taking, permission. That argument is essential to Lessig's view of copyright at the present moment.

How do we understand creativity? One form involves the use of another's creative work. Lessig points to The Mouse as an example of using someone else's IP to make one's own. A more recent example is from Japanese manga, the culture of doujinshi, where imitation, derivation, and riffing are encouraged and not punished. In fact,

...in the view of many, it is precisely because it exists that Japanese manga flourish. As American graphic novelist Judd Winick said to me, "The early days of comics in America are very much like what's going on in Japan now....American comics were born out of copying each other.... That's how [the artists] learn to draw, by going into comic books and not tracing them, but looking at them and copying them" and building from them...

This is a profoundly antiromantic notion of creativity. Siva Viadhyanathan writes well about this.

More coming soon.

Lessig, "Free Culture", first notes

First thoughts on reading Lessig's Free Culture.
Structure: Lessig's book rests on a dynamic between models of property and piracy. He's arguing that the strong defenders of IP are radical extremists, while balancing this by not endorsing some copyright infringement.
The major open note sounded: Lessig clearly evokes Richard Stallman and open source software of "free as in free speech, not free beer". This is an increased reliance than in his previous writing, and partially reflects Lessig's disappointment in WIPO's refusal to hold a global meeting on open source.
Political framing: Lessig is careful to position himself on neither end of the old left-right spectrum. This is consonant with his earlier work, as I've noted elsewhere.
Style: conversational and light, for legal writing. Vignettes anchor the arguments: FM radio, powered flight.

Additional resources:
Initial Web resources: texts include a free download of the entire book, from the Free Culture book homepage; a pretty Web version; one wiki version of the book and a wiki annotation site; an edition with each paragraph hyperlinked.
Reviews and discussion: Lawrence Solum is class blog reading the book. Stephen Manes cuts loose in Forbes, so far in March and April.

(thanks to Mark Dilley, Steve Kaye, and more)

Blogging in early April notes: money

Speaking of lessons from the current blogging controversies, Julian Sanchez at Reason points out that blogs have developed into conduits for campaign money. This makes ad-targeted campaigns effective.

That means ritual outrage isn't just fun; it can be politically efficacious. Given the sums at stake, candidates are unlikely to abandon the blogosphere, but they will be increasingly sensitive to the risks of being associated with writers who shoot from the hip. That's understandable enough, but it does make one wonder: Now that it's possible for bloggers to make it big, will the most ambitious of them rein in the very un-journalistic recklessness that made the form so much fun to begin with?

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Cthulhu decides not to run for president

Cthulhu has reluctantly decided not to run for the presidency of the United States:

Cthulhu, greatest and most powerful of the Old Ones and ruler of the sunken city of R'lyeh, has decided against a presidential bid this year, claiming that George W. Bush has co-opted Cthulhu's main issue: destroying mankind.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Blogging tactics in early April: case 2

Another instance from this week of concerted blogging tactics to influence the Web: the Wikipedia entry for "Jew" is now a leading entry in Blogdex. This is the result of a positive Googlebombing campaign. There's a Jerusalem post story on this, which I'll excerpt here, as it's behind a reg:

While surfing the Web from his New York home, real-estate investor Steven Weinstock was shocked to find Jew Watch, filled with propaganda similar to that used by the Nazis...
Emboldened by Google's refusal, Daniel Sieradski, editor of the Jew School, a site devoted to Jewish fringe culture, decided to take matters into his own hands. Using a method called Google bombing, which exploits a quirk in Google's algorithms, he hoped to raise another site to the No. 1 rank.
"I decided to issue a call to arms on my Web site," Sieradski said. "Within a week, my proposal caught the attention of other Jewish bloggers [keepers of Web-based diaries] in the US, Canada, and Israel."
Sieradski's efforts paid off. The Wikipedia encyclopedia listing for "Jew," which just a week ago held no rank on Google, rose to the fourth-highest entry.

I wonder if the antisemites will take to the wiki entry to fight, like some torn-apart entries.

Lessons: as with the previous case of the day, it's another swarming tactic. Timeframe is similarly short.
Additionally, Googlebombing has spread to be a general tool.

"Free Culture" reading resource

For Lessig's Free Culture, here's another resource: a Web version of the book, giving each paragraph a hyperlink.

I've read half of it, and will start blogging here from the beginning of the thing.

Blogging tactics in early April 2004: two cases

Blogging evolves, as we know. Case in point: two instances this week of concerted blogging tactics to influence the Web. Both of these are about politics, but this post isn't making a political observation.

The Kos comment: Michael Friedman launched a quick campaign to dislodge advertisers from Kos, after that blogger's comments about the killings in Falluja. Kos removed the initial post (other bloggers archived it), wrote about it, and criticized the blog response. Instapundit responded and aggregated blog posts. Other bloggers joined the campaign. John Kerry's blog delinked Kos. Instapundit sought perspective, seeing Kos' sequence of posts as symptomatic of a larger ideological problem.

Lessons: blog ads are an approachable target for blogging campaigns, drawing on the history of a variety of divestment drives. The combination of high-profile, emotionally invested topics (the war in Iraq) with blogging prominence is one stage setting for such campaigns. Contextual research, a la Trent Lott's fall, is not required; the one post plus general reputation was enough, here. Blogging campaigns work by swarming, not command and control - i.e., no order went out from BlogCommand, but bloggers networked and piled on. The blogospheric Web is more likely to remember something than the nonbloggic Web, despite one's post hoc behavior and the Web's emphemeral tendencies. The timeframe for such campaigns can be very very fast, a few days from start to the loss of momentum. Lastly, framing becomes critical, as contextualization is essential to fitting a comment into a campaign - first, it was the frame of Kos as major liberal blogger; second, the frame of the antiwar left.

Coming up: case #2.

Blogs, email, and generations

MSResearch, worth reading, has part of a conversation of the blogs vs email debate. The speaker makes a point about blogs' information architecture as a rich presence application, but not in a romantic way:

After two hours I thought I had incredible insight into this whole dense network of people that spread across the country... There is no conceivable way I could have learned so much about a group of people in two hours sitting in my office using any other technology. Clearly unique. And it was not difficult to see how powerful something like it might be in work settings.

A good point about where this discussion should be looking:

The issue is what will be the situation in ten years, when the millions of bloggers aged 18-22 are in the workforce. No way of knowing. We could get a hint by looking at their current communication patterns, or by continuing to look at the adoption trends inside and outside corporations.