Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Matrix Revolutions: first approach

Despite playing and following the online game, I haven't made it to see the third Matrix movie yet. I've seen the second, taught the first, and watched the animated anthology. Should I make my way to the empty theaters for it?

In the meantime, some clever reviews. The Voice has a Burroughsian moment. Jesse Walker has a fine discussion of the trilogy, looking at literary influences and viewer response. "Entertainment Marketing 101" argues for the trilogy's unified coherence in terms of broad-ranging, yet nuanced, audience targeting.

The series has inspired a torrent of creativity, including the Helix parody, The Meatrix food critique, and the sustained fanfiction of The Fanimatrix. And Fark:

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Mapping the internet: Opte

Opte is a new internet mapping project, using Large Graph Layout (LGL).

It's still in beta.
Some /. discussion.

Faulkner hypertext

I've been interested in creative editions of William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury since I first read the book, and grew fascinated by the first part's rapid shifting in time and space. The usual print edition signals those transitions by some italics, but I remember learning that Faulkner wanted to add multiple colors, one scheme per location in spacetime.

At last, some good folks have taken to the hypertext Web to create a fine edition of The Sound and the Fury. Please explore its now-multilinear depths.

(thanks to Jesse Walker!)

Faux phones for men

John Schott reports on men showing their enormous, ah, tech savvy with gadgets, then improvising mobile simulacra instead of doing without.

Men discovered that using their phones publicly in self-conscious, flamboyant ways turned the devices into babe magnets, at least every once in a while. So it wasn't long before some men--horney and broke, but resourceful--took to making cardboard phones.

In Europe, where strolling on shopping streets is still a custom, these mobile phone peacocks flocked on street corners. In the US, faux-phones were more often deployed in the car, where reflective glass and natural distance aided considerably in the ruse. Posed at the stoplight with cardboard phones in their hands, men could be seen in heated discussions with their brokers shorting stocks with the visible intensity of a 16-year-old high school student playing an 80-year-old tycoon in a high school play.

Technology changes; men persist. Today's of-the-moment babe magnet is a $400 iPod on your belt--worn discreetly, but for sure visibly. Not getting hit on? Don’t have one? Well now you do.

Visual poetry site

Visual poetry uses Google's image search to turn your text writing into a string of images. Try it!

It's from the splendid Douwe Osinga, who has a blog (of course).

Online romance article, interesting yet narrow

An article on online romance from last week's New York Times offers some good anecdotes about online dating, especially in terms of overlapping relationships, and using such services over time. Egan makes a good point as well about shifts in personal time senses, rapidity driving the turn to the net.

But why do so many discussions of online relationships narrow themselves down? "Love in the Time of No Time" is a good example. We read about the importance of online presence, but nothing about the world of human-computer interaction, interface affordances, the erotics of semibodilessness, the psychological differences of screen-mediated communication.

We don't read about the impact of embodied differences: regional, national, age, income, literacy, technological confidence.

Nothing about the burgeoning world of social software, including social network analysis, which is promising all sorts of changes precisely in this world of interpersonal connection.

Above (or beneath) all, what happened to cybersex? The obvious importance and extent of this well-studied sexuality is simply absent from accounts of on-line dating, all too often. Is it a disciplinary gesture of social sciences vs humanities, or neopuritanism? catching the meme of internet dating becoming more respectable? or an attempt to avoid the internet's reputation as zone of the unchained id?

itunes DRM hacked

The Norwegian who cracked CSS is on the iTunes case, now, cracking its Mac digital rights management (DRM). QTFairUse strips away the DRM content from an iTunes AAC file on a Windows machine, leaving the latter untouched. He pleads action against excessive copyright control, and for fair use. (He's also due to stand trial for the DVD caper)

Significance: this is a test of the internet's carrying of copyrighted material and restrictions thereby. This is a test of both technology and culture. Recently, any such crack would unleash a torrent of content into the darknet. But now, with DRM rising on all fronts, as I've been arguing, and economic fears persisting, there's the possibility that the net won't rapidly become an iTunes escape route.

Jon's hit the iTunes for Mac, first. ArsTech suspects the Windows version is next.

Cannibal uses net to score willing feast

A German man asked the net for a human to eat, and from the net a willing partner/victim/meal emerged. Armin Meiwes ate parts of Bernd-Jurgen Brandes, who shared in tasting the appetizer. Meiwes claims around 800 other Germans share his culinary ambition (a curiously specific number). The German government sees otherwise, and considers the feeding a sexual crime.

A Brit purportedly was interested, but backed out after the application of cling-film.

Memoirs are planned. I'm waiting for a video to make the rounds.

The popularity of this story is yet another instance of the "cyberspace is horror" meme. For example, from the BBC account:

The 41-year-old computer expert is expected to go on trial...
Advertised on internet...
Mr Meiwes, a computer expert [told us twice - Infocult], met 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes in early 2001, after Mr Meiwes advertised on websites...

(comment added)

False copyright claims proposal

Since consumers can sue companies for false advertising, how about allowing citizens to sue intellectual-property (IP) owners for excessive copyright claims? This adds social and individual (as corporate entity) responsibility to the IP owners' responses.

P2P+DRM?

A new paper by Bill Rosenblatt makes a case for considering digital rights management (DRM) regimes within peer-to-peer (p2p) computing.

Some good historical points, important for a paper working against the grain of intuition: referencing the ICE protocols, and superdistribution. His distinction between fair use, which he finds problematic, and personal use, which he favors ("DRM systems should be able to support a user's reasonable content usage expectations"), is in line with what I'm seeing from the DRM-centered IP models emerging from the recording and movie industries. And he does a fine job in laying out the many problems with DRM implementation.

This offers a parallel approach to the Bollywood-KaZaZ experiment.