Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Literature of information: John Crowley

I finished the first two novels in John Crowley's Aegypt sequence (Aegypt, Love & Sleep), and have been deeply impressed and moved. For those who don't know Crowley's work, his fiction is gorgeously written, drawing on the depths of Western hermetica and literary traditions, creating surprising narratives of emotional power.

Here I want to draw attention to what I'm hazily thinking of as the literature of information. These novels concern the discovery and re-discovery of a complex set of hermetic knowledge. This research/awareness occurs at many levels, from the library to reconsiderations of slang, glances at rural folklore and practicing meditation. You can read this sequence as (among many other things) a study in the persistence, recovery, assessment, and integration of information.

Is this a genre, or a type of writing? Is it related to mystery novels, which turn on information? Post away! I offer Borges as a free hint.

Alphaville, zone of depravity

A new story on the Alphaville case gives us a fine paragraph for the cyberspace panic file:

As it was, Alphaville quickly turned into a hellhole of scam-artists, crime syndicates, mafia extortion artists and teenage girls turning tricks to make ends meet. It became a breeding ground for the very worst in human nature - a benign-sounding granny, for example, who specialised in taking new players into her confidence, then showered them in abuse.

Lessig: IP and free trade

Global intellectual property wars, continued: Larry Lessig points out a conceptual and practical friction in American trade policy, between American intellectual property rules, which are nationalist, and America's free trade policies, which are sometimes border-crossingly noncompetitive.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Sterling, continued

More from that Sterling piece, on information poetics:

You want to trace back your spiritual ancestors.

That’s what André Breton did, and that’s what the pre-Raphaelites did. And they self-published to get the news out. The pre-Raphaelites had this fanzine called The Germ, and it went through four issues. And it always goes through four issues. That’s the classic fanzine thing. The surrealists had this fanzine called The Minotaur, and it went through four issues. The cyberpunks had two fanzines -- Cheap Truth and SF Eye. Cheap Truth went through 17 issues. But the issues were only one page long.

They’re blogs now.

Bruce Sterling on information, the net, and stuff

A new interview with Bruce Sterling in Reason is a pleasure to read, sitting in the company of Chairman Bruce. Some gems in there, like this nice note on the underside of the net:

I predicted for a long time that the Internet would be a big, stinking deal when there was finally a pop song about it. Sure enough, Destiny’s Child did a song that has a line about "some girl trashing me on the Internet." That’s funny, but the thing that’s peculiar about it is there was always a dark side. There was always the porn/mafia/drug dealer/pedophilia aspect -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

RIAA deploys forces

A new sign of the intellectual property battles' intensity is the appearance of RIAA agents in force.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood...

"We want to be very clear who we are and what we’re doing," says John Langley, Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit. "First and foremost, we’re professionals."

Langley, based in Los Alamitos, California, oversees five staff investigators and around 20 contractors who sniff out bootleg discs west of the Rockies. The former Royal Canadian Mountie said his unit’s on-the-streets approach has been a big success, netting more than 100,000 pieces of unauthorized merchandise during the recent Christmas retail blitz.

With all the trappings of a police team, including pink incident reports that, among other things, record a vendor’s height, weight, hair and eye color, the RIAA squad can give those busted the distinct impression they’re tangling with minions of Johnny Law instead of David Geffen. And that raises some potential legal questions.

Stephenson's site overhauled

Fresh from Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson's site has been redesigned, with new content. Some useful notes for those working through his books, like the argument about prolix style, minor interest in religion, and the nice attention to print design.

(thanks to Thomas Beckett!)

World wide Tolkien research

The Lord of the Rings Research Project is studying the Web-wide interest in Tolkien's novels filmed by Peter Jackson. This should be a fascinated exercise, as collaborative textual project, in using the net for cultural research, and in following a global media culture event. I'm curious about collaborative mechanisms, intellectual property understandings, and approach to globalization.

(thanks to Jason Mittell)

Mail art vs the copyright titan

Jesse Walker points us to this fun article on mail art, using postage stamps as the venue.
Tragicomically, it turns to IP:

But there’s one line even he won’t cross. "When we were putting together that book, we censored ourselves," says Hernandez de Luna. "We’d both used Disney images. I had done a Love stamp with Mickey and Minnie. Mickey was giving Minnie a bouquet of flowers, and he had an erection." That, he feared, would rouse the copyright police, evidently a force more fearsome than any postal investigator.

"If we used Mickey Mouse in the book, we’d get letters from Disney," he explains. "They don’t like you monkeying around."

Information from Mars

The multiple landings on Mars are, among other things, information events. The probe has sent back a steady stream of data, and been occasionally correct from other, in good, traditional feedback fashion. Now the arrival on the Martian surface is marked by information freighted heavily by meaning (as the silence of Beagle is, as well). Space.com covers the landing jubilantly.

I can't resist: the first Martian moblog!

I'm in love with Stardust, myself. But then again, I'm disturbed by the constellation of Mars+Spirit, which seems like something from an early Christian antipagan screed, or something.