Re: nettime a liberal revolution in 21st century Africa?
Keith: PS Mark S. Things digital do make an appearance in the book, but not in the essay. Thanks for the shout out . . . !! g There are revolutions and there are renaissances. My guess is that the latter would be a much more beneficial prospect for Africa. Revolutions -- particularly the liberal ones in the West of the 17th/18th/19th centuries -- all took place within the Christian cultural frame, with particular emphasis on the final chapter of the book most favored by the technology of the printing press. By looking for heaven on earth, these were all deeply concerned (whether they acknowledged it or not) with accelerating Armageddon and the Millennium. My hope is that Africa isn't caught in the same devil's bargain as was the West. Fortunately for Africa, China will be more important than the West for its future. China has no Revelations. China, in fact, is all about *renaissances* (with a cycle of roughly 700 years) and, since it has no interest in the 2nd Coming, it is not about *revolutions* (as reflected in their complete retooling of Marx now underway in Beijing.) Digital technologies overturn the environment of *electricity* (which, in turn, overturned the environment of the printing press and its enforced slavery to the Bible) so, for Africa, as for China and every other culture that draws its strengths elsewhere, perhaps digital will assist in a long needed renaissance of learning and prosperity. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime RIP: Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart, inventor of computer mouse and so much more, dies at 88 In December 1968, his Mother of all Demos changed computing forever. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddedv=yJDv-zdhzMY by Cyrus Farivar - July 4 2013, 12:09am CEST http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/07/douglas-engelbart-inventor-of-computer-mouse-and-so-much-more-dies-at-88/ If you’ve used a mouse to click this article, you can thank Douglas Engelbart. The longtime inventor passed away in the late hours of July 2 at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88 years old. In addition to inventing the computer mouse, Engelbart helped develop other technologies that have become commonplace in the computing world, including pioneering hypertext, networking, and the early stages of graphical user interfaces. He will always be one of the giants of Silicon Valley. Most famously, Engelbart gave a now-legendary presentation on December 8, 1968 in San Francisco later known as “The Mother of all Demos.” In it, he gave the world’s first demonstration of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and a collaborative real-time editor. Today, many across the tech world lamented the loss of Engelbart. Howard Rheingold, a noted tech writer, tweeted: “I'd say that most of what I've written was inspired by the day I met Doug Engelbart in 1983.” Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation added: “We gave him our Pioneer Award in 1992, but it's impossible to express his impact as a computing pioneer.” “Augmenting Human Intellect” Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” In the paper, he described a “writing machine” that is certainly recognizable to all Ars staff today: This writing machine would permit you to use a new process of composing text. For instance, trial drafts could rapidly be composed from re-arranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which you stop to type in. Your first draft could represent a free outpouring of thoughts in any order, with the inspection of foregoing thoughts continuously stimulating new considerations and ideas to be entered. If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft became too complex, you would compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs. You can integrate your new ideas more easily, and thus harness your creativity more continuously, if you can quickly and flexibly change your working record. If it is easier to update any part of your working record to accommodate new developments in thought or circumstance, you will find it easier to incorporate more complex procedures in your way of doing things. This will probably allow you to accommodate the extra burden associated with, for instance, keeping and using special files whose contents are both contributed to and utilized by any current work in a flexible manner—which in turn enables you to devise and use even-more complex procedures to better harness your talents in your particular working situation. UPDATE, Thursday, July 4 12:55am CT: In an e-mail sent to Ars, Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, had this to say about Engelbart: Doug and [J.C.R. Licklider] were going two of our farthest seeing visionaries. Doug's [oN-Line System] was as close to Vannever Bush's vision of Memex as you could get in the 1960s. He had a keen sense of the way in which computers could augment human capacity to think. Much of what transpired at Xerox PARC owes its origins to Doug and the people who created NLS with him. The [Web] is a manifestation of some of what he imagined or hoped although his aspirations exceeded even that in terms of human and computer partnerships. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime spying, surveillance and the everyday
Greetings All, Of course one can expect boiling outrage at the copious amounts of hoovering of data, eavesdropping and classical snooping that characterises the numerous Snowden/NSA revelations. What a good part of the discussions focus on is the notion of the 'invasion of privacy' either on an individual level or on the state level. But, in the post 9/11 world (in actuality much before) spying and surveillance have almost effortlessly crossed the borders of state and corporate territories into the realm of the private - whether in the virtual world or the physical; our everyday realities are subject to observation and tracking on numerous levels: in airports or on the street both named and anonymous forces can alter or thwart everyday mobility. Thus, the NSA revelations only represent one aspect of the surveillance tree in which 'stop and frisk laws', racial profiling and other criteria for identifying social miscreants are in play. It is quite necessary to add to this dystopic scenario perhaps a more troubling and deep-rooted aspect of the surveillance landscape: the neoliberal economic paradigm(s) upon which post-industrial societies rest is in itself dependent on the hoovering and collecting of individual data; in this sense the border between the avowedly political target of surveillance and the potential consumer becomes is naturally blurred; similar tools (employed on vastly different scales) are employed to identify the markers of the 'potential terrorist' or someone looking for a book at Amazon, tools for the garden, or food for the evening meal. It seems that across the various digital nodes that fill our contemporary landscapes there has been an ineluctable blurring of boundaries between the territories of the individual, the state or the corporate world. The public space of the internet is a very fragile reality, indeed, in the same manner that the public spaces of our cities are subject to the most insidious forms of privatisation. Time for a paradigm shift? cheers allan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime transcript of March 6 Murdoch meeting with The Sun's staff
http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5026/transcript-rupert-murdoch-recorded-at-meeting-with-sun-staff Mike Darcey: So, we met... we talked about one or two things there. We had a bit of an update in both directions in terms of state of play. I don't think we need to go through all that again. But, in a way, one of the key questions you left me with is you would really welcome the opportunity to chat to Rupert, just to hear his views and express your views to him, if that was possible, if he's in town. He's in town, so he's come along today, and was happy to come and meet you. I thought it would be a good chance for him to hear how you're getting along, the state of play at the moment, and give you the opportunity to ask him questions you've got, any concerns that you have been raising with us that you'd like to hear as well. Rupert Murdoch: Yeah, look, please be just as honest as you want to be, and I'll try and respond. Graham Dudman (The Sun's former managing editor): Okay, can I- If I could start by introducing myself. I'm Graham Dudman, I was the managing editor for seven years, until a couple of years ago. We spoke many times on the phone when I was editing, and I just wanted to thank you today for your time, appreciate that. We met earlier on this afternoon, all of us, and I was given the job of just sort of introducing- kicking it off. So, you will know that the people in this room are the human cost of the decision that was taken -- we believe in haste -- to set up the MSC and give it, what we believe, was the sole aim of protecting News Corp at all costs. We believe that we are the human cost of that decision. Until their arrests, everybody that you're looking at in this room today was a loyal, hard-working employee devoted to you personally, to The Sun, to News International and everything that this company and you stand for, and have been proud to work here -- proud to work here. People are at different stages of their career. You can see by just looking around this room. Some are at the beginning, some are half-way through-ish, some are approaching the final stages of their career. People are beginning to plan their lives around News International. Other people have given their lives to News International. Some faces you will recognise, some you won't. One thing that everybody in this room shares -- everybody in this room shares -- whether we are 20-something, 30-something, 40-something, 50-something or 60-something, is that we were arrested, thrown into police cells, treated as common criminals in front of our children, our families, and our neighbours, and our friends and our colleagues, for doing nothing more than the company expected of us -- nothing. So, as I say, we met earlier today. We have some questions that we would like to ask, we are very happy for you- to hear what you'd like to say. We've got the questions simply to give the meeting a kind of structure, some of the issues that we would like to address in the limited time that we've got, and I'm happy to kick off. Several of us- RM: Can I just say first that I appreciate very much what you're saying. I'd be saying the same thing if I was in your chair. And I'm sure we've made mistakes. But it's hard for you to see it this way. I'm just as annoyed as you are at the police, and you're directing it at me instead, but never mind. I mean, it is absolutely -- and we will be returning to this as a paper, if we can get through a bit more of this (Murdoch slaps table) -- what they're doing, what they did to you, and how they treated people at the BBC, saying 'a couple of you come in for a cup of tea at four in the afternoon,' you guys got thrown out of bed by gangs of cops at six in the morning, and I'm just as annoyed as you are. But all I'd ask that you remember is that in that first month, you said was panic, maybe there was panic that we closed the News of the World, but we were working in the belief -- I think rightly -- the police were about to invade this building, and take all the computers out the way, and just put us out of business totally. And everyone could have lost out. And it was done to protect the business. We thought, protecting everybody, but that's how it started. And if you want to accuse me of a certain amount of panic, there's some truth in that. But it was very, very- I don't know- it's hard for you to remember it, it was such- but it was- I was under personal siege -- not that that mattered -- but it was- the whole place was- all the Press were screaming and yelling, and we might have gone too far in protecting ourselves. And you were the victims of it. It's not enough for me to say you've got my sympathy. But you do have my total support. But go ahead, please. GD: On that line of support, which is useful. [Redacted.] In the event that any of us go to court, and in the event that we are convicted of whatever offences we're convicted of, what assurances can you give us about our individual future at News
