Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 662

Unfortunately, Ral Patel is not God.

*Nice and public-spirited of ol' Raj to let on to the rest of us.

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/16303

We Don't Need a Messiah (And Anyway, It Isn't Me)

Monday April 12, 2010 09:57

by Raj Patel

Coincidence led to my being hailed as a prince of peace. But change will

come from our own hard work, not a deity

The much arrested activist writer and Abahlali based Mjondolo member Raj

Patel on why he is NOT the messiah.

Firstb...

Here comes gerontocracy

*If you really want old people to freak out and get all productive, creative and inventive, despite their basic nature as the elderly — well then, destroying their life savings and throwing them out of their homes was likely a great start.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627550.100-the-shock-of-the-old-welcome-to-the-elderly-age.html

But this is not fundamentally about economics or retirement. It is about society's zeitgeist, its social wellsprings. The cultural historian Theodore...

Augmented Reality: Amsterdam AR flashmob

*That's a new one.

http://www.sndrv.nl/ARflashmob/

"You there! That virtual mob of human-scale figures! Disperse now or face teargas and a baton charge!"

Even More Brazilian Steampunk

*What is with those characters? Why them?

Dear Mr. Sterling,

Just to report some more retrofuturistic progress in Brazilian SteamPunk…

The press is all over the SteamPunk Council and the members are very busy trying to deal with all the interviews, events and the actual production of SteamPunk literature, informative texts, pictures, fashion designs, devices and a whole lot of other things through the ever growing "SteamPunk Artists League" we are supporting and promoting.

Apart from being...

Arphid Watch: homemade spoofer

*The everyday ones were never hard to spoof. They were just s'posed to be, like, magically invisible to everyone, forever, somehow.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/diy_arduino-based_rfid_spoofer.html

Showtime: Parallel Lines from Philips

*Dunno what this viral thing is, but it sure is some hardcore Russian kyberpunk.

*Weird to see electronics companies getting this deeply into science fiction filmmaking. Why? Is there some kind of Philips design-fiction diegetic prototype packed away in there? I don't have enough cognitive surplus to go find that out.

*Well, "if it's important, somebody is going to tell me." Welcome to the cruel dynamics of social networking and the — murderous and possibly lethal? — unicorn-based Gift...

Sorrowful punks publicly mourning Malcolm McLaren

*You can't read kindly stuff like this without realizing that there was something just irretrievably rotten and sinister about that McLaren guy. Yeah, he's dead now, and even the hardest of the hardcore punks are trying to make nice about him, but he was a hairy dropout Situationist, a ruthless enemy of the Spectacle. There was just no way to recuperate him and make him stop scaring the horses; he was a bohemian hustler who was all clay and happened to have feet of gold.

Very early computer graphics indeed.

Via @doingitwrong

http://translab.burundi.sk/code/vzx/index.htm

LIST OF MENTIONED ARTISTS

Ben F Laposky 1952-56
Herbert Franke 1953-55, 1953, 1961-62, 1969 (+ Peter Henne), 1970-71, 1975, 1975, 1978, 1978
William Fetter 1960
A Michael Noll 1962, 1963, 1964, 1964
Charles Csuri 1963, 1968, 1968
Ivan Sutherland 1963
Kenneth Knowlton 1963 (+ Lillian Schwartz), 1964 (+ Stan Vanderbeek), 1966 (+ Leon Harmon)
John Whitney sr 1963-66, 1967, 1975
Stan Vanderbeek 1964
Frieder Nake 1965
John Stehura 1965-69
Tony...

The softwarization of stuff

*I like to keep an eye on fabrication thinking, and you know what's really different about fabbing and conventional manufacturing? Conventional manufacturing has stuff like specialized trade journals, while this fabbing essay is on the net, and it's written by some guy in Spain I've somehow never heard of, and, furthermore, it's the aw3some.

http://fluxchange.typepad.com/en/2010/04/the-softwarization-of-stuff.html

(…)

"The new initiatives in fabrication share similar views on how to approach...

Sharing law

*I like it that this Oakland lawyer who is into online sharing immediately thinks about sharing law services. No, not Sharia law, because that's that Moslem business, but sharing law. You know, for Favela Chic people who live off free software and stuff they snag off Craigslist. More of 'em around all the time, so you can bet they're gonna get hammered someday — probably by one of those dark-of-night sneak acts of Parliament like the one the British just did to deprive pirate file-sharers ...