Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 797

For The Next Generation of Surrealists Worldwide

*Some great lessons here on how to use Surrealist/Communist political
radicalism to vanish from the American cultural radar almost entirely.

http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/12524

Franklin Rosemont RIP

Tue, 04/14/2009 - 11:13.

Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009

by David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib

Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker,
and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65
years old.

With his partner

Euro May Day

*I don't wanna rain on the anarchist parade here, but if you're meeting
in giant twittering mobs to sack the oppressor banks, aren't you risking --
wait for it -- SWINE FLU?! That's right! Massive hordes of youth rebels,
precarious unemployed, illegal emigres, all together, with banners,
in the plazas -- VAST SEETHING BREEDING PONDS OF MAYDAY SWINE FLU!

*But wait a minute -- maybe you could announce your intention to
go COUGH on the capitalists. That oughta drive 'em right out of the w

Dead Media Beat: Pr0n

*"Internet Porn as a *dead medium"?! You've gotta be kidding, right? Porn was the only
commodity on the Internet that ever had a spark of commercial life!"

Well, read it and weep, skeptic:

To: bruces@well.com

"Hi there. I'm an old fan of yours from your "long long essays in Wired" days, and occasional buyer of your books, writing in.

"Have been catching up on your dispatches at Beyond The Beyond today, and I must say your crack on April 5 caught me right where I live: "Crowds of

Nice dress, Nadya.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nadya/sets/72157617355268049/

"Our bodies continue beyond our flesh and bones. Humans have constantly augmented their bodies with tools like clothing or automobiles, and now our bodies are also extending into virtual space. An identity includes online identity, extending from cell phones and laptops into cyberspace. How do we regard our selves when the boundary between self and world is fading? Caché is a project that aims to extend online gaze into real space. When

Open the Future to Raw Pandemonium

http://www.openthefuture.com/2009/04/pandemonium.html

"There was a fourth scenario in my presentation, though. Let me quote the brief description:

"'In this fifty year period, a massive depression, coupled with the collapse of a key resource, undermines traditional economic models. Even as the global economy recovers, a global war erupts, a horrifying accident triggered by political systems overwhelmed by increasingly rapid communications, a tragedy multiplied by the almost casual use of che

I Always Wondered How 'Futurismic' Survived

*And now I know.

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2009/04/interview-paul-graham-raven.html

Centipede Gang Hunting Carla

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1174221/Highly-intimate-photos-video-Carla-Bruni-ex-lover-stolen-Paris-flat.html

*And they've hired house raiders to rob the kid's uncle. Man, that's ugly.

*I wonder if they're an anti-French intelligence service. Sex-smear work is cheap,
it's fast, it's modern, it's super-destabilizing.

*Waiting for the next 99 shoes to hit the floor here. Maybe they'll
catch these guys and they'll turn out to be operatives of the British Labour Party.

Literary Postmodernism Now Super-Officially Ultra-Post-Dead

*Sorry, but I'm afraid that critics will have to empty clip after clip of rounds into the
carcass of the thing and it's still gonna squirm.

*Entertaining reading, though. Makes me want to get even more postmodern than I already am.

http://www.outsiderwriters.org/archives/2046

(...)

"Preparing this essay, some months ago, I wrote a letter to twenty of my friends (writers, critics, professors, entertainers) asking them to answer these two questions:

1. Do you think Postmodernism

Hey, Wait, Wait! Me, Me, I've Got a Really Cruel Tool!

*"And I'm dying to tell the new editor of COOL TOOLS all about it!"

*Well, we're burning to tell our Cool Tools community all about your hardware too,
ma'am, fella. We're gonna want about a page of text from you, explaining what
the darn thing is good for, some photos of it if at all possible, and some strong hint as
to how our usership (((

*I will be your editor, and I will

More blog migration issues, and, uhm, I'm migrating some myself

*Blog text is up. Embedded videos are up. BEYOND THE BEYOND jpegs are not loading under Mac OS X 10.5.6 Safari or Firefox. This has been a public service announcement.

*I just became the new editor of Kevin Kelly's COOL TOOLS. Expect things to get a whole lot toolier around here for a while.

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/

*For instance, Kevin Kelly, for excellent reasons, only runs affirmative testimonies
about tools, ideas and services that really work for real people. This implie