the librarian
"According to our porn books, the library, once a hothouse of eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site. But somewhere on those shelves there’s still a memory of when books were really subversive, when being a libertine was actually about Voltaire and freethinking, and young girls were guarded from the corrupting influence of novels. The fantasy of awakening the librarian is also a fantasy of awakening the subversive power of the book, of excavating life from a dying cultural monument—or else scratching a bit of graffiti on it.
The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. “Throw me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,” says the narrator of “Checking Out,” the final story of 2011’s Nympho Librarian. “Fuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.”
the shock
The Shock of the New (1982)
A classic eight part documentary that offers a comprehensive view on the development of modernist art in its cultural context. It focusses mainly on painting and sculpting but pays some attention to architecture as well. The documentary is presented and narrated by the art critic Robert Hughes, whose views on modernism have left an unmistakable stamp on the film. It was originally aired by the BBC.
junkspace is the enemy of the soul
" THE tempo of today’s Web is different as well. A decade ago, a concept like the “real-time Web,” in which our every tweet and status update is instantaneously indexed, updated and responded to, was unthinkable. Today, it’s Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword.
That’s no surprise: people like speed and efficiency. But the slowly loading pages of old, accompanied by the funky buzz of the modem, had their own weird poetics, opening new spaces for play and interpretation. Occasionally, this slowness may have even alerted us to the fact that we were sitting in front of a computer. Well, that turtle is no more.
Meanwhile, Google, in its quest to organize all of the world’s information, is making it unnecessary to visit individual Web sites in much the same way that the Sears catalog made it unnecessary to visit physical stores several generations earlier. Google’s latest grand ambition is to answer our questions — about the weather, currency exchange rates, yesterday’s game — all by itself, without having us visit any other sites at all. Just plug in a question to the Google homepage, and your answer comes up at the top of the search results."
(...)
" IT’S this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us."
" It took about 350 years, but finally, in virtuality, cogito ergo sum has come to mean something very concrete and actual. Now is a place, a co-ordinate; i am where “I” am not, and iThink (type, write, and right-click) therefore I am. If space is a practiced place, then collective navigation produces the commons. Like mall rats flipping tricks in a parking lot, users exhibit a feral fluency in the use (and transgression, as it is reimagined daily) of this common timespace: we tune out the ads and get on with the serious business of flirting, hustling, hanging out and talking shit. We know that this serious business is affective labor which produces capital for the custodians of netspace; indeed, meme culture (including but not limited to YouTube parody, stock photo art, cut-ups and image macros) can be seen as the user asserting a subjectivity that exists and thrives despite (and beyond) her status as targeted marketing demographic. Like the Occupy movement, these activities amount to a kind of politics of the public (virtual) body in (virtual) space. We may never own the means of production as such, but will continue to assert, pervert and subvert the commons anyway: a gesture of post-corporeal territorial pissing which necessitates neither phallus nor spray-can nor html."
big stuff
"For thousands of years the imagination of storytellers has been a guiding light for people trying to change the world. In the last decade or two science fiction has almost fallen behind the work of technologists and entrepreneurs. For the sake of a more interesting tomorrow, we need to get the proverbial horse back out in front of the cart with our imagination professionals building a vision of the future to inspire the builders of the new world."
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