newspeak

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.

Interesting; just started reading it. The term, “Accelerationism,” is not new and has been featured in a few novels that I know of. But I’m interested in the idea now, as I’ve grown impatient with the seeming artificial blockages on social and technological movements imposed by monopolies, oligopolies, and persistences of the 20th (and even 19th) century.

Sabotaging Obamacare Is a Lucrative Endeavor for Some | The Nation.

The theatrics of Obamacare are a nothing new– Thus:

“While brokers claim they seek only to ensure patients are not scammed by “unlicensed” navigators, in reality, blocking competition seems to be the primary motivation. Last month, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America released a statement endorsing an effort by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) to repeal all of the funding for the navigators programs. Notes from a lobbying association for insurance agents in California warned brokers before a visit to Sacramento: “If we don’t [lobby lawmakers] they will not think it will matter that much when they allow the unlicensed “navigators” to solicit your book of business!!”’

That there is this sabotage is a nothing new: it’s the expected politics. I’m rather more interested in evaluating the ways in which “truth” is appreciated, weighed, acted upon.

Technology in the America’s Cup: Against all odds | The Economist.

“That” refers to Oracle’s core products, the software it sells to an enormous pool of enterprise customers. And my query is this: Much of what it sells lacks the ruthless creativity and ingenuity beautifully demonstrated in the America’s Cup. It’s not that Ellison deprecates the race; hardly. In fact, he seems to value the achievement of the race more than his company’s technology. The result? One is exciting and flies into headwinds to win, using genius and teamwork; the other?

I Want Your Job: Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre | culture | Torontoist.

The Cultural and Political Intersection of Fair Trade and Justice: Managing a Global Industry: Tamara L. Stenn: 9781137335272: Amazon.com: Books.

An interesting read–I hope. Got hint of it from Michel B. of P2P Foundation.

New Report: Policies for Shareable Cities – Shareable.

Who writes Linux? Almost 10,000 developers | ZDNet.

From a New Yorker article by Patricia Marx, overheard at a restaurant “We’d like a table for five but we don’t want to walk,” said the woman to the maître d’, as she arrived. (See: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/19/070319fa_fact_marx, “Dressin’ Texan: Houston and Dallas Decoded,” 19 March 2007. Requires subscription.)

IBM To Spend Another $1 Billion On LInux – Business Insider.

Mozilla Opens Up On Cookie-Blocking, Ad Targeting.

An interesting interview. A key section:

<quote>

“There is a lot of concern among advertisers about the criteria you’re using for the CookieClearinghouse and the cookie-blocking patch. Are you seeking input from advertisers on these projects?

DDT: We’re meeting with publishers, advertisers and exchanges. We need to understand what their concerns are so we can figure out if there is a way to get to an agreement here… We’re never going to please everyone but we’d like to get to a place where there’s an undersanding of what we’re doing. We’re not doing this to mess up businesses but to give the user a voice.

BE: One of the options is already the DAA opt-out and we’re always carrying the torch for Do-Not-Track as an individual user’s expression of “don’t track me.” We think that DNT as an idea matches our mission. It’s about serving people above all agendas.

If someone says I don’t want to be tracked, they send that signal out to websites and we would like integrations not to set third-party cookies. DNT has been adopted by around 17% in the US and 11% globally and we’ve heard from some players who say they would comply with it if it were just a tracking preference.  They would lose about 20% of their audience but they could live with that.

The trick is getting that individual expression to be unadulterated and not automatically set, for example by Microsoft which started pre-setting it in Internet Explorer.”

</quote>

I’m fascinated by this significant shift in the characterization of the modern consumer as liberal person–one ostentatiously divorced from need alone and poised to consume on the basis of desire. Let’s start from the window shopper born in the late 19th c. to the post-WW2 pre-fab suburbanite to the post-’68 me generation infinite consumer to the present obese consumer. The thread has been always one in which the advert subverts better judgement or “will”–at least, until now. We want and the often buy that thing not because it is something we need (laugh) or even really will use fully (sigh), but because “we” enjoy the pleasure (or relief) of acting on the desire, regardless of the actual “origin” of the desire. (I tend to think that origin derives from the mirror logic described initially by Girard and then made a lot more sophisticated and compelling by Borch-Jacobsen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikkel_Borch-Jacobsen_. In a sense, desire is a kind of identity.)

Putting aside the politics of choosing, and the critique of “choice” as something equally possible and significant for all, regardless of class and situation, the idea that we, as implicitly rich consumers, not only can, but would want to limit the field of desirable things offered us, is something that has been developing for a couple of years now and which is reaching an interesting point of visibility.

It’s not a new idea–few things are–but it’s prominence in this area is perhaps novel. In fact, the idea, that we can, and indeed, would want, to contract for our desire, is one that’s been figured in bondage writing more or less since its inception. In _Venus in Furs_, as with other Naturalist work, the object of desire is the contract that the protagonist engages in to sell him- and, in other works, herself. 

Which is not to say I object to Mozilla’s intervention. Hardly: I like it. And I tend to believe that the more things are made available for visible examination, the better, not because we can necessarily make wise judgements on their value, but because we at least are given the opportunity to understand those elements constituting us.