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| There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs. |
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Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT |
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| Topic: Education |
9:41 am EST, Mar 9, 2005 |
The MIT hacking culture has given us such treasures as police cars and cows on the Great Dome, a disappearing door to the President's office, and the commencement game of "Al Gore Buzzword Bingo." Hacks can be technical, physical, virtual, or verbal. Often the underlying motivation is to conquer the inaccessible and make possible the improbable. Hacks can express dissatisfaction with local culture or with administrative decisions, but mostly they are remarkably good-spirited. They are also by definition ephemeral. Fortunately, the MIT Museum has amassed a unique collection of hack-related pictures, reports, and remnants. "Nightwork" collects the best materials from this collection, to entertain innocent bystanders and inspire new generations of practitioners. Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT |
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| Topic: Technology |
9:18 am EST, Mar 9, 2005 |
Sony, arguably Japan's most iconic brand, is turning to an American chief executive, Howard Stringer, to lead the company. Blame Sony's desperation on the iPod, Apple's hot digital music player that has single-handedly destroyed Sony's reputation as the world's foremost consumer electronics innovator. Hollywood once famously waged a legal battle against Sony's video recorders. That cultural divide separating hardware makers (who want to empower consumers with technology) from content providers (who are nervous about this empowerment) remains deep. Stringer's elevation seems to signal a profound choice by Sony to see entertainment as its future, possibly at the expense of the consumer electronics empire that became a symbol of postwar Japan's resurgence. When the IBM-Lenovo deal was announced, some argued during the ensuing discussion that the standalone PC has become obsolete, its traditional functions coopted by other devices. "PCs are passé; consumer electronics are the new edge", it was said. It is becoming increasingly clear that the new edge is in China and Korea, not Japan. Sony's New Tune |
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Anatomy of a tribal rebellion |
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| Topic: Military |
8:37 am EST, Mar 9, 2005 |
The answers to what motivates and sustains the insurgency in Iraq are not readily found in traditional insurgency literature. Much better answers can be found by reexamining something deemed anachronistic in the information age: the dynamics of traditionally networked tribes and clans. This paper provides such a reexamination, and shows that tribal dynamics are particularly evident among insurgents in Fallujah and other parts of the socalled Sunni triangle. Anatomy of a tribal rebellion |
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Al Qaeda and its affiliates: A global tribe waging segmental warfare? |
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| Topic: War on Terrorism |
8:34 am EST, Mar 9, 2005 |
David "Netwar" Ronfeldt has written a new essay for First Monday. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are operating much like a global tribe waging segmental warfare. This paper describes the dynamics of classic tribes: what drives them, how they organize, how they fight. Al Qaeda fits the tribal paradigm quite well. Thus, continuing to view Al Qaeda mainly as a cuttingedge, postmodern phenomenon of the information age misses a crucial point: Al Qaeda and affiliates are using the information age to reiterate ancient patterns of tribalism on a global scale. The war they are waging is more about virulent tribalism than religion. The tribal paradigm should be added to the network and other prevailing paradigms to help figure out the best policies and strategies for countering these violent actors. Al Qaeda and its affiliates: A global tribe waging segmental warfare? |
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Blog Tool Writing Its Own Story of Success |
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| Topic: High Tech Developments |
9:26 am EST, Mar 8, 2005 |
Music, blogs, movies, whatever. Unpop is the future. "The future of blogging is not about bloggers who want audiences of thousands. The majority will be those communicating with four others or so." You are the Long Tail. Enjoy. Blog Tool Writing Its Own Story of Success |
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| Topic: Technology |
9:20 am EST, Mar 8, 2005 |
Google Desktop Seach has been updated, and is now out of beta. The company said Google Desktop Search would find photos, music and video files stored on PCs more easily, search the text of documents in Adobe PDF format and index Web pages surfed using Firefox and Netscape browsers, among other changes. A more complete list of new features is at http://desktop.google.com/whatsnew.html Google Desktop Search |
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As Through a Glass Darkly |
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| Topic: Society |
9:18 am EST, Mar 8, 2005 |
Spin is not just a technique. It is not just a political phenomenon. It permeates our culture and our daily life. And it's an industry almost a sector of the economy. One day's front page articles quoted lobbyists, public relations specialists, professional "damage control" experts. If computers and communications go by the acronym IT, for information technology, the perceptual industry might be MT, for misinformation technology. The business of MT isn't lying. It's shaping perceptions irrespective of the truth. Reality is a consideration, of course. But if reality were sufficient, we wouldn't need spin would we? As Through a Glass Darkly |
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| Topic: Fiction |
2:16 am EST, Mar 1, 2005 |
His ex-wife. He hadn't thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She'd been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent. He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it. Cory Doctorow | I, Robot |
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