Update on Media Ownership

Thanks to Frugal Dad for this updated chart. (For an even bigger version, click on the image to see it in a separate page, then click on it again.)

The bright spot has, of course, been the internet; but the 1% is fast closing in on controlling that as well (click on the "media consolidation" label for a bit more info on that, and assume that things have gotten worse since those posts).

UPDATE: Some additional charts re- media ownership at freepress.net, also, I believe, fairly recent.

Speaking of Systemic Problems . . . (for Those New to "Corporate Psychopathy")

As the Boston Globe reported in a blurb on a paper by Babiak, P. et al., “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law (March/April 2010), "[o]ne of the authors of [a recent] study was hired by companies to evaluate managers . . . for a management development program. It turns out that these managers scored higher on measures of psychopathy than the overall population, and some who had very high scores were candidates for, or held, senior positions. In general, managers with higher scores were seen as better communicators, better strategic thinkers, and more creative. However, they were also seen as having poor management style, not being team players, and delivering poor performance. But, apparently, this didn’t prevent some of them from being seen as having leadership potential. The authors conclude that 'the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings.'”

Fast Company has an excellent article with more info.

What Politics Has in Common with Pro Wrestling: Kayfabe

From Eric R. Weinstein at Edge:

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working."

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. . . .

More at the link. (Thanks, Randy!)

Gene Youngblood Re- the New Art of Video

Long but worth it; via Phil Morton; shot at SAIC; sorry I have no further background; but I found Youngblood's discussion brilliant and prescient of later developments in contemporary art in general, as well as in video.



(UPDATED to add:) Partial transcription below by Shane Mecklenburger (the segments are not necessarily in the order spoken in the video; emphasis supplied):

‎" ... expanding the domain of your possible descriptions. The more your domain of possible descriptions is expanded, the less one description can control your behavior; the less you will believe any particular description about reality."

"Alienation is about not being able to see your meanings and values reflected in the world in which you live. So there's always this distance between you and everybody else and the world and you're kind of disjointed. And ok, you can live with that, but ... once in a while you have a non-alienated experience where you're just high and you just become one with something else, like you see a work of art or you meet a person and there's no distance, and that's 'you.' I see myself in you, I see myself in this: No more alienation. I maintain, which is not very profound because every other anthropologist and sociologist does, that alienation is an intrinsic product of modern industrial society, necessarily so, because it's all about centralized mass production and mass distribution, which necessarily must ignore individual values and preferences. How to solve that? It seems to me that you've got to have some filtering device between you as the 'receiver' and the source as the sender ... the complex things it allows you to do is realize your own personal identity through a medium that is basically intended to wipe out your identity."



‎"process me."

"There are no grounds for a common ethics except for a desire to have one. A desire which springs up in all of us as a result of living in a world of strife, controversy, hatred, so forth ... if we do have [a common ethics] it must now simply constitute an arbitrary decision of how to live, then the question becomes 'how are we to make that decision?' My answer is, first of all through a decentralized, user-controlled communication network, through which people could dialogue and exchange their values ... and over a period of time, and only through a system in which the users control the dialogue ... there is also emerging a common ethic, because what happens is common ethics emerge out of a domain of common experience. To the extent that you and I have a similar history of interactions, we may have a similar history of desires ... Desire is an industrial product. You can only desire what you are given. You can only choose from the set of possible choices that's held before you. So as a result of habituation, of enforced habit, we have all come to have a desire for whatever's on TV... so we learn one thing: common desires come from common histories, so the question then becomes, how to generate a domain of common histories without it becoming imperialistic; without it subordinating everyone like we do now with the mass media, and saying 'there is only one set of experiences that you can have and this is it'? This will determine that we all have a common history and therefore common desires, but there's got to be another way. To me the way is a decentralized user-controlled feedback communication system ... and then organically what would emerge out of this process, organically and naturally from the long-term behavior of the people, an organic ethic which would not be imposed upon them by the structure of some imperial system, but which would be educed out of us by this very adaptive system, a system which adapts to each individual user's needs."

‎"am i positioned correctly in the video domain?"

[This is spoken by someone else, not Youngblood, and is not transcribed as precisely] "yes, i tune in on it as exemplified by CB Radio, which at any time is user-controlled and it is a constant, ongoing dialogue situation. Which politically can only be described as anarchy, because no one ... if someone tries to dominate ... everybody can flip and go to another channel and say 'fuck off' ... and so the whole thing has this kind of constantly moving, uncontrolled except by the moment of use of what is happening in the system right now ... I realized ... there were rules that were supposed to be followed, the FCC will get you, blah blah blah, and all of a sudden i found out that nobody was going by the rules that were advertised. Everyone is going by the rules as they are constantly changing all the time right now. And that the best organizational description that I could lay on it is that this is anarchy. And it's working. And I had always heard that anarchy is this terrible thing and it can't work."

Youngblood responds by saying, you can govern by either attenuation and absorption, attenuation meaning that government prohibits activities it can't handle, and absorption meaning that government adapts to allow activities as far as possible, regulating them so far as necessarily to be able to handle them. But this kind of adaptation is only possible through "these tools" – such as the processor being used to manipulate the video of this conversation.

Wikileaks Update 2010-12-31: Wired Hung Out, Assange Dis-Implicated, Theories of System Collapse, & What Happens When You Steal a Hacker's Computer

During the last week, there's been a furious exchange of articles and tweets in/re- the Greenwald-Wired fight over the Manning-Lamo chat logs, which at present constitute the only evidence outside of the participants' heads that might either implicate or exonerate Assange of any accusations that he actively conspired to bring about Manning's alleged leaks. The issue is seen as critical because (1) Wired has published only about 25% of the logs, and (2) Manning's been incommunicado in solitary for over seven months, while (3) Lamo's been talking rather freely to the media, with the result that The NYT reported that he said Manning said Assange was actively involved in setting up special arrangements for Wikileaks' receipt of Manning's leaks, including a dedicated FTP server, which might or might not suffice as a basis for the US to charge Assange with conspiracy, although that's a whole 'nother issue.

The dust now seems to be settling, with Wired personnel confirming that the unpublished portions of the chat logs contain no reference to any such special facilities; which means there's no such reference in any of the logs except for one reference to an FTP in the portions of the logs that Wired's already published; and the consensus seems to be that that one reference cannot fairly be construed to prove anything amounting to conspiracy on Assange's part – i.e., Lamo's been misremembering or misreported. Sean Bonner and Rob Beschizza at boingboing have the best summary of the spat I've seen to date, plus additional info; and there's more background here (worth reading for its characterization of Assange as "international man of demystery," among other things.) UPDATE: The Guardian now has its own summary.

More great work at emptywheel by Marcy Wheeler, who originated much of the research/analysis relied on by Firedoglake and Glenn Greenwald re- inconsistencies re- the Manning-Lamo internet chats. In "Lamo's Two (?!) Laptops," she highlights additional, disturbing discrepancies in Lamo's statements (worth reading for yourself), and in "Assange Alerts His Hostages!" she spotlights the fact that his "insurance file" probably contains the names of top Arab officials alleged to have close ties to the CIA – info the US is probably just as interested to keep secret as are the Arab officials named.

Floyd Abrams, an attorney who represented The NYT in its battles over the Pentagon Papers, has, to the surprise and disappointment of many, put out a piece attacking Wikileaks. There have been a number of good rebuttals, but Marcy Wheeler may have shredded him best.

Lynn Parramore at HuffPo has an informative and eloquent essay decrying the lengthy detention of Manning under inhumane conditions, "Tortured Until Proven Guilty." And Kevin Carson has defended Manning as "One Soldier Who Really Did 'Defend Our Freedom.'"

Here's another list of "How Wikileaks Enlightened Us in 2010."

Apparently, Western Union has joined the effort to execute Wikileaks through financial strangulation without due process of law. Lasers_pewpewpew responded, "[s]o they are only too happy for you to send money to an African prince who will give you a cut of his fictional $20 million (ala 419 scam), but not to Wikileaks? . . . f*cking Epic!"

There's a fascinating new piece, "The Transparency Paradox," at colayer, re- what I've called Assange's theory of "the cost of tightened secrecy to organizational I.Q.," or as Volatility puts it more succinctly (see below), Assange's "secrecy tax." The author at colayer makes the point that, while greater transparency maximizes efficiency and profits for a group as a whole, individuals within the group profit most when they're not transparent while others in the group are. Just like, when you're negotiating, you have an advantage if you know what cards the other parties are holding but they're ignorant of yours. And the internet and other technologies now available have greatly reduced the cost of transparency.

Re- the big, "systems" picture, there's a great article at Volatility on "racketeering":

According to Joseph Tainter’s theory of imperial collapse, as societies become more complex, they must expend an ever greater portion of the energy they have available simply on maintaining their complexity. Although social and technological advances may achieve profitable returns for awhile, once a certain level of complexity is reached, diminishing returns set in. Eventually, at the late imperial stage, the complexity of the power structure, the military infrastructure, the bureaucracies, all the rents involved in maintaining an ever more bloated parasite class, their luxuries, the police state required to extract these rents and keep the productive people down, and the growing losses due to the response of the oppressed producers, everything from poor quality work to strikes to emigration or secession to rebellion, reaches a point where the system can only cannibalize itself and eventually collapse.

Julian Assange’s theory of the secrecy tax he’s trying to impose through Wikileaks is one example of these diminishing returns on imperial complexity. All the indications are that Wikileaks has been successful in this.

* * * * *
This is a welter of parasites battening on the same host. They’re in a zero sum game, not only against the people, but among themselves. Each has an interest in just exploiting the host, not killing it. But together they are killing it and therefore themselves. It’s clear none is capable of organizing or regulating the others. The federal government isn’t capable of doing it. If one big bank tried to do it, it would be subverted by the others. Each racket, from highest to lowest, is going to maximize its bloodsucking until there’s no blood left.

Note that, theoretically, so long as the system as a whole remains mostly transparent, it's not a zero-sum game (or at least, its productivity growth would be subject only to such physical limits as peak oil or climate change), because problem-solving and efficiency are maximized by pervasive info-sharing, and everyone's equally incentivized. In contrast, where transparency has sufficiently deteriorated, workers become less productive, both because of reduced info-sharing and because they're disincentivized – i.e., those not sharing info are still incentivized to continue to exploit the others, but once those who are being exploited figure out what's going on, they're discouraged from sharing and working hard just to enrich the exploiters. At this point, the competition devolves from who can produce the most of the best, into who can loot the most the fastest.

To this analysis, Assange adds the dimension of time and the role of foresight, in his 2006 essay for counterpunch, "Of Potholes and Foresight." To put part of his point in other words, a stitch in time often saves nine, and transparency makes that kind of foresight possible, which otherwise tends to give way to political pressures to allocate resources in more near-sighted ways.

Here's an article on governments' moves to control the internets. Not the most precise writing I've seen, but pulls together a few items of interest.

Here's a list of cables published in the Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, and not elsewhere. It was not one of the original Wikileaks partners, and everyone's mystified as to how they got the full cable cache. One observer says there are impt. revelations in there that the original partners haven't yet published.

Here's a good discussion of the nature of the Anons and how they view the evolution of collective intelligence. Roughly speaking, they believe their non-authoritarian, open (transparent), emergent mode of collective info-processing and action should and eventually will supplant the authoritarian, top-down, constricted mode common among big corporations and governments.

The FBI has seized a server allegedly used in some of the Anons' DDoS attacks.

And here's a presentation about what happens when you steal a hacker's computer:



Happy New Year, everyone! And remember, "the truth shall make you free." – John 8:32, the Bible, King James Version.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Company of Colours, 2009, Shadow Box 9, hi-res interactive display with built-in computerized tracking system. "This piece shows the live surveillance camera view constructed out of a variety of culturally significant color swatches and palettes, from the 4 shades of green of the original Nintendo Gameboy to the X11 CSS3web browser palettes."

From bitforms, at Pulse NY.

What if Congress Actually Had to Congregate . . .

. . . with each other?

Today got an email soliciting me to sign a petition calling for an end to the filibuster. It may be that that's what must be done; but history, including the "Healthcare Summit" convened by Pres. Obama yesterday, suggests that something both more and less drastic might suffice.

What if we simply forced Congressmembers to actually be present, not just in the building but in the same room, whenever they're in session? So that yes, if they wanted to filibuster, they'd have to actually be there and do it; and yes, while any discussion or other business were going on, they'd have to actually be there and conduct it, or possibly even listen to it?

If nothing else, they'd have less time for lobbyists and preaching to their respective choirs.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

www.thedailyshow.com

Social Evolution

Speaking of monopolies (see previous post),

Some cell behaviors – especially those that give the cell group its ability to exploit environmental resources – are cooperative in nature . . . . When genetic relatives are clustered together, cooperative cell behaviors like extracellular enzyme secretion can evolve more easily. Secreted enzymes, in turn, may allow a pathogenic bacterial colony to become more virulent, or a nascent cancerous tumor to become malignant.

. . . . In the three images shown here, the red and blue cell types do not differ in any way other than their color, which is used to determine whether a cell group remains well-mixed, or whether related cells tend to cluster together.

From left to right, environmental nutrient concentration was decreased from ubiquitous, to moderate, to sparse. As nutrient concentration decreases, the tendency for different genetic lineages to spontaneously segregate increases, which favors the evolution of cooperation.

More here; from the Art of Science 2009 Online Gallery, where there are more cool images (thanks, Bob!)

Bloodwork

Last time I checked online for blood cell animations, pickings were slim. Now one need look no further than YouTube. I rec. you get as many onscreen as possible (these are formatted so that, if you have the option of making this window big enough, you can get a nice, tight 3 x 3 array of embeds), play them all simultaneously, here or otherwise, then click replay as needed to keep them all going for a bit (audio desirable). (Happy Halloween.)

UPDATE: I made a vidi of my own results here.

Big Brother Suffers Further Pranks

This, via J-Walk Blog (original story in The Sentinel) is even better:

"[S]tudents from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers . . .

"Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later."

Funny how much money and effort Big Brother devotes to keeping an eye on the little guys, while arguing it's futile to try to regulate Wall Street . . .

(Thanks, Ben!)

Why Paulson's $700 Billion Socialism for the Rich Won't Work -- and What WOULD

Nano-Artwork Making Nano-Circuits

In 2000, I wrote (here), "[w]e've already begun incorporating computers into ourselves, and it’s hard not to believe that one day, computers themselves will qualify as a life-form. We may already have commenced our greatest creation, the species that will succeed us and carry on."

. . . . and (here), "[p]erhaps the key characteristics of a living system can be summed up as having to do with the regulation and processing of material passing in and out of the system so as to maintain itself as a recognizable identity or form. The article my friend gave me on general systems theory pointed out that boundary and identity maintenance are key functions of any living system. The boundaries or skin of any living system should be neither too yielding or permeable, on the one hand, nor too rigid or impenetrable, on the other hand. If the boundaries are too rigid or impenetrable, interaction between the entity and its environment will be overly restricted and the entity will likely starve, explode, stagnate, or be unable to respond or adapt as necessary to changing external conditions or events. An individual or group can be destroyed through failing to take in resources or new information quickly enough. On the other hand, if the boundaries are too soft or permeable, the entity may be too vulnerable to deformation or invasion by outside pressures or attack, or to being depleted, or otherwise destabilized or overwhelmed to the point that it either disintegrates or is changed beyond recognition.

* * * * *

"My theory also suggests there may be optimal velocities or rates at which various functions might be performed, i.e., rates of change that balance the need for growth and the need for stability, given the exigencies of the environment in which the system exists. For a system to be healthy in the sense of surviving in identifiable form, it seems a balance is needed between softness and hardness, openness and closedness, and between rapid and slow rates of change."

As Paul Rothemund says, "To create complex forms, life performs computations."

Reinventing the Wheel

From National Georgraphic, via Dark Roasted Blend (scroll down).

Scientists Discover Baby Galaxy Legos

Scientists have discovered "nine Lego-like 'building block' galaxies" -- "the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way". More (and a better version of this image) here.