Rave Toilet

(Thanks, Ben!)

Big Brothers Are Ganging Up on Us

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

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“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told [Wired,] as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

This is particularly disturbing if you've kept up with this.

PS: Why is Nineteen Eighty-Four not available through Netflix?

"What I Learned from the Army": Killology

What I learned from the army about language and dehumanization

It's hard to get people to shoot other people when they aren't in imminent danger. People have the unfortunate habit of seeing other people as fellow humans. They hesitate, they start questioning the ethics of what they are doing. It eats them up and ruins them for battle.

We do two things in basic training to compensate for that. We work on instincts, training people to shoot faster and view their targets as a video game or a measure of our own skill, rather than personalizing them. Silhouettes pop up and down so fast, and they look like people but they are paper with aiming circles printed on them. We start categorizing our targets as not fully human. Colonel Grossman is somewhat of an expert on that [http://www.killology.com].

The other thing we do in basic, in military culture in general, but it's very specifically started in basic training, is we use language to normalize the dehumanization of others and assert our own supremacy. We use slurs against whoever is the enemy de jour, and we do this because normalizing their characterization as lesser than fully human, based on their group identity, is an important step in making violence against them more acceptable.

Haji, the word when it's owned by the people who truly own it, it's nothing offensive. It's people on a pilgrimage. But we use it in the army do identify them as The Other. Commanders understand the importance of Othering the enemy. When Mattis said "It's fun to shoot some people," that wasn't an accident. It's part of normalizing the enjoyment of violence because the people committing that violence need to believe it's normal, in order to stay sane while doing it.

He went on to add: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” Mattis said. “You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

That's a great statement if you know your men are going to be killing Afghan civilians in the course of their normal business. It uses language to mark them as different because they are muslim, and it marks them as Lesser Than Real Men. They don't have any manhood, so they are lesser than fully human, in the default (male) sense.

It's genius, really, because he can claim it's about defending women even as he's upholding and appealing to male supremacy.

And it's genius because it shows he understands dehumanizing language as a sort of gateway drug to violence without remorse.

(Thanks, noamnety!)

David O'Reilly's "Please Say Something"

"[A] 10 minute short . . . contain[ing] 23 episodes of exactly 25 seconds each." O'Reilly's "TAGS: 30 Second Breakneck Heartbreak Uncut Turbodrama. Fatfree Ultraviolent Freezedried Shrinkwrapped Antiballet Timeline Easyopen Modern Unpunctuated Crass Clean Crisp High Definition Subversive Absurd Arrogant Loud Pretentious Sugarcoated Sincere Authentic Stories. Please Say Something, any answer will do." It's brilliant.

Please Say Something by David OReilly.

(Thanks again, Video Association!)

The Bechdel Test

(Thanks, Video Association!)

X20+ @ The M.A.C.

(Dallas), Sat., Aug. 7. The second exhibition organized by artist Mary Benedicto under the "X20+" rubric. I'll be presenting a recent video/interactive piece, probably some time after 8:30PM. (The piece at right is not mine, but I like it -- ripped it off the invite; not certain whose it is.)

More info on the exhibition here.

Oil, Water, Dispersants, and Booms

"I refuse to acknowledge this as anything like an accident. I think that this is the result of gross negligence. Not just B.P. B.P. operated very sloppily and very recklessly because they could. And they were allowed to do so because of the absolute failure of oversight of the government that's supposed to be our government, protecting us. It turns out that -- you see this sign on almost every commercial vessel in the United States -- you know, if you spilled a couple of gallons of oil, you would be in big trouble. And you have to really wonder who are the laws made for, and who has gotten above the laws. Now there are things that we can do in the future. We could have the kinds of equipment that we would really need. It would not take an awful lot to anticipate that after making 30,000 holes in the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil, oil might start coming out of one of them. And you'd have some idea of what to do. . . .

"But I think we have to understand where this leak really started from. It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it's our government, meant to protect the larger public interest. So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause. We still seem to understand that at least we need the police to protect us from a few bad people. And even though the police can be a little annoying at times -- giving us tickets and stuff like that -- nobody says that we should just get rid of them. But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years, there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from, buying the government out from under us.

"Now this has been a problem for a very, very long time. You can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of America. And even Thomas Jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country. Okay, people who say they're conservative, if they really wanted to be really conservative and really patriotic, they would tell these corporations to go to hell. That's what it would really mean to be conservative. So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost. I think there are signs of hope."

Wikileaks

Below is an interview of Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange, from shortly before Wikileaks' recent publication of "secret" US military docs re- Afgahanistan. First, a condensed version of a few of the speakers' remarks:

JA: . . . . So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good. Because the organizations that know it best, that know it from the inside out, are spending work to conceal it. And that's what we've found in practice. And that's what the history of journalism is.

[Interviewer]: But are there risks with that, either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large, where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence?

JA: Not that we have seen with anything we have released. I mean, we have a harm immunization policy. We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal -- personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets -- you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret. But we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated.

[Interviewer]: So they are well-motivated. And what would you say to, for example, the, you know, the parent of someone -- whose son is out serving the U.S. military, and he says, "You know what, you've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out. It shows a U.S. soldier laughing at people dying. That gives the impression -- has given the impression to millions of people around the world that U.S. soldiers are inhuman people. Actually, they're not. My son isn't. How dare you?" What would you say to that?

JA: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. But remember, the people in Baghdad, the people in Iraq, the people in Afghanistan -- they don't need to see the video; they see it every day. So it's not going to change their opinion. It's not going to change their perception. That's what they see every day. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all. And that's our hope.

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[Assange's "core values":] . . . well, capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims.

UPDATE: I don't quite get how the secret US docs re- Afghanistan recently released by Wikileaks tell us nothing that wasn't already a matter of public knowledge, AND at the same time, the release was an irresponsible act likely to endanger hundreds of lives.