Sunday Reading

ReclaimUC:

nathan jurgenson

"The commodity markets of capitalism have made being truly different as difficult as space travel, and being merely different as easy as online shopping"
"The more labor we pour into our 'product'—that is, ourselves—the more we value we assign to it"
"I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, & I find myself laughing in the dark"
"the technocratic character of political debate is causing the irrationality of science to overflow its bounds"
"After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation"
“Using microchips, proud grandparents threaten to store thousands of images on portable show-and-tell miniscreens”
"The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else"
"with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway"
“Is a tweet labor? Is a Facebook post labor?”
"Drone makers have been courting the paparazzi"
"widespread bigotry and rape culture are just as big if not bigger barriers to a free and open Internet as over-zealous copyright laws and bandwidth caps"
"there is no good pre-internet metaphor for what it's trying to do"
"sources confirmed that the president said “Go get ’em!” and quietly watched the drone fly off into the night sky"
"Drones permit and accelerate new topographies of warfare"
"The Auto-Tune or not Auto-Tune debate always seems to turn into a moralistic one, like somehow you have more integrity if you don’t use it"
"we might someday wonder why our childhood memories are held under DRM"

T. F. Charlton:

Kerim Friedman:

Jacob Remes:

The European rewards and American dangers of free transit.
Greg Grandin on Hugo Chavez.
"Chávez’s detractors see this mobilized sector of the population much the way Mitt Romney saw 47 percent of the US electorate, not as citizens but parasites, moochers sucking on the oil-rent teat."
"If we pretend elite college students aren't sexually assaulting their peers, the rape fairy will make it all disappear."
A Quick Blow, Then Lingering Death for Devastated Towns
The truth about Vikings.
"The odd Norse loans seem an awesome window onto a gang of ungainly, rugged, angry fellows, bands of low rotten crooks winging it at the stern's wake, sly, flawed “guests” who, craving geld, flung off their byrnies, thrusting and clipping calves and scalps with clubs."

L. E. Long:

Frank Pasquale:

China model: 83 billionaires in Congress; hand-cranked ventilators for the people; extreme real estate bubble.
Russian thinking on what to do after an asset grab.
Thoughts on the surveillance society; Google's privacy record; Quotations from Chairman Schmidt.
Quotations from Chairman Schmidt: "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about" "Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are" "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time" “Some governments will consider it too risky to have thousands of anonymous, untraceable, unverified citizens – 'hidden people;' they’ll want to know who is associated with each online account and will require verification at a state level, in order to exert control over the virtual world.”
Google Guinea pigs; part II; Google as future of law enforcement and drug safety determinations.
Mistaking free information for freedom.
MOOCS to "enrich a select class of content aggregators;" beware infographics.
"Many scholars [fail] to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation."

Kitabet:

“If the walls are the book and graffiti the revolution’s message, poetry is a visible part of that telling.”
“we are standing until the asphalt speaks”
Letter from a Congo Literary Festival
Manual of Decolonization: an architectural toolkit for a post-occupation West Bank
“Calcutta is the first place I encountered modernity and became addicted to it.”
An interview with Amit Chaudhuri
The Prophet of Aleppo
“In Hackney, the riots are spoken about in strangely fond terms….”
When Electricity Was New, People Used it to Mimic the Moon
The moon towers of fin de siècle America
More Thoughts on the Dangerous Fragility of Men
The University as a Site of Struggle: on Occupying in a Midwest College Town
“With regards to graduate students and faculty, we need to dispel the notion that your scholarship can be your activism.”
The Good, Racist People
Amnesia in Mesopotamia (the remnants of the Iraqi National Library)

Bint Battuta: