Sunday Reading

Aaron Bady

nathan jurgenson

Ready (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010 from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

"Trecartin’s characters, like the modern-day technophiles they satirise, are umbilically linked to their Blackberries"
"if you haven’t visited the Deep Web, you ain’t seen nothing yet"
"nothing in society makes sense except in the light of power. And that goes for speech, too"
“it used to be hard to connect when friends formed clicks, but it is even more difficult to connect now that clicks form friends”
"how did the Awkward Party Comment shift from “I know, I read your Livejournal” to “You read what I posted on Facebook, right?”
"Red Bull will most likely never fund a trip to Mars or a high speed rail line"
"It became very difficult to look at the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building without thinking that they looked CG"
"self-broadcasting always feels like agency, even if it only builds the walls of our own personal terrordome"
"A 3-year-old shouldn’t know which of her actions are worthy of being documented"
"gamification seems to invite false consciousness arguments because it's scary that "play" can be so completely non-transgressive"
"Are we using technology to stylize our unease with the present, our feeling of disconnection from the past?"
"Why I felt OK outing Violentacrez: Anonymity should be valued mainly to the extent it helps protect powerless from powerful. VA wasn't that"
"Surface is going to make some kind of history for Microsoft, one way or another"
"I always react negatively against the idea that technology is a foreign body inside the human" (1997)
"You do not hear about a YouTube video in the press w/o hearing about how many views it has, and that’s not accidental"
"over the past two years social media has also become an increasingly hostile place for women writers and journalists"
"to design with an eye to how clothes look online, perhaps sacrificing how they feel on the body"

ReclaimUC

Must-read piece on Fisher v. Texas: How diversity came to replace anti-racism. Also interesting, At the Supreme Court, a timid defense of affirmative action.
The political economy of essay-scoring
Some interesting education pieces in the new Insurgent Notes: Lessons from the 2012 Quebec Student Strike,Preliminary Observations on the Chicago Teachers' Strike, and Beyond Ordinary Leftism.
Are we approaching "peak tuition"? Meanwhile, student debt loads continue to grow: "Students in the class of 2011 who took out loans graduated with an average of $26,600 in debt, a 5 percent increase from last year."
UC: Chris Newfield on the necessity, but insufficiency, of Prop 30: "To repeat, it is essential to pass Proposition 30, whose passage is not assured. . . . And yet Prop 30 isn't close to adequate." And the new, 2012 UCSC Disorientation Guide is out!

Jacob Remes

What happens when a geoengingeering "enthusiast" illegally dumps 100 tonnes of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean? Nobody knows, but we're finding out now.
Possibly the most important thing to do after a disaster:people-centered reconstruction
Marginal quote: "First, it means trusting people themselves to make choices, rather than handing those choices over to professionals (architects and engineers)."
A future of urban agriculture
A past of urban agriculture
"The biggest challenge facing the next President of the United States is runaway inequality."
Unite Here President John Wilhelm is retiring. He made his name on a campaign that teaches us quite a bit about organizing academic workplaces, organizing democratically, women in the labor movement, and organizing for respect, not just wages.
Chris Hayes on undecided voters in 2004: "a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the 'political'" that only real organizing, not only for elections, can change.
Bosses telling their workers how to vote (and firing them for expressing contrary opinions) is just standard union-busting behavior transported to the electoral realm.
The vexillological iconography of revolution and republicanism in Spain's anti-austerity protests.
You make history interesting by paying people to share it in an interesting way, not by wishing for more blood and guts.
"Only Immigrants Can Save Japan"

l.e. long

bint battuta