twitter, informational manipulation, steam culture and telescopic evolution.

Mercy.

So ive got an obscene amount of things to do this week including a shit ton of sketches for Zombie Beach Patrol, a miniseries comic project im working on with a chap named Matt. also firing up the olde inkflow cannon and getting that fucking beast up and running with a little help from space lightning and monster fire, so that should be so time consuming that i take my own life.

but its all for the love, isnt it?

also against my better judgement for said week, i have decided to abstain from all of my vices. no cigs, no alcohol, no drugs, no reefer, no coffee, no orgasms and no internets.

i assume this will be terrible, but terrible things make nonterrible things even better, so 2 weeks from now will probably be awesome.

anyways heres a quick rant ive been meaning to rant about and i might as well get it done before i fast from the wired.

its about twitter announcing that they intend to systematically censor tweets based on different governments requests.


im going to keep it short because i feel like with all the things happening everywhere rants like this tend to sound similar, since they are in fact all connected in a lot of ways.

ok so this social platform called twitter, which owes its immense success on quite literally, freedom of speech in two areas: hollywood celebrity culture(the repulsive, empty side), and the recent arab springs/ows protests(the positive, potentially lifechanging side).

see it has this ability to connect everyone on earth in an instant, and during the protests it was a huge force in 'up to the second, feet on the ground, UNEDITED, crowd sourced news', which allowed people on the streets to coordinate and communicate on the fly, which is really an amazing thing to witness in action.


see this happens all the time when a company gets giant, they fall into the "too big to fail" mindset, like netflix did when they decided to split its services into two separate entities, or when bank of america decided to charge for having a debit card or when mcdonalds food processing techniques were found to be completely repulsive or when the government tried to censor the internet as a whole.



these 4 examples also have something else in common. they were all met with extreme, crowdsourced protests. as a result, all of these policies were quickly changed, suggesting that this is, in some ways, still a buyers market.

something like twitter has a purpose. its a laserfocused version of facebooks status update and introduced hashtags en masse to further its cause and become the infohub it is today.

see with businesses that start laserfocused, it starts out as something pure, and everyone notices how well it does at what its supposed to do. its the best of the best, 100% pure ideologies, theres nothing better for its intended purpose.

kinda like reeeeeally good meth.


but a lot of these companies dont have the strength to stand their ground like walter white up there does it terms of product quality, and they begin to get greedy. they then begin to cut their product with inferior ingredients and ideologies to maximize their output, and thus profits.

i believe that twitter will backpedal, as google eventually did with chinas censored search engine, but well see how it goes. it could easily be a publicity stunt to get people talking about twitter and its future as things move forward in time. i think its important to remember that while we all fought to keep the internet free from immediate censorship from the u.s. government, companies like google and twitter and facebook are NOT small companies. their focus, as with all corporate entities(especially publicly traded ones) is on continued growth and branching out, indefinitely.

spiral out, keep going.

to trust these companies fully is to misstep. they all have ties to politics and are more powerful and worth more than some countries, which is something to be watched of course, but they also revolutionized the world and are largely to thank for the way the world works now in terms of connectivity and information generation, as well as, on the downside, data collection.

the future will deal purely in information.

heres an excerpt from "The Mindscape of Alan Moore", a documentary on alan moore, the writer of watchmen and v for vendetta. yeah, hes the one responsible for the guy fawkes explosion over the past ten years and assumingly the reason anonymous uses the mask to represent their (un)organisation.

"If we take one period of human information as being the time between the invention of the first hand axe, say around 50 000 BC and 1 AD, then this is one period of human information and we can measure it by how many human inventions we came up with in that time. Then we see how long it takes for us to have twice as many inventions. This means that human information has doubled.

As it turns out, after the first 50 000 year period, the second period is about 1500 years, say around the time of the Renaissance. By then we had twice as much information. To double again, human information took a couple of hundred years. The period speeds up, between 1960 and 1970 human information doubled. As I understand it, at the last count human information was doubling around every 18 months.

Further to this, there is a point somewhere around 2015 when human information is doubling every thousandth of a second. This means that in every thousandth of a second we will have accumulated more information than we have in the entire previous history of the world. At this point all bets are off. I cannot imagine the kind of culture that might exist after such a flashpoint of knowledge. I believe that our culture would probably move into a completely different state, would move past the boiling point from a fluid culture to a culture of steam."



this doc was released in 2003.

googles CEO has been quoted recently as saying that human information is doubling now every 2 days. even people criticizing this statement come up with something like a doubling every 7 or 8 days instead. the point is its really moving now, compared to 2003s 18 month doubling, which is on par with, funnily enough, moores law(different moore), which basically states that transistors in a circuit, and thus technology as a whole, get twice as fast every 18 to 24 months due to mans ability to shrink technology using technology.

steam culture. telescopic evolution reaching some kind of peak and the speed in which information is produced superheats our already boiling lucid culture, leading to an eventual change in the way we must process our information.

once this happens, as moore says, "all bets are off."



you never know, maybe like kurzweil says well have a supercomputer in 2040 or so that will rival the brains redline capacity. maybe that supercomputer will be able to analyze all of this information weve been collecting ever since we created hard drives. maybe something like twitter will become some sort of collective human thought database to be bought and sold, copied and torrented. we found out the world wasnt flat, its entirely possible that well find out that creativity is another dimensional reality, or that our universe is just a drop in the bucket of something much, MUCH bigger.

no one knows whats going to happen, but thats what makes it so important. it will affect every one of us.

things are heating up on this little rock of ours.

anyway, the point is that information is and will continue to be mankinds most important resource, and any attempt to censor, bottleneck, manipulate or otherwise compromise this informational substrate will inevitably fail, and fail hard.

it is our job, as humans, to wonder and wander, in the darkness, try to make sense of it, always moving forward.

wherever forward is.

so get out there humans, there is much to do.
-human

part 2 of where the world is now, a quickie

Ok so between my first post about the world and this one, lots of things have been happening.

on january 18th wikipedia, google, flickr and thousands of other web sites had either gone dark or added additional pages to protest and bring attention to the SOPA/PIPA bills being strongarmed through congress. it was the largest recorded infonets protest ever, the presence was pretty intense.

on january 19th, feds brought down megaupload.com without so much as a whisper of due process, arresting people in new zealand and confiscating u.s. servers in virginia. within minutes the internets troops began rallying. for the remainder of the day and all the way through right to this minute, hacktivist group anonymous has been dropping government and mpaa web sites using thousands of anonymous ddos attacks from all over the world. theres a program called LOIC(low orbit ion cannon) that anyone can use to help anonymous etc flood servers.

i spent part of the day in an anon-run irc chat coordinating attacks and constantly receiving updates on the operation.

i watched as they systematically took down the department of justice website, fbi.gov, mpaa.org, universal, etc etc etc.

it was messy but vaguely organized, with people from all over the internet chiming in to let everyone know what was up or down.
"mpaa down in lithuania, fbi.gov down in brazil, mpaa chugging in u.s., down in canada, fbi.gov back up in argentina, etc."

the chatrooms caption changed depending on the prime target at any point, which changed every half hour or so. it was a mix of noobs like myself figuring out how to use LOICs and HOICs and skilled cats using all kinds of things i didnt understand, but it sounded like they had a lot more power to work with than i did on my toshiba tablet.

aside from this, the supreme court on the same day had ruled to make re-copywriting public domain works legal, which essentially gives corporations yet another way to own things they shouldnt. this affects anyone using public domain works to make a living, such as orchestras now being forced to pay licensing fees to play certain songs they could legally play a week ago.

also there was a rather large protest at UC riverside, on again the same day, in which occupy l.a. joined students protesting the constant enrollment fee hikes. several hundred if not thousands of people eventually pooled, as did roughly 200 police officers. rubber bullets were fired into the crowd injuring a few, and a professor was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer. the UC regency meeting was soon after closed to the public.

l.a. november 17th, 2011 through my eyecams

this is a longass post, i got so much data and it took forever to get it all into this thing so i apologize for the long wait and its superwordiness, but heres some stuff on the 2 month anniversary of occupy wallstreet, dubbed the official "day of action.", which happened 8 days ago today.






i wrote this that night:


"i am writing this on the steps of city hall, my bed for the night. when i woke up this morning i thought i was going to school, but before i left i saw a news report on the people that pitched tens in the intersection of figeroa and 4th street, the crowd of protestors and police. i saw a reporter patronizingly interview the denizens hand in hand forming a circle around their vinal domes. i saw many police, and news anchors with giggles on breath of things they couldnt or wouldnt understand. i had to see it for myself, unedited, and so do you. 2 buses and a subway, some three hours and one free bus fare later, i was in north hollywood station. there was no sign of anything, so i headed towards fig and 4th, but there was nothing. i started wandering and figured id know when i was there. i checks the feedsites, 23 people had been arrested not soon after id left home. it soon became apparent by looking at the sky that i was close. choppers.


5 floating choppers


it was surreal to suddenly see so many, and most of them immobile, just looming in the air, motionless at every main street in the area. there were easily 6 or 7 of them, just eerily floating with their dull buzzes in the distance. i began to walk towards one. 20 minutes and a cigarette with a syrian guy named aamir on a layover on his way to ireland from who knows where that had the same blue pouch of buglers rolling tobacco as me and needed a paper later i was met by a chunky tail of people marching along the sidewalks and streets, plugging up intersections with their flow of people, signwielders and screamers, eyecams and drummers and a saxophone playing man. i followed briefly on the opposite side of the street for a block or two listening to their words, humming their bassline and crossed over into a welcoming serpent of energy. cars honk their horns as they push through the street, yells and cheers coming within. people watch from high windows, police followed. i made my way to the head of the serpent, where was it headed? it tunneled through the meat and metal traffic of the financial district and reached its apparent destination. a bank of america. maybe THE bank of america.

the serpent was long


the serpent stretches and coils around it, floods through its rent a cops and private security and the small showing of the lapd, around 20 or 25. we were many more and they barely were seen as establishing a presence. from what i gather from my surroundings, having dove into the thing mid-slither, is that a permit was held to hold a peaceful march for the day, but the arrival of several hundred people and the erection of a small group of 10 or 12 tents on their front lawn was a surprise and not part of the deal. over the next few hours, more and more people filled up the bofa plaza and surrounding streets, and so to did the police arrive. more and more of them, then all of them as i understand it, later reenforced with neighboring precincts. the choppers began to focus on the area. the police sport light riot attire, clubs and faceshielded helmets, guns and radios, bean shotguns and tear cannons; and form a line in front of the building, thats when the tents went up. once they did, the entire plaza, then all adjacent streets and intersections and parking garages were surrounded and blocked. i counted early on and there were around 60 of them in front of the building and and a section of the tent perimeter. there were cop cars in the middle of the streets, side by side two by two, spanning back two full blocks, ive never seen so many. in retrospect it was the perfect time to rob a bank somewhere else, but i digress. id never seen such a huge police presence with my own eyes, and for a little old peaceful protest and a bank. estimates at its peak saw 350 to 400 cops in riot gear, wearing guns and brandishing batons. the media then came, like a plague. all the tv outlets, loads of blogs, time magazine, the l.a. times, and tons of freelance reporters and photographers. i havent yet seen how the news is spinning it, but it was beautiful. anyway the police lines thinckened and tightened, surrounding wide perimeter of the tents, took them down, arrested 43 of its denizens and very slowly, over the course of several hours of pointed words and careful babysteps into the setting sun and beyond, the crowd took back to the streets in many subsnaked directions.

3:11 for the bulk of the cities police


theres a funny thing about laws. they are words, and words are interpretive. it was indeed private property, but with a cityordered clause of general public access 24 hours a day. eventually the commander(i dont believe the chief was present) claimed that the corporation of bank of america had issued essentially a court-ordered citizens arrest of trespassers on the property and had to do it because it was the law. it was a heated, messy talk between many people, message carriers weaving through the crowd to their respective groups. police higher ups, lawyers, the mayors people, march organizers and everyone in the nexus' vicinity had a take on what the flimsy law and actions held up. during those hours i held the front lines with my fellow citizens, face to face with helmetshield covered faces. face to face with fellow citizens. i talked to many of them, who wouldnt share an opinion on the situation, i mustve asked 30 of them.

opinions and badges, a venn diagram consisting of two nontouching circles.


with a badge comes an inability to voice an opinion. when they were on duty, they were to do as they were told, and you could tell that that bothered some of them. they tightened their squeeze on the minicamps perimeter and i began to roll video and get all of their faces, badge numbers and names, just in case. 20 or so minutes later, their grip loosened and fell back to their main perimeter around the plaza. anyway that was midday an hour or so after the tents went up. back to the face to face line. the majority of the officers were relatively respectful and delicate about the whole situation, some wanted to bust heads, you could tell. most didnt, most just wanted to go home. just like us. i talked to the officer i was face to face with in the line a fair bit, his name was wells. he seemed like a stand up guy, unable to openly speak about the present goings on, but visibly struck by it. there was a cop behind their line walking along their spines and whispering to them. "keep your batons raised." "take an inch." i asked wells why the guy didnt pick up a baton himself and join the line, and wells just gave me one of those "yep, this is fucked." faces. this man did not want to be there and he knew what this group stood for was right, but he had a family to feed, i asked. he understood, a lot of them did, and thats really what this movement is about, opening a dialogue within the country, to really get a conversation going between the people, all of them who are being affected by the worlds spinning out of control. looking at a police line, looking at a protest line, they were like looking at a mirror for both sides. both sides had good men and women. and bad men and women. scumbags looking for trouble and disheartened people trying to fix something broken and every shade in between. the media will spin it however they feel will best suit their needs since the majority of them are the very things being protested against. but they arent on the front line, they arent there, not really. today ended without tear gas or vicious beatings, or pepper spray or molotov cocktails or rubber bulletstorms. today ended with both sides foced to look one another in the eyes, size each other up, knowing that its not over by a longshot and theyre on the same side, in the same group, wearing different clothing, and that the way things are being run are both irresponsible, unsustainable, and generally fucking everyone. its a matter of pack size and the law still has the biggest pack on the streets, but that could easily change. a times on its way when those on the same side will have to make the conscious decision to work together or come to blows, to the dismay or joy of the people peering over the edge of the top of the world.








so here i am, here at city hall, here at this makeshift tent city, like an amalgamation of a camping trip and the lost boys neighborhood, mashed together with the white pillars of government buildings and trees, here with all of these people. i sat in at a meting of the nightly general assembly to hear many voices of the movement. everyone is given time and voices and ears, and all together. these people arent disorganized and stupid like their oppressors would have you believe, there are just so many ideas, with so many perspectives, with so little resourses, its bound to get messy, thats just how it is. but make no mistake, these are people with plans, and every direction is forward."

-its cheesy, but i was hopped up on pride and adrenaline. it was a good night.

the giants have begun to swing

theres a lot of things happening this week that i cant find presented as a whole by a proper news organization, maybe im just an idiot.

three things stuck out:

google is found to have refused multiple requests by law enforcement to takedown userbased videos of police brutality

the feds and uk police raid 40 anonymous members homes

the protect ip act aka the internet blacklist bill aka the us governments proposed chinesesque firewall of america is in transit through the house


so then. stir that up a bit.







feds hit anonymous








google releases a chart documenting takedown requests by world governments, refuses to take down police brutality vids



here is the chart






internet blacklist bill moving right along

the words and numbers
communicate

time to close some tabs

Take Anything from Henrik Östergaard on Vimeo.

Showreel 2011 from Henrik Östergaard on Vimeo.

linky

The Lullaby - 2011 - By Joe Fenton from Joe Fenton on Vimeo.