Present: Spiro, Jerimi, Jon, Kate, Michael.
1. The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution by Petter Biddle, Microsoft Corp, 2004 (Up to section 3).
"The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:
Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
- Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels."
The title of this document introduces the term Darknet, but doesn't explain how the term was arrived at or why they chose that term. Its a very interesting choice. Clearly Microsoft considers themselves to be the emitters of "light", and software pirates as the "dark" network. This coming from a company often referred to as the Evil Empire / Dark Force.
In the abstract, the authors refer to the "darknet genie", as in "the genie is out of the bottle". We wondered what magic powers this genie might have.
Spiro liked the phrase "Today, things of value are increasingly less tangible". Its echoed by Negreponte's notion of moving from atoms to bits.
2. The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 1, by Guy Debord, 1967.
"Guy falls into the Nihilism camp like most french guys do. Its either that or get religious". Spiro.
"The Spectacle is the mind, with all its powers and all its limitations." Spiro.
Whereas the 10 pages of the Darknet piece took barely half an hour to cover, in the remaining two hours we only covered 4 pages of the Debord piece! We read items 1-19.
Re. (2). The "unity" that is referred to - is that the Christian sense of unity, where man was one with nature, before Adam and Eve and the Apple? When did Spectacle come into existance - ever since cavemen and the painting? Or is spectacle restricted to modern means of production? This paper clearly presents both possabilities.
Is the spectacle "good" or "evil". We talked about IPods. IPods amputate our ears, but they also allow you to carry around lots of music. Is an iPod part of the spectacle, and if so is it evil? Jon said yes, because its part of the whole music generation/consumption industry. Jeremi said no, since anyone can create files that can be played in the iPod. Kate said the iPod was an aesthetic achievment, not something to describe as "evil".
One effect of the iPod is that it eliminates the album cover - music is reduced to a pure form, just a label linked to a song. Music makers used to wear fancy cloths and have big instruments. Then there were album covers, often carrying significant political messages. Now, music is just a file collected with other audio files and exchanged by the Darknet. "Whoever would have guessed that the carrying-case would become the cool object, rather than the things carried".
Technology has become more transparent, more intrinsic since this piece was written. Is this a zino's paradox: is cyber-reality just one step closer to apparemt freedom, getting us closer, but never quite reaching it?
The piece raises that haunting question of when do you document the spectacle vs when do you just live it?
References:
Academy Leader, William Gibson
The Weather Underground: Thirty years ago, with these words, a group of young American radicals announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. Fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War and racism in America, they went underground during the 1970s, bombing targets across the country that they felt symbolized "the real violence" that the U.S. government and capitalist power were wreaking throughout the world. From pitched battles with police on Chicago's city streets, to bombing the U.S. Capitol building, to breaking acid-guru Timonthy Leary out of prison, this carefully organized clandestine network attempted to incite a national revolution, while successfully evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history. Now an academy award winning documentary.
Waking Life, in which Debord briefly appears in one scene:
Waking Life Essay, by Carlo Cavagna
... the anarchist youths encounter a "Mr. Debord," who is a clue to Linklater's inspirations for Waking Life. Debord quotes the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): "Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest." All this is a clear reference to renowned anarchist filmmaker and author Guy Debord (1932-1994). Debord's most famous work is Society of the Spectacle (1967), which became a manifesto of the 1968 student revolts in Paris. Building on the ideas of Nietzsche, the anarchists, and the surrealists, Debord wrote that media and technology ("the spectacle") have reduced people to voyeurs of their own lives, with all their needs and desires commodified (this recalls the words of the self-immolator and the conspiracy theorist). Debord helped found the Situationist International, a group of activist artists who, like the surrealists, wished to transcend the separation of art and society to make art a part of everyday life.
This is, of course, exactly what Linklater hopes to do with Waking Life. For the Situationists, the way of erasing the separation was not through political revolution, but by reinventing everyday life. Changing widely held perceptions of reality and liberating one's own self--what Waking Life ultimately advocates--is the same thing as transforming society. Like Nietzsche and Sartre, the Situationists said that individuals should live to their potential by constructing the "situations" of their own lives (thus the source of their name). Unfortunately, after 1968, Debord constructed a situation of alcohol abuse and eventually shot himself in the heart--Stevenson's drink, suicide, and, perhaps, the devil, took care of Debord.
Immediatism by Hakim Bay