December 16, 2022

📡 – 2022-12-16

I have known many boxes. The first, I think, was the AIM Away Message Box, followed closely by the message message box and then by the array of boxes comprising my user profile (which I loved so much I used a trick to give it even MORE boxes). Then the Keyword box. The IE, and then the Netscape URL bar. IRC. Something Awful. Did Friendster have status updates? I don’t remember. It did have testimonials, though. One, two, skip a few, 99… Twitter. What’s Happening?

It’s hard not to feel, sometimes, like one’s experience of the internet is akin to endless paperwork; social media has tricked us into filling out forms for fun (and also, “fun”). So much so we’ll do it while looking at ads. The malaise of picking up a new social platform is in part, I think, over having to learn what all the new boxes are – where and to whom they send the various statuses. Or perhaps it is in simply meeting yet another box. Not much, you?

This week, as Twitter continues its Elon tailspin, Meta introduced an Instagram feature called “Notes,” which (anecdotally) seems to strike many users as a return to first principles: the away message. You type 60 characters into a box, and that text is pinned to your profile for 24 hours. It is, as far as I know, Instagram’s first text-only feature and is being described as a Twitter competitor.

Is it? Maybe. Maybe eventually. Good luck to ‘em. What I wonder is … how done are we? Are we done? Maybe it’s the post-exertional malaise of dealing with Twitter Right Now, but I see increasingly many mutuals render their assumed exit from the platform as something along the lines of “Where will I go after here? Maybe nowhere.” I think about Nicholas A. John, writing “no one (surely) thinks that social media are, in toto, a force for harmony, mutuality, and caring.” We might be done. I might be done?

I think about My Life in the Bush of Platforms; as a “geriatric millennial” who feels like he has signed up for every major service the internet has had to offer (Yikyak, anyone? Peach? Ello?) I feel capable of two opposed reactions: going easily wherever everyone goes next (hi, I’m on mastodon) but also going gently into that good social media night 💀 I rely on social media for (getting) work less and less, I find myself frustrated with my use of it more and more but I also find it increasingly fascinating in an increasingly [REDACTED] world. I love to stare at the sun. I’m a weird little guy.

Looking at the Instagram Notes, I think … I do not need another box. But did I type into it? Of course. Who am I kidding? I’m not done.

And neither are you. Here’s some stuff I liked.

👂

Two things, first:

One - The Roulette Archive

Roulette is a long-running arts institution here in New York. It was founded in 1978 as a home for off-center music. It’s now in Brooklyn, but spent a good portion of the late 20th century in Manhattan, where it was a fixture of Downtown Music.

I knew Roulette recorded a fair number of their many (many) yearly performances, but I didn’t appreciate just how true that was until I gave my first serious look at their archive which is, to put it lightly, incredible.

If you’re interested in jazz, free improvisation, new music, American avant-garde and any of the other things that define however you might understand a “downtown scene” … I cannot recommend spending some time perusing their collection, which spans 40 years and has 3000 audio recordings of, frankly, mind-blowing quality.

If you need a place to start, I made some recommendations on Twitter.

Two - Steffen Basho-Junghans

A couple weeks ago the guitar player Steffen Basho-Junghans passed away. He was an absolute legend of an acoustic guitar player, a man who spent his entire life engaged in a search of all the meaning one could wring from an instrument. He played folk, American Primitive (a lá Fahey), Takoma fingerstyle (a lá Kottke), jazz, avant garde, classical, he told stories; he was simply amazing, and I cannot recommend his work highly enough. There is plenty on bandcamp; IS is one of my favorites, but they’re all good.

On With The Show

I have a very distinct memory of hearing Ryoji Ikeda for the first time. It was in the Electronic Music studio at Bennington College. Someone framed his record +/- as an exercise in auditory illusion, in coaxing music from barely anything, and in placing sonic objects at positions in the stereo field with extreme and often surprising precision. +/- is a challenging listen. I can’t seem to find the version I know best online, but this is close. Ikeda’s catalog is large, and it varies … but within a tight focus of bleeps, beeps, clicks and pops. So imagine my surprise when ultratronics comes along and … there’s drum loops! All this to say … the record is rad, and it may seem tough at first. Just stick with it.

EDIT: Looks like, as soon as this went up, the record was taken down from BC. lol? I hope that wasn’t my fault somehow. You can catch it on streamers, though, and buy it from Boomkat.

Quarantine music; pretty, nostalgic, slow.

I don’t normally like to share pre-orders until they’re out, but there is no way this is not going to be incredible.

I almost didn’t want to post this SkyThala record, and interrupt the color scheme I had going for the art of the first three records but … hard to argue with Stravinsky inspired metal. Killer stuff.

📖

The Biggest Strike in Starbucks' History Is Underway

The Biggest Strike in Starbucks' History Is Underway - In These Times

Starbucks workers at around 100 stores have begun a national three-day walk out, the union campaign’s largest action yet.

In addition to going on strike, the union is also asking customers not to purchase Starbucks gift cards during the holiday season. This fiscal year, the company made a reported $212 million from leftover money on gift cards but has not been transparent on how it uses those funds.

The internet is headed for a 'point of no return,' claims professor

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-12-internet-professor.html

Eventually, the disadvantages of sharing your opinion online will become so great that people will turn away from the internet. This is the argument made by Geert Lovink, Professor at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science (AUAS) and University of Amsterdam in his new essay Extinction Internet. While Lovink's previous research focused on critical counterculture and possible alternatives, such as fairer social media platforms, he now sketches a future in which the internet (partially) disappears and we are forced to give up our tech addiction.

Lovink has retained his reputation as an internet pioneer ever since his involvement with The Digital City, a precursor to the internet. Its founders envisioned it becoming a decentralized network, maintained by citizens, for citizens. "We lost that battle in spectacular fashion," Lovink sums up. The fact of the matter is that the internet and addictive apps are in the hands of Big Tech, which cares little for individual rights or society as a whole.

You can read the slides and text of Lovink’s talk here.

Building the Ironworkers

https://popula.com/2022/12/13/building-the-ironworkers/

I organized for Ironworkers Local 377–San Francisco from 1999 to 2002, during the dot-com boom. The local’s jurisdiction extends from Big Sur north through coastal counties to the Oregon line. My territory was everything north of Page Mill Road, just below Stanford University.

Many jobsites I found through the Dodge Reports, a commercial publication obtained for us by the California State Building and Construction Trades Council. Others I found by taking a different route every time I crossed the City or drove down and up the Peninsula, or even by standing atop the City’s Twin Peaks and looking for cranes.

Some, I couldn’t enter. Work in safety containment, such as for asbestos, is inaccessible, as is work in secured locations such as prisons and military facilities. The work of a raising gang, the Ironworker crew that chases the sky with steel, is a pas de cinq, sometimes six—two connectors, hook-on, tag-line, pusher, sometimes phones. The dance is always dangerous. Steel is moving, flown by crane or derrick. Though I never saw the dance as refined in non-union as in union work, in respect for the workers and their risks, I never cut in.

Literally everything you need to know about video game unions

How and why video game studios unionize - Polygon

Literally everything you need to know about video game unions

This pamphlet is neither an all-encompassing instruction manual, nor legal guidance, nor a demand that every studio unionize. What we have assembled is purely information, and for many, inspiration for a potentially better way. This is, for those interested, an overdue first step in the marathon. And those who are indeed interested should seek direct guidance from labor relations professionals, like lawyers and union organizations noted here and elsewhere.

NYC’s Proposed Private Helicopter Ban Is One of the Best Ideas in Years

NYC’s Proposed Private Helicopter Ban Is One of the Best Ideas in Years

Banning private nonessential helicopters would be a political and environmental masterstroke: curbing the wasteful narcissism of the rich, while improving life for everyone else.

It’s obviously intolerable. Numerous studies have also found it associated with what is called, in scientific jargon, “annoyance.” The noise pollution of “the chop” is even worse than annoying. Research also shows that helicopter noise, horribly deafening, causes stress, daytime sleep disturbance, loss of concentration, as well as physical health problems like hypertension. (New York City’s proposed ban does not include police helicopters, alas.) It mars some of our cherished parks, like Governor’s Island, which would otherwise be idyllic urban retreats. Of course, rich people buy second and third homes in quiet places, precisely to avoid the cacophony they create in cities. But as New York City transportation activist and thinker Charles Komanoff wrote last year, in arguing for the helicopter ban, “Quiet isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a luxury.”

Anti-corporate sentiment in U.S. is now widespread in both parties

Democrats, Republicans agree banks and big companies aren’t good for country | Pew Research Center

The U.S. public’s views of banks and other financial institutions, as well as large corporations, have become much more negative recently.

Overall, Americans view small businesses much more positively than the eight other institutions included in the survey. Eight-in-ten adults say small businesses have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, and just 18% say they have a negative effect.

Majorities of Americans also say the military (62%), K-12 public schools (55%), labor unions (54%), churches (53%), and colleges and universities (53%) have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.

Convenient efficiency: A media genealogy of QR codes

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448221141086

This article explains the widespread adoption of Quick Response (QR) codes from a media genealogy perspective. Understanding QR codes as more than the materiality of their machinic embodiments and rather as a method of systematically and repeatedly addressing emergent problems, I argue that the operative logic of QR code is that of convenient efficiency. Convenient efficiency captures three dynamics that drive QR codes’ ubiquity: the potentiality of spontaneous system synergies (system/distributed convenience coupled with streamlined efficiency); the autonomy of the subjects involved as part of this cybernetic system (personal convenience coupled with stacked efficiency); and the relative independence of the networks/assemblages that these practices constitute (convenient efficiency). That the convergence between convenience and efficiency as driving forces in contemporary technological culture has origins in the shop floor is consequential to the way motion, time and the body become disciplined—as well as the epistemological practices that cohere around these forces.

📹

👾

Norco is finally out on consoles so I’ve been working my way through that during my scant playing time over the last couple weeks. It’s a classic-style point and click narrative adventure game about an alternate-future Norco, Louisiana - a town shaped (though some might fairly say “crushed”) by petroleum engineering concerns. In real life, that’s Shell, which bought the land from the New Orleans Refining Company… thus (no joke) … Norco.

The pseudonymous creator Yuts has said the game is heavily influenced by their work with the recently deceased “Marxist-Environmentalist" scholar Mike Davis, which is probably all you need to know about how the game comes down re: its take on Big Petroleum.

Highly recommended, so far; for fans of Disco Elysium, Strangers in Their Own Land, Kentucky Route Zero, &c.

🤓

Over the last couple years I’ve been doing these streams that feature a bear made out of bricks. Those went on hiatus for a little while as I worked on a new system to make them, namely learning Blender and Unreal Engine - both of which I now know enough about to be really irritating at a party.

The most recent few streams are the first I’ve done using this new approach, which I think is fun, and find very promising for a lot of reasons. I wrote a little bit on how I think about these “checkpoint” streams on my patreon (public post), which is also something of a reflection on the internet-as-a-whole at the moment.

Also, I’m writing this a couple days ahead, but this (Friday) morning the first Fun City side-game, a Brindlewood Bay murder mystery romp run by Jenn de la Vega, should be up on the FC feed. That is going to be hugely fun and rad, and you should absolutely listen to it.

🖋

That’s all I got, folks. Hope you’re having a good end of the year. Next one of these may be a little delayed due to the holidays, but you’ll hear from me before too long.

Drop me a line, drop me a comment, let me know what you liked, what you didn’t, and if you liked a enough of it, consider tellin’ your pals:

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