normally posers are considered bad but this, now this is a pose
tom moody
Sterling said what?
Am a huge admirer of Bruce Sterling's writing up through about Heavy Weather, but as a commentator he says less and less every year. If you strip away all its nuances-on-nuances, this essay appears to be saying (a) exposure of state secrets interferes with the operations of good government, (b) we tolerate a surveillance state but a countervailing regime of dissent will be dealt with harshly and (c) the techno phreaks and cyber geeks Sterling hangs out with are mostly excitable idiots. Not saying much in an era of massive unchecked snooping is understandable, but better not to write at all than support the status quo in the language of the rebellious free-thinker. Or to profess ennui on all sides of the issue to disguise the general conservative drift of your thinking.
(hat tip jb)
PS The Economist and Atlantic are much harder on Sterling than the above (links via Tomorrow Museum).
new year's eve
will be doing some virtual celebrating on a group blog called Haze Luux or commetscommets, depending on where you are looking. please come by to watch people igniting cyberfireworks (the ones above are agnes martin's) and guzzling jpeg champagne
oh, yeah and vomiting.
the results will be online for a few days. hat tip David Gray.
Update: Hypothete's posting of Prince's "1999" on YouTube reminded me of this story, which I think I just put out of my mind for eleven years:
On Dec. 31, 1999 I went to a party in an artist friend's Brooklyn studio. Fun, but very sparsely attended because every other New Yorker had left town for cabins upstate, family in the burbs, etc. It was widely believed that due to the Y2K bug the city was going to be in chaos with widespread looting etc. So those of us who stayed did indeed "party like it was 1999."
Paddy Johnson fundraiser
Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her blog. I gave and recommend you do too. As Brad Troemel noted, hers is one of two places offering any kind of substantive criticism of the new media scene; the other one being [HTML PARSING ERROR]. In any case, she offers a good balance to the "coal powered laptop," "alarm clock that rolls off the nightstand and forces you to scurry after it on the floor until you wake up" brand of institutional journalism. Indie blogs are important; hers, in particular, needs to continue.
