computers-R-stupid

web recorder, heal thyself

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So, Rhizome.org recently announced it had been awarded a $600,000 grant to develop a "web recorder" that essentially does what the Internet Archive "wayback machine" already does. Our old friends at ArtFCity breathlessly and uncritically reported this development, so here is the critical, huffing-and-puffing version:

Just before it won the $600,000, Rhizome did a site redesign that broke much of its own content. Using webrecorder (beta version) I've been submitting reports of Rhizome page URLs that have missing text and/or formatting. One of these was fixed after I submitted a bug report. (I've also sent some emails -- they are aware of these issues but fixing historic content is clearly on the back burner as they forge ahead with new projects.)

Here's another example, Ed Halter's squib on the so-called "Rematerialization of Art," from 2008, which touched off some extensive commenting by yours truly and others. Ironically, this page can be viewed correctly on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20080517165715/http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/590 but on Rhizome Halter's text has gone missing. The comments are there but they make little sense without showing what they are reacting to.

The same thing happened four years ago when Rhizome did a top-to-bottom site overhaul. Eventually most of the problems were identified and fixed, just in time for the current site overhaul, where everything was broken again. It's obvious where the $600,000 needs to be spent.

Update: The content of the Halter post has been restored. Next post in need of rescuscitation: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/08/brush-off/ (also missing text by Halter).

to phone or not to phone

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Dumper cheseball was pounding hard last night on a certain blogger's decision to double down on Linux PC art-making at a time when millions of sheeple are ditching their PCs for phones.
Apparently cheseball believes that if you are making "networked art" you must use the majority technology in order to respond to present-day culture.
Becoming obsolescent and losing an audience is certainly a concern for any creative type. Yet ultimately the work is still going "on the web" whatever hardware and operating system is used to make it. Whether it will be found on the web is another issue. Do you have to be on social to play or can you rely on search/word of mouth? Paying for a mobile plan doesn't guarantee a shot at a large audience.
Or is it that we're supposed to be making apps now, with the Apple store as the new commons? Arguably that's networked art but it's not the freewheeling, variegated network of interchangeable parts that the WWW was. Better to keep making autonomous objects (on Linux or any other means you can still mostly control), objects/processes that can be displayed, distributed, and remixed, for as long as the WWW model continues to exist. Regardless of what "millions" have decided to do.

another (flawed) anti-smartphone testimonial

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Here's another person -- an executive at a Silicon Valley start-up, no less! -- who has written an article about how he doesn't have a smartphone. Always good to read (more potential catechism-like phraseology):

I was on my bike, cycling to Stanford, and it struck me that a week had gone by without my having a phone. And everything was just fine. Better than fine, actually. I felt more relaxed, carefree, happier.

But then the confession falls apart when Mr. Silicon Valley admits he uses a friend's phone five times a month, to call... Uber!

This would be like a person in the '90s saying "I don't have a TV but I do knock on my neighbor's door five times a month and ask if I can watch my 'Faces of Death' video."

Just get a burner phone and call a cab, is that so hard? But we'll take what we can get, alternative lifestyle-wise.

Lovink on social media alternatives

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A new Geert Lovink interview has been posted on his site, expressing his ongoing struggle to imagine alternatives to iPhone/Facebook zombie culture. The Q&A below is "curmudgeonly" but still should be read aloud daily, like a church catechism:

Q: Why are you critical of the regular social network sites (SNS)?

A: Because I am part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks, an open internet in which the user wasn’t just a consumer of some product. Developments of the past ten or so years have meant that regular social media users have traded a lot of the earlier complexities and freedom [for] simplicity and speed.

And at the end of the church service, parishioners would read these words of Lovink's in unison, before filing out of their pews:

It is my dream that Facebook will close shop as soon as possible, preferably because its users massively walk away and abandon the service. I am saying this because such sudden exoduses have happened in the past. Amen. [Amen added --tm]

The stumbling block is alternatives. Lovink mentions homegrown attempts at Facebook such as Lorea, Diaspora, Friendica, Crabgrass, and Unlike Us. These are terrible names and that's half the problem. Who says we need another "scalable" connection service? Forums exist all over the web, to this day, for specialized discussion, and there are myriad ways to have conversations using the Net without crawling up Mark Zuckerberg's bum.
Lovink also bemoans "the (conceptual) stagnation of Linux." That may or may not be true, but he shouldn't shrug off that new-ish companies (such as Think Penguin) make it possible for non-geeks to have PCs and laptops that aren't running Windows or the Apple OS. One doesn't have to be "part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks" to appreciate their value. Lovink mentions TOR as an alternative browser; that's a subject for another post but suffice it to say, short of that, there are other ways to increase privacy from ISP and advertiser snooping, such as VPNs, that anyone can install.
The solution is individual choices. Or small groups, making use of available resources. As opposed to another "top down" site that "brings people together."

around the web

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The Atlantic: I went back to a dumbphone. Well, duh. This article obviously isn't aimed at the prescient few who used their dumbphones continuously during the iPhone era. Also, it's an ad for a "new" kind of dumbphone that does what any dumbphone on the market does: calls and texts. Update (related): Another media Einstein realizes that twitter is competing with regular (i.e., his) content. What did he think was happening a couple of years ago when twitter links to his posts started changing to t.co links?

Internet of things home pregnancy kit (hat tip Rene Abythe for this pic).

Matt Taibbi and Roy Edroso make fun of the "crying cowboys" out West. Edroso:

I don't like mandatory minimums and I'm willing to entertain the notion, at least, that the arsonists in this case don't deserve theirs, despite their belligerent history. But that's not what the current protest is about -- it's about seizing government land. Which I guarantee you would not in such a case be equitably distributed among We the People, but would instead get funneled to the usual shitheels whose cries for devolution of government resources always come down to "gimme."