general

New York's finest are clearing out Zuccotti Park tonight. They waited until 1 am because they are much braver in the dead of night. A mayor who has a right wing talking point understanding of the roots of the financial crisis is governing in a way that fits his class--with a good old fashioned show of force.

Above: "found angry programmer humor" (hat tip lightblack). Dennis Ritchie (photo on right) died shortly after Steve Jobs to considerably less public outpouring of emotion.

Felt like torturing myself so have been surfing around some Facebook blogs as a non-logged-in individual. Many thanks to Nullsleep for sending links to glitch artists who fill up their Facebooks with ASCII-style typographical noise--that seems like a compelling use of the "medium."
One thing you notice as someone who doesn't live there is how much more like MySpace it is, design-wise, than, say, some of the more minimal tumblr blogs. The Zuckeroids try to put so much on the page that it's busy and I would say junky looking. One feature that seems to have been adopted by Google+, unfortunately, is the constraint or miniaturization of people's content so all that other data can go on the page. Have chafed for years against a 580-650 pixel width limit and it would be hard to accept 400 or whatever theirs is.
Navigation also kind of sucks--when you go backwards in time in a "wall" (blog) and click on something and then something else, you have to keep going back to the first page of the "wall" to orient yourself--there are no monthly sidebar links as on the classic blog model. Am probably missing something but don't really care - it's not an inviting environment for someone who isn't partaking of all the friending and comment dramas.
OK, sorry for this unfrozen caveman report, am mostly just filling up space with typographic noise to separate the next and previous posts.

Just made a comment on Rhizome's post announcing its new feature The Download. Seems they forgot to mention that Ryder Ripps is offering all his Facebook data for download because he's quitting Facebook. This is all too convoluted to make much of a story but there is actually a journalistic nugget here.

Neither this post nor Joanne McNeil's paragraphs describing The Download mention that Ryder Ripps has deleted his Facebook account and this download of all his data is connected to that. That's kind of a big deal, especially since Ripps has been a Facebook love/hate supporter for some time. McNeil mentions that an artist named Kevin Bewersdorf deleted his data from his site once and murkily suggests that Ripps' The Download has something to do with that. This isn't even a case of "burying the lead"--hiding it, more like. But why?
All the best,
Tom Moody

It remains to be seen if this is a real Facebook resignation or one of those "that's it, I quit smoking today" moves. Regardless, in an absence of plausible reasons given for Ripps' Download as a work of art, you'd think it might be mentioned.

Update, a few days later: Am told that Ripps has reactivated his Facebook account. The precise, art historical term for this is "lame."

As a giveaway for dues-paying members, Rhizome.org is offering a downloadable archive of... drumroll... Ryder Ripps' Facebook account.

There is bad hagiographic writing and there is wrong hagiographic writing. Joanne McNeil manages a little of both here:

In the recent issue of Bomb magazine, Geoff Dyer in conversation with Jonathan Lethem, says his short book on the film Stalker was once conceived as a text that could be read in "real time… approximately the time it took the film to unfold." Likewise, Ryder Ripps's "Ryder Ripps's Facebook" is comment on the passage of time. (1) It includes every message sent and received, every image, every wall posting and his full list of friends, in addition to all other shared content. Rather than an invitation for scandal, the work could be interpreted as a moment in time preserved and captured, providing a temporal shift — we do not so often read our own messages from 2006, but a work like this invites us to explore the past. (2)

Over email the artist told me the appropriate tagcloud for the work might be, "Facebook, purekev, time, social media, work in the age of fun, friends as art, art as activity, download, delete, temporal history, privacy through rigor, celebrity, self infatuation, self as file, self as mediation, mediation/meditation, theft, lineage in the age of anonymity, laziness, ready made." It's a response to PureKEV, Kevin Bewersdorf's performance that over the course of three years, diminished the size of a gif of a sparkling white light until it's hardly visible on the website, while in the meantime he removed the rest of his work from the web. (3) "Ryder Ripps Facebook," as interactive epistolary nonfiction, provides a frozen moment, contra to the nature of the web, which is constant flux. (4)

1. This isn't the same at all. There is no meta-commentary about Ripps' Facebook dump that takes the same amount of time to peruse--it's just the archive itself.
2. How are we invited? Isn't this the same as looking at someone's vacation photos?
3. So it's a "response" because Bewersdorf took down all his data and Ripps is leaving his up? Ripps isn't deleting his Facebook, is he? [Update: A reader says he did - this could be clearer - deleting old posts or quitting Facebook? ]
4. How does one "interact" with Ripps' archive, beyond downloading it and reading it? What is special about a "frozen moment"? The Net abounds with mothballed websites.

Update: Revisions in progress.

Update 2: Rhizome links just keep on breakin' - the one I had for The Download was changed to http://rhizome.org/the-download/2011/nov/ after I posted this. Thanks to the reader who emailed about it. Just in case it changes again, here's their teaser post for the Ripps Download, which tantalizes with the come-on that "The viewer is invited to explore all of Ripps's Facebook activity, exposing some of the most intimate and private information." Yow. For those just joining us, this idea came about because Facebook (after much bad press) made the lordly gesture of offering users the ability of saving all their own posts, messages, etc, as a single download. Ripps is making "his" download available as a found object type gesture.

Update 3: Ripps has deleted his FB account, and offers the data as a "gold account" on his personal site.

Update 4: And yes, I knew the Facebook Gold account was a six-month old joke. Jeebus. Maybe with Ripps out of FB he'll have to start making regular jokes. Here's an idea: I'm gonna start making Word Press gags and snickering when you don't get them.

Update 5: See follow-up comment to Rhizome.

Update, Nov. 14: Am told that Ripps has reactivated his Facebook account. The precise, art historical term for this is "lame."