a hip poster-person for opt-out

“We don’t put things up on servers anymore,” she said. “Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we’re not on WiFi, we’re not on the Internet, we don’t work in a way where anybody can access the information.”

The author of the above quote was not some Edward Abbey desert rat cyber-contrarian but rather a privileged mega-insider, who became wealthy thanks to the pre-Internet saturation "push" advertising of one-way TV and radio and is now all freaked about losing market position due to "sharing." Five Arbitron Ratings points if you guessed Madonna.

It's amusing, in a sick way, to see the upper crust behaving like the perpetually cash-strapped, who can't afford phone plans and pay bills with postal money orders. They don't put things up on servers, either!

This leaves a broad middle swath of the population susceptible to cyber spying and pocket picking, from powerful but naive corporations (if Sony had one ounce of Madonna's paranoia the famous recent "hack" wouldn't have happened) to techno worker ants with phones and data in the "cloud."

For those not buying into the phone-and-cloud lifestyle for ethical and aesthetic reasons (which is not mutually exclusive with being cash-strapped) a convenient explanation for non-participation in the new media world order could now be, "no, I'm like Madonna."

distracting popup about distraction-free writing

WP_distraction

The latest Word Press release (are they still naming them after jazz musicians?) contains this gem. You've spent ten years typing blog posts into a white box and ignoring everything outside the typing field and suddenly some genius UX types decide you need to be free of these distractions. So they distract you with a popup telling you about distraction-free writing.

Update: Also note that the "tooltip" is out of alignment with the icon it's supposedly pointing to (hat tip ryz).

cassette documentation

dumpfm-ryz-home_electro_nakamichi600

A purchaser of the Home Electro for Fun and Profit LP received his complimentary audio cassette version and sent this photo of the cassette being played. Classy -- the Nakamichi 600 was an audiophile cassette player of the '70s-'80s and still pops up on eBay. In fact eBay has its own consumer reviews page where it talks about Nakamichi decks as if this were still the '70s. This is a strange historical moment, where one wing of the capitalist bloodsucking machine is telling us our gear is obsolete and we need to have the latest hard rectangle in our pants pocket if we are to be anyone, while another wing is extracting the last drop of value out of superseded state of the art devices, making it possible for something like a cassette underground to continue to exist.

As mentioned earlier, cassettes are still being manufactured, and Sam Ash, B&H Photo and other retailers are still selling the Tascam brand of cassette recorder, so this subculture is not based entirely on recycled media and electronics (yet).

Surge Molecule (Video)

surge_molecule_vimeo_screenshot

[Vimeo]

Video loop, 17 inch LCD screen, portable media player, SD card (installation view)

Notes: Thinking back to the "square screen" discussion, here is a screen with a 4:3 ratio, which is the only viable way to show this particular GIF-to-mp4 conversion in fullscreen. The irony is that to document it, you have to use 16:9 because that's what all the video hosting services are using now. The above GIF is a turducken of nested media: the frames started out as screen art, printed out, then photographed. The photos were combined into an animated GIF. The GIF was converted to mp4 so it could play accurately on the portable media player (at least I don't have to burn a DVD anymore). Then the looping video was shot with a mini-HD cam and converted to mp4 for upload to Vimeo. All this for a simple punk rock gesture.

Here is a 16:9 scrunched to 4:3 version of the same video [4.4 MB .mp4] with a permanent loop.