http://blogs.brown.edu/students/indy/METRO.essex.guerrero.jpg
Monday, December 22, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
I-diet
Mr Jobs said: "We're really, really excited about all these products. We think people are going to have a lot of fun."
Even with the recent scandals of i-exhaustion (overheating laptops, paper fires in tokyo offices caused by nano combustion...) Jobs is still on the treadmill with his finger-flicker-music-boxes. I think it should come with a pair of flesh-colored earphones, in every skin-tone, and then they can make those animorphic commercials like Dove to go along with their rainbow fetish. Maybe a camouflage i-device line will help ease the Williamsburg stabbings, plus hipsters could really mask their commodity fetishism while pulling off the, I've just always got that song running through my head walk.
Monday, September 1, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
the net
The Bard network features a Gigabit backbone with 100MB desktop speeds that link College facilities and give students, faculty, and staff access to Internet services, e-mail, and the World Wide Web from classrooms, residence hall rooms, offices, and public areas. Bard provides high-speed ethernet access to the Internet and campus computing resources via fiber-optic cabling to all student residence halls and 802.11b(g) wireless networking in several areas around the campus...Students wishing to use wireless networking will need to purchase compatible wireless network interface.
Identity Theft circa 1995
internet as spermoid penetration fantasy, a journey through the cybernetic womb
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Long Shots from the Powerhouse
The Hub at 32 Avenue of the Americas, "The Ultimate Meet-Point for Global Communications"
The Roof
| "These two 150’ towers provide line of sight to thousands of buildings in Midtown, Downtown, Jersey City, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. The ringed support structure is designed to accommodate a wide variety of antennas. Wireless connectivity from these towers extends down to The Hub and the meet me point on the 24th floor, thus allowing for the convergence of the wireless to the wireline." | ||
 Northern View |  Southern View |  Eastern View |
 Western View |  South-Eastern View |  North-Western View |
2. The Internet in the Cage//The Meet-Me Room//Fiberoptic Real Estate//Interconnectivity in the Free Market:
I wish these segments could upload as one, uncompressed, and sporting its original quality. But Freedom ain't free, providers like Blogger and Youtube are not as interested in High-Definition feeds and signal authenticity as the Telco Hotel. Free information-networking comes with its imbedded cost of quality, time, and space. The Internet's not infinite?
SOON TO COME: Parts 3-6, the rest of the documentation from last week's meeting with Patrick Shelley, the General Manager of the Hub.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Caffeine and the Information Age
Most people know that caffeine can help you overcome fatigue and keep you alert. However, did you know that some scientists believe that caffeine's mental boost can also actually help you to think better and perform certain tasks more accurately?
Leaders in the computer industry tell us that caffeine helped fuel the computer revolutions and continues to drive the software industry today. This is due in part to caffeine's ability to help give us the energy we need to complete our work. Computer professionals often rely on caffeine to stay alert during the long hours required to develop a new software system and to answer the calls to rescue the system when it crashes (which usually happens in the middle of the night!). However, caffeine's popularity in the computer industry may also be due to the special mental boost caffeine confers, which helps improve accuracy and speed in completing certain tasks, including writing computer programs and operating computer systems.
Experiments have confirmed the common experience that, especially when prolonged efforts are required, caffeine improves performance in work relying on the use of short-term memory, simple mathematical calculations, or carrying out repetitive tasks. Many scientists think that the mental boost caffeine provides can also help us process certain types of information better and thereby perform these tasks more accurately and rapidly, whether we are tired or not.
Whether you write computer programs, or just use them on the job or in your studies, you will be happy to know that a single VIVARIN tablet, containing the caffeine found in two cups of coffee of four cups of tea, can give you the boost you need to complete work, anytime and anyplace.
(provided by www.vivarin.com)
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Email Correspondence
[email from Sales Rep. at tel-x/60 Hudson. Five minutes later he called me back after hearing from his manager and temporarily de-invited me. Security protocol, of course. Every student needs an onslaught of collegiate stationary to get through these info-detectors. ]
RE: site tour of 60 Hudson
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| show details Apr 28 (3 days ago) |
|
Hi Saralee,
It was nice speaking with you a few minutes ago.
I will be give a tour next Wednesday, 5/7/2008 at 1:30PM for customer. You may join us if you like. We can meet on W. Broadway entrance between Worth St and Thomas Street. Please see the link below:
<http://maps.google.com/maps?f
Here is my blackberry number: 646.300.2034 in case you need to reach me. By the way, you will need a photo ID for access.
If you have questions during the tour, please ask me after the tour -- I will be happy to answer any questions for you then. Also, would it be possible to get a copy of your research paper once you are done? We would be interested learning your findings.
Thank you,
Gazi Sher
Inside Sales Executive
1 State Street, 21st floor
New York, NY 10004
Tel: 212.480.3300, x2014
Direct Dial: 347.562.0234
Cell: 646.300.2034
telx
The Interconnection Company
The Host of NANOG43 in New York and the CBX! June 1-5, 2008
"Gotta Catch 'em All"
re:re:constant access, i got in to the hub on the 24th floor and roof of the former AT&T building at 32 Ave. of the Americas with digital audio recorder and a Hi-Def camera, sucker.
video/audio tour coming soon!Re: [contact] Telecom Hotels
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| show details Apr 29 (1 day ago) |
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How great to hear from you!
I'm afraid that I don't have any information on how to gain access to these places. Frankly speaking, my own status doesn't really get me into them either, all the time. I haven't tried any of the centers in New York. Probably your best bet would be to find someone with connections to someone in a small telecoms company who can get you in there.
At present the NetLab isn't available for viewing although maybe later in the year. I would warn you however, that we don't have any exciting hardware or anything. We just do analysis so it's laptops, monitors, and us. Plus a really nice view of the Empire State Building.
All my best,
Kazys Varnelis
Kazys Varnelis [kazys.varnelis.net]
Director, Network Architecture Lab [netlab.audc.org]
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture
Preservation, and Planning
Co-Founder, AUDC [audc.org]
Studio-X
Suite 1610
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
A Final Project Proposal
Some Hotels are Bigger than Others
Perhaps to preface this proposal it is worth mentioning that it is commonly shared between us in coming to this project that we are not pursuing a grand apotheosis or declarative conclusion to the dispersed work we have all undertaken this semester. Moreover, we recognize that to truly commit to this project as a "complete work" would be impossible in the time remaining; if our research and materials provide us with enough inspiration, we may find it worth an ongoing investigation.
Kazys Varnelis (Director of Columbia's Network Architecture Lab) and the Center for Land Use Interpretation's ("CLUI") exhibition of One Wilshire telecommunications hub in Los Angeles introduced the phenomena of the "Telco/Telecom" or "Carrier" Hotel to the greater discourse of information systems from a scholarly, or perhaps more accurately, un-skilled information laborer's realm of knowledge. Their extended project on One Wilshire, the U.S.'s most expensive real estate ($250/sq.foot is a steal!) and infamous info-portal to Japan, may be found on CLUI's archive here. Kazys Varnelis' article (linked to the right) provides a brief but incisive genealogy of telecommunications infrastructure, both its centralization and distribution in the U.S. Varnelis ends with an image of One Wilshire, and in a sense puts to rest the popular myth that information travels in some sort of cosmic vacuum across the world, connecting you and your computer or the stock market and its dividends without heat, wires, security, or architecture.
Recently Eliza discovered two domestic Telco portals in our own backyard both operated by Frontier Online, an ISP with regional headquarters in Hopewell Junction, providing services throughout Dutchess County in telephone, fiber optics, and DSL. For more information on the types of commodities produced and infrastructure implicated in the single unit or small business telecommunications industry, a glossary of terms (a technical lexicon we are still learning) provided by the Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation may be found here.
The local buildings' architectural presences are understated, plain and uninviting brick structures - seemingly erected to inconspicuously house the telecommunications hub within this rural landscape. Part of our desire to know where other "houses" like these may be hiding, who operates them, and what they "really" look like on the inside comes from the absence of a transparent materiality of the new technologies connecting us to our education, community, and the dispersed networks we are woven through as citizens in an infocratic global market. We also wish to investigate differences in security management of rural and urban sites; the threat of hacking is made insignificant when compared to the physical vulnerability of these buildings. We are currently working on contacting Frontier, among other telecommunication centers in the Hudson Valley, to see if we can get a peek inside these telco houses to document their elaborate interior design. A directory of Telecom/ISPers that we are currently working from may be found here.
With limited access in the corporate world, and potentially more open access to Bard Campuses mothership-hub, we may be able to document some of these houses. Alana is preparing a map of the known Telecommunications & Internet Service Providers in Dutchess County, with intent to explore the ways in which access is determined. The map series will illustrate the relationships between the "etherstructure" and preexisting infrastructure (including rivers, roads, telephone lines and railways) in order to elucidate the concrete vectors through which information flows. Another aspect of the mapping project will focus on population demographics, income levels, degrees of urbanization, and distances from university systems, so as to reveal which segments of the population have access to cyber resources. For an added dimension, Alana will attempt to incorporate satellite images into the maps. Additional images, audio, website links, and video footage will be presented alongside of the maps, or perhaps embedded within, according to our technical and/or temporal capacities. These collaborative efforts represent a humble attempt to demystify the sources of information, to determine who is responsible for maintaining, selling, and storing these networks, and to explore what kind of information asymmetries exist in the relations between the information's infrastructural distribution and its consumer demographics and desires.
How Bard exists as a locus of telecommunications access in the Hudson Valley in relationship to Citizen Communications Company's (owner of Frontier who operates in Dutchess County) mission statement may illuminate a cultural urban/rural tension that manifests in a material access to resources and a spectrum of desires for certain methods of connectivity:
Saralee has sent emails to tel-x, 32 Avenue of the Americas, and Kazys Varnelis to try and document some of the U.S. most lucrative "interconnection powerhouses" connecting the Financial District to their global assets and Midtown to their national cell phone surveyors-- and in a sense, materially embodying "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere…"
(Marx/Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party.)
Limited access into "the essential knowledge for the data center industry" may be found at this Carrier Hotel networking database.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
they are the true fairies of these arcades
G [Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville]
Yes, when all the world from Paris to China
Pays heed to your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon,
The glorious Golden Age will be reborn.
Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea,
Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain,
And sautéed pike will swim in the seine.
Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground,
Garnished with crushed fired croutons;
The trees will bring forth apple compotes,
And farmers will harvest boots and coats.
It will snow wine, it will rain chickens,
And ducks cooked with turnips will fall from the sky.
—Ferdinand Langlé and Emile Vanderburch, Louis-Bronzeet le Saint-Simonien: Parodie de Louis XI (Theatre du Palais-Royal,February 27, 1832)
Despondent Divorcee/Genesee Hotel Suicide
Photograph by I. Russell Sorgi, Buffalo Courier Express, 8 May 1942.
B [Fashion]
"Here fashion opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware--between carnal pleasure and the corpse...For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman, and bitter colloquy with decay whispered between shrill bursts of mechanical laughter. That is fashion"(Benjamin 62-63).
Z [The Doll, The Automaton]
"In a shop on the Rue Legendre, in Batingnolles, a whole series of female busts, without heads of legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a percaline skin of arbitrary hue--bean brown, glaring pink, hard black--are lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables' J.-K. Huysmanss, Croquis parisiens (Paris, 1886)" (Benjamin 694).
Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century {Exposé of 1935}
"Fashion prescribes the ritual according to which the commodity fetish demands to be worshiped...Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve. The cult of the commodity presses such fetishism into its service" (Benjamin 8).
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Security, Information, Code
cats/dogs: for eliza,
" (Tourist Traps): Online commercial sites, including eBay, MySpace, and Amazon, have employed acrobatic ciphers as police, a fully achieved “implementation of a writing that is only cipher, not meaning” . Cognitive recognition of a sign’s assimilation into pixilated mutation is now even used to programmatically refuse non-human inquiry; password discovery must correctly reaffirm the sign, suggesting that this ability is stable, natural and a definitive qualifier of human vision. Perhaps in a pluralistic attempt to account for the visually disabled, one may also choose to listen to a polyphonic, anonymous, and fragmented dictation of the code. Human to human security is enforced as computer language is inverted to police itself. The cyborg orators collide in sterile recitations, vocal mathematics, numero-sadean fantasies of forced and necessary intercourse."
From: Poetry in /BIG>
On Literary Code and Informative Text
Eliza Wicks-Frank, December 2007 [1].
A new cipher (above) demands that you only type the symbols that have a cat climbing on them. The other beasts resemble puppies, although sign-semblance is really not the crux of the code here. In typical US security fashion, measures are ritualized and performed to create the feeling (and this use of semblance may be appropriate) of security, particularly of one's private property on the internet: personal information. The practical effects of the cumbersome puzzles hardly "measure up" to the cracking abilities of global spam-ers and credit hackers, much in the same way that the flu vaccine must evolve every year to combat the increasing strength of the immune virus (in relation to the exponentially decreased strength of the infected's immune system). Requiring consumers to identify characters on a linear plane and then re-type them gives each individual on the net another minute to abstract the process of their financial, or "personal" disclosures; one extra click secures the consumer of their own identity online. Only in the time between the previous page and the loading page does one have to reflect on the actual dispersal of property-information. The next page insures an eventual return through 2-3 day shipping.
[1] The code in Eliza's title is not able to be shown because it does not constitute a legitimate html read-able code or recognizable letters.
Monday, April 21, 2008
women in the integrated circuit
"Can anyone even name an important female programmer?"
HEDY HEDY HEDY LAMARR!!!
female computer
Melba Roy heads the group of NASA mathematicians, known as "computers," who track the Echo satellites. Roy's computations help produce the orbital element timetables by which millions can view the satellite from Earth as it passes overhead.
Friday, April 11, 2008
the additive property of communication
"That is the voice of the current somnambulism...There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form...It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are" (Understanding Media 23).
FriendsGreen!
"We are a bunch of green-passionate software people who wanted to make a difference by doing what we can on the web. Every little thing we do can make a big difference. We realized how much searching we do each day and thought, "gee, how can we turn search into a green-friendly activity?" The FriendsGreen Search Engine (friendsgreen.com) is an online activism site that gives Internet users a free and easy way to help fight Global Warming and to save the Rainforests. Merely by getting in the habit of using friendsgreen.com to search the internet, users can donate proceeds from their searches to fund a portfolio of reforestation projects.
How do you calculate the amount of rainforest saved?
Squarefeet are saved both by conducting searches on FriendsGreen and by our advertising features of the (Lil) Green Patch application on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/greentrees). The number of squarefeet saved is a total of all squarefeet saved across the media properties owned by Green Patch, LLC. The amount of funding generated per search depends on the search term and actions completed after the search is conducted. You are the key to the success of the FriendsGreen Search Engine. The more visitors we have using our search engine each day, the greater the total number of squarefeet we can save together."
http://friendsgreen.com/
Can the success of this type of proposed activism be measured by its actualized rehabilitation of ‘the rainforest’, or can it only remark on an adaptation of consumer consciousness which is now provided with pathways of concern-distribution by both advertisers and software programmers indebted to a bureaucratic network of desire management? The ambiguity of the projected result for conservation is inconsequential for the user in a transaction that is already vague. In presenting a platter of web results, the search engine communicates discreetly with its partners in market research, which allows a paperless loop of consumer feedback and bolsters advertiser niche marketing, flawlessly monitoring desire and choice and rendering the survey functionally obsolete for electronic consumption. This process is typically made invisible to consumers. Except, of course, when their previously assumed passivity in the act of searching (aligned with an assumed passivity of vision itself) can be revealed for its transactive exchange and allow the individual to play in directing the flow of this operation. Consumer activism, under the jurisdiction of an explicit set of active input (the search query) and the collaborative output (the advertiser’s agreement to contribute to a predetermined charitable fund in exchange for market research) conveniently manifests in 1 sq. ft. cubes of rainforest; the tangible (yet unimaginable) magic of this transaction allows the individual to experience the personal satisfaction of measurable conscientious behavior. As consumers become more concerned with ‘going green’, their anticipated processes of adaptation are matched by adaptations in the artifice of revenue generation by which corporations present their bureaucratic methods as more transparent, more interactive, and potentially more charitable, if only for the game in which the consumer may now conspicuously meddle.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
New! Gmail Custom TimeTM
Ever wish you could go back in time and send that crucial email that could have changed everything -- if only it hadn't slipped your mind? Gmail can now help you with those missed deadlines, missed birthdays and missed opportunities.
Pre-date your messages
You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we'll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.
Mark as read or unread
Take sending emails to the past one step further. We let you make emails look like they've been read all along.
Make them count
Use your custom time stamped messages wisely -- each Gmail user gets ten per year.
Worry less
Forget your finance reports. Forget your anniversary. We'll make it look like you remembered.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Yogalattes
Exercise regimens, like diets and PCs, require updates. In the perpetual quest to obtain physical perfection, insider knowledge is coveted. Women must know the secrets of the Celebrity, a need met by the reduced, reused, and recycled content of magazines. This mirrored regurgitation of women’s needs and desires is published again and again under new faces, in new outfits. The audience of these periodicals is a population of women who have seemingly forgotten how to nourish and move their own bodies.
“Celebrity endorsements include super model Christy Turlington and Broadway and film star Alan Cummings.”1
Yoga (both the practice and the idea(l)) performs a tripartite function in that it conditions the mind, body, and spirit. Yoga enables urbanites to stay sane, stay fit, and stay connected: to themselves, to nature, to an imported spirituality, to the ancient wisdom of the East, to whatever aspects of the practice they choose to emphasize or neglect. With cheaper rates than a therapist, yoga’s convenience and wide appeal lies in the fact that its ancient wisdom can be crammed into an hour-long session with an optional spirituality component. According to one’s whims or busy schedule, yoga se$$ions may be added or dropped; the practice of yoga can be modified according to the customer. The yoga classroom (and the general fitness discourse) creates space for the hyper-competitive and individualistic strain of Americana to thrive without guilt.
“Coming soon on Discovery Health 'She TV' Magee Hickey has produced a fabulous 3 minute segment on how Yogilates helps a stressed out TV producer release her worries for awhile and get back in touch with her body and spirit.”
In addition to her dependency on the next endorphin fix, the compulsive exerciser is in constant need of new tips, increased efficiency, stimulation, and variation. Yoga has outlived other trends of the physical fitness industry precisely because it is not new—although it may be novel for American (sub)urbanites. Its long shelf-life is sustained by the telling fact that humans have been practicing yoga since Before the Current Era, which lends the latest, greatest ‘fad’ considerable historical weight, credibility, and status (and serves as a selling point). But even with its seemingly endless array of postures and variations, and the option to tap into an infinite spirituality, yoga is not enough for the insatiable American consumer and her average attention span. She wants quick fixes, instant results, fast returns on investments, and immediate satisfaction guaranteed. With her lotus-embroidered Lycra® workout top, spandex pants, macchiato in hand and synthetic yoga mat strapped on back (with a hidden compartment for cell phones, cash or credit), the modern woman requires an exercise routine that fits tidily into her demanding lifestyle. She wants to have her low-fat, sugar-free cake without feeling compelled to throw it up afterwards. She wants Yoga to Go.©
“FAQ: I'm looking for an exercise system that isn’t too straining or difficult so I can do it every day without interfering with my work.”
From fusion cuisine to the Prius and the Labradoodle, the trends show that hybridism is in. The emergence of yoga hybrids includes disco yoga, in-flight yoga, bed-top yoga, and Yogilates. Conceived in 1997, Yogilates is a registered trademark that represents the fusion of hatha Yoga and the Pilates Method, an exercise regimen developed in the early 20th century by Joseph H. Pilates. In combining the antique with the ancient, Yogilates provides Baby Boomers and GenXYZers with a necessary physical fitness program update.
“The mass media, fashion, and health and fitness world seem to understand that the combination of these two disciplines makes sense, and they appreciate its appeal to all people interested in health and fitness.”
Perpetually dissatisfied with their own bodies, women are in the market for a replacement: the Rock-Hard Body, the Celebrity Body, the Yoga Body, the Pilates Body (or the hybrid Yogilates Body). As Jazzercise becomes dated, white urban and suburban women are turning toward more exotic fare: belly dancing videos, pole dancing classes, and Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease. Here arises a perverse and privileged craving for the Stripper Physique—representing the exerciser’s voluntary reenactment of a sex-worker’s labor hours without customers or compensation. All of this within the comfortable, heterotopic space of your living room, turned health club, turned strip club.
“In addition to the Yogilates classes in top health clubs, yoga studios, and corporate wellness programs, Yogilates is now a recognized brand name that has caught the eye of the media and health and fitness world as few exercise trends have before. Vogue, Elle, Jane, Bazaar, Mode, YM, CosmoGirl, Child, Weight Watchers Magazine, the New York Times and the Village Voice have all run features on Yogilates.”
Today’s domestic goddess must incorporate a block of time for the maintenance of her figure, in addition to maintaining her family and home. Exercise is thus added onto her list of household chores. With the latest technology and fitness accessories, it can be performed entirely within the domestic sphere. From SELF magazine to Pro-Anorexia Blogs, Lifetime TV to the Home Shopping Network, eDiet.com to meditation podcasts, information technologies have arisen as the secret keys to physical fitness. This mediated process has created a population of fitness-info-addicts—displacing the impetus to know and command one’s own body and replacing it with the desire to intimately know and own a prototype, a model.
1 All quotes from yogilates.com
Monday, March 17, 2008
Human Motorola
Human Motorola
Finally, a profound change in the perception of work and the working body became incorporated in a single metaphor—the frequently invoked ‘human motor,’ a striking image that illuminates an underlying affinity between physiology and technology. This image originated in an equally new perception of the universe as an industrial dynamo, or motor, the accomplishment of the thermodynamic physics of the nineteenth century
[Rabinbach, 24].
The work performed by any mechanism, from the fingers of the hand, to the gears of an engine, or the motion of the planets, was essentially the same. With this semantic shift in the meaning of ‘work,’ all labor was reduced to its physical properties, devoid of context and inherent purpose. Work was universalized [Rabinbach, 47].
At all moments of the machinated body, it is important not to amputate the prosthetics attaching the 19th century automated working body (proto-cyborg, integrated production line) to today’s info-compa(u)table body (modern cyborg, the cube farm). Capital’s liquid form follows the malleability of matter (technology) from the conversion of heat into use: the steam engine, the steel factory, conductive copper wire, the cooling units of heat-densified fiberoptic traffic. [Kazys Varnelis, Centripetal Cities...] The myth of a post-industrial body is that information technology has rendered us immaterial and invisible; we just need magnifying glasses, or perhaps laser pointers. ‘Traditional’ automation has moved offshore, the same shores that allow us to put the post in our industrial complex. In the ever consolidating information economy, American cyborg workers, whether in front of academic Apples or Applebee’s restaurant touch-screens, “[Our] engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of a post-industrial society” (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto 154) and their sacrifices are nimble-fingers in microelectronic sweatshops.
[Designed in California. Assembled in China] 
Sunday, March 16, 2008
HACK THIS BOYS, or, Slightly Digressive Research on Electronic Circulation, or, The Latest Control Revolution
(NOTE: the following is convolute material from Agorachronotistics—as yet this remains in a fragmentary form and should not be quoted from.)
Two tendentious questions requiring further research:
1. Have media theorists, globalization theorists, and recent Marxist writers (Hardt and Negri, for instance) underappreciated the role played by electronic movements of finance capital within the global economy?
2. Do ideology critics tend to pay too much attention to consumption and not enough attention to circulation (or, how come no one reads Capital, vol. 2, or, how come our Brother Blog seems so hung up on retail)?
A DERIVATIVE DÉRIVE, or, A DÉRIVE THROUGH DERIVATIVES
The credit card is the only kind of electronic money taken into account by Marshall McLuhan in his chapter on “Money” in Understanding Media. McLuhan acknowledges that money is a kind of language, and he places extraordinary emphasis on its role in producing and sustaining the symbolic order within media cultures. But he does not anticipate the widespread use of electronic technologies for circulating wealth—everything from ATMs, direct payment and payroll, electronic retail, or (most influentially in geopolitical financial terms) stock, currency, and derivative trading.
As the anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee remark in their compellingly readable Financial Deriviatives and the Globalization of Risk, the vast majority of wealth now exists in electronic form. The internet enables not only news, pornography, and useful information. It is also the foremost of the communications technologies that have fundamentally reshaped the global circulation of capital:
The conditions of connectivity, which permit someone, living almost anywhere, to download medical information to help diagnosis for a relative in need of medical care, to read a report on human rights and political detainees that the state would better like unread, or to correspond regularly with a friend living overseas, are also the conditions of encompassment and domination by circulatory capital and the infrastructure of the metropole generally. (47)
Derivatives, in other words, are a direct result of a globally integrated network; they are in fact a vast network unto themselves, constituting the “planet’s largest market” (46). Lee and LiPuma ask us to
Consider that according to the crystals of economic history, [the $100 trillion] derivatives market is approximately the same as total global manufacturing product for the last millennium. Or that deposits of that magnitude must be electronic, notional, and virtual because the amounts being circulated exceed the total quantity of the world’s currencies. (47-48)
Lee and LiPuma derive the figure of $100 trillion from the International Bank of Settlements 2000 report. In the interim, the derivative market has more than quintupled in size to $516 trillion. This would compare to a US annual gross domestic product of $15 trillion and a total US money supply also of roughly $15 trillion. (An accessible non-scholarly synopsis of the derivatives market is available at marketwatch.com current derivatives market) Perhaps physical money has lost much of its power, and is now merely a fetish by comparison to the electronic means by which wealthy individuals and corporations transfer money and finance capital. McLuhan calls paper money the “poor man’s credit card,” but the credit card is merely an instrument of individual borrowing. Individuals are hardly relevant to this largest of all markets: derivatives are primarily the province of large corporations and hedge funds. They transcend national boundaries, and they elude direct investment by all but the most intrepid (or wealthy) of individuals. McLuhan notes tamely that
Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the electronic age it has lost none of its power. (133)
McLuhan doesn’t consider whether the money he speaks of could take an electronic form, or if the acceleration of circulation enabled by electronic transfers of wealth might influence society. Indeed, one can hardly blame McLuhan: derivatives did not exist in 1964.
Not surprisingly, the non-specialist faces daunting challenges in trying to account for the influence of derivatives on the global economy. Lee and LiPuma argue that is in part because derivatives by their nature resist representation:
…the culture of derivatives posits itself as a space lying beyond the power of representation, one that is discernible only through quantification, grasped objectively as the necessity (emanating from the thing itself) of reducing all event structures to forms of differential equations, and subjectively as a kind of mathematical intuition embodied (as a quasi-genetic endowment) in those who master the financial practices. This culture of finance appears in academic and inside publications as well as newspapers and electronic media. It also appears in the organization, day-to-day operation, and distribution of money and power at investment banks (and nonbank banks), electronic trading sites, and hedge funds. Ironically, its own social determination and specific historical character lie in its unconscious refusal to recognize the socio-historical construction of the (derivative) object or (participating) subjects. (65)
The electronic movement of money and power is in some sense completely visible (detailed global financial transaction statistics are freely available at the International Bank of Settlements website; their annual report in some ways reads like a gross parody of the UN Human Development Report). And in another sense the electronic movements of money and power are completely invisible—in that the electronic transaction is always a fetish, i.e. it takes place electronically between infinite nodes; it naturalizes its own existence; and it largely divorces itself from the actual means of production. It seems at least indisputable that Lee and LiPuma are right when they suggest that
The culture of circulation of derivatives, especially those that regulate exchange rates and capital flows, structurally reproduces existing forms of global asymmetry and, more importantly perhaps, introduces a new form of structuring and structural asymmetry that owes its coherence to a set of ideologically impregnated conceptual schemes. (173)
Deleuze and Guatari make a similar point in stronger terms when describing the overwhelming influence of markets on the current global order. Perhaps they should have the last word:
In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There’s no universal state, precisely because there’s a universal market of which states are the centers, the trading floors. But the market’s not universalizing, homogenizing, it’s an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for human rights shouldn’t lead us to extol the “joys” of liberal capitalism of which they’re an integral part. There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery" (Negotiations 78).
PS
Or perhaps D&G shouldn’t have the last word:
PPS
Please don’t ask me to define a derivative. As many times as I’ve memorized Lee and LiPuma’s definition of a derivative as “the generic name for any security whose value is tied to an underlier,” I still find the derivative to verge on the indescribable—to verge on the banal, or the hopelessly general. The derivative is the post-script which ignores the letter which has come before the signature. The post-script lies beyond writing, after the labor of writing has been done. The derivative is underivable from experience; it is a sign within a language without etymology. The postscript is the post-crypt of the labor of communication, where the letter dies as afterthought, its signature effaced—now a dead letter, part of a postal crypt. There are potentially as many varieties of derivatives in cyberspace as there are varieties of human beings in cyberspace. Or, as Lee and LiPuma put it, “there are as many kinds of derivatives as there are forms of connectivity” (192).
Sunday, March 16, 2008 5:19 p.m.
Kindlebild 1.0
Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” is not an inventory of books—instead it is an inventory of activities involving the buying and selling, handling and arranging, valuing and remembering of books as physical objects. A scholar or serious reader is now likely, even without a Kindle, to buy the majority of her books online, and to have no tactile interaction with books during the process of buying them. The Kindle completes the process of the consolidation of the sale and distribution of books. New and used, Amazon dominates by ease of use. The efficiencies of scale at Amazon must be monumental; the Kindle increases those efficiencies, now that publishers will in effect deal with a Wal-Mart of bookselling, which will control the book trade at the wholesale as well as the retail level. Transmission costs will be reduced to a nearly insignificant amount. Paper and the fuel to deliver books will be saved. Amazon currently packs books clumsily and wastes immense amounts of cardboard in shipping. The labor hours of bookstore workers will be saved, as will the labor of postal delivery.
Perhaps in terms of efficiency there is no argument against books as kindling. To resist the electronic book is probably a futile form of nostalgia. Even so, the Kindle, like most cutting-edge technologies, is merely a temporary incarnation of a larger set of ongoing operations. There will be competition. Perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Sony will come up with a better electronic reader. The Kindle is an expensive technology, primarily because its content is proprietary. As in the case of the iPod, this probably won’t be an obstacle to its success. The most important question will be the ownership of content. Kindle users pay Amazon directly even for books which are out of copyright. Why pay to read a newspaper when one can read it for free on any laptop? When will someone hack the Kindle, and enable it to access free content? Or does wireless transmission preclude this possibility? Wireless networks, after all, are pay-as-you-go. With rare exceptions (bootlegged wi-fi and pirated music), there are no free rides in the technology world. Cell phones are cheap; cell plans are not. The Kindle, like the Blackberry, is effectively an installment plan technology. By its own logic of efficiency, the Kindle is likely to put itself out of business.
As for the physical codex, it will doubtless always survive, but perhaps in smaller numbers. The increasing prevalence of electronic reproduction (from JSTOR to Googlebooks) will likely raise the cost of the physical codex. The codex was arguably the single greatest tool in the spread of literacy and social change over the past six centuries. Even if the Kindle will distribute information more efficiently, so far there is little evidence that it will distribute that information more interestingly, more equitably, or more convincingly.
Saturday, February 23, 2008 2:27 p.m.
PS
Friday, March 14, 2008
BREAKING NEWS: THE VACCINE AGAINST FATIGUE PERFECTED, FOUND IN PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND: 01/23/2008
RE Caloric Calculation and college jogging: from The Consumer Society
III. Adderallabor [Work on Progress]
n+1, a biannual (not to be confused with the recent biennial, although somehow related...) literary journal from Brooklyn, has apparently come the closest out of any journal in print to re-instate the legitimacy of Wilhelm Weichardt's "antikenotoxin" fatigue vaccine synthesized in 1904. The German alchemist's fatigue vaccine was officially discredited in 1914 after European physiologists and the Austro-Hungarian army found Weichardt's evidence wildly exaggerated. Yet, like so many revelations of pseudo-science, the search for the fountain of energy significantly bumped up a notch (followed by injecting subjects with caffeine and cocaine) after Weichardt's experimentation. As should be common knowledge, but has found new disguises, “fatigue” is one diagnoses of many derived from the ideal of a 19th century worker maintaining optimum energy conservation for maximum production within an expanding concept of the hourly work day[1].
Historians James Beninger and Anson Rabinbach, in the tradition of Marx, witness the dialectical tendency of entropic digressions after periods wherein the material relations of a society undergo intense rapidization and dispersal through technological revolutions in the way societies produce and process information. The crash of Industrialization's pathbreaking momentum was expressed through thermodynamic terminology as “entropy” by scientists, while pathologized as “fatigue” by physiologists, labor-scientists, and capitalists in order to control the effects of an exhausted work force. Such a well-managed response to tired societies kept a pace of (over)production supplying and expanding Industrial-State economies, managing integrated distant markets, often state-unification or colonial projects, and fueling the frontier-market horizon. As was appropriate to the type of labor involved in industrial societies, the calculation of fatigue and its attempted correction were concentrated on the proletarian body[2]. In a further defense of work, the psychophysical diagnoses of the fatigued upper classes were written as evidence and consequence of their decadent and idle lifestyles, in effect, their absence of labor. Whether you were working too long or too little, it wasn't enough. While the bourgeoisie had their coffee and tea, biomedical remedial research on the anti-work plague turned to chemists before labor lawyers, desperate for a drug to restore proletarian workers’ automated muscles.
Weichardt's first experiments were ironically conducted in the schoolroom where students excelled on their math performance, cutting time in half, focusing more, and getting better answers. Yet the "antikenotoxin" gas could not restore over-worked muscles that were repeating the same activity all day, probably due to the fact that the relaxed muscles absorbed the stress of the worked muscles, producing kenotoxins all the while. The study was debunked for the physical worker and soldier while refined stimulants in the form of caffeine and cocaine were experimented with as a possible antikenotoxic simulant. Yet coffee and tea, the main proprietors of caffeine, as well as cocaine were only available to the elite due to their commodity status as exotic import. The upper classes, who mainly engaged in intellectual production created a fetish of stimulation for the unstimulated, non-laboring 'worker.' Perhaps on a more insidious level, Weichardt's study enabled the scientific precedence for experimentation of psychoactive stimulants on schoolchildren in order to measure their performance[3].
Adderall as modern fatigue vaccine for the intellectual laborer.
"Kickstart my Heart," the n+1 news brief from young Brown University scholar, is obviously one hip class warrior experimenting with exhaustion through intellectual expenditure as pleasure principle. Adderall is, depending on whether the prescribed version is Extended Release (XR) or standard, respectively either multiple strands of amphetamines set to absorb at different times to sustain the effects, or pure amphetamine. The pill is purported to boost the ADD, ADHD, or Depressed patient’s attention span, productivity, memory, mood, time management, and overall energy. While popularly marketed and consumed by children and adolescents, and widely covered in privileged health insurances plans, the black market of the pink pill goes for one dollar per milligram on Wall Street, and depending upon the University, a few bucks on campus.
Adderall provides the scholar not always increased productivity, but the amphetamine high of desiring the drive of labor and connectivity: increasing your discursive capabilities, providing unparalleled focus, and capability of data-processing and storage akin to a flashdrive. The n+1 Adderall Diaries attest to the frivolity of theoretical labor, while reaffirming the 24-hour work ideology produced by capitalism’s requirement of surplus-labor in order to exponentially increase production, a pathological condition of capital as old as the concept of work itself[4]. The 24-hour work-day of the intellectual laborer subsidizes the task of reabsorbing consumption into production, integrating the waking hours into a seamless circulation of information—our hottest commodity these days.
| Work | |
| If I have to do something that requires a lot of thought or planning, I put it off for as long as I can. | |
| I have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project. | |
| My mind sometimes wanders or "drifts away" when I'm reading. | |
| Despite all my effort and preparation, my performance is not consistent. | |
| I find myself easily distracted by noise or activity around me. | |
The overloading of information follows the overloading of stimulation: heart races, reads faster, types quicker, sleeps less, works longer.... crashes harder. Amphetamine stimulation follows the tragedy of borrowed energy. The anxiety-crash after "pulling an all-nighter," or mixing exercise and amphetamines resembles the panic in the scientific community following the discovery of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics. The law of “entropy” as Rudolf Clausius identified in 1865, revealed the loss of energy in heat when work moves from a warmer body moved to a colder body. Since all motors, whether human or not, must regulate their energy so that they do not exhaust in over-heating:
“Countering the limitless energy of the conservation theory, the second law of thermodynamics raised the prospect of the cataclysmic ‘heat death’ of the universe, the gradual dissipation of energy into an icy, lifeless void[5]."
The reliance upon borrowed energy deprives the body of reproducing its own energy—alike to the parasitic reality of a fever when the body cannot heat itself—racing towards a heat-death, cardiac arrest, exhaustion occur in the form of physical collapse or mental blackout. Yet, due to the relatively physically-inert character of intellectual labor, the sustenance of borrowed energy can last a lot longer... Nervous energy works more electrically than mechanically.
The Control Revolution introduces the origins of the Information Society through tracing the evolution of information as control mechanism for industrialized production to information as the labor and commodity itself. The model of "society as a processing system, one that sustains itself by extracting matter and energy from the environment and distributing them among its members,” is an image of living systems in a productive exchange between resources and their conversions. ‘Society as processing system,’ in an Information Age becomes the feeding ground of capital, dominating information control in order to safeguard the reproduction of itself[6]. Adderall inserts itself as a smooth-operator in repairing the lines of fried nerve-wires, re-integrating isolated units of inefficient production, and connecting information processors to the grid at the moment of their conception. Pre-K for some in this country means 20mg of amphetamine with their Cheerios every morning.
"Living organisms, for example, convert energy originally from the sun into forms more useful to the processes of life: body heat, chemical energy for metabolism, electrical energy to fire nerve impulses, mechanical energy to contract muscles and move about (luminescent organisms can even convert the energy back into light)[7]."
Adderall's epidemic arises at a new phase in the Control Revolution, one where we are dealing with a crisis of information-traffic, nervous stimulation-overload, and increasing mediation of our daily work and leisure lives through information circulation. Our mental ecologies are witnessing psychophysical statistics similar to the creation of fatigue and neurasthenia pathologies of the 19th and early 20th century of the over/underworked body. We too are overheating: Depression, Anxiety, Tourettes, OCD, ADD, ADHD, Alzheimers, Shaking Leg Syndrome... are all medical fictions and lived realities of processing information in an ever accelerating society (reflective in our obsession with online social networking and our exhausted dollar). Adderall’s ab/use on the college campus signifies the crisis of assimilating into a production-line where the meeting of deadlines is only a symbolic gesture in the timelessness of intellectual labor as a ‘lifelong pursuit of knowledge.’
| Family | |
| I sometimes completely forget about special occasions or scheduled family events. | |
| I tend to "tune out" in the middle of conversations. | |
| I have difficulty managing finances: bank accounts, bill-paying, etc. | |
| I put things down at home and then can't seem to find them. | |
| I just can't seem to unwind or relax, even when I have the time. | |
In 1883, the US Government authorized the division of the U.S. portion of the continent into five separate time-zones in order to better regulate distribution and communication, particularly making time for railway and telegraph coordination. So too does Adderall further divide the intellectual laborer’s workday into a to-do list grid, making easier the crossing off of tasks and finished products by integrating the time of their production[8]. As Molly testifies in “Kickstart My Heart,” one not need separate exercise and studying, or the worker’s reproduction through maintaining health in the midst of a relatively un-muscular line of work. As for sleeping on Adderall, the student finds that every professor with a deadline makes a cameo in their dreams. Ignoring the solar clock around ‘crunch time,’ is not a choice but a mandate, signified by the cruel mantra of finals: “sleep when you’re dead.”
Pastoral idleness inhibits the headspace of the information-superhighway, the pace of life of electro-academia: always awake, on the go, with a cup of coffee and now, with a little blue or pink pill…never stop moving, exchanging, networking, connecting. The recent surge in Blackberry and Ipod devices acquired by college students of America testifies to this addiction to information consumption, social networking, and super-efficient processing. In an era when every worker has homework, the combined planner, phone, computer Blackberry and Iphone are the perfect connectors to scheduling in social hours when free-time must be calculable and results determined.
| Social Life | |
| I make decisions too quickly, without thinking, and then regret it later. | |
| I feel impatient when I have to wait (e.g., in line or when stopped at a red light). | |
| I sometimes talk too much when I'm around others. | |
| I fidget or squirm with my hands and feet when I have to sit still for a long time. | |
| I have trouble managing conflicts or making compromises. | |
The image of Molly on a treadmill, on adderall, negative caloric expenditure, reading Spivak.
[1] Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Faitgue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
[2] While many other pathologies were at stake in this discourse, fatigue may be most appropriate as a collective signifier.
[3] Rabinbach, 142-145.
[4] Rabinbach, 46-47.
[5] Rabinbach, 47
[6] Beninger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 32.
[7] Beninger, 37.
[8] Beninger, 16.
Another Possibility of Entropic Energy,
Tired of Work
Idleness, fatigue, hysteria, and psychosis—the mechanical failures expressed as essential pathologies of the woman-condition through her ‘weaker constitution,’ her poorly designed motor. Such biomechanical deficiencies constructed around the turn of the 19th century became the predominant rational etiology of the female-workers’ tendency towards entropy (perhaps produced by the over-production of blood caused by her menses.) The pseudo-science of neurasthenia (et.al) was backed by Scientists (frontiering the much-demanded bioenergetic field research) to Industrial Capitalists/Taylorists (creaming over any excuse to reduce wages while maintaining the most calculable and generalizable worker: nearly-alive, barely-dead) to Big Daddy (dying to keep her in the cave). These bimodal physical and mental pathologies haunt the female worker beyond the 19th century conception of her labor power. The epigraph of woman’s intellectual labor begins, consistently, with an excuse. From the Emilys (both, the schizophrenic sister and the spinster) to Avital, women write themselves in, through, and out of madness, weakness, and insufficiency. From the hysteric rant of the literary feminist to the compulsive suburban mother’s to-do list to the over-time punch card of the factory seamstress—the order of the laborer’s list enumerates the potential energy of her motors, while each reminder of her expenditure brings back the fear and calculation of net-loss in heat-energy, never able to re-circulate through the blood of capital. Cybernetics is ‘woman’ as the control-function of man’s production—how fast he may replicate and with what efficiency—regardless of whether we are interested in the cybernetic system of the factory, the office, or the home: “That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a function of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new” (Haraway, 1991:167). If capitalism, therefore, has no limits except its own scandal: the exhaustion it requires in the form of surplus-labor (Rabinbach, 1992:74), then ‘woman’ becomes the control-limit when her surplus-labor as head domestic unit is crippled through psychophysical pathologization, or better yet when Nature herself is exhausted in the exploitation of her limited resources… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere… The closed circuit of her reproductive motor-organ at once makes possible the production, and limits the potential energy of Man. In his disseminatory-driven competition of semen (liquid capital), woman arrives as the entropic expenditure of man’s excess-value and heat-accumulation. At once ensuring a limit and insinuating the eschatonic arrival of the ‘heat-death’ of the planet, with the threat of her dead-labor as an icy, lifeless womb.
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