Posts by tb@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #AbqkjG1D0PlCJqGywa by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2023-10-20T19:47:44Z
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[2/x] Imagine: the most toxic job you've ever had, the most abusive relationship you've ever been stuck in, the craziest cops who've ever hassled you (all in plainclothes), the most frightening border-crossing experience you've ever experienced, the most treacherous friendship you've ever navigated, the most overly surveilled setting you've ever passed through, the most hopeless political moment you've ever endured, the most autocratic forced-conscription you've ever fretted over, the most frightening slum (or maybe provincial setting) you've ever lived in or just passed through, the most oppressive family dinner you've ever sat through, the most aggressive bullying you've ever witnessed, the most surreal 'splaining you've ever been subjected to "for your own good," the most corrupt, faceless bureaucracy you've ever faced, the most shameful compromises you've ever been forced to make, the worst neighbors you've ever had to cope with, and more — all fused into a single, seamless nightmare seemingly without end, because you don't allow yourself to imagine an alternative.Those aren't analogies, they're the concrete reality, because these movements are *made of, by, and for those antagonists in every facet of life*: family, friends, colleagues, high-ups, neighbors, passers-by, randos, and reply-guys. And the movements "incentivize" those forms of oppression, exploitation, and betrayal — and, often, the most aggressive people are the ones who rise to the top of these movements.
(DIR) Post #AbqkjHzVfhacR9UeZc by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2023-10-20T19:48:09Z
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[3/x] There's a reason we don't hear internal, open, democratic, subjective debates emanating from areas under the control of political formations like Hamas: people don't allow themselves to do it, because the consequences can be summary, severe, and often seemingly random. Your progressive values and the freedoms you take for granted come to an end. Period.Not one word of what I've written is explicitly or even implicitly "pro-" or "anti-" Israel. I'm not talking about Israel, its ideology, history, politics, strategies, tactics, or actions. I'm describing what, in my limited observation, life was like for people who are ostensibly represented by a militarized ethno-religious-territorial revolutionary movement. And I'm describing that because I believe everyone — *everyone* — should live fully and freely. I don't know how to realize that, but I do know how *not* to: terror. Not "terrorism," *terror*.
(DIR) Post #Ad4dNhyMDgim2Y8LKq by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2023-12-22T16:54:30Z
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@tante Decades ago, in the late ‘90s I think, I saw an interesting arg — by Brian Boigon, I thought but could never find it again — that time-based media display formats played a dominant role in structuring certain standards of female beauty in particular. A specific example was Grace Kelly. Her elegant facial (it was argued) contours were ideally suited to large B&W screens, in contrast to the hyperexaggerated faces of actors like Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie, whose features look like they were attached toa face, almost Mr Potatohead–style — a quality suited to small displays (which at the time meant computers, ~ten years before iPhones etc). In retrospect it seems obvious, at the time less so. There are other less speculative (and less heteronormy / white) examples, like the origins of voguing adopting still photography as a movement vocabulary, or Twitter personas ‘branding’ themselves with dyed hair and clothing color, or some aspects of fandom/cosplay, etc. It seems clear that what you note is an ‘IRL’ adaptation to, and compensation for, many aspects of YT, TT, etc — basically competition in space (screen real estate) and time (fleeting attention). Unrelated: this is probably a better framework for rethinking long-forgotten debates about whether / how video games ‘cause’ violence.
(DIR) Post #AhG1VXTsldhTwhXZgW by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-04-23T20:36:17Z
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🎯
(DIR) Post #AhGvDitXBgkXZ7cWtE by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-04-26T04:38:17Z
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Microsoft: “Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we're releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license.” https://m.slashdot.org/story/427680
(DIR) Post #AkIr9fwXDsVxrC3IlE by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-07-25T22:04:11Z
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If you’re in NYC, the Friedrich Kiesler exhibition at the Jewish Museum is one of the most boggling exhibitions I’ve ever seen. I knew he was fascinating, but I can’t think of anyone else who sat at the nexus of so many cultural transformations: surrealism, ergonomics, architecture, vitalism, education, theatrical design, and — for lack of a better word — the emerging cultures of diagrammatics. It closes in a few days, so run don’t walk — and leave time, because it takes time. The explanatory texts only scratch the surface of what he was up to.
(DIR) Post #AkIr9jIyitFYHfZley by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-07-25T22:10:58Z
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When I first moved to NYC, I was lucky to work on a play, “Serves You Right” — written and performed by my then-neighbor in the East Village, Steve [Buscemi] and Mark [Boone Junior] — that Kiesler’s widow, Lillian, acted in, along with her close friend Maryette Charlton. Her improbably great line, which she bellowed with amazing gusto for such an elderly person: “WAITRESS, I’M HOT — I’M BURNING UP!” I was way too young and callow to have a clue about what wild characters she and Maryette were.
(DIR) Post #AkKRTQnF3BdIAbNvaC by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-07-26T16:33:49Z
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It’s barely been FIVE days since Biden stepped down, and there’s no way on earth that Harris could have accomplished more. Yet the NYT’s lead editorial insists “she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly.” Um, like what? “Ms. Harris ought to challenge Mr. Trump to a series of debates or town halls,” they say — as if the problem was her failure to do so rather than Trump ricocheting between sawed-off insults, beaten-bully threats, and desperate efforts to moonwalk out of debates? If their editorial was honest, it’d say, “Donald, sit down, shut up, and grow the fuck up.”This points to how and why the NYT *needed* to pretend away the jaw-droppingest moment in a jaw-dropping week: the Harris campaign’s statement that used actual words that actually mean something to describe Trump. The NYT’s shadowplay election “journalism” depends, utterly, on the Dems doing the same: pretending Trump is real, pretending the GOP aren’t fascists, pretending hopelessly stacked decks are fair, pretending corruption is legitimate. If indeed the Harris campaign continues, whether consistently or just occasionally, to call Trump what he is, the NYT will *have* to cover it — but doing so risks having to address their own real complicity.We’ll see. Note that I haven’t said one good word about Harris. I’ve never liked her as a politician, and her record is SUPER problematic. But whether you, I, or anyone else “like” non-fascists (a) is a luxury we can no longer afford, and (b) was always a pretty bankrupt way to think about politics anyway. Harris has my absolute, unequivocal support, and she will until *she* is sitting in the Oval Office and Trump is not — and is on his way to jail.
(DIR) Post #AlCxiXpcqw9NPcaQXw by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-08-11T15:12:55Z
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I was thinking just now of Hegel’s claim that he saw the Zeitgeist riding across the battlefield of Jena, and I thought: whatever happened to that Zeitgeist. Oh, right, Google ‘enclosed’ it as name for search trends a decade and a half ago, and we’ve been wandering in the desert ever since, not just missing a Zeitgeist but missing the fact that we were missing anything at all. Then it hit me: now, finally, we have a 👉🏼 Zeitvibe 👈🏼.Since amateur neologism is my lifelong avocation, I looked it up. BOOM! Only two prior sources?! But the real question is how vibes could be e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e these days but Zeitvibes are nowhere?
(DIR) Post #AlbAAElJD0CxcYZp8y by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-08-29T16:39:55Z
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Image lifted from FB, where it came with the caption: {{{ This bicycle, called the "RELATIVITY Special", if pedaled at 90 rpm, is designed to travel faster than the speed of light. This is proven by a description of the gear ratios on the sheets seen on the wall behind it. One revolution of the pedals sends the bike 6 times around the earth. (It is part of the art exhibition "Circle of Time" that Pat Chirapravati curated now on display at California State University, Sacramento). }}}I have no idea if that’s true, but I have some idea that it exemplifies the kind of theoretical-rhetorical style that’s destroying the world — like ”the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the universe will inexorably tend toward heat death, so here’s my deck on how we can get first-mover advantage by burning everything down.”
(DIR) Post #AljKNxzKvJ4OSU0FE0 by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-09-06T14:48:29Z
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A friend asked the hivemind, basically, how do you deal with the fact that, at a university level, assigned readings are expensive / scarce, and that they’re available by other means. My answer:/// The genteel name for these resources – IOW, the way to avoid using words like “piracy” — is *shadow libraries*. In and of themselves, they’re a legit subject of academic research, but they’re difficult to study because the precise nature of one’s interaction with them can stray very close to the line between fundable research and massive civil or even criminal activity. Doubly so because in academic contexts the *means* of interacting with them, i.e., the internet, is effectively run by IT departments, which are typically more closely aligned with general counsels’ offices than with faculties, so their role is ambiguous and often — due to federal law — involved in enforcement of intellectual property. Put plainly, if you sit in your office downloading books from Library Genesis or papers from Sci-Hub, sooner or later you’ll get a talking-to or worse. That’s in the context if WEIRD nations (you know, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies), though; in LDCs, the issues are different, centering more on equity and A2K (access to knowledge) than IP…. /// [1/2]
(DIR) Post #AljKNzQfZAWmvXnaT2 by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-09-06T14:48:54Z
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[2/2] …Some of my academic besties have done serious work on SLs: Joe Karaganis edited a book (Open Access, BTW) for MIT Press that was the culmination of a comparative longitudinal and historical studies across several countries — Germany, Russia, Brazil, India, and (crucially for you) South Africa, that I remember. And note *historical*: much of the book is concerned with ths pre-internet origins of informal libraries (samizdat, photocopies, etc), and the broad arguments or at least implications are that the IPR regimes of WEIRD nations are an extension of colonial practices, and that we need to understand SLs as *continuous* with unofficial means of circulation. So: if you think of your syllabus as a document that’s purely ‘internal’ to a course / dept / school, then telling students how to access works by legally questionable means is problematic; whereas if you think of it as a document that also has an ‘external’ function — for example, to an international scholarly community presented with other standards and legal aspects, then there’s a stronger equity-based argument for including explicit pointers to SLs. That all sounds very elaborate, but it can be distilled to a short paragraph that (1) is a genuine “teachable moment,” and (2) acknowledges the fact that many scholars around the world be unable to engage with your syllabus were it not for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, etc. A pointer to Joe’s book _Shadow Libraries_ both supports that and enables students and others to understand why these questions aren’t reducible to the usual pearl-clutching blather of WEIRD privilege. ///
(DIR) Post #AlzhVLps43jJvCQOEi by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-09-14T12:36:21Z
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@tomjennings ?
(DIR) Post #Am0VsdVRWlGX5uAMvA by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-09-14T22:00:49Z
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@tomjennings Ah! UI thing. And that graphic really is amazing.
(DIR) Post #AmNlXqRkHtWt36cgeO by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2024-09-26T01:11:18Z
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Denis Zakharov says he’s going to post a chapter a day of the first English translation of Putin’s “official” biography — the one Putin’s been trying to suppress for decades. Oh, and he also says the proceeds from his Patreon will go to the ZSU a/k/a the Armed Forces of Ukraine. 😹 🇺🇦 👊🏽https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1838984984020795549.html
(DIR) Post #Aq1YPjVZ7luW1eHUFE by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2025-01-12T16:42:09Z
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Yesterday I got curious about #Trump’s saber-rattling over #Greenland, so I went down a rabbit hole — and came back out with a carefully sourced timeline going back to 2011. tl;dr: I think Russia is punking Trump into provoking a break with NATO.https://counter.ink/blg/new/2025-01-12-trump-and-greenland-a-timeline
(DIR) Post #ArRxNSvcMjwzBEPdtQ by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2025-02-24T17:06:37Z
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@tomjennings @jym we just need innovation in the pie space
(DIR) Post #ArTcWrGThgLYczXDNo by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2025-02-25T00:34:38Z
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Everything about this is excellent. From Cinephilia & Beyond on Bsky [EDIT: it’s by badtastegoodcause.com]
(DIR) Post #Avlo5sq22sL2gNn2Ho by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-03T22:25:13Z
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@tomjennings Masto needs FB-style reax like 😮
(DIR) Post #AyNzzXY5ZRaK8zQPJ2 by tb@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-19T12:14:41Z
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I use the phrase “must read” very sparingly, like once every five years or so. This review is a *must read*. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century