Inspiration
Make greed, hoarding and consumerism uncool
We live in a poorly educated society which idealized the famous, powerful and wealthy. A ruthless and cut-throat culture which perceives kindness and compassion as weaknesses instead of virtues. Start changing that and youll see the billionaires ostracized and shamed, instead of revered in the covers of magazines. Make greed, hoarding and consumerism uncool. Exalt compassion and kindness and slowly our cultural attitudes, as well our social, political and industry leaders will start to look a lot different.
via 4 Beware of Images.
you can sit there a long time
The advice I like to give to young artists, or really anybody, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.
via Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work | A Photo Editor.
to spawn a hydra
The Pirate Bay’s goal was not to be the biggest, but to spawn a hydra. — Rasmus Fleischer
via Pirate Bay ‘Founders’ Speak Out on the Site’s Past and Future | TorrentFreak.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s prison letters to Slavoj Žižek | Music | The Guardian
The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production.
via Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s prison letters to Slavoj Žižek | Music | The Guardian.
erase ±/ Living Symphonies
“… a sound installation based on the dynamics of a forest ecosystem, growing, adapting and flourishing in the same way as a real forest’s flora and fauna. Modelling the real-world behaviours of over 50 different species, it will be installed in a series of English forests over the course of summer 2014, adapting to the inhabitants and live atmospheric conditions of each site.”
behemot | a local bookstore closing on the 14th of January
In my opinion, technology is not an interstellar gate for future to happen to us. Technology is not a materialization of God’s secret plans. It is just something we create and use. We choose its purpose and we create the morals behind it.
Making Programming Meaningful
Certainly, we can introduce computer science without programming. Certainly, computer science is more than just programming. But computer science certainly includes programming, and programming is a critical part of the passion, beauty, joy, awe, and art of computer science. We have to engage with the hard part of broadening participation in computing, by introducing programming. We have to develop the design processes so we can figure out how to introduce programming to a broader audience; we have to develop performances that recruit and engage students; and we have to be free to change programming so that it is meaningful and has a chance to induce passion.
Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech): Making Programming Meaningful to Induce Passion for Broadening Computing, Future Directions in CS Ed Summit.
a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks
A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
Steve McQueen: my hidden shame
“You know, I’m not so interested in that. I’m only interested in the work. So all this chat, all this, you know, selling your soul, that’s of no interest. To me, it’s all about the work. It’s the only thing one can do.”
pablo soto & torrents.com: a way to give control back to the people
“We believe that the most powerful weapon we have in this important battlefield is Free Software. Constructing search engines, P2P servants, robots and what not, and releasing them all under a free license that lets everybody read the code, modify it, and replicate it, is a way to give control back to the people.”
via Most Important Torrent Site in Years to Take the Internet By Storm | TorrentFreak.
Capital has motion, necessities, a life of its own
The problem is not the greed of individual capitalists (though they are greedy). It’s structural. Capitalists are merely social agents who fill positions that are required and generated by capital as it reproduces itself. Capital has motion, necessities, a life of its own. Capitalists, the stewards or servants of capital, are compelled to maximize surplus value by whatever means necessary. Capitalism is currently facing a convergence of crises: of overproduction, financial instability, and ecological catastrophe. Yet they can’t ease up on production, but continue to forge ahead. It reaches such irrational proportions that in China, there are 12-24 massive cities built each year that have no people living in them At the same time, not coincidentally, 80% of that country’s rivers no longer support aquatic life.
