counter-culture

This kid's story will make you never post on Facebook again.

Meet Cameron D’Ambrosio. He’s 18 and lives in a small town near Boston. He talks a lot of smack on Facebook and wants to be a rapper. Oh, and he’s being held without bail as a terrorist for … WHAT??!

This is disgusting. Of course, the kids an idiot, but the media is the horrid monster. Furthermore, the US intelligence agency is a draconian force that serves only to instill fear in the people rather than protect them. Their farcical “laws” are the true source of terrorism that exists in the world today. 

Now please raise your hand if you think i should be detained for exercising my first amendment rights and promoting political dissent.

http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/

World Press Photo controversy: Objectivity, manipulation and the search for truth - British Journal of Photography

“There’s nothing worse for a photojournalist than to have his or her integrity questioned. As the most recent debate about Paul Hansen’s winning World Press Photo image has shown, rumours, speculation and misinformation travels far quicker than the truth. Last week’s exposé by Extreme Tech, ‘How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop’, was shared 17,000 times on Facebook and more than 2500 times on Twitter, while World Press Photo’s clarification clocks only 130 shares on Facebook.

Yet the idea of post-processing being a recent innovation is fundamentally wrong. Before digital, photographers made the same decisions about how their images should look. But, as Ashley Gilbertson argues, these decisions were made at B&H, when “we were buying these different film stocks and filters”. For the VII photographer, today’s situation isn’t different from what happened in the early 1990s in Bosnia, when “we had four photographers photographing the same thing on a street corner, where one guy was shooting with a tungsten filter, one guy was shooting with Kodachrome and a warm filter, another guy was shooting on black-and-white film, and another was shooting on colour negative,” he says. “You had four completely different images, four different perceptions of reality, four very different looks, but all very relevant….

…Photographers are a lot more opinion-driven than reporters.”
And that should be at the heart of this debate, says Magnum Photos member Christopher Anderson. “It is beside the point to argue about the degree to which facts have been altered, because all photography does that,” he tells BJP in an email conversation. “I could care less whether or not a photographer uses HDR techniques to produce melodramatic, hyperbolic alterations of the facts. I am more interested in the truth in what they have to say, even though I know it is subjective. I don’t need an algorithm to know that I am looking at a lie. I know because the world we live in does not look like that. My mind knows it, my heart [knows it]. When a suburban kid in garage in New York is retouched to look like he is in a burned out alley in Aleppo, I don’t have to examine the raw file to know that the photographer has created something that has nothing at all to do with facts.”

He adds: “My point is that facts do not exist, but truth does. And truth is paramount. Authenticity and integrity in the image is something I think we understand intuitively. When we come to grips with the fact that all photography is a lie, the question is not whether or not it is factual, the question is whether or not it is true. It is not the technique that makes it true or not, therefore it is pointless to argue about how much retouching should be acceptable. But, as a general rule, heavy handed retouching makes me doubt the photograph’s intention towards truth.”

Anderson is quick to point out that he too retouches his images and alters the colour palette to his liking. “I am not making a claim to some integrity in that regard,” he says. “But I also do not make claims to factual, objective photography anymore. My goal is truth, not fact, but it is my own personal subjective truth. That is all I can offer, and I no longer enter contests for that reason.”


Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news-analysis/2269913/world-press-photo-controversy-objectivity-manipulation-and-the-search-for-truth#ixzz2U2blshMe

The Performative Nature Of Being

"In the particular is contained the universal."

∴ James Joyce

dream-caught:

edwardspoonhands:

Google Earth Engine is a joint project between Google and NASA that allows anyone access to a 30 year time-lapse of the surface of the earth. I made a video about how amazing, terrifying, and important it is.

Wow.

DAMN.

Culture industry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.^{[citation needed]} The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse. (See Eros and Civilization, 1955).The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.^{[citation needed]} The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse. (See Eros and Civilization, 1955).

"freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices."

∴ Theodor W. Adorno

Who the Fuck is Jacques Ranciere? :: Critical-Theory.com

Who is Jacques Ranciere?

A French critical theorist and philosophical troll in a world of ivory tower intellectualism, bourgeois academics, and Jean Baudrillard, Ranciere stands out as a kind of anti-philosopher. A University of Paris professor and former student of Louis Althusser, Ranciere has committed his intellectual project to destroying its foundations.

While that may sound a lot like Baudrillard, who wants to remind everyone that everything is simulation and nothing matters, or Nietzsche who attacks the foundations of Western metaphysics, Ranciere takes a different approach. Namely, by accusing every other philosopher of being a shitty Platonist and hating democracy.

While other philosophers deconstruct the metaphysical tradition and replace it with their own project, Ranciere’s philosophy can be summed up by “meh, people will figure it out.” And thus we present: the thought of Jacques Ranciere.

#1 “Fuck the Police” is Pretty Much his Definition of Politics

Dissensus is the process by which actors disrupt the politics of the police.

You see, the police are all about telling you what to do and where to do it. Remember that time that cop got all up in your grill for skateboarding in front of 7-11? Or, if you’re a person of color, remember that time a cop arrested you and planted drugs on you for skateboarding in front of 7-11? That’s the police order; the partitions that the police put in place for what can be seen, said and done, and where they can be done. When that cop drove away and you kept skateboarding, you totally disrupted the police partitioning of  that space (sort of)…

…That’s what the police order does, it tells you to take part in the fake politics – casting a ballot, going to a town hall – and tries to divest energy from what Ranciere calls real politics. After all, the Egyptian revolution didn’t start because people started sending nicely worded petitions to the government. It started when people manifested themselves in the public spaces that were once apolitical.

#2 He Doesn’t Get Along with his Colleagues

But that was just the start. Ranciere’s project became more and more defined as time went on. From a criticism of Althusser and orthodox Marxism, Ranciere’s message soon became “Philosophy – it’s a big bag of dicks.” Writing Hatred of Democracy, Ranciere attacks the Platonic tradition and ties it to practically every Marxist philosopher. He argues that everyone in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marx, wants to become a philosopher king to shovel Truth into the mouths of the blind ignorant masses. Ranciere carries this line of thought to his other books such as “Disagreement” where  he accuses every theorists of democracy of being a Platonic saboteur.

#3 He Thinks Your Professor is Worthless

Ranciere advocates this form of  “universal education” and says the traditional teacher/student model is only meant to perpetuate societal inequality and keep students in a state of stultification. Stultification – that’s a fancy word for stupid. The implications of this philosophy are A) You don’t need a teacher like Ranciere to teach you anything and B) An illiterate parent could teach their children to read by plopping a book down and saying “figure it out.”

The crazy part? This shit works, and not just around random corners of Europe where the tradition was born.

You know how your dumb ass can barely figure out how to change the settings on your Kindle? Remember that fancy college degree you spent more than $100k on? Well fuck you, because kids in Ethiopa who don’t even know what a tablet is can not only fix your settings but remove any pesky security measures while they’re at it.

You see, someone at One Laptop Per Child had the bright idea of just dumping a bunch of Motorola Zoom tablets in an Ethiopan village full of kids. The children did not speak English, which was the language loaded on the tablet, and they had never seen a computer before. Within weeks these kids were fucking wizards with the things so much so that they actually figured out how to jailbreak them.

http://critical-theory.com/who-the-fuck-is-jacques-ranciere/

theolduvaigorge:

futurejournalismproject:

CISPA Is Not Dead

Visit Fight For The Future and CISPA Is Back for an overview and actions you can take, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for background on the bill since it passed the House and what happens next as it moves to the Senate.

Meantime, the White House responded to an anti-CISPA petition signed by over 100,000 people with — in part — the following:

The White House issued a veto threat for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) on April 16, because the legislation did not fully address our core concerns (especially the protection of privacy). Even though a bill went on to pass the House of Representatives and includes some important improvements over previous versions, this legislation still doesn’t adequately address our fundamental concerns…

…There is broad consensus on the need for more threat-related information sharing — including among the leading privacy advocates we regularly engage on the issue. The essential question on which people across the spectrum disagree isn’t if we can share cybersecurity information and preserve the principles of privacy and liberty that make the United States a free and open society — but how.

Related: Here’s something to chew on, via Wired:

A secretive federal court last year approved all of the 1,856 requests to search or electronically surveil people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” the Justice Department reported this week.

The report, released Tuesday to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, provides a brief glimpse into the caseload of what is known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. None of its decisions are public.

The 2012 figures represent a 5 percent bump from the prior year, when no requests were denied either.

Image: Via CISPA Is Back. Select to embiggen.

I’d like better sources, but given the government we have, I fear this is all likely legit info. I don’t have the lung power for a deep enough sigh.

this needs to be brought to full public attention, again and again.

(via wespeakfortheearth)