9 kb drawing by gummy4
Rhizome.org is having another net art ancestor-worship party, with their digital conservator slaving over a hot stove to reheat old cuisine. Art continues to be made, however, in ways that don't require conservation. Looking at some recent work by gummy4 and ptato0, there is a fairly seamless continuity back to some posts by a certain blogger about someone named Petra Cortright...
untitled by ptato0 (resized from original)
The Clintons' "Russians hacked the DNC" meme hardened into conventional wisdom faster even than "Saddam has WMDs." In case you find it laughable but get pepper-sprayed with links from a Hillbot, purporting to prove the connection, here are some counterlinks (1 / 2 / 3) to spray back with. OK, one of them is the National Review but just because they're hard shell conservatives doesn't make them wrong about everything. Mrs. Clinton herself doth protest a bit much when she claims that "17 intelligence agencies" verified her campaign talking point. I mean, c'mon.
Hillary Clinton is being sold as some kind of foreign policy genius, yet not knowing the location of Mosul is a large gaffe.
This geographic illiteracy, which came out during her third debate with Trump, was quickly noted by the Greens and Libertarians, according to US News & World Report (excerpts of its coverage below).
Greens:
"The fact that Hillary Clinton incorrectly identified Mosul as being on the border of Syria, despite having led us into war with Iraq and advocating U.S. intervention in Syria as secretary of state, highlights the insanity of our current bipartisan foreign policy," says Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate who often polls fourth behind the major-party candidates and Johnson.
"The political and media establishment have built up Clinton as the best and most experienced candidate on foreign policy, when the reality is that her experience includes a trail of destruction and failed states, from Iraq to Libya and Honduras," she says in an emailed statement. "This is much more troubling than Gary Johnson's 'Aleppo moment,' yet we expect the corporate media will largely ignore it because their owners don't want to discredit the preferred candidate of Wall Street bankers and war profiteers."
Libertarians:
Though greeted with a yawn, Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, says Americans should care about Clinton's description of Mosul.
“It's concerning in the general sense that Hillary Clinton is simply getting a free pass from the media – and also that the media doesn't seem to know where Mosul is, either,” Raimondo says.
“It's more than merely concerning in a more specific sense because Mrs. Clinton's comments were uttered in the context of her strategic plan to take on ISIS,” he adds, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. “If she really thinks that taking Mosul will somehow provide a gateway to ‘press into Syria,’ then she is in for a big surprise.”
Sena Partal: What do you think about the social media companies that are applying filters and recommendations to people’s information? What are the established interests behind it?
Geert Lovink: The mechanisms at work here have been known for years. The turning point is arbitrary but I would put it somewhere after 2008, when the founding frenzy of Web 2.0 had come to an end and the scaled-up platforms were getting serious about making money, in short, when the internet entered its monopoly stage. It wasn’t anymore about sheer possibilities.
The focus shifted to locking in customers...
[snip]
SP: Do you think social media users in general are interested in having control over their news feed?
GL: I doubt it. Once a tool or service is new, we like to find out their affordances and play around with settings, we discuss them with peers. Facebook and many other social media services have become so powerful precisely because they became part our daily lives [speak for yourself --tm], they are now deeply routed into our routines. At first, me, and many others, were confident that the stubborn and independent internet generation would get bored soon, and would, almost intuitively, started looking for the Next Thing (as happened in the past with MySpace, Blogger etc.). This didn’t happen. Most users I speak to start to get uncomfortable when I raise the issue why they are still on Facebook. They got lured into it and do not know how this happened, and how to quit. There is no reason to quit. Slavoj Žižek is right with his bad [conscience] (we know it is bad for us but still use it etc.) [speak for yourself --tm]. Yet, he doesn’t offer an alternative either, and this is where the social media story gets stuck. Spreading critical information how news feeds work is good and feeds the uncomfortable feeling -- but doesn’t change much. It merely raises the paradoxes we have to live under. [or that people choose to live under --tm]
