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Lauren Weinstein, When Mozilla's Fanatics Make Us All Look Bad

Have noted this attitude problem of the Mozilla developers -- looks like these egomaniacs are on the verge of driving Firefox and a large chunk of the web off a cliff over the https thing. Weinstein writes:

What they're discussing for Firefox is turning off unencrypted http support. You're not able to run encrypted https? Too bad, Firefox users won't be able to access your sites. Or perhaps for a while they'll just get a big red warning telling would-be visitors that you're subhuman slime who just doesn't care about security.

Plus -- you guessed it -- it seems that they'd like to make this an Internet standard so you'd effectively have no escape regardless of which browser was in use.

Meanwhile Firefox continues to worsen with each accelerated update. For example, I can't page back in my dump.fm log now without getting browser windows of blank space from never-loading images -- this starts happening about 5-10 pages back -- the buggy behavior appeared with FF version 37. Mozilla's Seamonkey browser isn't affected by this contagion. Am contemplating my future as an Opera user.

But without freedom of expression how would we know about people who... oh never mind.

[120] retweets [769] favorites

Winona Ripps blazed a trail in the feminist net art community (and drew some scorn) for her exhibitions and performances where only women were invited. Despite a separatist bent that had not been seen since Andrea Dworkin, Ripps' frequent targets were "cis-identified" females, that is to say, sexy babes that seemed more interested in catering to the male gaze than transcending gender boundaries. Ripps' critics characterized her work as "self-hating" since the word misogynist didn't pass the laugh test. Her project "Art Whore" was a classic Guerrilla Girls stratagem, a prank where she embarrassed a hip Manhattan hotel that had hired her to be an unpaid one-night artist in residence. She used her materials stipend to hire masseuses from Craigslist, one male and one female. Rather than exploiting them by having them pose provocatively, she asked them to make drawings. Completely misunderstanding the nature of the project, a writer for the Art F City website asked if it was "the most offensive work of 2014." Many mainstream publications parroted this diatribe, leading to a mass dumbing-down of a subversive feminist idea.
When Ripps announced that she would be showing paintings at Manhattan's Postmasters gallery, denunciations were swift that she had sold out. Art F City issued another angry ukase, declaring before the show even opened that the work was self-hating and "not truly feminist."
Let's say at the outset, now that the show is up, that most of these aren't great paintings. This reviewer liked some of the smaller ones the gallery had in the back room but it's very hard to feel anything about work you know was farmed out to a Chinese oil-on-canvas sweatshop -- a practice increasingly used by American artists who can't deal with the messy, hard realities of producing a large body of painted work. As a critic you either talk about the outsourcing or pretend it didn't happen.
Digital versions exist of much of the work so that's what we'll talk about here. Winona Ripps' subject matter is a cis-identified fashion model named Adrianne Ho, whom the website Hypebeast called "the unofficial face of menswear." Using her Instagram account, Ho presents herself in sexy "exercise" poses sponsored by various brands that pay for the shots. In the manner of Kathy Acker, Ripps appropriates Ho's work, and using an Apple iPhone's imaging program, makes "posthuman" digital distortions of Ho's images. Like a cyber-Orlan, she alters Ho's features, not into some classical ideal but into grotesque modifications suggesting recombinant plastic surgery or gene splicing, aimed at the cliches of female heteronormativity. Instead of a petite button nose, a comically enlarged one. Instead a waist that's merely skinny, one so small that food could barely pass through it. Instead of pleasing symmetry, funhouse mirror asymmetries.
This jamming on the extremes of patriarchal capitalism is the purest feminist work but that hasn't stopped another round of critics from calling Winona Ripps "self-hating." Some have even stooped to personal attacks, saying she's a lousy lay! Hell hath no fury like the cisgendered female scorned.

(a thought experiment - connections to actual persons or institutions are intentional)

Passing along a couple of links without endorsement:

1. "The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic" (Brian Feldman, The Awl)
What do you mean, rise? We've been covering cruddy image quality around here for years (bicubic mush, quantization noise) but the particular wrinkle of Feldman's article (that we don't much care about) is image noise and compression artifact buildup as a true indicator of virality, or authenticity, or something. Feldman assumes an internet full of non-Turing Complete Users screenshotting and re-screenshotting pictures because of the limitations imposed by phones and social media on downloading and lossless saving. Call us snobs but we're just not very interested in those idiots or their memes.

2. "It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic" (Nick Douglas, Journal of Visual Culture [PDF]
This article is a bit better but still too focused on 4Chan stuff that isn't all that funny (rage comics) or fresh (LOLcats). The subject is meme culture as perpetuated on Tumblr, Reddit, Cheezburger, etc and a kind of sloppiness aesthetic that dominates in comment threads. Again, many Dump.fm users are going to cop to a certain snobbery about the lameness of Douglas's examples.
The bigger question is what's at stake here? Douglas sees these cruddy pictures as the visual face of trollpunk but within that vague label, perhaps we still need to separate true revolutionaries from hapless participants in the troll economy.

Worth reading and thinking about: this post by Digby about a Der Spiegel article revealing the origins of the current Middle Eastern evil baddies of the moment. Seems that they aren't in fact Islamist fanatics but an intelligence operation planned by a former Saddam secret policeman, as a way of using the Syrian mess to regain lost Sunni territory in Iraq. If this is true (and Der Spiegel bases the article on a recently-unearthed cache of planning documents by said henchman) then much of the Fox News blather about Islam's inherent violence is turned upside down. As Der Spiegel describes it, this was a mixture of the "long con" and the thought control tactics of a secular military underground.