Counter Terra

Map Art

Oddly enough, Miriam Dym, a former housemate from the Upper West Side (aka the Wilderness Years Part I), makes abstracted maps and geographies in the art world. She has a very nice screensaver also.

Pynchon Me I'm Borges

That isn't enough for you? How about this?

"[The great thing about maps is that they are] the socialisation of obsession, even if counter-academy, an inscription/de-encrypting of obsession into discourse which can be empowering in a way that suggest R.D. Laing's description of psychotherapy as a way of recognising passively undergone processes and converting them into praxes -- 'the patient becomes an agent.'"

Indeed, yes. Maps have an odd way of mixing the subjective and objective. There are lies, damn lies, and maps. But at least maps can be visually appealing. Score one pomo cred for the cartographers.

New Yorkers, be sure to check the link to the Institute for Applied Autonomy's web application for finding the "path of least surveillance" in Manhattan.

Carbon Sequestration

A dinner on a ranch in Tucson saw thunderstorms roll in, causing the dry wash to flood black with soot from the brushfires in the mountains. The frogs came out into the desert. So perhaps it was appropriate that I was dining with some of the fine folks who are working on greening the world's coastal deserts with seawater.

Their video took particular care to display the rusting hulls of Russian T-72s(?)--legacies of Hallie Selassie--as part of the greening process in Eritrea.

A Horse Named Toyota

I'll be on the road for the next few days. Planned stops in Santa Barbara, Tucson, and El Paso. Back soon.

The Market is Really the Blog

This post on Crooked Timber is an astonishingly refreshing reminder that the prevailing meme environment might just be a bit misleading.

"Because the market form is such a dominant feature of contemporary societies and of talk about them, applying the “x is really a market” trick to any given x is by now quite a common trick... It’s important to see, though, that you can do exactly the same thing in reverse, or with other combinations of concept and institution, and to similar effect."

Human Robotics

The guy in the red shirt about 30 seconds into this SoCal asian-american group's clip is phenomenal.

Simulation and Simulacra

More fun with philosophy and the end of the world:

"Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."

But who says they're descendants?

Plus bonus material on how to live in a simulation, viz.

"If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look likely to become eventually rich, expect to and try to participate in pivotal events, be entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happy and interested in you."

Sounds suspicious to me.

I Against I

A GMU Geography grad student has been getting some attention lately.

"He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: 'If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?' In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys."

"For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society."

But this open vs. secure society tension is more than a policy thing, of course. Clay Shirky's recent discussion of groups and social software gets us pointing in the right direction. Relevant and funny bits:

1. Society against the State: "Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy."

"There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?"

"He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: 'Hopelessly committed to both.'"

2. Conan and Canon: "The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein [sic] newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying 'You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way.' Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: 'This is for discussing the works of Tolkein.' Go in and try and have that discussion."

OK.

3. Memory Leaks: "People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done."

4. "Geoff Cohen... said 'The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.' As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high."

5. Gang of Four Revisited: "But you cannot completely program social issues either. So you can't separate [technical and social issues], and you also can't specify all social issues in technology. The group is going to assert its rights somehow, and you're going to get this mix of social and technological effects."

"So the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed, which means you have an ongoing issue. And the best pattern, or at least the pattern that's worked the most often, is to put into the hands of the group itself the responsibility for defining what value is, and defending that value, rather than trying to ascribe those things in the software upfront. "

6. Homo Hierarchicus Revisited: "Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for 'the group within the group that matters most.'"

"The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy."

"Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so. "

7. I Against I: "The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in."

"In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down, in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn't a country; it was a region of China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn't a country, there oughtn't be any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic."

"Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said 'Anyone who's on Usenet gets to vote on any group,' sufficiently contentious groups could simply be voted away."

"Imagine today if, in the United States, Internet users had to be polled before any anti-war group could be created. Or French users had to be polled before any pro-war group could be created. The people who want to have those discussions are the people who matter. And absolute citizenship, with the idea that if you can log in, you are a citizen, is a harmful pattern, because it is the tyranny of the majority."

"So the core group needs ways to defend itself -- both in getting started and because of the effects I talked about earlier -- the core group needs to defend itself so that it can stay on its sophisticated goals and away from its basic instincts."

8. Identity Politics: "If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in."

"Now, I say 'handles,' because I don't want to say 'identity,' because identity has suddenly become one of those ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag of stuff comes along with it. Identity is such a hot-button issue now, but for the lightweight stuff required for social software, its really just a handle that matters."

"It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because 'who said what when' is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations."

"The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain. And actually, it's right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the brain. Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren't linearizable, and they're not portable."

"There are people who cheat on their spouse but not at cards, and vice versa, and both and neither. Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to another, and it's not easily expressed."

9. Alienation: "eBay has done us all an enormous disservice, because eBay works in non-iterated atomic transactions, which are the opposite of social situations. eBay's reputation system works incredibly well, because it starts with a linearizable transaction -- 'How much money for how many Smurfs?' -- and turns that into a metric that's equally linear."

10. Daemonic Possession: "And you see things like the Kaycee Nicole story, where a woman in Kansas pretended to be a high school student, and then because the invented high school student's friends got so emotionally involved, she then tried to kill the Kaycee Nicole persona off. 'Oh, she's got cancer and she's dying and it's all very tragic.' And of course, everyone wanted to fly to meet her. So then she sort of panicked and vanished. And a bunch of places on the Internet, particularly the MetaFilter community, rose up to find out what was going on, and uncovered the hoax. It was sort of a distributed detective movement."

"Now a number of people point to this and say 'See, I told you about that identity thing!' But the Kaycee Nicole story is this: changing your identity is really weird. And when the community understands that you've been doing it and you're faking, that is seen as a huge and violent transgression. And they will expend an astonishing amount of energy to find you and punish you. So identity is much less slippery than the early literature would lead us to believe."

I must confess I usually find Mr. Shirky's stuff frustratingly basic, but he still talks about the internet more interestingly than most. Sorry for the rambling post. Glass houses and such.

Back to the Enlightenment

Maybe my favorite period of world history will come around again! At a cost of ~5.4 billion souls...

"Let's cut to the chase here and assume that a giant switch goes off in the Atlantic and ninety percent of everybody dies in ten years. That would leave 600 million people, about the population of the early 1700s. What are they going to do with themselves henceforth, one wonders. There are still lots of them, and the early 1700s was a pretty lively time. We might assume that they'd be reduced to Mad Max savagery by a holocaust of this magnitude, but why? All of them? No way. Those 600 million survivors would have plenty of elbow room, plus enough leftover infrastructure for 6 billion. The TVs would still be on, the cellphones would work.... Assuming that the climate is stable in its new Ice Age configuration, this 600 million could re-create industrial society in a jiffy and go right on burning coal. Because hey, it's COLD outside!"

Bruce Sterling's Viridian post this week is a rather sobering commentary on a Gwynne Dyer article. Dyer's an interesting fellow; a military historian/journalist--for the Left. Kinda. Such creatures are so rare these days it seems he's better known simply for his politics than his analysis.

Navigating by the (Low-Orbit) Stars

An interesting Fast Company article on GPS is generating some discussion on Slashdot that serves nicely as a kind of primer on some of the applications and issues of the technology. There's a lot of breathlessness regarding money and privacy reminiscent of n number of technologies touted as the Next Big Thing, but in this case it I can see it being significantly justified.

I'm working on a more comprehensive GIS post, so I'll try to get that up in the next few days. I find myself having to explain what it is with increasing frequency...

Angelika

This should make life in Dallas more pleasant: Angelika!

Thanks, Seyd!

Texas the Long Way

Texas Bound!

Geek Out

Okay, so I've blown hours going overboard adding lots of nifty doodads to this site which I'll probably end up removing in a few weeks anyway. The niftiest of all, Blogmapper, isn't quite working properly, however. It allows you to blog on a map. I'll see if I can sort that out later.

Drilling in Indonesia: Asian Pop Divas

More on that world music theme:

After seeing an incredible screening of morlam karaoke videos, my interest in asian pop divas has skyrocketed.

Particularly stunning was Jintara Poonlarb's "Arlai World Trade".

"Bare-midriffed disco dancers gyrate against still pictures of the attack on the World Trade Center. This is not a ballad, but rather a rocking morlam tour-de-force, propelled by a hard-charging line-up of combo-organ, bass, and drums, and Jintara's sharply-honed vocals, much of it sung against a backdrop of a surging American flag."

"Synopsis of lyrics: The World Trade Center is buring and my new husband is missing. I am shocked at seeing his last name on the list of the dead; it was not his choice to go, he was assigned there. We just got married, and then he died."

Probably more poignant and surreally accurate (from a global perspective) than anything we'll see in western media for another 5-10 years.

Also of interest is "the girl with the breasts" and diamonds implanted in her teeth, Inul Daratista, whose "drilling" is apparently making waves in the Java Sea.

"But the furore surrounding the Indonesian "dangdut" singer Inul Daratista is on a completely higher plane than anything I've come across anywhere in the world since the death of Princess Diana. War has all-but broken out again between the government and separatists in the westernmost province of Aceh after a five-month ceasefire, protests are mounting against a controversial education bill and the first of the Bali bombing suspects is about to go on trial - but you'd be hard-pressed to find much news about these weighty matters when the latest twist in the Inul saga is vying for airtime and newspaper space."

This story has irate muslim clerics, controversial pics of the President's spouse, media industry conservatism, and rags-to-riches (and probably back again) drama. What more do you want?

Drilling:

"Basically, it involves rotating the hips in increasingly energetic circles while steadily bringing in the rest of the limbs until one's body has become a flurry of moving appendages. With her flowing black locks and usually clad in a brightly-coloured sequined outfit, Inul has created, or rather become, a new art form."

So says John Aglionby of The Guardian.

If anyone has or tracks down mp3s of this stuff, let me know! I mean, if Inul has no official releases and an estimated 3 million pirated VCDs, there's gotta be something out there.

Finding a Path

I'm still not sure what Counter Terra is. For the time being, it is another art/science/culture/politics/society/technology blog, a clearinghouse of links and (hopefully) discussion of things and people interesting to me and any who should choose to participate. It may also double as a personal blog.

In time, I would like to see it become part of some sort of community and evolve into something with a stronger focus and voice. We'll see. Consider this an invitation!

Regarding the name, it is of course a play on "counter-terror" and the memes associated with it. I mean it also to suggest a kind of critical perspective of global issues, with particular interest in things in the peripheries and interstices of the world system. It is also the name of one of my father's earliest books of poetry, published contemporaneously with his first Martian fiction.

Tradi-Modern

I thought this might be appropriate for a first post. It incorporates some elements of where I want this blog to go. Congolese electronica. Hand-made gear. "Merciless grooves."

"The musicians come from an area which sits right across the border between Congo and Angola."

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess this is one of the more insane places in the world these days.

"Their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, but they've had to incorporate the originally-unwanted distorsions of their sound system. This has made them develop a unique style which, from a sonic viewpoint, has accidentally connected them with the aesthetics of the most experimental [western] forms of rock and electronic music, as much through their sounds than through their sheer volume (they play in front of a wall of speakers) and their merciless grooves."

Be absolutely sure to check the mp3 link at the bottom of the page.

I believe I originally spotted this on Metafilter.

Welcome to Counter Terra!