The Internship is a 2013 comedy directed by Shawn Levy, written by Vince Vaughn and Jared Stern, and produced by Vaughn and Levy. The film stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. It is a lighthearted look at the labor market and generational politics, with a light romance background story. It is not going to be a classic in the future, but it does have a lot to say about the sort of world we would have if Google defined culture. I am thinking about the combined vision of
society and production it presents. The title itself is a giveaway I
suppose but the deeper I get into the film I see it as an account of the
working conditions and social order that organizations such as Google
would like to see as standard in the world.
Obviously competing for jobs. But this competition also
includes identity. Because to quote the film; "sometimes the most
radical move is to be yourself". This self is defined by senseless hard
work and no fixed status. The self also has a physical dimension, and
the dinner between the Aussie executive and Owen's character defines
what a jerk is: with "A moment on the lips forever on the hips" - bodies
are people.
The only way to be educated is by
paying for tuition (as two strippers tell us) or attending corporate colleges (Google
Campus, the scene of most of the story). Its about 'hard work' and not "a fancy education". The
often referred to University of Phoenix or as they call it in the film "the Harvard of the
Internet" is real and "offers campus and online degree programs,
certificate courses, and individual online classes":
"The University of Phoenix (UOPX) is an American for-profit
institution of higher learning, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona,
United States. The university has an open-enrollment admission policy,
requiring a high-school diploma, GED, or its equivalent as its criterion
for admissions. The university has 112 campuses worldwide and confers
degrees in over 100 degree programs at the associate, bachelor's,
master's and doctoral degree levels. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of
Apollo Group Inc., a publicly traded (NASDAQ: APOL) Phoenix-based
corporation that owns several for-profit educational institutions." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Phoenix
Failure is described in the sauna scene as a flawed
information footprint. Working in a strip club while studying to be a
dental hygienist is success, as the money falls from the air in one
scene with the pole dancers. But not having a straight story online is a
huge problem:
"Google has singlehandedly cut into my ability to bullshit" "
"Cramping your style?"
"Making you a better person?"
"Yes"
The need for a registered and monitored presence online is
emphasized in the Google Help sequence. Firstly Google Online help is
only available to business customers. There is no direct online support
for non-paying customers. But the character who does not log in and
therefore his work does not exist is part of the hegemony of sanctioned
and controlled information.
The society of The Internship is not about
inclusive places, social positions or even people. Its about progress
through the artificial creation of needs. It is defined by the line in the film "We've had lots
of jobs but we are trying to build a future here".
I associate the surveillance and corporate governance of The Internship with the emerging Trans Pacific Partnership, whereby production is governed by the beliefs that;
"commits the parties not to set or use labor or environmental laws
or practices either for trade protectionist purposes nor to weaken such
laws or practices to encourage trade and investment" (http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/145583.pdf p13).
Its a free market for labor and environmental laws. When the competing interns in the film approach a mom and pop pizza place to advertise with Google, the line they take to sell the service is about a form of globalization we are increasingly familiar with today:
"Hasn't the neighborhood gotten a little bit bigger?"
"We're not asking you to abandon the artistry, we are asking you to expand the reach"
"All waiting at the click of a button"
Its a disturbing vision where everything is channeled through the search engine and all alternative forms of organization and regulation are void. Information may be power. But all information is reality.
(BTW
- Flashdance, a meme in the film The Internship, came out in 1983. On
January 1 1983 the migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially
completed and this is considered to be the beginning of the true
Internet).
'Alleph: A Self Portrait' won a BAFTA Interactive Arts Award in 2003 for its author Sakab Bashir. The work is no longer available online, but I include some screen shots here from a prolonged study I made of it as part of my graduate work for a earlier incarnation of my PhD thesis. 'Alleph' is a beautiful multimedia production in which links opened to audio and video loops. Seven spaces linked together to provide an allegory of the major stages of life. Material was lifted from the 12th Century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds and intertwines with material sampled from popular films from the 20th Century, images of a school, a prison, a hospital, a workshop and a menhirs on a hill. There are adaptations of seven verse stories from The Conference of the Birds in Alleph; ‘A Pauper in Love’, ‘The Heron and the Sea’, ‘Rabe’eh and the Two Grains of Sand’, ‘The Ambiguous Courtesan’, ‘The Devil Complains’, ‘Joseph and the Well’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Hallaj’. Titles flowed across the screen and one manipulated and navigated the text of 'Alleph'. As one navigated further through the work the flowers opened around the main image, thus positioning the reader in the looping structure of 'Alleph' (it resumed again once the final image had been completed for links and media).
I present a few screen shots here to give an idea of what 'Alleph' looked.
The exhibition Game On 2.0 is organized by the Barbican Center in London and opened last Friday at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. I experienced it today, moving through more than 100 playable games on consoles, handhelds, arcade boxes and personal computers from the past 50 years of interactive computer games.
Highlights of Game On 2.0 include an original 'Computer Space' by Nutting Associates (1971) captured in this video of actual play.
I was very impressed by the audio used in Computer Space. Computer Space was the world's first commercially sold coin-operated video game and video game system of any kind (predating magnovox odyssey) It's the first coin-operated arcade game to use a video display to generate graphics via video signal (predating Magnovox Odyssey). It was built by Nolan Bushnell (a founder of Atari and Chuck E' Cheese).
Also featuring in the exhibtion is a Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first commercial home video game console. It was first demonstrated in April 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. It is a digital video game console, though is often mistakenly believed to be analog, due to misunderstanding of its hardware design. The Odyssey lacked sound.
Here are a few detail shots of the Odyssey from the one on show in the exhibition.
The following are two examples of Computer Space (1971) in original green and ruby arcade cabinets. Each stand almost 2 meters tall and has an other-worldly feel to them. But I suppose that was the idea back in the day.
Of course as everyone knows, the first real computer game was Spacewar, which Computer Space was based on. This is acknowledges in the exhibition:
Some of the oldest games in the exhibition are handhelds.
The other outstanding feature of the Game On 2.0 exhibition are the sketches, models and drawings from some of the biggest games ever made.
Finally, another highlight I want to mention here from Game On 2.0 is a simple piece of nostalgia. It is Galaga in an original arcade cabinet. I played Galaga at skate rinks, shopping arcades, as well as in bus stations as my parents dragged my brother, sister and I around Greece and Turkey on a 6 month hippie odyssey in 1982. Suddenly in the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm I was 13 years old again as I assumed the rapid fire hunched posture I knew all those years ago. This time my two sons were beside me, and we each played a round of Galaga. It was a magic moment.
The Game On 2.0 exhibition runs from 25 October 2013 – 27 April 2014 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. Take the Bus 69 to Museiparken from the stop near Sergels Torg oppostite the Åhlens. I recommend it to all, and plan to return myself. It is a popular account of computer games that avoids any difficulties or the darker sides of gaming. I noticed the absence of the Wolfenstein games, but due to the Nazi imagery maybe this was too difficult.
Be warned that at high demand times (like now) you buy a 50 minute slot of time at the exhibition. These have to be booked once you have purchased your tickets. The staff say this may change later in the year, but it depends on how demand goes. Fifty minutes is not enough to see the whole exhibition. The rooms are not that large and they are filled with games. I could have easily spent 4 hours there.
"The Immersive Internet provides
the first omnibus account of the emerging world-view of people who
spend most of their quality time mediated by computer-based
technologies. It should be taken seriously by anyone trying to design a
liberal arts curriculum for Humanity 2.0." – Steve Fuller, University of
Warwick, UK
The Immersive Internet Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy will be released by Palgrave Macmillan on Friday 29th March 2013. The internet has begun to develop into a much more immersive and
multi-dimensional space. Three dimensional spaces and sites of
interaction have not just gripped our attention but have begun to weave
or be woven into the fabric of our professional and social lives. The
Immersive Internet – including social media, augmented reality, virtual
worlds, online games, 3D internet and beyond – is still nascent, but is
moving towards a future where communications technologies and virtual
spaces offer immersive experiences persuasive enough to blur the lines
between the virtual and the physical. It is this emerging Immersive
Internet that is the focus of this book of short thought pieces –
postcards from the metaverse – by some of the leading thinkers in the
field. The book questions what a more immersive and intimate internet
might mean for society and for each of us.
Contents
1. Postcards from the Metaverse: An Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Dominic Power and Robin Teigland 2. Niggling Inequality: A Second Introduction to the Immersive Internet; Edward Castronova 3. The Distributed Self: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Human Identity; Richard Gilbert and Andrew Forney 4. Meta-dreaming: Entangling the Virtual and the Physical; Denise Doyle 5.
Individually Social: Approaching the Merging of Virtual Worlds, the
Semantic Web, and Social Networks; Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez 6. Virtual Worlds as Radical Theater: Extending the Proscenium; Anthony M. Townsend and Brian E. Mennecke 7. Virtual Worlds and Indigenous Narratives; James Barrett 8. The Immersive Hand: Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Environments; Smiljana Antonijević 9. Discovering the 'I' in Avatar: Performance and Self-Therapy; Alicia B. Corts 10. Reflections and Projections: Enabling the Social Enterprise; Steve Mahaley, Chuck Hamilton and Tony O'Driscoll 11. Added Value of Teaching in a Virtual World; Inger-Marie Falgren Christensen, Andrew Marunchak and Cristina Stefanelli 12.
Play & Fun Politics to Increase the Pervasiveness of Social
Community: The Experience of Angels 4 Travellers; Maria Laura Toraldo,
Gianluigi Mangia, Stefano Consiglio and Riccardo Mercurio 13. Framing Online Games Positively: Entertaining and Engagement through 'Mindful Loss' of Flow; Müberra Yüksel 14. Inhabitants of Virtual Worlds, Players of Online Games - Beware!; Antti Ainamo and Tuukka Tammi 15. Relationships, Community, and Networked Individuals; Rhonda McEwen and Barry Wellman 16. Gemeinschaft Identity in a Gesellschaft Metaverse; Cynthia Calongne, Peggy Sheehy and Andrew Stricker Sorting out the Metaverse and How the Metaverse is Sorting Us Out; Isto Huvila 17. On the Shoulders of Giants: Understanding Internet-based Generative Platforms; Jonny Holmström 18. Social Norms, Regulatory Policies, and Virtual Behavior; Andrew Harrison, Brian E. Mennecke and William N. Dilla 19. Self-organising Virtuality; Rick Oller 20. Making Currency Personal: The Salutory Tale of the Downfall of the DomDrachma; Matthew Zook Afterword; Tom Boellstorff
All welcome; followed by what promises to be a truly unique Q&A.
ABSTRACT:
We are increasingly expected to perform in Mixed and Augmented
Realities. We are no longer merely biological bodies but increasingly
accelerated by our machines and enhanced by our instruments. And we have
to manage data in virtual systems. We have become extended operational
systems, performing beyond the boundaries of our skin and beyond the
local space we inhabit. As well as Circulating Flesh it is now an age of
Fractal and Phantom Flesh.
We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war
against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has
been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a
patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in
natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the
new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun,
and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality
and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market
barbarism to live on. - Raoul Vaneigem (2009)
The War we live in is waged via virtual and violent means. People are dying in Syria as they are supported by the digital infrastructure provided by the Telecomix network. People are going to jail in Europe and North America, and dying in the process for what they believe should be the future for humanity. Massive cyber-attacks are probably happening right now on large institutions of power in the powerful nations of the world. The United States government is using drone devices, an extremely high level technology, to kill its own citizens. This is a war with technology and information at its center; with access, distribution and ownership defining the battles. Surveillance is an important part of this conflict, with one company combining all popular social software into a search engine, RIOT, which gives not only GIS information but links it to time and visual images for individuals. A subject can be surveilled and intercepted from the information they provide online.
"Hacktivist cluster Telecomix released 54 gigabytes of Syrian censorship log data. The anonymized log data was collected from seven of 15 Bluecoat SG-9000 HTTP proxies used by Syrian government telco and ISP STE. Preliminary analysis revealed such keywords as proxy and Israel
were blocked. And of course, much porn. The data set provides a unique
look at Internet censorship from the inside. Internauts who enjoy
regexes and charts are invited to help make a pretty infographic.
Telecomix's #opsyria has been fighting censorship and facilitating communications
[note: French language link] in Syria for the past few weeks, providing
TOR, VPNs and technical advice and support via IRC. They've also been providing DNS service for The Pirate Bay."
Swartz had his principles, and he held to them forcefully. “Aaron
generally felt like being a stickler about that stuff made the world
better, because it actually pushed people to do the right thing,” says
Wikler. He wouldn’t sign any contracts that might encourage patent
trolling. He was finicky about his wardrobe, wearing T-shirts whenever
possible. “Suits,” he wrote on his blog, “are the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.”
He wasn’t dogmatic about everything. He’d always been opposed to
marriage, but he was starting to think he’d gotten that wrong. On
Friday, Jan. 11, Stinebrickner-Kauffman stopped over at Wikler’s house.
She and Swartz were coming over for dinner later that night, but she
came by herself beforehand. As she played with Wikler’s new baby, she
mentioned that Swartz had told her that, after the case was resolved, he
might consider getting married. If that was possible, anything was
possible.
Our first book began as an invitation to reflect on the events of
2011: to make sense of the changes going on in the world and in our own
lives, and to voice the questions the year had left us with. From Wikileaks to the UK riots, Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, the
headline events of the year all make their appearance, often from the
perspective of those involved in or touched by them. Smári McCarthy
writes about his experience as a Telecomix activist providing tech
support to revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Keri Facer examines
her responses after riots come to the street she has just moved into.
But these images sit alongside the less dramatic events that make up the
fabric of our lives, and between the two a pattern begins to emerge.
Then there is register for a free copy of The Open Book global movement for open knowledge. From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. New concepts about public information, transparency and the Commons are combining in unprecedented ways, resulting in a breadth of transformative collaborations across the globe. The Open Book explores the social and technological manifestations of this emergent movement for the first time. It features 25 in-depth thought pieces written by pioneers of openness around the world from London to São Paulo, including the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Rufus Pollock, the Free Software Foundation’s Karsten Gerloff, the Centre for Sustainable Communications’ Jorge Luis Zapico, The Guardian’s Simon Rogers, the Open Hardware Summit’s Catarina Mota, IBM’s Ville Peltola, Open Design Now‘s Peter Troxler and the Harvard Berkman Centre for Internet & Society’s Mayo Fuster Morell. Each of these contributions explore a unique aspect of the open knowledge movement and how it has affected work, society and culture across paradigms, from government to business to design to education. Also included is “The Evolution of Open Knowledge”, the world’s first crowdsourced timeline of openness and transparency from 1425 to the current day. The Open Book is an essential reference point for those interested in the culmination of a global movement for change in a time of rapid social progress. The book is a free PDF.
Hacking is nothing new. Some do it for profit, others for secrets.
Self-styled "hacktivist" groups such as Anonymous do it for causes they
believe in. But what if the target is a newspaper and the hackers have a
grudge? On January 30, the New York Times revealed that hackers
based in China had waged a four-month-long cyber onslaught against the
paper soon after it published an article exposing the fortune amassed by
the family of outgoing premier Wen Jiabao, a fortune that for the
Chinese Communist Party has turned out to be – quite literally – an
embarrassment of riches. Soon after the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post
admitted that they too had been attacked. Bloomberg News and Associated
Press are also on the list of media outlets targeted by China-based
hackers, raising the spectre of a new front in the global cyber war –
one that puts journalists and their sources in the firing line.
The documentary about the founders of the Pirate Bay. Share it with the world! Support the filmmakers of this free film here www.tpbafk.tv A film by Simon Klose
Simon
Klose, the Swedish documentary and music video maker, wants you to
pirate his film, TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, and he’s
not even kidding. His documentary about file-sharing website The Pirate
Bay is available for sale, on YouTube (free), or via Pirate Bay torrent
(also free).
The documentary covers the stories of Pirate Bay
administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde as
they handle their 2009 Sweden court case about civil and criminal
copyright laws. After being convicted, they are then forced to handle
life “away from keyboard”.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been in police custody since 1 September 2012, when he was arrested and later extradited to Sweden from Cambodia. Upon arrival back to Sweden he was immediately arrested for suspicion of
hacking Logica, a Swedish IT company that works with the local tax
authorities. He was kept in solitary for up to 23 hours a day until
December 7, 2012 while serving his one year sentence. The prosecution
kept extending custody and later implicated him in a second hacking case
along with accusations of four instances of serious fraud and four
attempted frauds. Again, no official charges were filed. He remains in custody today.
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google (Right) with with the Iranian Foreign Minister (Left).
The Google boss hit the headlines last week when it was revealed he
had co-authored a book criticizing the Chinese authorities. Google has
clashed repeatedly with Beijing over censorship and alleged hacking. Schmidt
called China the world's "most sophisticated and prolific" hacker of
foreign companies, in a book called The New Digital Age, which will be
published in April.The book, co-written with Jared Cohen, a
former state department official who now runs a Google thinktank, brands
China as the world's most dangerous superpower.
Eric Schmidt goes on to sign a 60 million euros deal with the French President Francoise Hollande to be able to link to French publications without having to pay tax on the advertising revenue it earns.
Anonymous' 'Operation Last Resort' has published a new document
revealing that the hacking collective has had an astonishing amount of
access to The Fed's internal files and servers.
Anonymous has compromised the Grand Banks Yachts Web site to host this new file—Grand Banks Yachts, Ltd.—which manufactures and sells luxury yachts worldwide. The URL filename ominously reads, "dorner-is-a-symptom-not-the-syndrome."
The Anonymous 'Operation Last Resort' action
last Sunday exposed over 4,600 bank executive credentials for The Fed's
expanding nationwide program, the Emergency Communications System.The FBI has now begin to respond—at
least to the bank hack—by opening a fresh criminalinvestigation into
Anonymous 'Operation Last Resort.'
It was announced on Wednesday morning that Barrett Brown (pictured), a man who
became a very public talking head for AnonOps (the brain trust that is
arguably the cortex of the hacktivist group Anonymous, even though there
technically isn’t one) is facing up to 100 years in jail for three separate indictments. - 'Why is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?'
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian
reveals how an "extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon,
the world's fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of
information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and
Foursquare.
Raytheon says it has not sold the software – named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology – to any clients.
But
the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was
shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and
development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system
capable of analyzing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace. (Guardian)
Society has been infiltrated by new digital technologies with potentially profound consequences. It makes sense to ask what’s changed? How has it changed? How much? Researchers and companies have gathered enormous amounts of data to ostensibly answer these questions, but the full implications of this data too often go unexplored. The Web is not a new, separate sphere, but part of the same social reality about which critical social theorists have produced several centuries worth of insight. These theories may be profitably used, tweaked, or even abandoned in light of contemporary realities. What previous theoretical tools help us understand these changes? What new theories should be
created?
The Theorizing the Webconference seeks to bring together an inter/non-disciplinary group of scholars, journalists, artists, and commentators to theorize the Web. As in the past, we encourage interrogations of power, social inequality, and social justice; intersections of gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability will be woven throughout the conference.
Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman of Google sketches out a future world in which
cyberterrorists are targeted by government drone strikes, online
identities are taken hostage and held for ransom, and parents explain
online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex.
Eric Schmidt also said that his recent trip to North Korea had shown
that the population there lives in an "utter information blackout" – but
that change was certain to come, as well as for the 5 billion people
worldwide not yet connected to the internet, for whom connectivity would
bring enormous benefits and transform their lives.
Speaking to an audience at Cambridge University, in the first of a
number of speeches outlining his view of the technological future,
Schmidt said that he thought change would come "slowly and
incrementally" to North Korea as the use of mobile phones spread, and
with it information. Google has already updated its maps of the country since Schmidt's visit using "citizen mappers" inputting information to its Mapmaker software.
The conference aims
to investigate how we might understand and theorise space in relation to
the digital image. Building on the recent 'sensory turn' in visual
scholarship, the meanings, materialities and values of the image
suggested through the interconnectedness of visual and other sensorial
relations have revived discussion of the image's transcription of space.
Part of this discussion concerns a shift in thinking about visual
production and consumption, particularly from mobile media, as happening
in movement. At the same time, this shift coincides with the
development of digital imaging technologies as digital photography and
cinema facilitate new experiences and consumption in movement, in the
process encouraging new ways of understanding space and images. The
objective of this conference is to bring together scholars in the fields
of digital media, architecture, anthropology, design, visual studies,
cultural studies, game studies, and any others who are interested
in space and digital media to expand on what has so far largely been a
'visual discourse' and to facilitate a dialogue from diverse
perspectives about questions of space, movement, the sensorial and
the digital.
Confirmed speakers
Alan Blackwell, University of Cambridge
William Brown, University of Roehampton, London
Sean Cubitt, University of Goldsmiths
Seth Giddings, University of West
of England
Asbjørn Grønstad, University of Bergen
Markos Hadjioaonnou, Duke University
Monique Ingalls, University of Cambridge
Trond Lundemo, Stockholm University
Lisa Purse, University of Reading
Aylish Wood, University of Kent
Sponsors
Supported by the Centre for Research in the
Arts, Humanities and Social
Sciences (CRASSH), University of Cambridge.
