Month: September 2018

Quoted Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications (Boing Boing)

The copyright extremists have told us that internet freedom is the same thing as piracy. A generation of proud, self-identified pirates can’t be far behind. When you make copyright infringement into a political act, a blow for freedom, you sign your own artistic death-warrant.

Can’t help but feel that this is one set of laws that, in answer to Thoreau’s question, surely must be transgressed, en masse.
I enjoyed the London Design Festival this weekend. Design informs everything that we make, it’s part of the fabric of society. While I can appreciate good design that’s simply functional or aesthetic (or better, both), I’m really most interested in that which is sociopolitical, raising awareness about a social or political issue, or even better, helping to solve it. There was a good number of pieces fitting that description – my favourites were probably the Institute of Patent Infringement, and the Anatomy of an AI. Also MultiPly and PlasticScene, which were discussing alternative and sustainable material usage. For aesthetics alone I still love the computational art and sculpture, whether it’s the geometric or the organic, but can’t help but want to know what problems it can solve.
Watched Four Horsemen by Renegade Inc from Renegade Inc

Four Horsemen is an award winning independent feature documentary made by the Renegade Inc. team which lifts the lid on how the world really works.
As we will never return to ‘business as usual’ 23 international thinkers, government advisors and Wall Street money-men break their silence and expl…

Watched the Four Horsemen documentary. It’s a bit heavy-handed, maybe a bit disjointed, but an interesting selection of interviews and a decent broad brush at the damage neoliberalism is causing. It felt like there was a lot radical rhetoric, not so much in the way of concrete praxis, but I guess it probably works best as an eye-opener film. The presence of Joseph Stiglitz would suggest it’s a more reformist than revolutionary message. But then Noam Chomsky was in there too. Female voices were somewhat underrepresented. I didn’t particular like the small segment of ‘we just need a different type of capitalism’. And sometimes it felt like a focus on the individual more than society as the vector of change. But if it causes some people to question the current sociopolitical system, then all power to it.