Hey,
On 06 Jul 2008, at 15:07, Patrice Riemens wrote:
>> Rob van Kranenburg wrote:
>>> “Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles.
>>> Once a
>>> vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban
>>> environment
>>> is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri
>>> dish of
>>> both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has
>>> long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security
>>> available
>>> is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been
>>> routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-
>>> fiction
>>> genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S.
>>> Eliot's Rat'sAlley.
>> btw has any of you seen mandabala? some called it 'fictionless sci-
>> fi' :P
> Yeah, if it means what it suggests (and not what it says), fi-less
> SciFi
> has become quite a feature these days: the future has already arrived.
That's when I stopped reading cyberpunk, maybe 7 years ago or so. It
was just there!
Strange Days movie was basically doable, take or leave a few details,
the feeling was just that what was fantasy before, was now real.
Worse than that, things we didn't imagine in cyberpunk were here
(life blogging, twitter addicts, massive contactless tracking
systems, collusion of politics and hype and mafia in a bling-bling
show-business way, ...).
There are things that this massively specialized, highly layered
global world doesn't accept.
So that means that there are way to combat some bad orientations.
Some examples:
a/ mashing up things faster than the market can digest them, as
discussed in Joachim Montessuis conference during last Hacker Space
Fest, as exemplified with WU-M-P recontextualizing UMP / Sarkozy
speeches in wu-tang like rap songs, ... cf. excellent book "Mediated"
by Thomas de Zengotita
b/ using trash to make valuable new things that evades profit and
tax: recycled used vegetable oil into diesel/fuel being now
prosecuted by France for not perceiving tax on petrol oil-based
products (!), recycling trashy radio spectrum of ISM 2. GHz into WiFi/
mesh networks that can actually circumvent ADSL and Internet for
local communities, etc...
c/ using funny things to show how weird / ironic / sad situations
are, cf. Critical Art Ensemble playing miniature cars in malls, some
unnamed groups ;-) planting marijuana field on top of administrative
retention/detention centers by sending seedballs on their roofs (i.e.
french government ends up farming ganja on top of one of the worst
case of liberty deprivation for just the sake of being), decorating
only surveillance cameras without affecting their use during
christmas with decoration balls (cf.
http://www.XLRMX.org , shameless
auto show), being sued for promoting and selling seeds that have been
planted and harvested by many generation of our parents (cf.
Kokopelli association
http://www.kokopelli.asso.fr/ ), etc...
I think the worst things that we can fall in is:
a/ saying "we can't do anything against it"
b/ keep discussing this in small circle without enlarging the circle
of people being involved
c/ not doing things and keeping into the "debate" phase
d/ not dreaming, not having fun!
Love,
Phil.
>> http://www.mandabala.com/
>>
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