Jay Rosen argues that Wikileaks
is a "stateless" news organization, by which he means "decentralized."
It's an interesting parallel to my own thinking on information-age
activism. Of any group in existence today, Wikileaks probably best
embodies what it would mean to do decentralized advocacy, for better or
worse.
I love scripting languages, and I especially love this
series on using JavaScript--highest of the high-level--to emulate
the original GameBoy. It's kind of an amazing learning tool, if you
think about it. Someone should do this for X86.
While it's true that b-boys
and b-girls love correcting people who call it breakdancing, I
actually think it's more depressing that most people think the dance is
entirely about acrobatics--flares, windmills, and backspins--to the
exclusion of toprock and footwork. That's not their fault, of course:
that's how the dance has been sold in mainstream culture since the
eighties. But check out this video by Zeshen of Havokoro, and consider
how much people are missing. He starts out with some pretty standard
stuff, and then about a minute in starts going off on impressive
combinations of strength, flexibility, and creative movement. It's one
of the coolest footwork displays I've seen.
Consider this
part of an infinite series titled "Innovative, Magical, and Stupid."
Long story short: an iPhone developer wants to make a service for doing
enhanced copy-paste functionality, but you're not allowed to do that on
the iPhone. So instead, they have to play music (or an .mp3 of silence)
the entire time that they're backgrounded in order to pass muster. They
refer to this "a very elegant solution," but let's call it what it
really is: an awkward hack required by a patronizing, artificial
requirement.
Finally, this Washington
Monthly story is a fascinating read on how Google Maps has touched
off a new generation of border disputes--especially interesting for the
crisis-mapping crowd. People in developed countries, and particularly
urban areas in developed countries, tend to forget how political and
contentious seemingly-neutral documents like maps can be. But of course,
this is only the start. In a world where our surroundings are tagged
with metadata by a combination of community processes and automated
spiders, we're going to see these kinds of scuffles a lot more often.