A comprehensive list of all of Adam Curtis’s documentaries, conveniently linked in one long list. There are a few I didn’t realize I hadn’t seen. I’ve heard that some of the videos include advertising breaks, so you may want to seek out alternate versions for those ones.
See also: that time I called into WFMU and asked Adam Curtis if he thought his use of imagery was manipulative (around 50 minutes in)
Link via Kevin Slavin
Here is Douglas Rushkoff’s closing talk at this weekend’s Platform Cooperativism conference. And Astra Taylor gave a follow-up response.
There are also a bunch more videos linked from the conference video page.
Jennifer Daniel on self-important rhetoric within the design field. I think this critique can easily be extended beyond the realm of design.
Loved this quote about professional provincialism:
“When you think about it—and I mean really think about it—everything is meat distribution engineering.”
—a meat distribution engineer
I did some light maintenance on something I made a few years ago on a previous Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Mainly I replaced the QuickTime embed with the more modern <audio> tag and hooked it up to an interactive transcript. This makes it possible to deep-link into the speech:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
This was something I built when I was a student at ITP and making one-off web pages. At the time I was doing a daily exercise of creating a novel online artifact, figuring out the best way to express an idea in HTML/CSS/JS.
I’m happy to start tidying & conserving this old code. And glad to have an excuse to meditate on Dr. King’s speech at Riverside Church.
Neal Stephenson: “I saw the best minds of my generation writing spam-filters.”
Bruce Sterling: “The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the Anthropocenic condition.”
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:
Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning—they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
And also this part:
The banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.
Your average chimpanzee couldn’t fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?