polanyi

02.03.2010 by escrubb | No comments

I was in Budapest 2 summers ago. I like that we’re reading a Hungarian. That country felt good. Beer and pork for breakfast, and the baths.

This reading is taking a long time, and I end up having to take a bunch of notes. I have no ability to construct a narrative reaction this week, so I am just going to post my notes (or as I sometimes like to call it, “my real journal of useful ideas”. heh.

Last semester, in 4016, I did this with a Cmap. I no longer use cmaps much, as I prefer hierarchical organization, especially when taking notes. I prefer cmaps and bubbles on paper when I am trying to brainstorm about an essay. So the following attachment is an HTML export from HNB (hierarchical notebook), my outliner. I would like to have been able to export a collapsible version of this, but so far, I cannot. I have been trying to learn about xml and xslt transformation, but no luck yet. So here it is, my somewhat hard to read notes on Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation”.

p.s.–VITAL is impossible to use in Linux if Quicktime plugins aren’t working perfectly, which is very hard to make happen. I guess I’ll be traveling to public computer labs to use proprietary hardware and software in order to construct my essay about communications technologies and corporate business control of the masses, since it’s incredibly difficult to use my open source software (created freely by many people in a digital commons) to do it. BTW–there are many video formats besides Quicktime, and my media player does play many of them. Also, BTW–I realize that the decision to use Quicktime probably had many positive aspects, and was a difficult choice (I certainly hope there was diligent thinking about it). But I wish the decision had gone the other way.

Google for blogs, Quicktime for movies, Microsoft underwriting 2 of our readings. Hmm. I restate my desire to more fully critique the tools we are using, ostensibly for the sake of ‘ease’. Thus speaketh the squeaky wheel.

Please no one read this as a “complaint”. I reallly do understand the desire (and need) to make things “easy”. I just think that it may be a Siren singing. And if someone can show me how VITAL is actually usable for Linux, and that I’m missing a very simple thing, I will be very grateful (”Quicktime Alternative” hasn’t worked for me). It’s not like I’m trying to access the film via Commodore 64.



labor and land made into commodities

central to all this
establishment of a self-regulating market VS principle of social/natural protection

the protection/intervention is that of a Public, I think
'…if factory legislation and social laws were required to protect industrial man from the implications of the commodity fiction in regard to labor power, if land laws…, it was equally true that central banking and the management of the monetary system were needed to keep manufactures and other productive enterpreises safe from the harm in the commodity fiction as applied to money.'
'Paradoxically enough, not human beings and natural resources only but also the organization of capitalistic production itself had to be sheltered from the devastating effects of a self-regulating market.'
'the North appealed to the intervention of arms to establish a free labor market.'
ricardian theory

underpinned marxist theory
most important aspect was 'comparative advantage'

'refers to the ability of a party to produce a good/service at a lower opportunity cost than another party.'
opportunity cost

developed by john stuart mill
the next-best choice available to someone who has picked between several mutually exclusive choices. It has been described as expressing the basic relationship between scarcity and choice.

3 classical tenets of laissez-faire

or, in other words:

labor market
gold standard

money

creation of bank money
'money is only another name for a commodity used in exchange more often than another, and which is therefore acquired mainly in order to facilitate exchange.'
'any other means of exchange would involve the creating of currency outside the market, the act of its creation–whether by banks or government–constituting an interference with the self-regulation of the market.'
'…all notions investing money with any other character than that of a commodity being used as a means of indirect exchange are inherently false.'
'The currency issue(d?) was first brought home to the English community in the form of a general rise in the cost of living. Between 1790 and 1815 prices doubled.'
'unless the price of labor was dependent upon the cheapest grain available, there was no guarantee that the unprotected industries would not succumb in the grip of the voluntarily accepted taskmaster, gold.'
'not until the 1825 panic did sound currency become a tenet of economic liberalism'
the creation of money should be subject to an automatic mechanism

free trade

Why do competitive labor market, automatic gold standard, and international free trade form one whole?
'The danger points were given by the main directions of the attack. The competitive labor market hit the bearer of labor power, namely, man. International free trade was primarily a threat to the largest industry dependent upon nature, namely, agriculture. The gold standard imperiled productive organizations depending for their functioning on the relative movement of prices. In each of these fields markets were developed, which implied a latent threat to society in some vital aspects of its existence.'
poor law

'’since the ((old) Poor Law) prevented the rise of an industrial working class which depended for its income on achievement.
outdoor relief
indoor relief
allowance system
speedingham system
1830-the Old Poor Law was ‘amended’ and allowances were cut off (not gradually, as many had suggested).
freedom of contract / market VS laissez faire

'Theoretically, laissez-faire or freedom of contract implied the freedom of workers to withhold their labor either individually or jointly, if they so decied; it implied also the freedom of businessmen to concert on selling prices irrespective of the wishes of the consumers.'
'But in practice such freedom conflicted with the institution of a self-regulating market, and in such a conflict the self-regulating market was invariably accorded precedence.'
'In other words, if the needs of a self-regulating market proved incompatible with the demands of laissez-faire, the economic liberal turned against laissez-faire and preferred–as any antiliberal would have done–the so-called collectivist methods of regulation and restriction.
'…the introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range. Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system.'
'free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course.'…–laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state (creation of the cotton manufactures)
'For as long as that (market) system is not established, economic liberals must and will unhesitatingly call for the intervention of the state in order to establish it, and once established, in order to maintain it.'
social effects

'the trading classes had no organ to SENSE the dangers involved in the exploitation of the physical strength of the worker, the destruction of family ilfe, the devastation of neighborhoods…forests..rivers..craft standards,,folkways..existence..housing…'
'two vital functions of society–the political and the economic–were being used and abused as weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was out of such a perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century the fascist crisis sprang.'
government administration

'Benthamite liberalism meant the replacing of parliamentary action by action through administrative organs.'
'and yet all these strongholds of governmental interference were erected with a view to the organizing of some simple freedom–such as that of land,labor, or municipal administration. Just as, contrary to expectation, the invention of labor-saving machinery had not diminished but actually increases the uses of human labor.'
revisionism of Industrial Revolution

'For how could there be social catastrophe where there was undoubtedly economic improvement?' (ironic)
'but the immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embodied.'
miscellany

sum up (ch. 12) is on page 156
'…took place in various countries at a definite stage of their industrial development, pointing to the depth and independence of the underlying causes of the process so superficially credited by economic liberals to changing moods or sundry interests.'
'Purely economic matters such as affect want-satisfaction are incomparably less relevant to class behavior than questions of social recognition.'
'the interests of a class…are primarily not economic, but social.'
economic betterment VS social restoration (native americans)
'original meaning of the word 'proletarian', linking fertility and mendicity, is a striking expression of this ambivalence (cultural vitality or of cultural degradation).'

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tools-hnb,xpdf, and ratpoison

27.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

hnb-full-scrotSo I’m going to try to be a little more disciplined in posting about ways in which I use the computer.

In this post, I very briefly describe the combined use of xpdf, hnb, and ratpoison.
For a long time, I’ve been looking for a good method of reading, notetaking, brainstorming, and organizing. In addition to these functions I of course would like to have citations,bibliographic referencing, and export functions to LaTeX, etc. But right now the core functionality I need was reading,notetaking, brainstorming, and organizing.

Up until now, I’d used freemind, bluefish, and pdfxchangeviewer (or Evince, sometimes). This was pretty good, but there were some unecessary graphical and control layers that got in the way of pure thought–>paper efficiency. Freemind is a great tool, but at this point I have a hard time seeing it for anything other than a nice scaffold/jumpoff towards using a more abstract organizational tool. I just don’t need bubbles. My words don’t need clouds around them. So kudos to freemind, and thanks for the memories, but now I use HNB.

HNB stands for hierarchical notebook, and that’s what it is. The screenshot that starts this post should do the describing quite well. It’s fast and leaves out unnecessaries. A quick comment–I tried using Emacs Org Mode. While I could def see it as a great thing, there were 2 drawbacks for me. 1: it stopped working, and with all the forum searching that I could do, I couldn’t get it working again. annoying. 2: It’s a huge tool and I don’t need all the extras it gives me. This isn’t really a drawback in that Emacs is very good at hiding its power, but I didn’t need it. HNB is simple and exactly what I’m looking for. If I need more someday, I will look to OrgMode, if I can ever get it to work.

I use xpdf to read docs, or if they are in HTML form, I use elinks (because it’s superfast and much more visually pleasing than firefox). Here is a shot of how I use xpdf and HNB together, tiled nicely through the wonderful Ratpoison window manager.
hnb-xpdf-scrot
I’ve written about ratpoison before. With minimal keystrokes, and NO mouse intervention, I have perfect splitscreen and task-switching with the programs I want to concentrate on. So I read and scroll, switch and edit. Read and scroll, switch and edit.

That’s it. HNB provides editing, reorganization, hierarchies, and ratpoison allows ease of quoting a pdf doc (on xpdf–which is highly customizable). So, as my friend Matt suggested to me once, don’t highlight, take notes.

btw, the background image you can see in the shots is from The Seventh Seal (Bergman). Another great thing about HNB, elinks, ratpoison et. al. is that you can set up a background image in a transparent terminal (I use aterm), and most terminal apps (like HNB and elinks) will therefore have a sweet background. Is this a desktop background? Well, only if you believe that there is a desk.

a final shot:
hnb and elinks working together with an HTML doc.
hnb-elinks-scrot

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benjamin – art in the age of mechanical reproduction

23.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

Gang of FourGuerilla warfare is the new entertainment!
Guerilla warfare is the new entertainment!
Guerilla warfare is the new entertainment!
Guerilla warfare is the new entertainment!

The concepts Benjamin will introduce in his theory of art in the age of mechanical reproduction are “completely useless for the purpose of Fascism”. Why?

“Fascism attempts to organize the proletariat masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate..Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but the ability to express themselves…The logical result..is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses…has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”

Several things. What is the apparatus that is pressed into the production of ritual values? Is it art, film, criticism, aesthetics? Deciding this then, why is it a counterpart to the “violation of the masses” by Fascism? And again, why are the concepts Benjamin introduced “completely useless for the purpose of Fascism”?

Just questions this time. The early part of the essay is reasonably clear concerning authenticity, uniqueness, aura, reproduction, distribution, etc..

All this talk of blood and iron is the cause of all my drinking.
All this talk of blood and iron is the cause of all my thinking.

edit–this extending of time, this use of the camera as tool, to see things differently, zoom in on things, watch from different angles, this extension/culmination of cubism (?). Compare to computer technology, to data-mining techniques, combination of video recording and programming instructions, of tools of observations combined with tools of analysis, which become (spawn) new tools of observation. end edit.

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Australian Rules

16.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

sp881I’ve been noticing more and more that the FOSS community in Australia is pretty vibrant. It may be selective reading, but many of the blogs I end up reading, conferences I read about, etc. are based in Australia.

This is just a backdrop for me dropping the following link about the recent DDOS (denial of service) attack on the Aussie.gov sites. A brief outline.

1-They are explicitly in reaction to specific censorship attempts (pornographic)
2-They have been condemned by the more public faces of anti-censorship movements
3-They have been claimed by ‘Anonymous‘, who has been behind a lot lately.
4-They were described beforehand, and GOV OFFICES WERE GIVEN INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PREVENT THE ATTACKS using good security measures. I haven’t read the details.

cellular organizations, cutting-edge tech, reacting as a Public with regard to long term consequences of some other group/person’s actions, using non-traditional methodology, some would (incorrectly) call it terrorism.

There are sex words in the link. If you would like to censor yourself, please call A.A. (Australian Anonymous)–.

Edit: additional link to google’s new patent re: geographic/nation specific user access to content.

weatherfbi

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more globalizing

12.02.2010 by escrubb | 3 comments

Sri Rama can’t be wrong. Neither can Google:
Google is ‘Chinaing’ again.

Mandatory schooling versus fundamentalists (ish):
education as state propaganda tool and fundamentalism perhaps masquerading as fight for freedom

Corporation running for office:
An interesting riff in light of Kurzweil and Dewey

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#google, #scaffolding, #standards, #metaphors, #branding

10.02.2010 by escrubb | 1 comment

grandparentsday10Nice picture, huh? Nothing ominous…I’d like to start thinking more about the Google question. I know, obviously, that I’m not the first to think about this. How can you not consider it? But anyway, what is the Google question? It goes directly to the motto “Don’t Be Evil”. Is Google evil? However, evil is kind of a stupid word to throw around, because I could care less about the hearts and souls of Levchin and Page. What I care about is, is Google herding us toward evil, whether or not it be intentional? Microsoft is a slightly different story, I think. But only to some extent.

The motto has been an excellent marketing device. Google’s branding has been exquisitely done. And, being a consumer/citizen, I have had my own always transforming brand loyalty or disloyalty to Google. I’ve used Gmail for a long time, used many other apps, and, oh yeah, I search the web. I have been a part of the most commonly used new word of our post-(public)-www vocabulary (not including the new contestants, ‘omg’ and ‘lol’).

But recently, and not for (explicit) moral reasons, I have been transitioning away from google. Basically, I have been going through a steadily accelerating process of clearing my computer of clutter, bloat, externally branded imagery, unfree software, presently undesirable metaphors (mouse,desktop,icon,gui interfaces). Gmail is just one more pile of pork in the barrels I’m throwing over my computer/brain speed cruiser. I’m tired of a lot of javascript and ajax just to see my mail. I’ll probably end up using Mutt, which I am intimidated by. Plus, then I have to trust my own backup powers instead of the (Google) cloud’s backup powers.

I am trying to shed scaffolding and transform my image of myself as computer user, becomig a scripter, a programmer (barely, although Tigerstorm! was probably the best ever Java101 midterm exam, miles better than ET for the 2600), etc.

And I have no cell phone (but that is perhaps the stranger part of my tale).

So there are links between google,brand,computer metaphors, scaffolding, trust, cloud backups. In one of my classes (4078-History of Education and Technology, with R. McClintock), we are using google Wave for discussion/posting (in fact anyone interested is invited join the wave “Discussion of Education as an Academic Study” .)

In our previous class, and in my current 4010, students have blogs for the class, and most use, and have been directed towards, googleBlogspot for this purpose.

There are super obvious reasons for doing this. IT’S EASY. They are cross-platform, they pretty much JUST WORK, and they seem stable. At the same time, I have a lot of trouble seeing how google wave is much different, in features, not ease of use, from an IRC flow (this is one reason why I am GLAD that we are using Wave. I definitely want to understand its positives before I flay it). And I also wonder about the tradeoffs involved in the choice between something like blogspot, and something like installing wordpress and running your own blog (or even just going to wordpress.com, which is soooo easy.). Are we using these apps consciously enough?

In 4010, we are studying, among other things, confluences of technology, means of production, and public narratives. Should we be critiquing our tools more? I certainly tend to because of my own interests, but just in terms of the class aims as well, don’t the tools deserve more criticism?

Certainly, reading Jaron Lanier is a good way to start that train, but could this critique be made more explicit, perhaps?

The following quotes are from thinkmoult.com, which I surfed upon while trying to figure out how to do certain things (like Cut and Paste!) with my elinks text browser. How I got there, I no longer remember. It’s lost in the waves*.”

“Once Google has a place in the browser market, they have every right to start sticking in their own ideas into the new HTML 5 standards. Now Google has their arsenal to define exactly what the browser is capable of.”

“…what we now have is in effect “an operating system right in your browser“, or as one person in IRC put it, another layer to depreciate the coding layers below it…there are also technical implications about this, like what will happen to the rest of the programming languages.)”

“So once people try to compete…the only way to create competitive products is to either rebuild your own framework (which is likely to be extremely time consuming and impractical) or…Use Google Toolkit and Google API and Google Code….It doesn’t matter if it’s open-sourced, if you have to use Google Toolkit to make anything decent, that’s “Google is here to define what can be done” for you.”

Google! The ONLY thing the web is capable of.
Standards, standards, standards…

–edit: and of course I’ve left the obvious out. The search engine itself has, if not authority over html/css/etc structure, at least a very strong voice in shaping coding, based on what the engine looks for in web pages. Combine that with what was spoken of above, and what Lanier speaks of often, one begins to see the strength of the company. Not to say it’s not perched waiting for a fall or anything.

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Homer and Dewey

08.02.2010 by escrubb | 1 comment

AchilleShieldI am studying in both 4010 and 4078 (Hist of Tech&Ed, with R. McClintock), so I guess it’s my responsibility to point out some nice connections between this week’s readings in the two classes.

In 4010, obviously, we are reading Dewey’s ‘The public and its problems’, where he stresses a posteriori approach to the analysis of states (gleaned straight from the back cover, no doubt, they whisper), in which we should leave behind a search for ’causes’ and essences in imitation of modern science, and rather look to the (unintended?) consequences that arise when the private affects the non-private and in effect creates the public.

Following this, we can examine human reaction to consequences as the ’cause’ of the creation of the public, of government, and of states. And with varied consequences and conditions, we get varied responses (both well- and ill- reasoned).

In 4078, we are reading Raaflaub’s ‘Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in archaic Greece’, along with a collection of pre-Socratic thinkers, including the ‘Old Oligarch’. Both are relevant to the Dewey reading.

Raaflaub’s work reads into the politics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, especially taking note of the main conflict, between Agamemnon and Achilles. While examining the Odyssey, he pays special attention to the contrast between the island of the Cyclops and the island of the Phaikians, with regard to the state of their civilizations [one a good polis, the other a collection of private oikoi (family caves)[. Also in the Odyssey, Rafflaub analyzes the actions taken and discussed by Penelope’s suitors, in their plans to rule the polis, in place of both the missing Odysseus and his son Telemachos.

Here Rafflaub’s description of the suitor’s and the people’s rationale:
‘In contrast to Telemachus, Mentor argues strictly on the political level: what appears to be a private affair is in fact important to the entire community because it affects its safety and influences future relations between leader and community and hence the wellbeing of all. To take a stand is therefore indispensable. The noble leader’s obligation to care for the well-being of the community, which is rewarded by high status and honours, requires as a corollary the people’s willingness to get involved.’

Here Rafflaub’s description of another of Mentor’s arguments:
‘Wise Mentor then uses a different approach. Odysseus was a good and just basileus (~king). The community thus is obliged to him and his family. By ignoring such obligations, it violates traditional norms and sets a negative example: in the future, since there is no incentive or reward for good leadership, no basileus will want to put the interests of the community above his own.’

The ‘Old Oligarch’ carries on a very interesting examination of Athenian democracy, with especial attention paid to the variety of city-states within the Greek world, examining different conditions, consequences, and subsequent political structures. He also has some great early thoughts about just how far a good Naval fleet can take a state.

Anyway, these readings are certainly related to the Dewey, and it’s nice to cross-fertilize.

I also have questions about the Dewey. I felt like the 1st chapter was pretty straightforward, but he lost me a bit during chapter 2, on ‘discovery of the state’, right around the following quote: ‘It is rather that the public itself, being unable to forecast and estimate all consequences, establishes certain dikes and channels so that actions are confined within prescribed limits, and insofar have moderately predictable consequences.’ This sentence by itself is not superbly confusing, in fact I think I get it, but some of the pages that follow seemed pretty confusing, namely pp. 55-57. It is all about what the law is, how it is formed, how it is listened to, contingencies, predictableness, and so on. But I was quite unclear. I will read it again, but that was my initial reaction.

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IE4Linux – standards – Benkler

06.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

ie-donateLook at the header image for this post. It should get big.
This is a screenshot I took after installing ie4linux.

Some background:
ie4linux is a program that allows linux users to run internet explorer.

This is not because linux users miss internet explorer, and pine away for it. If anything, we long ago broke it’s buggy chains. It is for one of 2 reasons: 1) we are web developers, and must see how our websites look and run under internet explorer, or 2) we need to use websites that only run properly under internet explorer. I currently fall into category #1.

The reason for #1 is because at least 50% of worldwide net users use some version of internet explorer (number hazy, sourcecheck needed). Web designers must bow to market share. However, if it weren’t for market share, most (knowledgeable) web designers would not attempt to design for IE because IE does not play nice with standard HTML and CSS code, and therefore many magician’s tricks are necessary to get sites to work under IE. However, if you don’t want to ignore 50% of market, one must bow somewhat to power. So we need to test our sites under IE.

The reason for #2 is similar. Many companies/people use IE and only know IE, some have contracts with M$ (icrosoft), and this leads to certain websites only ‘running properly’ under IE. This number has been decreasing (I think) over the years, but it is still substantial.

So, these are the two reasons why a linux (or BSD, etc.!) user (or mac user) might need to run IE. So it was necessary/desirable/itchy for a version of IE that would run under Linux. I don’t know the programming details, but I don’t think it was the simplest thing to make (One wonders whether M$ is happy or unhappy about the existence of IE4Linux…).

Anyway, since we were speaking about open-source and markets, and since standards figure heavily into several aspects of the market, this seemed like a nice, relevant image. Notice how the software developer is asking for $ contributions directly post-install, how the site uses google ads for some revenue, how the user is invited to take part in the development process, and see an example of the often provocative image/icon that signify open-source software projects (the ‘e’ on it’s head, for some reason in a martini glass, from what I can tell).

So this program functions as a way for web developers to continue to write and improve HTML/CSS/etc standards while keeping an eye out for necessary IE magic/hacks, so that market share is not lost on the pathway towards freedom and goodness and helpful standards and candy.

Here’s the link to the site home page.

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Bare Ruined Choirs

04.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

3mKant(I wrote a bit about this earlier in the year, in a post with ‘electric sheep‘ in the title.)

More on Kurzweil. I was thinking about standards and web standards. I just finished css/htmling a page for a site and I thought about how basic my ‘look’ is (you can see it here, it’s for my mom’s counseling service). And it’s clearly a combination of two things. I’m both pretty new at it still, and I’m trying very hard to both implement and understand standards-based web design (although I am currently using a css template for sanity’s sake, but it’s a goodun).

So I was thinking about the fact that we are no longer designing just a visual thing when we make a web ‘page’, right? We’re designing information, and information communication structures, right? But obviously visual information is information too, so I started thinking about normal vision, and Kurzweil. I hadn’t really thought too much before about the limitations of our sight–cones, rods, memories, socially-constructed vision, narrow electro-magnetic spectrum available, etc., at least not in terms of vision’s relationship to web- and other- standards.

So the analogy is this: web-browser is to viewed web page as human sight is to the visual world. Pretty simple. Both of the ‘viewers’ (the browser and the human sight) are tools that have both capacity and limit. Human sight has the types of limits I mentioned above, and the browser has the limit that it can only understand/see/receive objects for which it has an appropriate receptor (html/css decoders). Example: firefox will only put this nice gray box in this particular spot on the page because firefox ‘understands’ the concept of ‘div’ and of the internal syntax of the css file, which is the ‘object’ that the browser is receiving. Both the object (the css file) and the receiver (the browser) have been programmed to do this.

In the same way, our eye is ‘programmed’ to receive only things that have been ‘programmed’ to be received, the things that have the qualities the eye understands. They share common languages. (Perhaps a Latour tour would make sense here)

The final gist of what I’m thinking is about art, and future art, especially art made by machines and by future Kurzweil cyborgs. If there are new, different ‘eyes’ designed (such as web-browsers, themselves extremely early versions of ‘eyes’, preceded of course by early programming languages themselves), then these new ‘eyes’ can see different things, in different spectrums, with different memories, socially-constructed visions, etc.. Clearly, the eye is one of many percept organs. All organs could go through changes, design processes. This would change art (and much else) in many ways, and as Kurzweil described, the human can become just one of many constraining forms, like a sonnet, within which future artists can be both freed and constrained by meter. Man, the measure of some things.

This type of idea clearly has ramifications in other areas, such as data storage and access, future libraries, social memory, and all sorts of tekne. And this is all just a footnote to Kant anyway I think (analysing the necessary conditions under which we must be existing in order for us to perceive the things we are perceiving), but it’s interesting.

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Weekly Micros 2010-02-01

01.02.2010 by escrubb | No comments

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