— cw

Originally from: MetaFilter.

When Gravity Fails: Editor Marty Halpern looks back at the career of George Alec Effinger (part 1, part 2, part 3), a prolific author best known for his work set in the Budayeen, a walled city in a future Islamic state, teeming with gangsters, hustlers and transsexual prostitutes, many of them habitual users of plug in personality modules. The noirish tone and exotic technology of the Marîd Audran books (When Gravity Fails, A Fire In The Sun, The Exile Kiss) made Effinger one of the leading lights in the cyberpunk movie, and spawned a videogame – a rare attempt at a graphical adventure from Infocom – and an RPG setting. Sadly Effinger faded from prominence after that, and he suffered from a number of health and financial setbacks before passing away in 2002. His work has had somewhat of a resurgence in popularity of late, with the Marîd Audran books coming back into print in 2007, a long with a collection containing The Wolves of Memory, Effinger’s personal favourite amongst his novels.

• “The Archive and Everyday Life” Conference

• Reunion With a Childhood Bully, Taxidermied

• Moma, the High-rise Condo – Triple Canopy

• The Creative Industries & Community Economic Revitalization Act 2010
• Sonia Sotomayor on Art (sort of)
• 19 reasons to take a nap
• oops! U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally
• Anarchism and Prefigurative Politics

Originally from: virtualpolitik.

Facebook Foreign Agents: Batsheva Sobelman, who has covered stories that reference the use of online video in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opines in the Babylon and Beyond blog at the Los Angeles Times that Facebook may pose a security threat to Israel by encouraging its citizens to aid and abet the enemy.

I had hoped that this argument had died a merciful death, but it appears that equating terrorism with social network sites continues to be popular with pundits and policy makers, just as it was in the Bush administration. It’s an argument that I discuss in some detail in the Virtualpolitik book.

However, Solomon notes in “Loose lips on Facebook” that both sides in the conflict are using the popular social network site to recruit potential sympathizers.

This week, Israel’s General Security Service took the unusual step of issuing a warning urging Israelis to be alert to terrorist activity on the Internet. Specifically, people were warned against unsolicited approaches on social networks by strangers offering meetings abroad or easy money and seeking information. Seemingly innocent contacts might be terrorist efforts to recruit or kidnap. (Presumably this works both ways: A few months ago a Syrian paper had warned of Mossad and CIA recruiting efforts on Facebook as well.)

Solomon also claims that the Israeli army is limiting soldiers’ use of the site because Facebook members may unwittingly divulge sensitive information about porous checkpoints, lax monitoring, classified military procedures, and vulnerable concentrations of troop deployments. Concerned Israeli civilians now run a Facebook group that intervenes if Israeli Defense Forces soldiers make cyber-slips that seem to risk the secrecy that is essential for their military units.

Tartakovski opened his own Facebook group to form a neighborhood watch called “Protecting our IDF.” It serves as a war room of sorts, a headquarters. Anyone identifying compromising information in the open is invited to contact the group; members approach the individual and point out the problem. Most people cooperate and remove carelessly revealed sensitive information. Those who don’t are reported. In one case, Tartakovski wrote an uncooperative soldier with everything he knew about him. It was a lot. Stupefied that a perfect stranger could learn so much about him from his profile, the soldier got the picture.

Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute warns that such monitoring behavior could easily turn into “facebook vigilantism” as practiced by the twenty-eight-year-old Eran Tartakovski, who monitors Israeli soldiers and polices their friending, messaging, and updating practices.

Now, I am not sure which element of the story I find more disturbing: the panopticum-like transparency of online activities of Israeli soldiers or the heavy reliance on crowdsourcing by Tartakovski et al (I bet he would never succeed in policing every uploaded photo if he was doing it by himself).

Are we witnessing the birth of Facebook vigilantism? After all, this could be the logical counterpart to the citizen journalism practiced by those naive Israelis who upload their photos to social networking sites…

Originally from: Frieze Magazine.

Comment: Speculative Realism: A report from the recent ‘Speculative Realism and Speculative Materialism’ conference at the UWE, Bristol

‘Though it has always been a badge of honour among intellectuals to dislike being stamped with any sort of label,’ said Graham Harman at the start of his typically exhilarating presentation at the ’Speculative Realism and Speculative Materialism’ conference at the University Of West England in Bristol (UWE), ‘other fields of human innovation have a much stronger sense for the value of a brand name.’ Harman argued that branding is ‘not merely a degenerate practice of brainwashing consumerism, but a universally recognized method of conveying information while cutting through information clutter.’ He maintained that the label ‘speculative realism’ – originally a term of convenience coined at a conference at Goldsmiths, University Of London, two years ago – was just such a potent brand name. This conference at UWE was partly an attempt to question the continuing usefulness of the term.

Speculative realism has certainly revivified philosophy, inspiring a fervour of concept-production far beyond the traditional (but now largely moribund) academic spaces with which philosophy is usually associated: in the para-academic journal Collapse, for example, as well as in an efflorescence of blogs such as Speculative Heresy, Accursed Share, Planomenology and Naught Thought.

The original Goldsmiths event brought together four philosophers – Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux – who were united by an antipathy towards the dominant consensus in continental philosophy. It was the publication of Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2006; translated by Brassier into an English edition published by Continuum in 2008) that gave the four philosophers’ common enemy a name: ‘correlationism’, the view that thought cannot have access to things-in-themselves, only to things as they appear for us.

For different reasons, the other three thinkers leapt over the threshold to the ‘great outdoors’ that Meillassoux’s intricately argued book opened up. All three had already developed different forms of philosophical realism which had nothing in common with the pallid form of realism rightly held in disrepute by European philosophy: naïve realism, the view that the world is just as it appears to us. Instead, the speculative realists each opened up a weird world, foreign to human experience and commonsense. Returning to Descartes, Meillassoux maintained that the real is what can be rendered as mathematical symbols. Harman’s ‘object-oriented metaphysics’ (outlined in Tool Being, 2002 and Guerilla Metaphysics, 2007) argued that the world is made up of ‘entities with specific qualities, autonomous from us and from each other’; Grant’s ‘nature philosophy’ (expounded in his On An Artificial Earth: Philosophies Of Nature After Schelling, newly published in paperback by Continuum’s imprint Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy), sees nature as a ceaselessly productive machine, throwing out particular bodies only as the visible side effect of a perpetual, invisible mutation; while Brassier’s pulverising equivalence of scientific naturalism with nihilism was made in Nihil Unbound (2007; still sadly only available in an expensive Palgrave hardback).

With a shared agenda now established, the UWE event promised to explore the differences between the four thinkers (something that Harman has been doing on his own blog, where he has produced science fictional scenarios in which the future of philosophy is fought over by factions developing from the four speculative realists’ current thinking).  Is ’realism’ the right term? And what is the relationship between ‘realism’ and ‘materialism’?

Materialism is a label which is almost universally claimed by a continental philosophy which also prides itself on its hostility to realism. Harman wanted to reverse this valuation, holding on to realism while rejecting materialism. The tendency in materialism, Harman claimed, is always to dissolve specific objects, reducing them either to smaller physical entities or, as in the case of Grant’s philosophy, seeing them as ephemeral products of an underlying monist hyper-nature. Brassier, by contrast, pointed out that in the philosophy of someone like Slavoj Žižek the material seems to connote only a blockage, the point where thought fails – by this definition, the material cannot be thought. The problem was to return to matter without assuming a pre-established harmony between our conceptual apparatus and the world. Brassier also questioned the equation of materialism with practice: why is praxis material?

Meillassoux could not attend the UWE event, but his replacement, Alberto Toscano*, raised the important issue of speculative realism’s relationship to politics, and to another sense of materialism – precisely the Marxist one that gives such a central role to practice. Using the work of the Marxist theorist Lucio Colletti, Toscano argued that Meillassoux’s refusal of anything outside of logic and mathematics is a form of philosophical idealism. Meillassoux seeks to combat what he sees as a resurgent fanaticism with mathematised reason. But the very point of Marx’s critique was to have shown that ideological distortions are not just errors of reason. Toscano referred to ‘Marx’s theory of real abstraction, to wit the idea that the excesses of speculation and the hypostases of idealism are not merely cognitive problems, but are deeply entangled with abstractions that have a real existence in what, following Hegel, Marx was wont to call an upside-down world. Thus the State, and its philosophical expression in Hegel, and Capital, and its theoretical capture in the political economy of Smith and Ricardo, are not simply thought-forms that could be dispelled by some enlightened emendation of the intellect, or a valiant combat against superstitions.’

The role that speculative realism might play in a new anti-capitalism has yet to be established; it is one of many exciting areas that this still-emerging, thrilling philosophical field has opened up.

Mark Fisher

Originally from: Newgeography.com – Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places.

Suburbs and Cities: The Unexpected Truth:

Much has been written about how suburbs have taken people away from the city and that now suburbanites need to return back to where they came. But in reality most suburbs of large cities have grown not from the migration of local city-dwellers but from migration from small towns and the countryside.

It is true that suburban areas have been growing strongly, while core cities have tended to grow much more slowly or even to decline. The predominance of suburban growth is not just an American phenomenon, but is fairly universal in the high income world).

This is true in both auto-oriented and transit oriented environments. Suburbs have accounted for more than 90 percent of growth in Japan’s metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 residents, both those with high transit market shares and those with high auto market shares, The same is true in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In Western Europe, where vaunted transit systems carry a far smaller share of travel than cars, all growth and then some has been in the suburbs, as overall core city populations have declined. Indeed, the same trend is well underway in middle and lower income world urban areas. In such places as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Manila, Shanghai, Kolkata, and Jakarta, nearly all population growth has occurred in the suburbs, rather than the core cities.

As the world faces a more expensive energy future and as efforts are intensified to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is sometimes suggested that people need to “move back” to the cities. This is a dubious and needless strategy, which reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of metropolitan growth.

Most suburban growth is not the result of declining core city populations, but is rather a consequence of people moving from rural areas and small towns to the major metropolitan areas. It is the appeal of large metropolitan places that drives suburban growth.

Larger metropolitan areas have more lucrative employment opportunities and generally have higher incomes than smaller metropolitan areas. This is particularly the case in developing countries. As a result, the big urban areas attract people seeking to escape what are often the stagnant or even declining economies in smaller areas.

There are, of course, significant individual exceptions. Virtually all of the first world core cities that have achieved a population of more than 400,000 – if they have not expanded their boundaries and did not have substantial empty land for development – experienced losses to 2000. Yet even in most of these cases, the majority of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan areas, rather than from the core cities. For example:

• St. Louis is a champion among the ranks of population losers, having lost the greatest percentage of its population of any large municipality in the world, (dropping from nearly 860,000 in 1950 to 350,000 in 2000). Indeed, it may be fair to say that St. Louis has lost more of its population than any city since the Romans sacked Carthage. Yet, even in St. Louis, 60 percent of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area, rather than from the city.
• Few core cities have lost the nearly 1,000,000 residents that have fled Detroit since 1950. Yet, even in Detroit, 65 percent of suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area, rather than from the city.
• The city of Chicago lost 725,000 residents between 1950 and 2000, yet 82 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area.
• The city of Philadelphia lost 550,000 residents between 1950 and 2000, yet 76 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area (See lead picture of Philadelpia downtown).
• The central city of Paris lost approximately one-quarter of its population from 1965 to 2000 (675,000), while the suburbs gained nearly 3,850,000 residents. More than 80 percent of suburban Paris growth came from outside the region.
• The central city of Lisbon experienced a 30 percent population decline from 1965 to 2000. Yet suburban Lisbon’s growth was 80 percent from outside.
• Stockholm was another losing core city, yet more than 90 percent of the suburban growth came from smaller towns and cities.
• Despite Zurich’s nearly one-quarter population loss 83 percent of the suburban gains derived from outside the region.
• The core city of Tokyo (which really doesn’t exist except as 23 separate subdivisions or kus of a city abolished during World War II) lost more than 700,000 residents from 1965 to 2000. Tokyo’s suburbs, however, attracted more than 90 percent of their growth from region.

In some metropolitan areas, smaller towns and rural areas contributed less to suburban growth. In Amsterdam, 50 percent of the suburban growth was from outside the metropolitan area. In Copenhagen, the number was 40 percent of the suburban growth while in Birmingham (UK) only 30 percent of the suburban gain was from outside.

In a few cases, both the core city losses were greater than the suburban gains, such as in Pittsburgh, Liverpool and Manchester. In these cases, it is fair to attribute all of the suburban gains to core city losses.

Unlike the cases above, however, most core cities gained population. This includes all in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many in the United States. As a result, none of the suburban growth in the corresponding metropolitan areas can be attributed to an exodus from the city, because there, on balance, was no exodus.

Suburbanization is often characterized as reducing densities, but in fact it has done just the opposite. Most suburbanites come from smaller places; they may prefer suburbs because they are less dense, safer, or simply more manageable than the core cities. But they are also, almost invariably, more dense than where they lived before. Suburbanization is thus a densifying dynamic, albeit one that is less dramatic than preferred by many planners and architects.

In this sense, suburbs have to be seen not as the enemies of the city, as just a modern expression of urbanization. They are neither the enemies of the city, nor are their residents likely to move “back” there. You cannot move back to someplace you did not come from.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris. He was born in Los Angeles and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission by Mayor Tom Bradley. He is the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.

Originally from: BLDGBLOG.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds: [Note: This is a guest post by Jim Rossignol].

Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards.

And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There’s surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it’s okay to aim for hi-score vengeance.

[Image: From World of Warcraft].

Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There’s barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn’t in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dependent on previously pillaged artistic ideas from Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien that evil ambiance is delivered by shorthand. (Of course, World of Warcraft‘s Lich King gets a Stone UFO to fly around in – but it’s still the same old prefab pseudo-Medieval schtick inside). Where the enemy is extra-terrestrial, HR Giger‘s influence is probably going to be felt instead.

[Images: (top) Bran Castle, (bottom) Hunyad Castle, all via Wikipedia].

But, I suspect, these signposts – or the ways in which game designers architecturally represent evil – are becoming too much a part of our everyday imaginative discourse to remain affecting. They’ve begun to lose their danger. The connection with the inhumanity that makes the enemy so thrilling has started to fade via over-familiarity.

Where the evil lair becomes a little more interesting is when its nature is ambiguous – but nevertheless disturbing. Half-Life 2‘s Citadel is an example of this. The brutal gunmetal skyscraper that looms over a nameless Eastern European city, below, appears deeply threatening. But, like everything else in the Half-Life 2 universe, it is unexplained. It does not seem inherently evil. The structure moves and groans; it is a machine of some kind. It is something constructed and mechanical, rather than the clear manifestation or emanation of an evil force. The Citadel is not a fire-rimmed portal to hell, nor a windswept ruin. Nor is it a volcano base. It could even be somehow utilitarian. In fact, it’s reminiscent of the real Moscow’s own television tower.

It is, perhaps, even incidental to the scourge that Half-Life‘s denizens face: alien infrastructure. It is only later, as the plot uncoils the inner architecture of the Citadel, that you come to realise that it is the enemy: the lair of an alien force that must, ultimately, be destroyed.

[Image: From Half-Life 2].

Where the lair is itself the enemy, games are able to excel.

This is the case in both System Shock and System Shock 2, the finest of SF horror games. Both are set aboard spacecraft, but these spacecraft are also the “bodies” of the enemy: SHODAN, a malevolent Artificial Intelligence that controls each vessel.

In a provocative climax of virtuality-within-virtuality, the final act of System Shock 2 is to enter into the cyberspace realm of the AI and defeat SHODAN inside the graphical representation of her own programming. The evil lair is within the mind of the enemy – a motif repeated even more literally in Psychonauts, a game about exploring the physically manifested psyches of various bizarre characters.

[Image: From System Shock 2].

More interesting visually, and far more ambiguous in its delivery of the evil lair, is the underwater city of Rapture, in Bioshock. The designers of this game (some of whom also worked on the System Shock series) poured the early part of the twentieth century into their designs, creating opulent, decaying, Art Deco corridors down which the genetically-enhanced super-human player goes thundering, searching for the enemy.

The ostentation of the city’s innards suggests that the city’s objectivist overseer, Andrew Ryan, must be the enemy we seek. He has, after all, created himself an entire city with a single, over-arching theme: a trademark act of the all-powerful videogame nemesis. Yet, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, although you will inevitably kill Ryan, his architecture tells you nothing about the nature of the enemy you face. Indeed, the true enemy has nothing to do with the stylised nature of this lair at all.

[Image: Channeling Ayn Rand, Andrew Ryan's city banner announces "No Gods or Kings. Only Man." From Bioshock].

But perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

[Image: From Shadow of the Colossus].

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies – horribly and permanently – when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

[Jim Rossignol is a games critic for Offworld, an editor at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and the author of the fantastic This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. A full-length interview with Rossignol will appear on BLDGBLOG next week].

Originally from: VVORK.

»Bunkers (Switzerland)«, 1999-2004 by Leo Fabrizio ….:

»Bunkers (Switzerland)«, 1999-2004 by Leo Fabrizio.