The Alchemist has moved!
I have turned off commenting on this site, and transfered all posts to the new location, but will still leave this blog up for reference.
Thanks for playing.
/Jonah
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This blog has moved to a new location - http://alchemicalmusings.org
Meanwhile, on the home front, we fail to recognize censorship under the guise of its free market counterpart --"The House International Relations subcommittee's top Democrat, Tom Lantos, told representatives of the companies that they had accumulated great wealth and power, "but apparently very little social responsibility".
"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," the Associated Press quoted him as saying." (bbc news)
"In today's sausage factory of knowledge production, that is exactly the situation that we face. Dominant groups explain the world through their control of knowledge production. Subordinate groups are excluded, and as a result, subordinate knowledeges are excluded as well. In liberal societies, these knowledge disqualifications are not achieved primarily through the legal authority of censorship. But as Foucault reminds us, these disqualifications are made by the 'ensemble of the rules according to which the true and the false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true.'" (The Birth of Postpsychiatry, p. 139)Free and open discourse is under attack, in the homeland. Just ask a ninja:
And here is something you can do:
...Lyotard states, in the final passage of The Postmodern Condition, that new media technologies can be more than simply tools of market capitalism, for they can be used to supply groups with the information needed to question and undermine dominant metaprescriptives (or what might be called ‘grand narratives’). The preferred choice of development, for him at least, is thus clear: ‘The line to follow for computerization to take . . . is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks’ (Lyotard 1984: 67). (Gane, 2003, p.9)Considering Google's stated ambitions to "house all user files, including: emails, web history, pitcures, bookmakres, etc" the freedom movement better wake up to the fact that there is more to freedom than free software, and we are being outflanked.
2) In the upcoming world of omniscient surveillance, what role will M$ play in insuring individuality, privacy, and anonymity. What is M$ doing to contribute