technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
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against policy (a tiny manifesto):
The notion of “policy” presumes a state or governing apparatus which imposes its will on others. “Policy” is the negation of politics; policy is by definition something concocted by some form of elite, which presumes it knows better than others how their affairs are to be conducted. By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs
— David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology -
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back— Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
— Goethe -
A tree house, a free house,
A secret you and me house,
A high up in the leafy branches
Cozy as can be house.
A street house, a neat house,
Be sure and wipe your feet house
Is not my kind of house at all-
Let’s go live in a tree house.— “Tree House,” Shel Silverstein -
facebook is the panopticon.
- Me: "Why is my camera on?"
- [...]
- Me: *clicks Facebook tab*
- Me: *green light disappears*
- Jehan: "Mark Zuckerberg is watching you."
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I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laugh till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés (via Rebekah) -
Our best machines are made of sunshine.
— Donna Haraway -
One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.
— Edward Abbey -
ph.d dropout?
- AL: wait, you quit? 0_o
- Jenny Ryan: not exactly.
- Jenny Ryan: i took a leave of absence.
- AL: oh hm
- AL: taking a break?
- AL: or... got any plan?
- Jenny Ryan: http://jennyryan.net
- Jenny Ryan: you could say that
- AL: the pyre COOL
- Jenny Ryan: my advisor didn't get it..
- AL: #FAIL
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(8 Feb 1996): In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
— John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -
- Trying to use words, and every attempt
- Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
- Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
- For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
- One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
- Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
- With shabby equipment always deteriorating
- In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
- Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
- By strength and submission, has already been discovered
- Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
- To emulate—but there is no competition—
- There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
- And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
- That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
- For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
- Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
- The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
- Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
- Isolated, with no before and after,
- But a lifetime burning in every moment
- And not the lifetime of one man only
- But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
- There is a time for the evening under starlight,
- A time for the evening under lamplight
- (The evening with the photograph album).
- Love is most nearly itself
- When here and now cease to matter.
- Old men ought to be explorers
- Here or there does not matter
- We must be still and still moving
- Into another intensity
- For a further union, a deeper communion
- Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
- The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
- Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
