(no subject)

[kradeelav]

got lucky with some very fun links and books recently, spreadin' the goods here.

• lainchan is. a marvel. of a site that's like a more curated version of 4chan for my tastes? 
• (and tangentially) lainzine. collection of 4.5 zines that oh my god instantly have a spot on my library. nowhere else can you find material that teaches you to make a stun gun(!!!) plus probably the most accessible introduction to hacking i've ever read plus a philosophical-slash-fiction dream sequence. also by far the best book design/layout from a graphical standpoint I've seen - it makes me suspiciously curious as to what the creators do for their dayjobs - probably at the top of their fields.
  
  • 04: “ Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that is a coincidence”  l  o  l

• Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art - out of print Rizzoli art book that I had the lucky opportunity to grab for 100% charity returns.  greatest collection of punk art I've seen yet, with some lovely excerpts from the scene. It feels very honest in a way I haven't felt from an art book in, well, decades. 
• Hackers & Slackers - felt more like an overgrown zine than a book (i suspect that's where some of the low reviews came from), but a lovely piece of first-person history of the NY hacker-and-truly underground art scene. Don't see too many other books where Tom of Finland is mentioned right next to Myst and MIT.
• National Security Internet Archive - ever wanted to paw through every interesting declassified document from every major branch of the US government? my jaw honestly dropped when I realized how many ridiculously interesting docus there were in here after stumbling through it on my usual interrogation research spree (that is quite a selection of words, i know). some fun ones: 
  
  • (CIA) MKULTRA files
  • (NSA) Military Cryptoanalytics
  • (State Department) 7000 Hilary Clinton Emails
  • (DoD) INSCOM Dossiers
  • (NSA) NSA Methodology for Adversary Obstruction
  • (CIA) A Psychological Analysis of Hitler
  • (FBI) JFK assassination files
  • every goddamn military field manual you could put your hands on
  • and a shit ton of UFO files lol. this is like literally the gold bucket for anyone vaguely interested in mil-hist/hacking
• https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ - haven't had the time to fully poke through this one yet, but a fun hacker/privacy centric site to read through.

Comments

[queenlua]

i clicked the lain stuff thinking "lol like that lain anime" and. apparently that is the namesake. lol.

thanks for the link to Hackers & Slackers; that one looks very much up my alley. (jaron lanier's one of my favorite thinkers around today ahhh)

[sailorkitty]

Omigosh, yaaay! More sources for research :D! Thank you for the NS links, finding 'credible' WWII sources is sometimes a struggle.

[kradeelav]

glad it helped! :D And oh, I feel you, digging around there feels almost impossible sometimes with the sheer number of writers / conspiracy theorists / etc in that corner.

[kradeelav]

me: 'i bet he was the super hippie looking guy who had that EPIC interview in the back that you copied and pasted almost the whole way through 'cause it was so rad'

[ googles ] LOL YEP

i'm curious what makes him one of your favorites/how you found him! but yeah, very very interesting thoughts from the guy, surprisingly lucid for how abstract they are. but yeah, the whole book's definitely in that vein.

[queenlua]

my introduction to him was Who Owns the Future?, which i read while at that hippie hacker retreat in 2014, on the recommendation of a friend, and—ha, this actually compelled me to pop open a Kindle tab, here's the bit where i remember thinking "damn this dude gets it":

"I know many of the people who run the biggest, richest servers, where the money and power are being concentrated. They're remarkably decent, for the most part. You couldn't ask for a nicer elite. But that doesn't really help. Iconic online empires have been accepted as sacrosanct. It's okay to notice in the abstract that free online services aren't creating as many jobs as they destroy, but we still hold up these newfangled companies as examples of how innovation will drive the economy.

The problem is broad and we are all part of it. Individuals of high or low station are not reasonably able to avoid playing along in an immediately compelling system, even if that system is destroying itself in the big picture [. . .]"

that "you couldn't ask for a nicer elite" line, in particular, has stuck in my brain all these years. you couldn't ask for a nicer elite, but it doesn't matter—this seemed like a much more accurate presentation of The Tech Industry than is ever offered by the tech press. the tech press is constitutionally incapable of talking about tech in any shades subtler than "breathless enthusiasm" OR "hyper-critical anger," and while i get why that is, i think it means we ground the problems in tech in very odd places. like, all the exhortations of "engineers should take ethics classes" and "zuckerberg being a jackass is specifically the reason facebook sucks," as though tech would be better if everyone were just a bit nicer and took more humanities classes—which just does not square with the reality i know. in the corners of bigtech i've seen, the average engineer could not care harder; they will fight subpoenas & government surveillance at every turn; they're constantly wrestling with ways to do better and more right by our users; they're often riven with doubt and earnest questions of how can i help more?

the problem isn't "engineers suck." it's that, even when they're remarkably decent, it doesn't matter, in terms of societal impacts and all that.

...which is all a sidebar from the main point of that book, haha :P i found the thesis of the overall book very compelling, and while it's not tackling a novel question ("so the information age seems to be concentrating all the info and thus all the power in a very small number of places, what do"), Lanier approaches the question with more nuance and lucidity than most thinkers (see above), and notably i respect him hugely for trying to propose solutions that might work—and while i do find his suggested solutions pretty lacking, he's upfront about, "look, i'm not sure this is a very good answer, but i think it sucks to talk about how bad something is without at least trying to propose something better, and if i throw this idea out there and some other smarter folks are able to turn it into something workable, that will just rule." he's an optimist at heart! i too am an optimist! he is my people lol.

there's also just a deep attention to humanism in all his writing and i really love him for that as well.

/lanierfangirling, lol