This beautiful video shows an old-fashioned sort of documentary about the aspects of corporations that have direct effects on individuals and the way we understand us. Marx would agree with the fact that an economic system, based on corporations, not only forges man in their socio-economic conditions, but also in his/her self-understanding.
I found at Divine Caroline this video depicting life in 42 seconds. It is somehow scary, remember, time has no mercy.
At the end of his speech, following his now famous campaign about the insustainability of the concept of God as a rational claim -visible in public transports all around the globe-, we can perceive how Dawkins has become more than a humble scientist, a priest on the altars of knowledge. His crusade, evolutionism in hand, against those absurd beliefs on God and mystique debouch into a cultural relativism that mocks ethnocentrism, so far so good. But, has he answered the whispering voice of the girl who caught the microphone to interpellate the contemporary savant? Or is his discourse a novel object of devotion, the prophecy of an almost accomplished religion of science?
I doubt he has answered the girl and I am not reclaiming the truth about any statement whatsoever. I am defending the right to be self-critic without appealing to a vast knowledge that finally ends up in relativism and buries the voice of the girl into a biblical hero discourse. Will Dawkins impersonate the new version of Jesus Christ Superstar?
Hilarious ad for the campaign of Soren Kierkegaard for President of the US. He has two strong contestants though, Kant and Nietzsche. Is advertisement today’s philosophy?
Are European MPs biased to favouring record labels rather that artists in their proposal to extend the duration of copyright? Whose interest are MPs defending? Obviously not the consummers’. Maybe the ones from a creative society? No, they are sustaining the rights of music lobbies to maintain a position of predominance they have not been able to keep by natural market means. One example more of an obsolete protectionism of inefficient companies we all have to pay because of their influence power. Another brick in the wall of democracy.
I found in one of my favourite blogs Microsiervos an excellent document on the evolution of internet from its inception (or rather pre-ception) in 1957. It dwels with the development of networks and communications between computers as a first step into the accelerated path that is leading us now to speak about cloud computing and the dissolution of the operating systems into browsers.
This transformation also implies greater changes in culture and maybe now we are just, like in 1957, on the road towards a new technology, instead of Artificial Intelligence a brand new taste of Collective Intelligence.
History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.
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This excellent video show us the real possibility of men flying. Falling hundreds of meters from a hill and arriving safe and sound is possible with one of these windsuits that creates both a resistance against the wind and allows to glide gracefuly in the air. The sensations have to be huge, falling from this altitude has to be breathtaking.
wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.
So I wondered what sort of policies would three of the bigger sites from Web 2.0 have. And this is what I found out:
Facebook will become propietary of all you put on their website.
“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.” (In their Terms of Use User Content Posted on the Site)
We are in the dragon’s lair, on our own foot. They can do anything they want with our uploaded content. It can be passed over to anybody and be used for any purpose. An absolute disclosure of any personal data, picture, food-liking or disliking we have uploaded or posted. Besides, the use of your material in a derivative work is allowed, what sort of license would the author (e.g. you) have? An attibution, non-commercial
On the other hand we have admirable services like Twitter that clearly state on a headline from their Terms: “Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)”, and follows smoothly declaring:
“We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.”
NO intellectual property claimed. Finito! All our content is ours!
Lastly, let’s examine briefly the longer quote from MySpace:
“MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in your Content, subject to the limited license herein. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace a limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on or through the MySpace Services, including without limitation distributing part or all of the MySpace Website in any media formats and through any media channels, except Content marked “private” will not be distributed outside the MySpace Website. This limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services”
Alright, no granting of rights. A limited license for the use of your content but not for selling it , “…solely on or through the MySpace Services…”. Still it can be used for purposes different to the one you wanted but being it only within MySpace the situation appears less critical.
After this brief review you can make your mind and think what sort of possibilities of using the data, pictures, and personal information do some companies have. So much worries about the license of artists certain companies have, and all the content of the populace belongs to other companies that, without the minor pain, can do as they wish with our, non-existing, intellectual property.
I had today at work some colleague commenting me about an outrageous intellectual property policy in Facebook’s Terms and Conditions. As it was a little vague, I decided to immerse myself for a few minutes in the underworld of the internet: The Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) of websites most of us, users, we never read.
Recently somebody told me, and as such I keep it in the realm of the doxa, in my personal sandbox, a certain company had put on their T&Cs, on clause 9 or similar, that the first person writing back to them after finishing the exhausting task of reading the T&Cs was winning a certain amount. It took months before they gave the prize away…
Even the lawyer of my company once told me that if I was to put, after the visible portion of the T&Cs of the software we install everyday, definitions like “User (def. the moron who bought this piece of sh**…)” time would gently lapse before anybody had acknowledged their dismal condition.
This beautiful video shows in a few seconds all existing commercial flights on earth. It is a nice way to look at our cartography and its basic nodes, its basic junctures and plies where to these lines of fugue tend - like a sort of swarn with the appearance of a swerve, of a free movement.
Networks limit space into a form of interconnectedness in which the surface is limited to nodal points, the homogoneous divided into discrete entities and locations, foci and references. Can we still be nomads?
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