Is the sacrifice worth it?

I miss writing about technology, privacy and security.

During WWII people gave up so much (silk and such) for the war effort in order to fight a semi-tangible enemy (at least one that had a specific geo-political border). I guess it’s only fair to give up something intangible for something intangible (Terror, Drugs…).

Yet how do you know when the war is over? When do the rations stop?

There was Godwin’s Law and there were Six Degrees of Seperation…now there’s Wolfe’s Law: It All Leads Back to Terrorism

There. I said it.

Just like with Godwin’s Law, how every conversation eventually brings up Nazis, and with Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment”, how everyone is generally connected to anyone else by a few small degrees of separation…

Now, now I coin the phrase, after yours truly, Wolfe’s Law: Everything leads to Terrorism in one way or another.

The below example is only one of many. See how many you can come up with!

Spotting Links to Terrorism, Inc.

“As companies expand their global reach, they risk smudging their reputations by linking up with less-than-savory regimes. Even firms with good reputations reach into dark corners.

Take Royal Dutch/Shell. Although highly regarded for its environmental and human rights stances, the oil giant is drilling in Iran. Or consider Swedish carmaker Volvo. Despite its nice-guy image, it has sold trucks to Iraq.

Until Sept. 11, no group formally screened publicly traded companies for their links to terrorism or the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But as the United States has focused on terrorism, so some groups have begun to look at companies linked to it, even peripherally.

Earlier this month, a socially responsible investors group announced it had compiled a list of nearly 300 such firms. The group, the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), along with the Conflict Securities Advisory Group (CSAG), prefers to sell its list to subscribers (at $12,500 a year) rather than make it public. Nevertheless, the statistics it has released make interesting reading.

For example, of the 260 or so firms linked to countries supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction, a third are European. More than a quarter come from Asia. Only 10 percent are American.”

So long, good friend

VHS is finally dead.

“The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs.”

I know, not my usual shocker article, but I’d like to pay homage to the VHS.  After it was made mainstream by porn, VHS has entertained us for something like three decades, really taking off in the 90’s.

So I’d like to write about some memories that I have with VHS. A eulogy, of sorts. Feel free to add your own memories in the comments section.

I remember still being in Russia, so I was under the age of 6, and how I thought my Grandpa was something close to god (secular Soviet home) because he could make TV stop, rewind, and play at will. I watched endless reruns of the same episodes of Gummi Bears (in Russian of course). I thought the TV power solely belonged to my Grandpa. Sure, I didn’t know it was a trusty VHS that held my joy on it, but there it was, a token of  my early childhood.

In case you’re curious as to what Gummi Bears sounds like in Russian..

You can only imagine my sheer happiness when I discovered that this strange new land, America, also had Gummi Bears, albeit in it’s own language. America also had those adorable little cheese wrapped in wax (Babybel), which I first met on the plane coming to the USA, where I promptly ate the cheese, wax and all, until some nice lady took pity on me and explained to me that I can take the wax off.

Oh VHS, I remember the sheer control. I could put it in, record anything I want on TV, play it back, record over it again. I remember recording mistakes. I remember footage being lost. I remember the joy of finding it again, accidentally, that as you’re watching some old cartoon, for nostalgia value as now you’re too told for the cartoon, that you recorded at a very tender age that would get interrupted midway through by the porn that you recorded from the TV at that same tender age.

I remember feeling so powerful. I could capture moments. I could rewind and play at will. I could erase. Maybe this sounds so geeky, but the idea that one could take memories from the TV without permission. We don’t have that anymore. We pay for it. We are also watched. Someone else knows what we record. What we prefer. The privacy is gone. That was really the glory of VHS, video home system, the privacy in your own home. Obviously this was primarily for porn purposes in the beginning, as it’s nicer to watch it at home instead of some peep show theater. With VHS we had our own personal cinema. It was so revolutionary. It was so intimate. I loved hitting pause, and then play and watching everything move very very slowly. I loved the noise of the machine when it would fast forward or rewind. You could feel the little guy working.

I remember the anticipation of tracking. When the tape was too old and it would be fuzzy and not so perfect, and you would hold your breath hoping that tracking would fix it. I remember actually the days before auto-tracking and how that was a bitch and a half to set the levels just right. It was a sense of pride and accomplishment every time I made a video look good.

I loved the working technology as a kid, but I also loved it when my parents gave me the important task of destroying videos as well. I’d pull the black tape out and out and dance with it in the house. Sometimes I would rewind it manually with my fingers. See if I could put it back together. See if I could undo it more. I would braid it into my hair, then take it out because I wasn’t allowed to look like that outside the house. I loved how tangible VHS was.

My college house still has a ton of VHS tapes. Old Disney movies, not digitally remastered, that we gather around and watch. We bask in the feeling of being young again. Of the tape sometimes being soft around the edges. How everything wasn’t so perfect, and that is, and was, part of the appeal. Nothing more exciting than taking that clunky VHS tape and watching the VCR eat it. No menu screen with options. Just ff and then play. No DVD that sits and keeps replaying the menu screen over and over.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the new digital world. Yet sometimes I miss the fuzzy memories of my youth.

So goodbye and so long, VHS. You done good. I know others will make a far more creative and artistic omage to you. You might get some gallery installations. Some modern art pieces. Maybe a movie and documentary. Maybe a porno.

But you will never again teach young immigrant girls how to capture memories on their own. Don’t worry, VHS, your memory is already captured. It keeps playing inside. My generation watches your graceful death. You embody the death of our childhood.

I didn’t know Colbert read Lacan!

America used to live by the motto “Father Knows Best.” Now we’re lucky if “Father Knows He Has Children.” We’ve become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies. But there’s more to being a father than taking kids to Chuck E. Cheese and supplying the occasional Y-chromosome. A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?
- I am America (And So Can You!) – Stephen Colbert

Here is some theory for you: Zizek on how to read Lacan:

The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious

In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn’t know that he is dead) that enables us to deploy Lacan’s basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist… – If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naïve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Everyone Hop On The Bailout Train!

Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.

…

But the industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

“No US president has ever died under the same flag that he was born under.”

Surveillance Abroad

The authorities may lawfully conduct searches and electronic surveillance against United States citizens in foreign countries without a warrant, a federal appeals court panel said on Monday, bolstering the government’s power to investigate terrorism by ruling that a key constitutional protection afforded to Americans does not apply overseas.

Well, constitutionally that makes sense.

“The Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness — but not the Warrant Clause — applies to extraterritorial searches and seizures of U.S. citizens,” the judge wrote.

Obama Launches a Video Game Campaign

Excerpt from the article:

Obama Ad Campaign Targets Video Games

Following in the footsteps of leading-edge advertisers like Red Bull, the Obama campaign has diversified their ad blitz to include not only print and television spots, but also ads in social networking sites and video games.

The campaign has reportedly purchased ad space in several Internet-enabled video games running on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 platform. The titles include popular games like Burnout Paradise and Madden NFL ’09, and the ads will be restricted to users connecting from battleground states like Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, and Wisconsin. The ads in the game burnout appear as billboards that say “Early voting has begun / VoteForChange.com.”

This is the latest tech-savvy step for a campaign that has shown unprecedented mastery of social networking, text messaging and targeted emailing to spread information about its candidate. This isn’t the Obama campaign’s first foray into non-traditional advertising, however; the candidate also sponsors spots on popular sites like Hulu.com, a streaming television site, as well as Google’s YouTube. If you’re a Facebook user, you’ve probably seen his ads there, too.

Whether or not this is a wise investment of last-minute capital — or if users even pay much attention to in-game ads — remains to be seen, but if Obama wins in November, it’s likely that other candidates will attempt to duplicate his strategy to enfranchise the elusive 18-34 age group.

You don’t need to click the link because this the entire thing, the rest of the link talks about dorky things that probably only I would care about such as Windows OS and Adobe Suites.

I also don’t know how effective in-game political ads would be but gosh darnit, that’s a very innovative strategy. His campaign is doing some interesting things. Regardless of what I feel about Obama, I have got to give him praise for awakening the 18-30 something demographic politically. We have been both ignored politically, and politically apathetic, and again the two feed into one another.

Is Voting for Young People? is a short, but concise book on the issues around youth voting. In a very short summary what is created is a rather vicious circle of a lack of participation and a lack of attention. Young people have a crappy voting record, so politicians hardly tailor to them because there is little benefit to them. At the same time, young people feel that they are not being represented politically, and in their resentment they become even more politically distant. The more distant they become, the less politicians pay attention to them. So what Obama has done is a national service, but also a great re-energizer to democracy. More representation to a part of the voting block that has been silent for many decades. Whether or not he wins, he has started (as my old History teacher would say) a fire under our asses to get us to act. To become political once again. To become interested and aware of politics. To participate. That’s pretty awesome. So while I supported Hillary, I do respect Obama for what he did.

The apathy of my peers is a great concern for me. While the statistical trend is that people become more political and more civically-engaged with age, I’m worried that the passitivity and indifference that most youth feel will carry on as they grow older.

As for bringing politics to video gamers, I think that’s awesome. Sure, I can see this being used for darker (and more annoying) purposes (you have to watch an ad before you can enjoy the glory of whatever game you’re playing, but also you will be opened up to marketing and ad-bombings). What I think is awesome is the fact that gamers are being acknowleged by political leaders. I’m rather sensitive about gaming (good god my obsession with WarCraft), and I think gamers, as a group, are often poorly described. But that’s a blog posdt for a different day.

Also…because I cannot resist..a game! It’s sort of like Risk. I had fun. How well did you do?