reid/write



home // about
shitbloggin with reid scoggin

link roundup 5

Published:

not so many posts this last week or two. i’m getting close to graduating and i’m a little preoccupied between that and my girlfriend. i still have a few ideas for interesting things besides regular features, though.

onward!

reading

In the realm of military action the particularity of this vision of reality via lines of force or faith lines is that the world will be observed through the target tube of a weapon, or, to put it simply, through a weapon. This kind of vision is also most commonly applied in video war games by which the aesthetics of ISIS’s visual material is heavily influenced. A picture of two ISIS fighters inserted into a still from the game Call of Duty symbolizes the video game affinities of ISIS culture and has become famous as it has been widely circulated on the internet. In general, ISIS appropriates aesthetic codes from action movies and video games or it even appropriates entire games. The ISIS video Grand Theft Auto: Salil al-Sawarem is entirely made out of sequences from the video game Grand Theft Auto, reproducing only the most violent scenes and making the nasheed chant the only original contribution.

The popularization of Bitcoin, a decentralized crypto-currency has inspired the production of several alternative, or “alt”, currencies. Ethereum, CryptoNote, and Zerocash all represent unique contributions to the cryptocurrency space. Although most alt currencies harbor their own source of innovation, they have no means of adopting the innovations of other currencies which may succeed them. We aim to remedy the potential for atrophied evolution in the crypto-currency space by presenting Tezos, a generic and self-amending crypto-ledger.

Tezos can instantiate any blockchain based protocol. Its seed protocol specifies a procedure for stakeholders to approve amendments to the protocol, including amendments to the amendment procedure itself. Upgrades to Tezos are staged through a testing environment to allow stakeholders to recall potentially problematic amendments.

Lenin and Wilson both believed that ideology could liberate mankind from imperialism. Articulated within days of each other, their competing messianic visions both aimed to de-Europeanize global geopolitics after three centuries of the Old World’s dominance. One knows a systemic crisis when it spawns challenges from both geographic and political extremes. Aiming to overcome the geopolitical legacy of the “long nineteenth century,” Wilson and Lenin assumed that the proliferation of ideologically similar regimes would ensure peace. Their visions’ competitive symbiosis would define the fate of the world for the rest of the century. But although the age of ideologically driven foreign policy had begun, it did not evolve in a linear fashion.

The FBI first launched its advanced biometric database, Next Generation Identification, in 2010, augmenting the old fingerprint database with further capabilities including facial recognition. The bureau did not inform the public about its newfound capabilities nor did it publish a privacy impact assessment, required by law, for five years.

Unlike with the collection of fingerprints and DNA, which is done following an arrest, photos of innocent civilians are being collected proactively. The FBI made arrangements with 18 different states to gain access to their databases of driver’s license photos.

If Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s, promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, the Ccru responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme. They saw capital itself as the protagonist of history, with humans as grist for the mill. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land wrote in his essay “Machinic Desire.” For Land, the Basilisk was already here.

At the time, Benjamin Noys took note of this philosophical trajectory, initially calling it “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Eventually, in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, he gave it a pithier name, the application of which has been both broadly extended and hotly contested: accelerationism. Noys focused his critique on a particular misreading of Marx as a hybrid technological determinist and catastrophist, which licensed the idea that if the accumulation of capital generates and exacerbates the conditions that lead to its dissolution, then it is the duty of radicals to urge capital to fully realize and hence negate itself. Broadly conceived, the futurist telelogy this term denotes demonstrates the basis for its alignment with the Singularitarian ideology, seeing the exponential growth of technology as the key to the next stage of human species.

What Chiang really wanted to talk about was science fiction. We spoke about free will (“I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”), the literary tradition of naturalism (“a fundamentally science-fictional approach of trying to work out the logical consequences of an idea”), time travel (he thinks of “A Christmas Carol” as the first time-travel story), and the metaphorical and political incoherence of Neill Blomkamp’s aliens-under-apartheid movie “District 9” (he believes that “Alien Nation,” in which the aliens are framed as immigrants, is more rigorously thought through). Chiang reframes questions before answering them, making fine philosophical distinctions. He talks more about concepts than he does about people. “I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that’s not my primary goal as a writer,” he said, over lunch. “My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas.”

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpolitics and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

Algo VPN is a set of Ansible scripts that simplifies the setup of a personal IPSEC VPN. It contains the most secure defaults available, works with common cloud providers, and does not require client software on most devices.