One of my favorite students is in France right now and I asked her to send me some French hip-hop.
This is what she dropped on me. I wonder if the man in the video is a stand-in for Sarkozy (or a supporter at any rate)?
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I wrote a story set in a military installation years ago, based on a vivid dream I had. The details of the story remain fuzzy…and it’s likely that I never completed it. One thing I do remember though was the idea of cameras embedded in tiny mechanical objects the size of dragonflies. They would be used for riot surveillance, and inevitably, control.
Combine this with the fact that we’re less than five years away from invisible fabric?
More from Mafia K1 Fry from the album La Cerise Sur Le Ghetto (”The Fruit of the Ghetto”).
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Ths is the singularity. The best fictional description of a society dealing with the consequences of the singularity is Accelerando.
We’ve been operating under the general auspices of the early twentieth century even as we move deeper and deeper into the 21st. Why the hell, for example do we organize our data into “files” and “folders” rather than a term more appropriate? Why do we still use scarcity as the basis of pop culture economics when the means of production AND distribution have been so widely distributed as to reduce the price point of these objects to zero?
There are two very recent news pieces that indicate a signal shift in human society is around the corner.
This one I just read about a second ago.
The other one I read about a couple of days ago.
These two findings combined with the increases in computing production and distribution means that we have in effect reached the precipice. There is no going back. You and I will probably not see the benefits/consequences of this directly–there is too much cultural baggage that our generation has been saddled with. But to our grandchildren hacking their own code will seem as obvious and natural as taking a pill to stave off pregnancy. What this means for black people is much much deeper than the prospect of “changing our race with a pill” as George Schuyler posited in Black Like Me.
For those interested in the cultural consequences of this and other significant civilization-altering events from a black partisan perspective check out Craig Nulan’s new spot. It was through Craig that I understood the problems presented by the reality of Peak Oil, and the possibilities present in doing internet-enabled collaborative work.
Several months ago I got tagged with one of those “thinking blogger” joints. A lot of blogs make me laugh (and that’s not always a good thing). A few blogs give me information (Earl stands out here). But if anyone deserves that tag it’s Craig.
I do not know if this new justice movement has legs, but I wrote earlier that this is about justice for EVERYONE that simply STARTS with black children. Trickle up politics at its best.
In writing about the Shaquanda Cotton case many of us blogged (and Howard Witt wrote) about a young white girl who received probation for burning her house down. This compared to Ms. Cotton who was sentenced for a minor altercation with a teacher.
Anyway, turns out that the young girl violated the terms of her probation. And suffered a fate far worse than Ms. Cotton. Even after being routinely assaulted sexually by a prison guard she remains in prison–in fact her prison sentence was extended.
Now if the white progressive blogosphere was anything like the black progressive blogosphere–concerned with concrete domestic issues as well as foreign policy ones–I’d suspect we’d see an array of folks mobilizing to get this girl out.
