Snowden's Globe
Video essays about Nazis and lodges, an antidote to exhausting techno-optimism, plus smiling and cheeks!
First, a brief apology for the delay in getting a Globe out. I’ve been busy getting situated at my new job, and the link-and-story collecting has had to be thrown on to the back-burner. Not even the back-burner, really, more like thrown back into the fridge. Anyways, now that work is running well, I *should* have the Globes out on a weekly basis.
Jackie Brown and Phillipe Mesly’s contribution to the Syllabus of the Internet, “Labors of Love”, is a fantastic overview of the ideas of Ivan Illich. In particular, they do a wonderful job of laying out the way that Illich approached his skepticism of the professional and technical world we’ve created. Illich is an immense field of thoughts to encounter, and I’m still working through some of his criticisms. This essay is a great starting point.
A painting that delighted me: “Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image, 1625.” By Gerard van Honthorst.
Google released their transparency report on reverse-location, aka geofence warrants. Briefly: law enforcement agencies will get a court to force Google to turn over information on every person who is in a certain geographical location at a certain time, in order to identify people of interest. It’s pretty creepy, but unfortunately it seems to be the new future. Here’s a visual depiction of the rapid increase in the use of Google location data:
I have a general theory that one of the rising challenges of the next decade is going to be a race for creating true privacy.* Right now, we don’t have much of a private space, outside of the Dark Web. Everything else is simply overrun with eyes, both human and bot. I can foresee, however, the potential creation of a form of transportable, ownable, personalized data. Once an individual can own their data, and move it between competing data brokers, there will finally be markets competing for privacy, instead of our Surveillance Web. The question is, will the big boys of tech allow that? The way I see it, Google and the NSA and the Chinese Communist Party all are necessarily invested in the idea of people’s data being tracked and commodified. It’s clear that they won’t easily tolerate something outside their grips.
Word to the wise, however, and I’m going to keep this vague: folks need to think long and hard about where they take their phones. I don’t think you can prudently say otherwise.
*not to toot my own horn, but my predictive guess at what the 2010s would be about was “Governments finally fully discover the Internet and all its implications,” which ended up being pretty spot-on. Weirdly, I’m a little more optimistic about the next decade. This could be a really dumb idea!
Scout Tafoya’s series “A Treasury of Glass Expiring” reviewed Lodge 49. If you haven’t watched the Lodge: watch it. It’s on Hulu, and you won’t regret it. There’s no spoilers in the video essay, but you can’t appreciate it fully until you become a Lynx yourself.
Relatedly, may I present to you: the archives of IAPSOP: the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals. You can spend hours or days browsing old copies of The New Thought or Buddhist Ray, which “set forth the teachings imparted by the Mongolian Buddhists to Emanuel Swedenborg, and published by him in his mystic writings.” If anything, these archives document the fervent world of nonstandard religious feeling that arose as the old religions lost their authority. You can find all kinds of resonant critiques of institutional religion, as well as some really nutty ersatz histories of human thought.
Maxx Seijo’s video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed” [content warning: Tarantino gore] is one of my favorite thought-provokers, tying in the industrial mobilization of the US in WWII to the mobilization of desire to kill Nazis, and the icky realization that American greatness is dependent on Nazi villainy.
I love these guiding maxims of the Zapatistas:
“Suggest, but do not impose.
Represent, but do not replace.
Obey, but do not dictate.
Descend to the people, but do not dominate.
Persuade, but do not defeat.
Serve the others, but not yourself.”
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Have a great week!
Snow