Making Internet politics personal
“It’s not always easily to find a visualization of online activism that expresses the magnitude of steam that the cause has.”
The Keystone Fight's Labor Pains
Back in 2009, it didn’t seem so strange LIUNA was playing with two natural enemies, getting closer with the greens while buddying up to the oil and natural-gas industry. Green groups like the Sierra Club were forming unlikely allegiances, too, convincing themselves that the natural-gas industry, with its carbon-light fuel and competition with oil, might just be a new best friend. Like a smart but athletic kid who can hang with both jocks and nerds, the Laborers had interests in common with both groups, and in the economic dung heap of 2009, no union could turn its nose up at an offer that might lead to jobs for its members.
“But this idea of nature as timeless—and this is one of the reasons why it’s so deeply problematic—disguises that it in fact has a history. It has served both general social needs throughout American history, and specific social needs for every generation, and, I think, fulfilled very specific and very personal needs for Rachel Carson.”
The trouble with Aaron’s Law
Shortly after Swartz’s death—which some speculated was caused by federal charges he faced after downloading large batches of documents from the digital library JSTOR—Lofgren announced that she was beginning work on a law that would protect other Internet users from experiencing the sort of prosecution that Swartz was facing—what Lofgren called “inappropriate efforts undertaken by the US government” and “abuse of power.”
The law would amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the statute that US prosecutors had used against him. When she posted a first draft of the bill—she called it Aaron’s Law—to Reddit in January, Lofgren wrote that it “could be an important tribute” to Swartz’s work. Friday’s award ceremony was the sort of occasion that would have served as a perfect forum for announcing that she was introducing this bill to Congress—if she was ready to take that step. But in the end, she couldn’t even attend.
The new copyright alert system is running
if you’re sloppy about downloading music or movies from a peer-to-peer network, like BitTorrent, μTorrent, Vuze or Frostwire—if you don’t mask your IP address with a VPN or similar shield—you might start hearing about it.
The alerts start with a message that a copyright owner (likely one represented by the Motion Picture Association of America or the Recording industry Association of America) has connected allegedly improper sharing or copying of content to your IP address. If you’re a Comcast customer, for instance, your first alert will look like this:
The smuggled hard drives of Timbuktu
When the Malian city of Timbuktu fell to Islamist rebels last April, the destruction of its immense cultural treasures did not begin at once. It wasn’t even clear, at first, who exactly was in charge of the city, or what they might do.
But by July, when a coalition of new leaders consolidated control and began tearing down some of the city’s most important burial shrines, the heads of Timbuktu’s libraries had already been working quietly for months to move and hide their collections—one of the most significant troves of unique medieval manuscripts in the world. And among the first materials that they smuggled out were something surprising: hard drives.
“A thousand-year-old tradition, the Inupiat whale hunt provides the community’s annual food supply, currently limited by international law to 22 whales a year. Each spring as the ocean thaws, ice breaks away from the mainland as a single massive chunk, which then floats out to sea, creating a canal of open water called the “lead”. It is through this lead that Bowhead whales migrate north to the Arctic Circle, where they spend summers, surfacing for air every 30-45 minutes en route. We saw hundreds of whales on the horizon, but most were too far away to attack. Finally on the fourth day two whales (each 36 feet long and weighing around 40 tons) were harpooned, hauled up onto the ice using a block and tackle system that resembles a giant tug of war between man and sea, and summarily butchered, the meat and blubber then distributed to the Barrow community.”
On the way to Double Negative, Nevada.
Source: gin+gelato
fennel, oranges, onions, feta, olives
