Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country’s officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!

Write Them Now! I urge you to vote no on ACTA and to communicate its severe problems to your colleagues. ACTA’s vague language locks us into obsolete copyright and patent laws, preventing democracies from updating their laws to unlock new economic and social opportunities.It criminalizes harmless remixes by ordinary users if they achieve ‘a commercial scale’ (art 2.14.1) which many amateur videos do on sites like Youtube. And it criminalizes legitimate websites by making them responsible for user behavior (‘aiding and abetting’ art 2.14.4).Worse, it permanently bypasses the democratic process by empowering the ‘ACTA Committee’ to ‘propose amendments to [ACTA]‘ without your approval. (art 6.4) In other words, it’s impossible to know what you’re voting for.The global movement against the US law SOPA showed that internet freedom is a crucial issue which belongs in the legislative process of each country. You should view ACTA as an attempt by a handful of companies to circumvent the democratic process, and you should vote against it.Thank you. Please reply if you have any questions.

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We have the hottest first couple in the history of ever. http://flic.kr/p/7JDsym
—Mike Monteiro’s twitter

Check out the wordy disclaimers on flickr. Can’t blame ‘em, I guess.

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) is the trend of stretching our ‘attention bandwidth’ to cope with the myriad demands on our concentration posed by technology. The term was coined by the writer Linda Stone, formerly of Apple and Microsoft, who describes CPA as ‘the behavior of continuously monitoring as many inputs as possible, paying partial attention to each’. According to Stone, CPA is ‘post-multitasking behavior’. If multitasking is ‘motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient’, CPA is ‘motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network’. Anxious to connect and desperate not to miss an opportunity, CPA ‘contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation, and a sense of being unfulfilled’. Indeed, the ‘always on’ character of technology (emails, PDAs, IM, VOIP) compromises ‘normal’ social interactions (checking your BlackBerry or cell during lunch) and, in Stone’s analysis, ‘has created an artificial sense of constant crisis’. Like wild animals in a continuous state of alert, an ‘adrenalized fight or flight mechanism kicks in’. Of the hundreds of emails received each day, Stone asks, how many are ‘tigers’, requiring immediate action, and how many are merely ‘mice’? (Most, in fact, are likely to be spam.) Faced with this profusion of inputs we increasingly turn to filters (TiVo) and blocks (iPods) to find a signal amidst the noise.

Stone suggests that ‘the world may continue to be noisy, but our yearning and fulfillment are more likely to come from getting to the bottom of things, from stillness, and from opportunities for meaningful connection’.

From Schott’s Almanac 2007

I heard the title Vampire Weekend and I thought, “Oh, man, that’s gonna be great. I gotta see it.” And there are these guys with little Gap T-shirts on and I’m going, “What happened to the balls in rock ‘n’ roll? Why are American bands so wimpy?”
—Alice Cooper

(via Pitchfork)

Click here for the photos.

www.NewYorkCult.com

www.AestheticRealism.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic_Realism

By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case)  […]  But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear

This. Fucking. Election.