Have you watched the last few moments of Saddam’s life? Or the necrophilic videos with Gaddafi’s behind? Al Zarqawi’s internet kill rooms? Magnotta’s cat suffocation videos? Ronal Poppo’s eaten face? I will admit that I have and it is ticklish, but not in a good way. Gore videos on the internet are abundant and they certainly work up the stomach. It’s no trek to watch them, but apparently that is the point. Recently, I stumbled (as one does on the internet) on a range of gore forums and videos. All sorts of weird kinks flourish in these platforms, and they will give you a good dose of weekly shock ‘n’ awe material. In these marginalized discussion groups, a certain thought intrigued me. Gore aficionados claim that watching ‘real’ murder protests the distorted and censored imagery of world horror events, and these videos correct our vision by portraying a more realistic representation of atrocities and the macabre. Also, gore audiences are stigmatized as those who engage in snuff activi

Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity. Animated GIFs crystallise a form of the combination of computing and the camera. As photography moves almost entirely into digital modes, the fascination with such quirky formats increases. The story of photography will be, in no small part, that of its file formats, the kinds of compression and storage it undergoes, as they in turn produce what is conjurable as an image. The Graphics Interchange Format was first developed through the computer network firm Compuserve. As an eight-bit file format it introduced the amazing spectacle of 256 colour images to be won over the thin lines of dial-up connections. Due to this, when a picture is converted to GIF, it’s likely that posterization occurs – where gradations of tone turn to patches of reduced numbers of colours. Such aliasing introduces a key part of

There are really two points. The first is a bit of technical background you can ignore if you like, and skip to the next paragraph. It’s the idea of “relative entropy” and its equivalent “information” formulation. Information can be thought of as “minus the entropy,” or even better “the maximum entropy possible minus the actual entropy.” If you know that a system is in a low-entropy state, it’s in one of just a few possible microstates, so you know a lot about it. If it’s high-entropy, there are many states that look that way, so you don’t have much information about it. (Aside to experts: I’m kind of shamelessly mixing Boltzmann entropy and Gibbs entropy, but in this case it’s okay, and if you’re an expert you understand this anyway.) John explains that the information (and therefore also the entropy) of some probability distribution is always relative to some other probability distribution, even if we often hide that fact by taking the fiducial probability to be uniform (… in some va

Image spam is one of the many dark matters of the digital world; spam tries to avoid detection by filters by presenting its message as an image file. An inordinate amount of these images floats around the globe, desperately vying for human attention.2 They advertise pharmaceuticals, replica items, body enhancements, penny stocks, and degrees. According to the pictures dispersed via image spam, humanity consists of scantily dressed degree-holders with jolly smiles enhanced by orthodontic braces.

Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to find an effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the U.S. market.

Our annual selection at the P2P Foundation

Paul Baran (1962)

 Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal and unreachable verity. Information is, by definition, consumable. It is less the case, then, that “information wants to be free” than that “information wants to be consumed.”

Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through a sociological point of view, adopting a dialectical perspective in the analysis of network dynamics might open an opportunity to question the notion of artistic intervention itself. This thread connects multiple identities projects and hacker practices of the last decade with business strategies of today, reflecting on the role of activists and artists in social media. Their interventions are thought as a challenge to generate a critical understanding of contemporary informational power (or info-capitalism), and to imagine possible routes of political and artistic action. Furthermore, this analysis questions the methodology of radical clashes of opposite forces to generate socio-political transformation, proposing more flexible viral actions as relevant responses to the ubiquity of capitalism.

by Manuel DeLanda

The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement as any piece of software. The spirit of the license is clearly informed by Stallman's moral philosophy but its unintended consequences go far beyond it. Similarly, Eric Raymond's attempts at an ethnography of the movement, and to distill "rules" which capture its dynamics, fall short of success but he has in addition provided good material to study those unintended consequences....

(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in the 21st century, the NEA may need to issue the sobering final report in the series, “Reading, Rest in Peace.”

Several social and technological developments of the 20th century, such as television, electronic games, and even comic books, have been generally perceived as threats to literacy and the practice of reading. For some reading purists, even the growing popularity of ebooks and audiobooks is a s