MAY DAY NYC. Visualizing The New Arab Mind - Computational History. Experts say Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future.
Now that Mubarak has stepped down, I can share the work I've done making that metaphor tangible, and visualizing the pro-democracy movement in Egypt and across the Middle East. It is based on their Twitter activity, capturing the freedom of expression and association that is possible in that medium, and which is representative of a new collective consciousness taking form. The map is arranged to place individuals near the individuals they influence, and factions near the factions they influence. The color is based on the language they tweet in -- a choice that itself can be meaningful, and clearly separates different strata of society. Many fascinating structures can be seen. The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly gafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground.
Adbusters. The Great American Bubble Machine. The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere.
The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. Invasion of the Home Snatchers By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street.
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. The Feds vs. Wall Street's Big Win.
Occupy: Together. Occupy: New York. Occupy: LA. Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality. The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.
And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality. I have used this perspective of augmentation to critque dualism when I see it. But the dualism keeps rolling in. A Call to Occupy. New York, NY — We are a global movement that is reclaiming our humanity and our future. We have stepped into a revitalizing civic process, realizing that we cannot fix our crises isolated from one another.
We need collective action, and we need civic space. We are creating that civic space. To occupy is to embody the spirit of liberation that we wish to manifest in our society. It is to exercise our freedom to assemble. Liberated space is breaking free of isolation, breaking down the walls that literally and figuratively separate us from one another. Last night, billionaire Michael Bloomberg sent a massive police force to evict members of the public from Liberty Square—home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months. Supporters of this rapidly growing movement were mobilized in the middle of the night, making phone calls, taking the streets en masse, and planning next steps. Occupy Atlanta brings Bloods and Crips Together. Good Morning all! This below article just blew my mind! Sherrod Britton and Shabaka Addae Guillory Crossposted from: AFSC Sherrod Britton, 29, was initiated into the Bloods when he was 18 years old. He joined because he felt lost and wanted to be a part of something.
This story is absolutely amazing and positive.
American Progress. BBC. May Day. CNN. #occupy from Verso.