The /-\ pile

Connections is a 10-episode documentary television series and 1978 book (Connections, based on the series) created, written, and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science and Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. The series was noted for Burke's crisp and enthusiastic presentation (and dry humour), historical re-enactments, and intricate working models.

In this highly acclaimed and bestselling book, James Burke brilliantly examines the ideas, inventions, and coincidences that have culminated in the major technological advances of today. With dazzling insight, he untangles the pattern of interconnecting events: the accidents of time, circumstance, and place that gave rise to the major inventions of the world. Says Burke, "My purpose is to acquaint the reader with some of the forces that have caused change in the past, looking in particular at eight innovations -- the computer, the production line, telecommunications, the airplane, the atomic bomb, plastics, the guided rocket, and television -- which may be most influential in structuring our own futures....Each one of these is part of a family of similar devices, and is the result of a sequence of closely connected events extending from the ancient world until the present day. Each has enormous potential for humankind's benefit -- or destruction."

Donna Haraway’s celebrated observation that “our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert” has given this issue a certain currency in contemporary cyber-theory. But what is in- teresting about Haraway’s remark – its challenge to the oppositional think- ing that sets up free will against determinism, vitalism against mechanism – has seldom been processed by a mode of theorizing which has tended to reproduce exactly the same oppositions. These theoretical failings, it will be argued here, arise from a resistance to pursuing cybernetics to its limits (a failure evinced as much by cyberneticists as by cultural theorists, it must be added). Unraveling the implications of cybernetics, it will be claimed, takes us out to the Gothic flatline. The Gothic flatline designates a zone of radical immanence. And to theorize this flatline demands a new approach, one committed to the theorization of immanence. This thesis calls that approach Gothic Materialism.

Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation is a theosophical book compiled by the members of the Theosophical Society A. Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. It was originally published in 1901 in London. From the standpoint of Theosophy, it tells regarding visualization of thoughts, experiences, emotions and music. Drawings of the "thought-forms" were performed by painters Varley, Prince, and McFarlane.

tyranny of instantaneity, one-time system, virtualization/globalization, effects on democracy, disinformation

But how could we know when I was young All the changes that were to come? All the photos in the wallets on the battlefield And now the terror of the scientific sun? -The Clash, "Something About England" It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. -Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of the Simulacra" i haven't fucked much w/ the past but i've fucked plenty w/ the future. -Patti Smith, "babelogue" Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

Contents: "The Coming Anarchy" - Robert D. Caplan "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism" - Scott Alexander "Patchwork: A Positive Vision" - Mencius Moldbug "Beyond Folk Activism" - Patri Friedman "Seasteading and its Critics" - Patri Friedman "The Education of a Libertarian" - Peter Thiel "The Lure of the Void" - Nick Land Extracts from Xenosystems - Nick Land "The Atomization Trap" - Nick Land "Atomization and Liberation" - Justin Murphy "Independence Games" - Nick Land "Leviathan Rots" - Vincent Garton "Skins and the Game" - Uriel Alexis "Whitman" - Gilles Deleuze "Bartleby, or The Formula" - Gilles Deleuze "The Smooth and the Striated" - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari "Pre Face: Or, How to Begin at the End" - Amy Ireland Notes on Warpwork - #CaveTwitter

At its simplest level, this book is an introduction to musicians and sound artists whose works reflect, and sometimes transcend, their temporal, spatial, and psychological boundaries. Making informed critiques of human nature and post-human development in this era is not as simple as it at first seems, though: such efforts are regularly challenged by an overwhelming amount of extraneous noise smothering unique and distinct signals with slick media flak. To build a convincing argument as to why these artists are successful in their activities, and worthy of further consideration, we first have to zoom out to the broadest possible view of our planet’s condition, to see exactly what these constraints are which form the framework for their creative endeavors. As the title suggests, the unifying theme of the book is that of musicians and sound artists taking bold leaps forward in spite of (or sometimes because of) their financial, technological, and social restrictions. Some symptoms of this condition include the gigantic discography amassed by the one-man project Merzbow, the drama of silence enacted by onkyo and New Berlin Minimalism, the annihilating noise transmitted from the humble laptop computers of Russell Haswell and Peter Rehberg and much more besides. Although the journey begins in the Industrial 1980s, in order to trace how the innovations of that period have gained greater currency in the present, it surveys a wide array of artists breaking ground in the 21st century with radical attitudes and techniques. A healthy amount of global travel and concentrated listening have combined to make this a sophisticated yet accessible document, unafraid to explore both the transgressive extremes of this culture and the more deftly concealed interstices thereof.