That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way of getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self. - Alan Watts
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Masakatsu Sashie, Bazaar, 2010
oil on canvas
Pink Floyd - Shine on you crazy diamond
Kowloon Walled City was a densely populated, largely ungoverned settlement in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898.
Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by Triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug use. In 1987, the Walled City contained 33,000 residents within its 6.5-acre (0.03 km2; 0.01 sq mi) borders.
In January 1987, the Hong Kong government announced plans to demolish the Walled City. After an arduous eviction process, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened in December 1995 and occupies the area of the former Walled City. Some historical artifacts from the Walled City, including its yamen building and remnants of its South Gate, have been preserved there.
The buildings were often built without blueprint, and stayed up mostly by leaning against their neighbors.
(for more and larger images go here)
view of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, 1990
(source)
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“I’m enthralled by Spanish artist Dionisio Gonzalez’s favela photo series. His images are created by digitally manipulating real photographs. He has featured a number of locations in this series, including Korea’s second biggest city Busan.” (source)
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The Internet is clearly a good idea—not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that’s happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn’t know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter got an iPod a few years ago, want to go and ruin the web to benefit a few reactionary trade groups who would prefer censorship to innovation. A bill that was introduced into the House last month, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), aims to penalize or eliminate websites that have pirated content, and the repercussions for Internet users could be far-reaching. - MediaShift Idea Lab - DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS
Geoffrey: There is a big difference between free speech and the theft of goods or services. Rogue websites exist to benefit from the theft of others’ intellectual property—no one has provided even a single example of a rogue site that contains speech protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, these two priorities are consistent. The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet is critical for the United States, for its creators and inventors, and for the jobs it promotes and the economic promise it provides.
bradburnham: Geoffrey, no one is suggesting that the Pirate Bay is hosting the Declaration of Independence. The problem is that the remedies proposed would undermine the characteristics of the Internet that have made it such a fantastic engine of innovation—primarily the right to innovate without permission from an incumbent who may be threatened by your innovation. PIPA and SOPA would require search engines, social networks and ISPs to censor the net on behalf of content owners. That creates a significant burden for those services. It also won’t work. The relatively simple techniques to circumvent the censorship will undermine the security of the Internet broadly and will lead inevitably to the next step, which is the implementation of a great firewall. Once we go there, we will have become China. The concern is not that rogue sites protect free speech. The concern is that the remedy will stifle it.
(source)
MediaShift Idea Lab - DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS
Tumblr took even more dramatic action as far as getting users’ attention, and redirected the roughly 500,000 daily unique visitors to Tumblr.com to a slick “call Congress” tool that dialed users, prompted them with talking points, and connected them to their representatives.
I need to take a minute and let you marinate on Tumblr’s part in all of this. The service combines Twitter and blogging and has grown 900 percent in the last year. With 30 minutes’ notice, Tumblr got hooked up with Mobile Commons, another New York-based start-up, and then they delivered an average of 3.6 calls per second to Congress. Because Tumblr is a blogging platform, its action also produced a sharp uptick in blog posts about SOPA.
The tool the Tumblr team built made me a little happy and a little sad. I was happy because it was perfectly executed. The interface was nice; it was blatantly clear what I was supposed to do; and it got my complete attention until the task was completed. But it also made me sad because I’ve been watching political technology for 10 years and have never seen anything nearly this good from the industry vendors who charge campaigns and non-profits significant sums of money for their clunky click-to-call tools.
It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years.
Wall relief, Nijmegen, Netherlands, by unknown artist
photo by Klaas Vermaas
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