a common idea that really annoys me:
that if something was developed with defense funding, then even if it has no obvious military application, it must have a non-obvious one
it’s sort of the same kind of mistake as “facebook is mind control”
here’s the thing:
to do anything new…
i hate that cryptocurrency (and especially proof-of-work cryptocurrency) has been so strongly affiliated with decentralization in people’s minds.
one of the benefits of decentralization is that it makes payment & metering hard, which disincentivizes commoditization.
metering & charging for access to truly decentralized systems without central gatekeeping is still not…
Discordianism has already become ‘historically important’, because of its impact on major geopolitical events.
As pope, I declare: discordians have a sacred duty to create ‘textual chaos’, and extend the ‘textual chaos’ present in the variations of the PD.
Future historians, being servants of the season of bureaucracy, are our…
This is actually a great example of how material concerns influence culture. The differences (including this one) between manga & american comics don’t come from “japanese culture” or whatever, but from the economics of selling anthology magazines vs individual books.
In American comics, stuff runs as individual comic books and…
By dying before finishing Acid Communism, Fisher freed us up not just to argue about what he really meant by Acid Communism, but also to argue ahistorically about what the best possible version of Mark Fisher would have meant by Acid Communism, and that’s a silver lining.
Leaving a mysterious…
A huge part of enjoying media objects in good faith is figuring out where you stand in relation to the media object & where you both stand in relationship to the world. When we consume media, it becomes a part of us and changes us in complex ways. …
Long ago, when we all lived in the forest and no one lived anywhere else, Saint Dog got a Facebook invite to a great bacchanal and meeting of the Discordian cabals. …
The problem of generating interesting long-form text (whether fiction or non-fiction) is a problem of information density: people do not like to be told things they already know (or can guess), particularly at length, nor do they generally find the strain of interpreting content that’s too informationally-dense interesting for long…
When Fisher died, he was working on a new book describing ‘Acid Communism’. Looked at in a particular light, we can see in the three books he published during his lifetime fragments of a negative image of this theory, and when we see these fragments, it is difficult not to…
A response to iniksbane on what constitutes anime
Another blogger, iniksbane, has responded to my piece ‘What is Anime’. Their response is worth reading in full, and I think we are more closely in agreement than that essay makes out. Where I disagree is the characterization that the vibe of…
John Ohno
Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net
