“The experiment foundered, and Beer’s allie in the Chilean government was toppled by a coup. Today, similar models of dynamic algorithmic resource management provide companies with an edge over others. Bloomberg Business provided insight into the Black Book process that is responsible for Coca Cola’s ‘Simply Orange’. Revenue Analytics have provided Coca Cola with an algorithm “designed to accept any contingency that might affect manufacturing, from weather patterns to shifts in the global economy, and make adjustments to the manufacturing process accordingly.” The numinous U-machine parceled up as an algorithmic consultancy product. Also worth noting is Max Levchin’s presentation to the Digital-Life-Design 13 conference. He positions the success stories of the collaborative consumption as indebted to one powerful trend: “the digitalization of analog data, and its management in a centralized queue (can be used) to create amazing new efficiencies”. Extending that trend to its vanishing point Levchin muses on the transformation of risk that could result and even indulges some dystopian future speculation by positing “dynamic pricing for brain cycles”. The driving logics of collaborative consumption, managed by dynamically adjusting algorithms, have their conceptual predessor in Cybernsyn.”
(via meet your new wetware manager | THE STATE)
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Murmuration—a festival of drone culture
“What is a drone? Is it a drudge? An idler? A monotonous hum? A meditative chant? Is it a killer robot? A toy? The automated arm of US imperialism? A technology perhaps capable of developing agency of its own? A flying camera? A police spy? An agent of apocalypse? A promise of the future?
…
Now we invite all of you to join this conversation as well. We are opening submissions today, May 1, and we encourage all of you to think about your understanding of the drone, and then to create. We can offer $50 for every piece we accept. Below is a copy of Murmuration’s “Mission Parameters” so that you can get a fuller sense of the thinking behind the festival.”
via SUBMIT TO THE DRONES | THE STATE
latest anarchist dating advice—fucking the borders
“is role-playing problematic from a revolutionary perspective? should we feel guilty for cop fetishes?”
(via anarchist dating advice #3: fucking the borders | THE STATE)
“The great schism in Central Asian history isn’t pre- and post-Islam, or pre- and post-Russia. It is pre- and post-canals.”
(via a pleasant apocalypse | THE STATE)
White men wearing Google Glass
“plagues do not disclose their real symptoms, they are ‘communicable yet invisible’ and technology runs on software that is hidden yet revealed in times of crisis. Again, queue the story of the despair of the computer not turning on, but this time link it (as my brain seemed to do) to the wax tablets of Frau Troffea’s time.”
(via dancing, technology, and the plague: death | THE STATE)
“In that post, Tim articulates all the difficulty of dealing with structures when they are in the long, middle period. But regardless of when or how they officially enter the state of “ruin,” there is a point at which a structure could be considered to unequivocally be a ruin. The Coliseum is most definitely a ruin. It may be other things, but it is certainly a ruin.”
via the accumulation of ruin-space | THE STATE
Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet—”It’s stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot. Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan.”
Red Hack—documentary on Turkey’s communist hacker collective
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams—”The Remote Administration Tool is the revolver of the Internet’s Wild West”
DDoS Attack Looks Like an Intense Game of Pong—”We’ve all heard of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks bringing down web servers, but we bet most people can’t really imagine what a DDoS attack looks like…”
How the Syrian Electronic Army hacked the AP—and who are these guys, anyway?
The Syrian Electronic Army are at Cyber War with Anonymous—”The SEA was actually founded by Assad back when he was thought to have next to no chance of inheriting his fathers position as dictator because he was just such a geeky nerd. So they’ve been around a while, and we were aware from day one that they could become involved in the cyber conflict. As for our dealings with them, that’s pretty straightforward. They are, by their own choice of allegiance to the dictator, the enemies of Anonymous. And they introduced themselves into the conflict fairly early on with a rather spectacular hack of a fairly well known Anonymous web site. We, in turn, responded by attacking their web assets and that conflict continues to this day.”
via elsewhere on the internet 27/04/2013 | THE STATE
“Compared with officially minted banknotes, the imagery printed on local currency notes shows vibrant coloring, unconventional crests, woodcut engravings inspired by Cordel literature and other cool features. But the highlights are the skills developed by a group of designers from CUFA, a favela collective founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1999; their “lasca” banknotes designed for Aroeira Bank will go down in history with its simplicity and grace.” (via favela chic redux | THE STATE)