five-by-five

my precious: a brilliant equation of the One Ring to the allures of technology

love token #9: a look at Victorian forget-me-nots for Valentine’s Day

i-spy: nickle-tour of some of the grandiloquent bastions of espionage

reboot: how the TV show Friends might look today

reaction faces: dramatic gesticulations from a nineteenth century guide

unionists and publicans

Writing for the Spectator, columnist Mary Dejevsky has found a more apt, although much more uncomfortable, analogy for the tension and territorial integrity that’s no rarified metaphor or theoretical matter triangulated among Russia, Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula.
Rather than resorting to popular but inhibiting comparisons to Nazi aggression or Czarist Russia, Dejevsky suggests a more contemporary parallel to another triad composed of Ireland and Britain and the creation of Northern Ireland. The correlation is of course not a perfect fit either, history being untidy, but I believe that by avoiding abstractions that strip away civility and humanity and making matters more personal (the UK certainly would not have tolerated any meddling in these internal affairs), one is better outfitted with the vocabulary to talk about matters, even if the received-language is already chilling enough in one direction.

pins and needles

In the early 1960s, the US military, fearful of Soviet sabotage against traditional modes of communication that were restricted to undersea cables or radio signals propagated with varying degrees of reliability—depending on the weather and other factors—when bounced off the ionosphere, commissioned the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create an artificial ring in low orbit of some half a million tiny copper needles to augment the quality of transmissions. Once the news of the secret programme called Project West-Ford was uncovered, there was understandable outrage that America could deport itself in such a manner, possibly polluting the atmosphere and grounding space travel forever by undertaking an experiment on a global scale. Pressure from the scientific community was passionate and brought about the international Treaty on Outer Space. The system worked well and did facilitate broadcasting and if the technique had not been made obsolete by the communications satellite, another orbiting ring, we might still be chattering via pins in the sky. Though the majority of needles have fallen back to Earth, a few are still circling the globe half a century on.

five-by-five

personæ: one’s choice of avatars conveys a lot about one’s real personality

apocalypse cow: televangelist reports on bovine harbinger of the End Times

cyrus virus: begging to be noticed is ruining everything authentic

PR’s PR award: Sigmund Freud’s nephew invented marketing, calling it propaganda

coöp: there is a small collectivist community in Andalusia described as a peaceful utopia

maybe that’s the cave plato warned us about

The excellent Quartz Magazine presents a very delving article that demonstrates, I think, with great lucidity one of the consequences of forsaking so called net neutrality—an idea generally portrayed as something nebulous and complex, not that the motives underlying the argument are straightforward, by the mainstream medium to inspire defeatists attitudes. Much of that same estate serves gentle reminders, usually when those dominant institutions are thinking of doing something underhanded, that in fact the internet is not a search-engine, which checks both detractors and opponents of the change. The West, I think, is taking this rhetorical device for granted, however, especially vis-a-vis the magnanimity of one social network, which would provide free access for all. Businesses are not meant to be surrogates for free and democratic principles and people ought to be wise to ulterior motives, but the charity and outreach of the media empire, as outlined in the feature, does not in fact give the Third World an outlook on equal-footing with the First World counterparts. Instead of encountering that brutal, rough but independent world-wide web, the young generation in Africa, Asia and India are received into the refined and gated environment of that social network.

A not insignificant portion of ascribers don’t even realise that this service is even just a selective mask for that cyber substrate that’s walled off and out of their price-range. Maybe some believe that the messy, unknown internet they’ve heard of is a playground of privilege and can make do with what they’re filtered—after all, all their friends and family are famous here, whereas the wider internet takes no notice of them. Maybe it is better than having no foothold and people may eventually discover all things behind the scenes or as expounded rather eloquently, maybe we all just become serfs and sharecroppers for a single magnate and mogul. One only knows what one is exposed to, especially during the impressionable onset, and ideas, policy, and credibility—not only fashion and commerce—fall prostrate to what’s liked.