Archives for March 2013
о кругозоре
27 March 2013 | Culturology, Literature | 1 Comment
до прогрессивной молодежи начинает доходить:
Бросила читать Пинчона. Как только начинаешь улавливать какую-то мысль, нить пропадает и появляются новые герои и сюжетные витки. Пинчон словно издевается над своим читателям и надо мной в частности. Я не знаю какой нормальный человек сможет дочитать до конца этот набор абзацев. Я пишу значительно лучше.
в поисках тирана
26 March 2013 | Culturology, Psychology | 6 Comments
а вообще, конечно, все эти особенности поведения давно уже описал Эрих Фромм в своей работе “The Fear of Freedom”:
Quite regularly these people show a marked dependence on powers outside of themselves, on other people, or institutions, or nature. They tend not to assert themselves, not to do what they want, but to submit to the factual or alleged orders of these outside forces. Often they are quite incapable of experiencing the feeling ‘I want’ or ‘I am.’ Life, as a whole, is felt by them as something overwhelmingly powerful, which they cannot master or control.
In the more extreme cases – and they are many – one finds besides these tendencies to belittle oneself and to submit to outside forces a tendency to hurt oneself and to make oneself suffer.
Besides these masochistic trends, the very opposite of them, namely, sadistic tendencies, are regularly to be found in the same kind of characters. <...> One is to make others dependent on oneself and to have absolute and unrestricted power over them, so as to make of them nothing but instruments, ‘clay in the potter’s hand.’ Another consists of the impulse not only to rule over others in this absolute fashion, but to exploit them, to use them, to steal from them, to disembowel them, and, so to speak, to incorporate anything eatable in them. <...> A third kind of sadistic tendency is the wish to make others suffer or to see them suffer.
Фромм абсолютно гениален, серьезно, и для того, чтобы убедиться в этом, достаточно взглянуть хотя бы и на то, как складывалась мировая история в 30-ые годы прошлого века: как описанные им архетипы, застыв посреди растерянной эпохи, алкали и — точно по нотам — находили убежище в тирании и диктатуре:
The individual finds himself ‘free’ in the negative sense, that is, alone with his self and confronting an alienated, hostile world. In this situation, to quote a telling description of Dostoevski, in The Brothers Karamasov, he has ‘no more pressing need than the one to find somebody to whom he can surrender, as quickly as possible, that gift of freedom which he, the unfortunate creature, was born with.’ The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.
вся история того же СССР, от Сталина до вахтера, все эти люди — они просто боятся, именно; они не знают, что делать, не умеют, не хотят, не будут — и, в итоге, находят себе очередного карлика.
в этом-то и загвоздка.
буква за буквой
25 March 2013 | Culturology, Lifeform | 3 Comments
мы расцветаем на глазах:
We’re now in the most literate age in history. I remember in 2003 asking someone, “What’s a blog?” By 2006, the analysis firm NM Incite had identified 36 million blogs worldwide; five years later, there were 173 million. Use of online social media rises every month. In fact, writing is overtaking speech as the most common form of interaction.
все так и есть, да. я и сам давно уже выбираю письмо, а не живой разговор.
вот только читаем, я думаю, мы большей частью памфлеты (в лучшем случае), а не какие-то действительно значимые тексты, увы.
чище и глубже
24 March 2013 | Art | No Comments
сон, как искусство:
[Tilda Swinton], 52, took up residence in a glass box at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on Saturday as part of an unannounced performance piece.
Clad in jeans and a blue button-down shirt, the Academy Award winner slept on an unadorned white pallet in a transparent display case.
A label for the work lists its materials as “living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water, and spectacles.”
Her public napping is part of a performance art piece titled “The Maybe,” which she debuted in 1995 at London’s Serpentine Gallery. She later repeated the work in the Museo Barraco in Rome.
вот еще подробности:
The MoMA clarified that Swinton will be performing “The Maybe” about a half-dozen more times between now and the end of the year, “each unannounced and in a different location in the Museum.”
как заметил недавно Брюс Стерлинг:
My own problem comes when you’re a <...> Woman Artist. <...> I can ask the artist these innocent <...> questions, <...> and Marina just sits there gently bleeding and staring into space for six solid hours.
bitcoin is what money should be
24 March 2013 | Economics, Internet, Lifeform | 2 Comments
Bitcoin is to banks what email was to postal offices. Instead of going to a bank, respecting their schedule, paying their fees, I can transfer money to Ethiopia, Egypt or China from my living room withoung anyone knowing who’s behind the address B and address A.
жажда зла
24 March 2013 | Culturology | 1 Comment
мне кажется, в ностальгии по Советскому Союзу есть пугающе огромная доля какой-то внутренней импотенции, неспособности и нежелания делать хоть что-то сегодня.
да еще, знаете, эта извечная мечта рабов, чтобы “весь мир плясал под нашу дудку” — и неважно тогда, в каком дерьме находятся сами Маниловы, всё готовы терпеть, лишь бы только их общий хозяин казался в других краях могучим великаном — точно эдакий Стокгольмский синдром навыворот.
и все это так… так зазеркально.
под надзором
23 March 2013 | Economics, Internet, Lifeform | 1 Comment
в первую очередь, речь, конечно, о биткойнах[1]:
The U.S. is applying money-laundering rules to “virtual currencies,” amid growing concern that new forms of cash bought on the Internet are being used to fund illicit activities.
The move means that firms that issue or exchange the increasingly popular online cash will now be regulated in a similar manner as traditional money-order providers such as Western Union Co. WU +1.04% They would have new bookkeeping requirements and mandatory reporting for transactions of more than $10,000.
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там же, впрочем, и занимательное:
The jump in the bitcoin exchange rate this week also coincides with concerns euros could be taken from retail bank accounts in Cyprus to fund a bailout.
use your body as a poster for the slogans of freedom
23 March 2013 | Censorship, Culturology | 3 Comments
женщины лучшее и смелее нас:
Campaigners including Richard Dawkins have called for a day of action to support a young Tunisian woman who appeared to post pictures of herself topless as part of a feminist movement in the country, and was subsequently threatened with death by stoning.
The 19-year-old activist, identified only as Amina, posted on the Femen-Tunisian Facebook page a topless picture of herself with the words “F**k your morals” written across her chest.
fuck your morals, indeed.
выше стропила, плотники
23 March 2013 | Culturology, Literature | 1 Comment
оказывается, многие думают, что Кафка абсурден. счастливые люди, замечу.
потому что дело-то как раз в обратном: он максимально, шаг за шагом, логичен и последователен. это, собственно, и пугает каждый раз до оторопи — его следы за окном.
it is hard to trust Google
23 March 2013 | Google, Software | No Comments
Ом Малик про новое приложение от Google
Google today launched Keep, an app that allows you to save things, clip stuff from the web, hoard notes and what not and put them all onto your Google Drive. Yup, you guessed it — it is an imitation to Evernote and many other such applications. It is a good thing that Google has decided to compete with the likes of Evernote — it validates their market.
It might actually be good, or even better than Evernote. But I still won’t use Keep. You know why? Google Reader.
или, как метко заметил Джон Грубер:
Trust your thoughts and ideas to the makers of Google Reader. Good luck with that.
вот, посмотрите на расчет средней длительности жизни для таких Google-приложений. может все дело в том, что эти разработки не являются основными?
I said — nuanced as it might be — that I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.
I am far more likely to believe in and use products that are the main focus of the company behind them. Online storage? Dropbox. Time-shifting web content? Pocket or Instapaper. Short form communication? Twitter. Baby pictures and wedding photos to make single people miserable (or happy for being single)? Facebook.
The point is that a company whose main focus is a specific service or a singular product, like Evernote, is far more likely to focus its energies to build a business around it and keep it around. And if in seven years (or seven months) they fail — hell, at least they went down trying.
sounds solid.
избегайте пользоваться их решениями везде, где только можно[1]. потому что иначе завтра винить прийдется только себя.
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и, в общем, фрагментация Android и другие вытекающие отсюда проблемы — все это тоже, в известном смысле, звенья одной и той же цепи: you are not the customer, you are the product. ↩