Ending the Cybernetic Honeymoon

Image Source: I09.

For the past thirty years, humankind's marriage to technology has enjoyed a lovely, whirlwind honeymoon. With the exception of deadly neo-Luddites like the Unabomber, it seemed the love affair would go on forever. Yet here and there, there are signs that the honeymoon is ending.

Times Outside History 8: Google Maps of Prehistory

During a visit to New York City, Surui Chief Almir proposed plugging the world of his Brazillian rain forest tribe into Google Earth. Image Source: Paiter.org.

At the Rio +20 conference, the chief of Brazil's Surui indigenous peoples signed an agreement with Google to post photographs of his tribe's territory and cultural life on a specially dedicated Google Maps app. One cannot say that this tribe, so accustomed to exchanges with the outside world (their first contact was 40 years ago), exactly inhabits a prehistoric time capsule. They are more a jarring hybrid of the deep past and the cutting-edge present. From news.com.au:

GOOGLE unveiled a cultural map of Brazil's Surui indigenous people, a tool that will help the Amazonian tribe share their knowledge of the forest and fight illegal logging.

The map, the result of a five-year partnership between Surui chief Almir and the US technology giant, was released online for the first time at a business forum held on the sidelines of the UN Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.

The map, a collection of picture and videos mapping historical sites and offering 3D visualisation of Surui territory in the northwestern Brazilian state of Rondonia, is available on the site http://www.paiter.org/ as well as on Google Earth.

Donning a multi-colored feather wreath, chief Almir hailed the project that "shows the value of our culture to the world through Google."

Almir, who proposed the idea of the map to Google during a visit to the United States five years ago, told a press conference that he was particularly proud of the contribution Surui youths made to the project, including narration.

Chief Almir proclaims that "it is time to put down the bow and arrow and to take up the laptop." His tribal territory directly runs up against totally deforested areas. He has provided his people with portable devices which allow them to state their territorial boundaries via Google Earth, to monitor their borders, and to take censuses of wildlife - from jaguars to toucans - and plants in their forest.

Find an explanation in English about this project on the tribal Website here. To see the cultural map, you have to first download Google Earth here, and then open the cultural map data here in Google Earth. The map provides clickable information, photos and history (with many accounts of border battle victories) of the intrepid Surui people, along with the location of their villages. There are a couple of Surui Youtube videos about the project below the jump.

Recession Ghost Tales

Image Source: Greater Pittsburgh's New Home.

The blog Ghost Stories accepts submissions from readers about their experiences with paranormal phenomena. On 14 June 2012, that blog received a story from a lady, Lori Z., who owns a home cleaning business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is sending in a three-part missive about ghostly encounters while cleaning a home in a shiny new housing development in the Pittsburgh suburbs. From her comments, these sound like McMansions, built on former farmland. She writes:

Cleaning A Haunted House..What I do For Money Part 1

My name is Lori and I own a small cleaning service in the Pittsburgh area. I have 22 customers and 2 employees C.J. And Marie.

I am writing this story about one house in particular, yes the haunted one. Before I begin I would like to tell all you non believers of the paranormal to chill out, I am not looking for ghosties they just show up. In the past if I saw something or heard a misplaced noise I would pass it off as whatever, now I am paying a little more attention.

In June of 2008 I got my first customer in a very nice neighborhood with all new houses (economy is not effecting this hood). From that customer I was able to get 2 other houses. One was a couple with 2 dogs and the other was a family with 3 little girls. All was great. When we first started cleaning these homes all three of us would go together. The house with the family is quite large 5,000 square feet so as a group we would work our way through all 3 levels.

The first odd thing that I would notice and shrug off was that when we walked into the house we would all feel like someone was home. I would call out for several moments without a response before realizing no one was at home. The other strange thing was the door that we would enter would always shut on me and sometimes it would lock, ok not so strange just enough for me to always hang on to my keys. Then the little weird stuff started, a roll of paper towels spread across the grand foyer, cleaning rags tossed down the steps. I would blame my helpers, what are they doing? This was the norm. ...

Now the fun starts. Six months into cleaning, the customer request weekly service but only the main floor and the master bath ... .

I went my first time by myself and once again the feeling that someone was home was overwhelming. I made it through the whole main floor with no problem. I went upstairs to tackle the master bath, my foot hit the top step and I heard a door slam somewhere in the house. I called out once again," Hello is someone home?" No one was home. I proceeded down the hallway lugging 2 sweepers, a bucket and a bag full of supplies, as I was walking a rubber ball rolls past me into the master bedroom, hmmm... Where did that come from? Whatever, I cleaned the bathroom (takes an hour). Whilst gathering all my stuff and I heard a crowd of voices coming from the foyer downstairs, once again, I called out "hello, whose home?" Got all the way down there with all my stuff, no one was there.

Weeks went by with some weird stuff but once again it could have been shrugged off as whatever. Then the day came when I saw him...

Continue reading here.

For Part 2 to the story, go here.
For Part 3 of the story, go here.

Photo of the Day

Click to enlarge: Endeavour Crater. Image Source: NASA via Wired.

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity spent the winter at Endeavour Crater in the Meridiani Planum, where it soaked up weak sunlight and took 817 images to make up this panoramic view of the crater. The new Mars rover, Curiosity, is due to arrive on the Red Planet on August 5. For more views of the Martian landscape as seen from space, see Wired's best of 5 years' worth of Mars Orbiter images, here.

Syria's 10,000 Year Layers of Reality

Image Source: Web Pro News.

Syria is currently the Internet's favourite conspiracy theorists' stepchild. WikiLeaks dumps contend with a so-called "US-led conspiracy against Syria." There are the unconfirmed Homs Youtube massacre videos and anguished MSM chatter about 'chemical weapons' aimed at the country's citizens. As the situation shifts toward international action, characters like George Galloway join the rain dance.

I won't comment here directly on the Syrian troubles, but rather suggest in this case how Millennial meta-realities are derived from information, not the other way around. This is a phenomenon which Orwell recognized during the Spanish Civil War: because of opposing disinformation campaigns, independent reality disappears. That is a frightening moment. In our era, this moment depends critically on the implementation of online media. And it offers powerful potential, recognized by all players.

Conspiracy theorists are waist deep in the usual suspects, many of which are thinly-disguised characters out of the fake fin-de-siècle anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Illuminati, CIA, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Arab nationalists, religious factions, al-Qaeda, international bankers and Russians. Theorists' complex logic and exciting mythologies supposedly inch toward something called the 'real truth.' As the conflict escalates, the blogger at Examined Intelligence, who must surely be an anti-Galloway animal, describes WikiLeaks' Syrian role in metaphorical style:

The recent hype created by the limited hangout operation known as 'Wikileaks' regarding the exposures of Syrian government documents shows no real Scoops, but simply rehashes old news in a manner designed to condemn 'Western Hypocrisy' with regards to Syria. It doesn't take a genius to understand it has something to do with Assange's new Bosses at the Kremlin.

As we noticed a few months ago, the purchase of former CIA asset \ MK-Ultra zombie Julian Assange by the Kremlin's state sponsored propaganda channel ' Russia Today \ RT' (believed to be an "alternative news" outfit by all too many gullible American bloggers) where he was given a prime time show (the first of which hosted Hezbollah's terror kingpin Hassan Nasrallah), had nothing to do with any kind of 'investigative journalism'. Assange simply switched sides to the Russian FSB once he became a liability to the CIA limited hangout apparatus.

All the documents published so far by Wikileaks are related to western companies selling communications gear to the Syrian government, supposedly in violations of the sanctions regime imposed on Syria on behalf of western oligarchies. This is in a time when Russian trade with Syria is heavily condemned by the western MSM, thus the whole thing can be understood as a Russian counter measure to western propaganda. ...

A real investigative exposure would have focused on NATO's complicity with funding and arming Al-Qaeda and similar terrorist groups in an effort to destabilize the Syrian government, but Wikileaks has no interest in any of this. Instead they simply focus on whatever serves the present short term interest of their current bosses in Moscow. There's nothing dramatic with western companies trading with Assad, unless it is understood in the context of current Russian diplomacy. ...

It is best for everyone in 'alternative' media to realize that state sponsored propaganda channels (like RT or PressTV) as well as their patsy facades (like Wikileaks \ Anonymous) must be discarded (and treated like BBC (MI6)) , even when they attempt to create the superficial impression of supporting the anti-establishment agenda. This impression is always fake and meant to lure western patsies (and otherwise well intentioned activists) to serve a rival establishment which is just as bad as the western one.

After flashing the anti-anti-anti-establishment badge of trust (plus garnering points for creatively working in the popular word, 'zombie'), Examined Intelligence believes that Anonymous leads Netizens to a "cybernetic Sleepy Hollow" and argues that the hacker group is a headless bogeyman created by evil financiers: "The 'Anonymous' operation - which isn't likely to represent a real movement but rather a 'no-flag' operation played by the Banksters against the free Internet - seems to be escalating its position on the globalist world theater of destabilization with actual acts of sabotage. What are its real motives?"

Debates on Syria are full of the language of blame and irresponsibility; but these bloody, tragic troubles originate in oppression and mystery. Perhaps they are the latest in a long line of unsolved histories.

Wonders of the Millennial World 4: Underwater Museums

The Phoenix © J. deCaires Taylor. Installed in Cancun, Mexico, 4 metres undewater.

Jason deCaires Taylor is a sculptor who installs his sculptures underwater, where the sea life interacts with them and grows on them.

MUSA ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Several large installations are protected in an underwater sculpture museum in Molinere Bay, Grenada, which will develop into an artificial coral reef as time passes. Another such park, the Museum of Underwater Modern Art (MUSA), is situated off the coast of Cancun, Mexico.

You can see the Gen X artist's fascinating gallery of environmental sculptures in dreamy underworlds here (Hat tip: Ghost Hunting Theories). As the sculptures evolve, deCaires Taylor, who has been exhibiting since 2006, ties together the major subtexts of the Millennial mentality: immortality and mortality; science and art; immutability and transformation; blindness toward, and embrace of, the natural world. All photos are from the artist's online gallery unless otherwise sourced. Photographs of the artist's installations are being shown at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City from 30 June-28 July 2012. See more images below the jump.

After Seven Decades, The BBC World Service Moves On

Image Source: Telegraph.

Today was the BBC World Service's final live broadcast from Bush House, which stands at the geographic centre of London. The Service is moving to a new home at Broadcasting House. Bush House was designed by Harvey Corbett and financed by American businessman Irving T. Bush in 1919 (the latter was a tycoon descended from New Amsterdam settlers, not linked to the presidential family). The building was conceived as a trans-Atlantic financial trading centre, and was dedicated 'to the friendship of English speaking peoples'; there are two statues at the front portico representing Britain and America (photo here). Unlike the BBC World Service, dedicated to hard facts, the stories around the building and the broadcaster are loaded with symbolic signficance. Bush House anecdotes show how easily hard facts intermingle with metaphors and shape little interconnected worlds of culture.

Depression and Dilemma

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) © 20th Century Fox. Image Source: A Drifting Cowboy.

Are we in another great depression, and we don't know it? If you believe the most dire pessimists, it might be a good idea to brace now for another economic freefall, which will unfold in late 2012 and through 2013, and which will be worse than 2008. By the technical definition, the Great Recession ended in 2009. But this recovery quickly faltered over 2010-2011.