Eric Harvey: Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground (Pitchfork)
In the same way that Twitter asking me "what’s happening?" compels me to fill that box with something, a non-annotated line on Genius just feels…empty, in need of being explained, in some way. It’s Frere-Jones’ job, in part, to come up with some way of adding value to music that doesn’t lend itself toward lyrical exegesis.
Quinn Norton: Online and Offline Violence Towards Women
The misogyny doesn’t come from the internet, it comes from contemporary culture. It won’t be fixed by the internet, and it won’t be fixed by women. It has to be fixed by men.
Frédérik Lesage: Review of ‘Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing’ by Ian Bogost (Culture Machine)
In an account of designing one of these litanizers for an OOO symposium website, Bogost writes how it inadvertently shocked a visitor to the site by randomly generating a sexist image of a scantily clad woman on the symposium’s main page. Bogost’s response to the visitor’s complaint was to modify the code for his litanizer so as to exclude these kinds of images. For me, this encounter and subsequent compromise is where carpentry becomes most interesting. If carpentry is about exploring how things playfully hang together, the point where this hanging breaks down or encounters resistance would seem to me to be of particular interest. Instead of recognising this disruption and attempting to develop a means through which carpentry can address this challenge, Bogost is happy to have the litanizer simply raise thorny questions ‘in a unique way’ and vents his frustration that resolving the complaint means compromising its flat ontology of objects.
The notion that every woman you may hire has some measurable risk associated with her—as if we’re all ticking discrimination lawsuit timebombs—is itself discrimination. The “risk,” if there even is any, isn’t located in the women a firm may or may not hire, but in the structure of their own organization. That is, the “risk” isn’t that a woman will call you out—it’s that you’re already committing acts of discrimination, consciously or otherwise, and just don’t know it.
30 species, 30 pieces. In Pieces is an interactive exhibition of 30 of the world’s most interesting but unfortunately endangered species — their survivals laying literally, in pieces.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race. But Does It Want to Talk To You About Racism?
It is hard to know where to begin talking about race the way Starbucks wants to talk about race. I know theories, histories and measurements of race and racism. I do not know much about race “perspectives” that might fit on stickers that would be worth sticking somewhere.
What these two moves share is the underlying view that some kinds of affective labor and digital interactivity are good–the kinds that Swift can both control and extract the most surplus value from–and some kinds of interactivity are bad–the kinds that Swift doesn’t control and extract enough surplus value from. The bad kinds feminize Swift–they put her in the position of feminized laborer, of wife. We can think of Swift’s two moves this week as attempts to Lean In, that is, pull herself out of structural/economic feminization.
Here's a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions. You can hear the roar of a space shuttle launch or Neil Armstrong's "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" every time you get a phone call if you make our sounds your ringtone. Or, you can hear the memorable words "Houston, we've had a problem," every time you make an error on your computer.
Stassa Edwards: A Short History of the Executioner
What remains of the history of the executioner is his professionalism; his ability to efficiently manage the spectacle of death, to make his work seem like justice’s natural route, and to above all avoid disruption or botching. Like the throngs that gathered to witness the work of Charles-Henri Sanson or the beheading of Thomas Cromwell, we do not question the executioner’s purpose—to kill the condemned—only the cruelty of his methods.
Mike Sheffield: Internet slang meets American Sign Language (Hopes and Fears)
How do you sign "new" words? The Deaf community works as a network, collectively brainstorming new sign language terms over the web, until dominant signs emerge.
"moDernisT" was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song "Tom's Diner", famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 video compression.
Fredrik deBoer: What’s Really Going on with the Beck-Beyonce Thing
These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.