Today’s Media on the Web
My 20,000 Cents on the iPhone
From Radio Leo, “MacBreak Weekly 60: Another Brick in the Wall,” is 82 minutes, 47 seconds of the lower classes complaining about Steve Jobs, the Baron Pimp that slapped his bitches around by making them pay too much cash for early adoption and “bricking” the phones of those who dare to think of the iPhone as a computer. Now these privileged minions of Apple consumer confidence have some vague notion of what it’s like when an imperial government forced to leave their colonial property will blow up ports and railways to prevent others from “abusing” their private property.
Remember when computers were celebrated as general purpose devices? Remember when you were told with pride by representatives of big computing companies that the computer was the first widely distributed tool in history that does not do one thing? Well, my horrible vision of the white-supreme future is that representatives of big computing companies will exploit the general purpose nature of computers and withhold this flexibility from their customers. So in an extreme case a company will sell the same general purpose device to the public under the guise of diverse, innovative single-purpose gadgets. Leo Laporte asks the question, “Is the iPhone a personal computer or is it a just a cell phone?” The answer to this question may ultimately be, “It’s none of your business, bitches.”
“Japan Dome House Builds Environmentally Friendly And Energy Efficient Houses From Dense Polystyrene”
This story about dome houses in Japan and the associated YouTube.com video “Dome was Built in a day: Diginfo” reminds me of the dome dwellings of Nader Khalili, mentioned in this journal last February in “Today’s Links to Human Beings.” As any Frank Lloyd Wright student of the Usonian House knows, these efforts to systematically build freestanding homes for people (the under-classes) who are not giving orders in the halls of government, seems (like universal healthcare) to never quite work out the way most innocent children would expect these things to work out…
My informal survey suggests to me that the most popular form of planned low-income housing worldwide is the massive high-rise prisons made famous here in North America by 1970s televisions shows like Good times. Stacking people so high in these planned housing projects destroyed the concept of neighborhood and community and made few like Robert Moses extremely powerful and economically rich.
You can see examples of unplanned housing in the “Ramona Afrika: 1992 e08—The Root of All Evil” and “Ramona Afrika: 1992 e04—Back to Africa?” segments of one of the earliest African-centered motion pictures on the Internet, “Freeman Manifestation: Ramona Africa: 1992 (YouTube.com)”
“How Did We Get Into This Mess?”
In “How Did We Get Into This Mess?,” George Monbiot goes over the origin story of the white-supreme Injustice League (for the 20th century and beyond). When you get past this cute pseudo-nerdy word “neo-liberalism” what you have are a group of “wealthy” crime families and their obsequious minions conspiring to monopolize all the resources of the Earth by bypassing all democratic systems under the guise of democracy. Let me repeat for clarity: fat cats steal shit through bypassing democratic systems under the guise of democracy.
Few of us have personal, visceral memories of this kind of stealing but just imagine having a self-described stupid friend from a “rich” family. And you want to go skateboarding with your friend—but you can’t really go skateboarding until your friend figures out that can be done safely and its fun. As time goes on, you realize that your stupid rich friend limits your lifestyle because you find yourself waiting for him (or her) to figure it out. So you are skating around by yourself a lot… and then it happens! Your pal figures it out! It’s fun! In celebration, your pal’s family builds skate parks, opens a chain of skate stores (that steal all of your home-grown coolness) and cause a world-wide phenomenon.
Now you can’t afford to go skating because ‘magically’ it is now illegal to skate anywhere except in your pal’s skate parks and the cost of skating gear has skyrocketed. What’s worse is that your children will be born into a world that will condition them to assume that this is the way it should be—this is the natural way to skate. Now this stupid rich guy and his media-making minions are deliberately limiting the imagination of your children so the stupid family can protect its neo-liberty and neo-freedom. Your children smugly laugh at you while you in vain try to explain a different way of skating because they “know” how the “real world” of skating works.