"The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; more recently, the Yes Men have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-foot-long golden penis (“employee visualization appendage”) at a WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution."

"When Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rochenko went to Paris in 1925… he wrote in a letter home: “The light from the East is not only the liberation of worker, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”… Imagine faux possessions. These artifacts lack the melancholy and emotional deprivation of the must-have status symbols described in de Botton because unlike the “real” products that promise an authentic experience of material success, they are complicit, our comrades in status-deception. Counterfeits and hybrids are surreally aware of the symbolic terms of the game of snakes and ladders we play as inhabitants of a Western democracy—a game in which we are as upwardly mobile as we are prone to social slide. Objects that register and embrace the dizziness of that freedom, though, may make for a fortunate fall."

"3D Wireframes were around 30 years ago, solid & textured 3D shortly after and still all done in software. 20 years ago some of these calculations moved onto GPUs on dedicated 3D graphics cards. Computer vision it’s all still done in software, and we’re roughly up-to depth, joints, colour & shading detection, if the evolution was on par with graphics we’d start to see the first few dedicated vision cards appearing on the market for consumer use. Or put another way, current computer vision can probably “see” computer graphics from around 20-30 years ago. Which in turn means to design for machine eyes we need to be at the level of computer graphics from the 8bit era, and so we have QR codes all over the place."

"There is a strong sense that with computers and their networks, something is going on in there, something emergent and radically other, which nonetheless does begin to infiltrate our edges… Ramified and compounded many times over, the emergent, virtual taste of the network metastasizes into some fascinating effects: a ubiquitous-but-glitchy attention; an ambient-but-imperfect recoverability of the past; an assemblage of objects that seem to keep track of their histories, that seem to have something like experience; a participatory, slightly asynchronous panopticon. I don’t think the New Aesthetic is heralding the approach of the Singularity’s event horizon, where computers will vault into consciousness and begin writing a sui-generis literature that drops fully formed from the brow of Stanislaw Lem. The New Aesthetic is making a much humbler move: pointing out these feral phenomena erupting into our midst and saying, but they move."

The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. “Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.”

"It is incumbent on us to drastically re-think how we design infrastructure. It is quite possible that mono-functional infrastructure is dead. Infrastructure cannot just do one thing anymore – it must do many things – ecologically, socially, and financially. It must produce as much as it exhausts. It must seek out new ways of generating value. It must couple, triple, and quadruple functions wherever possible. Like the scientists of the past, on a quest to discover a perpetual motion machine, our new mission should be to search out an elusive perpetual infrastructure machine – an infrastructure that once built, will no longer require any additional inputs to keep it going.  And while the scientists ultimately failed in their quest, their mission brought them a thousand-fold closer to their goal.  And so it should be with infrastructure."

"The New Aesthetic (previously) is a phrase for the burgeoning artistic relationship to machine-processed images. The phrase was coined by James Bridle who maintains a tumblr of links to projects, art, news stories, and discoveries that match that description. The idea is further elaborated in this short essay and image gallery. Bridle goes in to more detail with his talk at Web Directions South in December of last year (text transcript). There's also this round-up of a recent NA panel at SXSW, to which Sterling refers in his Wired essay. Some examples (culled from the Bridle's tumblr) of NA in online performance art, video art, comics, glitches, fashion, commercial design, advertising, warfare, more fashion, relationships, photography, poetry, entrepreneurship, homelessness, erotic dancing, glitches, and humanity. And that's just within the last month." A great place to start for research into the New Aesthetic.

"An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering… The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings… Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished… [T]he New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one."

"We can recreate your favorite Minecraft® world as a fully detailed 3D replica rivaling the beauty of any miniature ever made. Using 3D modeling techniques pioneered by special effects houses and manufacturing technology that allows even the most complicated of these models to be created, FigurePrints can bring your fully outfitted, one-of-a-kind Minecraft World to your doorstep."

"A freelance cartographer working primarily for companies in the fantasy and sci-fi role-playing game industry."

This website is full of excellent hand-drawn fantasy maps and tutorials for how they are made.

I'm looking forward to receiving a review copy of The Insurgent Barricade by Mark Traugott next week, and, in the context of that book, this "enormous inflatable cylinder" could take on other, aboveground roles, such as intervening in and impossibly redirecting urban movement (both in the name of security and insurgency). To put this in somewhat absurd terms, what might the Paris Commune have looked like, for instance, had its participants used giant, knife-proof inflatable objects, like revolutionary sausages blocking access to whole streets? In any case, whether or not these or other such "plugs" will be permanently installed, like automotive airbags, inside underground infrastructure is yet to be decided; but it seems quite likely that affordably fabricated, inflatable barriers will become regular architectural safety features of a subterranean system near you.

The new method of aerial analysis relies on the detection of anthrosol, a distinctive type of soil that forms in the presence of long-term human activity. Anthrosols have a subtle but distinctive color, and are richer in organic matter than surrounding soils — a fact that archeologists have been using for years to search for settlements at the ground level. But Ur and Menze took the search for anthrosols to the sky, with the help of multi-spectral satellite images… The beauty of Menze and Ur's new satellite technique is that it takes something archeologists have been doing for years (seeking out settlements by searching for anthrosols), scales it up, and automates it; the fact that the satellite imagery is analyzed by an algorithm means that it takes the detection out of the hands of human operators, who, according to Ur, are slow and subjective.

"In fact, in a number of disciplines the boundary between radical and mainstream has become blurry. Noel Castree, one-time editor of the radical geography journal Antipode (founded in 1969), suggests that "Leftist geography has insinuated itself into the very heart of the discipline".

A similar point has been made by Sean Sayers, one of the founders of Radical Philosophy (founded in 1972): "Much of what was originally demanded by radical philosophy has been achieved. Marxism, continental philosophy and psychoanalysis are now respectable subjects of study in most British universities."

Yet this happy state of affairs is at odds with the wider political picture. Writing in 2000, Castree… offered a pointed contrast: "Few can ignore the fact that the expansion of the academic Left has been coincident, in ways both striking and seemingly contradictory, with the precipitous contraction of the non-academic Left in the domains of business, government and civil society.""

"The last few months, however, have brought news from abroad suggesting that in many places, punk's combination of splenetic dissent, loud guitars and outre attire can cause as much disquiet and outrage as ever. The stories concerned take in Indonesia, Burma, Iraq and Russia – and most highlight one big difference between the hoo-hah kicked up by punk in the US and Britain of the late 70s, and the reactions it now stirs thousands of miles from its places of birth. Back then, being a punk rocker might invite occasional attacks in the street, a ban on your records, and the odd difficulty finding somewhere to play. Now, if you pursue a love of punk in the wrong political circumstances, you may well experience oppression at its most brutal: torture, imprisonment, what one regime calls "moral rehabilitation" and even death."

"This renaissance won't be of the cosmetic variety: it will be structural and bear witness to the subordination of those that control the speculation of value to those that control the production of technology, food, energy and knowledge as capital. Crucially, it will require "production" to assume a more devolved focus, with the transfer of power shifting to "the local" as domestic energy security, amongst others, becomes a reality. With this, it will be necessary for government – and particularly local government – to shift away from its traditional priority of servicing its community, towards strengthening it. To this end, local government is arguably at the forefront of efforts to create more resilient local communities, a task which requires their structures, resourcing and corporate accountancy to reflect strengthening rather than servicing."

"While I’m perfectly willing to accept that many of the Uni Lad users, and even the site administrators, are genuinely ‘joking’ (in the sense that they would not actually commit rape), their ‘jokes’ normalise misogyny, and ensure that those men who have raped and those who would rape believe that this is normal and acceptable. In the UK, statistics show that on average a woman gets raped every six minutes. These ‘jokes’ foster an attitude of acceptance of a crime that ruins lives on a daily basis; there is no subversion, no intellectual defence, and no shock – it is laughing at the reality of violence perpetrated against women, and actively encouraging it."

"News headlines flashed around the world, announcing the arrival of a new type of border conflict: the Google Maps War.

Over the past decade, Google Earth and Google Maps have become the online cartographic resources of reference. But popularity does not bestow authority. The lines that Google draws on maps have no government’s imprimatur. Yet by virtue of its ubiquity, Google is often the arbiter of first recourse for borders and toponyms. So where Google’s maps show borders or place names that deviate from official usage or stray into international disputes, they may cause confusion, offense or worse."

The murky territory of border disputes.

This site reveals the technologies that underpin a certain web address.

"One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry… One of the things that "the future," when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play… Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can't even begin to contemplate."

"Think about an alternative racial history of the 1990s. It goes without saying that the 90s were a strange time: neoliberal triumphalism gave birth to a culture of political correctness and a reigning sensibility of diversity based on the simple belief we can all just get along. Yet, at every step of the way, it was accompanied by intense forms of division and surreal spectacles of discrimination of virtually every stripe imaginable." This seems to be somewhere between radical politics and science fiction. If only I lived in NYC.

"Although not a prolific genre by Hollywood standards, pre-perestroika Russian sci-fi offers a fascinating body of films – a fantastic voyage from early constructivist epics to post-apocalyptic dystopias, taking in prophetic moon explorations, space-race propaganda, atomic war allegories and existential art cinema. An ideologically charged genre, Soviet sci-fi can be read as charting the rise and fall of communism behind the iron curtain, with the wide-eyed optimism of space fantasies made in the early years giving way to damning post-Chernobyl nuclear nightmares as the Soviet bloc crumbled from within."

The aesthetics of the communist space program as an anticedent to crisis of meaning on the left.

"What post-capitalism needs is an imaginary that intersects the above justifications with a positive vision of the future that capitalism has failed to deliver. And part of this means rescuing the most lasting merits of the Soviet experiment. For while everyone can agree that the USSR had many failings, it remains the case that the artistic, architectural and technological development it stood for was in many cases a widely recognized concrete achievement. No one can deny the quality of their space programme. Even recently in London there has been two major exhibitions showcasing some of futurist ambitions of Soviet communism: Building the Revolution at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Red Skies season of Soviet science fiction at the British Film institute.  There is an element of aesthetics here as well as actual ambitions."

Belstaff were acquired and since have perhaps got worse. Ebay might be the place to look for these

"The core of Safety Maps is simple: by following the instructions on the site, you can create a nice-looking map that shows a meeting point along with instructions or a personal message. The site then generates PDFs with versions of the map that you can print off in sizes ranging from business card to small poster. "We wanted to design map templates that would work well with the printers and paper people already had at home, and the contexts we imagined people using them in," says Kim. In this way, the service is resilient: it creates documents that can be printed in just about any environment."

The Web is what Donna Haraway calls “a non-optional system.” Social media is now part of the very fabric of our society. Information distributed via social media affects all of us regardless of whether we participate in it directly or not... Gibson and other cyberpunk authors/directors imagined that, in the complexity of computer code, a separate, virtual reality would emerge—existence in a realm of pure information. But this thinking was simply a reiteration of the same mind-body dualism that plagued Western philosophy for centuries.

Detroit has given rise to the emergence of new artistic collectives, galleries and organizations that are all facilitating collaborative artistic and community projects throughout the city. [T]his new appearance of the ‘commons' and cultural community engagement [is tied] to the theoretical formulation of “real utopias”… A “real” utopian project, defined in opposition to the classic idealist strain by its insistence on the rigorous pursuit of attainable goals, places its aspirations on actualizing viable emancipatory social and political achievements through the principled and pragmatic transformation of dominant institutional structures… [W]ith the burgeoning artistic scene of Detroit and the deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing nature of aesthetics and politics, the city is beginning to feel itself undergoing serious “revolutionary” and “evolutionary” changes and possible “utopian” alternatives to the former reigning institutions of privatized and corporate space and culture.

Economics is performative. Economics doesn’t just describe the world; it is the basis of policy and action and is instrumental in shaping society and producing aspects of its reality. This is why he is ambivalent about just claiming establishment economics is wrong. It is certainly demonstrably wrong in some of its assumptions about society, human nature and so on. But there is some sense in which it is correct simply because the world it describes has been partly produced according to its theories and models. It studies and describes phenomenon that to some extent have been produced and made real according to its dictates and templates.

I list of programs and editors for Minecraft.

"“There’s so much money on the Upper East Side right now,” she said. “If you look at the original movie Wall Street, it was a phenomenon where there were men in their 30s and 40s making $2 and $3 million a year, and that was disgusting. But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization… As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’” The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”"

"Every year there are 70 million new residents in cities, decade after decade, most of them in the developing world, the “global south,” where five out of six of us live. The ex-peasants often start in nearby small towns to acquire urban savvy and then head to big city slums. When the existing slums are full, they build new ones. A billion people live in such places now… New shanty-towns lack sanitation, water, electricity, and organization. In the early years the place stinks, water and power are stolen and irregular organization is improvised and sometimes criminal, and the homes are hovels. The whole community is always under threat of being bulldozed out of existence. But the outlaw citizens find themselves in a cash economy at last, and it is vibrant. Every lane among the shacks teems with food stalls, cafés, hair salons, clothing racks, temples, health clubs, and mini-shops selling everything. Cell phones abound. Most of the economy is “informal”—no deeds, no licenses, no taxes."

"It’s easy to find plenty of stories to support the death of print. It wasn’t only the magazines that were closing. Long-established specialist stores like Londons RD Franks (above) unexpectedly closed. Following the earlier demise of the Borders chain, this was a serious blow for the many smaller independent publishers who rely on this type of outlet. There’s another side to this though. There have been too many magazines repeating the same content and chasing the same readers and advertisers, while anyone who visited RD Franks over the last few years would agree it was a miserable experience, one not conducive to enjoying and buying magazines. So perhaps we can learn from its closure – certainly Shoreditch’s ArtWords store seems to have done, adding a second branch on Broadway Market and expanding its original one. Their selection of books and magazines varies from RD Franks’ in some respects, but the shopping experience is a far brighter and pleasant one."

"We have climbed so many churches and cathedrals this year that I think we can nominate cathedral climbing as a new Olympic sport. St-Sulpice was the gem of the year. Marc Explo distracted a security guard with inane questions just before we shimmied up the hoarding to the scaffolding. When we finally got to the top, the Eiffel Tower glowing in the distance, we found a group of 5 university students in really nice clothes having a picnic on the roof. Only in Paris. Later, this crusty old hippie came up the scaffolding with his 6-year-old daughter and fired up a spliff as he introduced himself. Like I said, only in Paris."

"The language of globalisation is pretty ambiguous, on the one hand, for me and this is critical politically and theoretically, most of the global happens inside the national but it is not recognised as global. What we recognise as global is mostly very powerful actors, the WTO, the IMF, the multinational corporations, the financial firms etc; and these actors produce a huge penumbra that hides and obscures all the other, the little presences if you want and they also have the effect of disempowering. If you’re not one of them you’re out, you’re provincial, you’re a local, you’re immobile. I think that we have to change the language through which we understand reality. So number one globalisation has certainly opened the borders for flows of capital, information, certain kinds of products, outsourcing. It took law and making new kinds of regulation to enable these cross border flows. On the other hand we have also put in a lot of effort in building up the border vis-a-vis other flows."

"China is planning to create the world's biggest "mega city" by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million… By the end of the decade, China plans to move ever greater numbers into its cities, creating some city zones with 50 million to 100 million people and "small" city clusters of 10 million to 25 million. In the north, the area around Beijing and Tianjin is being ringed with a network of high-speed railways that will create a super-urban area known as the Bohai Economic Rim. Its population could be as high as 260 million. A new train link between Beijing and Tianjing allows the 75-mile journey to be completed in less than half an hour, providing an axis around which to create a network of feeder cities."

"Cryptoforests are those parts of the city in which nature, in 'secret', has been given the space and the time to create its own millennia-millennia-old, everyday-everyday-new order by using the materials (seeds, roots, nutrients, soil conditions, waste, architectural debris) at hand. Cryptoforests are sideways glances at post-crash landscapes, diagrammatic enclaves through which future forest cities reveal their first shadows, laboratories for dada-do-nothingness, wild-type vegetable free states, enigma machines of uncivilized imagination, psychogeographical camera obscuras of primal fear and wanton desire, relay stations of lost ecological and psychological states… What starts with weed ends with a cryptoforest, and in between there is survivalism, with plants eking out a living against all odds, slowly but determinedly creating the conditions for the emergence of a network of biological relationships that is both flexible and stubborn, unique and redundant, fragile and resilient."

"So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets. You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

"During the months of the Onda movement self-training practices flourished: seminars, free universities, independent research laboratories, projects for grassroot change of the public university, the statue of disciplines and knowledge. The movement was well aware that the defence of the public university meant the invention of a new university. On the one hand public funding is essential, but at the same time, the elimination of divisions between disciplines and criticism of knowledge and driving out feudal power plays, typical of the Italian university, are just as important. Where the government attacked the movement describing it as conservative and nostalgic, the movement made clear the innovative aspects without taking a single step back in defending the public nature of education, in public schools and in the universit"

Climate Camp moves on to new things. "Nothing lasts forever. Movements have to move. That doesn’t mean there won’t be grieving: many of us have given heart and soul to Climate Camp. But we can’t demand that society changes radically, while we ourselves do not. As everyone who has tried something daringly new knows, it can be scary and there are no guarantees of success. But that didn’t stop us before the first Climate Camp, nor did it stop the students at Millbank, nor the people of the Middle East. And it shouldn’t stop us now. Yes, Climate Camp leaves a space. What fills that space is up to us. This is a unique opportunity to work together with others to create a more co-ordinated, dynamic and stronger movement against climate change and its root causes. Now is a chance to team up with the anti-cuts and anti-austerity movements and play a crucial role in the revolutionary times ahead. Anything but co-ordinated action is doomed to fail."

"Utopia demands a denial of time. A realised utopia is definitive and concluded. It cannot evolve, for that would imply an error or instability in the originally conceived utopia. This is what seems to underlie the brutality that Michel Houellebecq ascribes to Le Corbusier's vision in his latest novel: utopia's inherent lack of evolutionary scope (for nature, man and architecture itself), and the exclusion of continuity from its language. The same flaw is also shared by 3D projects for the most recent signature buildings, thus disclosing their utopian aspiration: whiter than white, rendered surfaces; empty and immaculate horizons all around, never to be populated; proportionate, identical trees set in rows; scattered knots of people inside them gazing into each other's eyes or holding hands, with children destined never to grow, who have no shadow. This non-utopia represents the epicentre of Dionisio González's work."

"From inside the Wisconsin State Capitol, RAN ally Ryan Harvey reports: “Hundreds of cops have just marched into the Wisconsin state capitol building to protest the anti-Union bill, to massive applause. They now join up to 600 people who are inside.” Ryan reported on his Facebook page earlier today: “Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”… Rock on Wisconsin. Remind the politicians who have forgotten, and the corporations in denial, and any folks out there who aren’t sure their voice really counts, that the true power of these United States is with The People."

"I don't think it is a coincidence that recent polls show that only about 17 percent of black youth support the Tea Party, compared to 34 percent of white youth and 15 percent of Latino youth. Black youth understand that the policies advanced by Tea Party candidates and members will mean a more limited role for the government in the lives of everyday Americans. And while many believe that the reach of the government has extended too far, black youth realize that many of the opportunities secured by the mobilization of Blacks and others from the Civil Rights Movement through the election of President Obama have only been implemented and protected by an activist and expanded federal government."

"As people elsewhere are killed for their belief in democracy and the rule of law, the supposed controversies of British politics inevitably rather fade. By comparison, we live in an Eden of stability, and argue over mere increments: to be getting in a lather about Cameron and Clegg can easily feel not just indulgent, but indecent. Still, there is a tale to be told that includes Westminster as well as Tripoli and Cairo, and underlines what watershed times these are. Much of the world's current tumult is traceable to the long and tangled fall-out from the crash of 2008 (note the role of rising food prices in recent unrest). And though most commentators seem either too polite or deluded to recognise it, the British side of this story is rapidly being revealed: not just cuts, but the most far-reaching attempt to remodel British society in 60 years, undertaken at speed, and with a breathtaking disregard for what was offered to the country only months ago."

"The most controversial of all was Voina's final stunt before the arrests, the "Palace Revolution". Members overturned 7 police cars, some of them with officers inside, at St Petersburg's Palace Square. Mr Pluster-Sarno denies that with this last radicalisation, the group's work attained a criminal element. "If the artists consider their action a piece of art, if the experts along with the audience agree with it, what it is then? Art or crime? We struggle against the authorities who are criminal indeed."… Mr Vorotnikov and Mr Nikolayev have been charged with hooliganism, which carries a sentence of up to 7 years in prison, while Mr Plutser-Sarno has been charged with organising a criminal group, which could land him a sentence of up to 20 years… Not everyone in the Russian art community approves of Voina, but there has been a certain solidarity after their arrest, and the Dick Captured by KGB has been nominated for a prestigious contemporary art prize."

"The number of SF authors being retrospectively rolled in to the literary canon seems to grow exponentially year on year… But which works of speculative fiction might challenge the Booker judges' perceptions of the genre? Already available for consideration is The Silent Land by Graham Joyce. Joyce has been stalking the boundary between literary and fantastic fiction for some years. His latest novel is an emotionally shattering exploration of the human need for love, focused through the lens of a contemporary ghost story. Jo Walton's new novel, Among Others, is as much a story about fantasy as a work of fantasy, and is already gathering the kind of awestruck praise that marks a breakout hit from an established but underappreciated author. And China Miéville must surely have a chance of consideration this year. Miéville's mission to reform SF continues in 2011 with Embassytown - but will actual aliens and spaceships be a wormhole too far for the Booker judges?"

"At fairly regular intervals, atmospheric pressure on the western side of the Pacific falls; the trade winds blow from the cooler east side towards the trough, pushing warm surface water westwards towards the bordering land masses. As the water-laden air is driven over the land it cools and drops its load. In June last year the bureau of meteorology issued a warning that La Niña was about "to dump buckets" on Australia. In 1989-90 La Niña brought flooding to NSW & VIC, in 1998 to NSW & QLD. "Computer model forecasts show a significant likelihood of a La Niña in 2010" [sez Dr Watkins of the climate bureua]. In Brisbane the benchmark was the flood of 1974; most Queenslanders are unaware that the worst flood in Brisbane's history happened in 1893. Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to "get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer". So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, "She'll be right, mate". She wasn't."

"I'm writing this by candlelight as the power at home went some 12 hours ago now. The irony of using an iPad by candlelight is not lost on me… The Ballardian overtones are also clear in the sense that social breakdown doesn't seem far away. Despite the casual stoicism with which most people are addressing the flood, this 'natural disaster', the sense that food, water, electricity and connectivity is so fragile does give pause for thought. How far away is this form of civilisation from something deeply uncivilised? Does a culture hoisted up on the twin pillars of property development and 'lifestyle' create the right conditions for civilised resilience in such circumstances? These are empty words at the moment, as the vast majority of Queenslanders are performing everyday heroics but the murmurs of spot acts of looting are already circling, the first sign of a society breaking ranks." A lengthy but gripping account of the floods by someone accustomed to thinking at the scale of the city.

"On 21st October 2010 a statement posted to Indymedia revealed that Nottingham based activist "Mark Stone" was in fact PC Mark Kennedy and he was an "undercover police officer from 2000 to at least the end of 2009". This news didn't get picked up in a big way by the corporate press until a story was spun that the trail of the Ratcliffe 6 had collapsed because he had "gone native" and had considered testifying for the defense. The "gone native" story was probably police disinformation… The media frenzy has also led to three further undercover police officers being exposed, Officer A, "Lyn Watson" who was undercover in Leeds from 2004 till 2008, Officer B, "Mark (Marco) Jacobs", who appeared in Brighton in 2004 and then moved to Cardiff in 2005 and was active there till 2009 and PC Jim Boyling, "Jim Sutton". A summary of the activities of the 3 agent provocateurs has been put together and activists are asked to publish any better photos or information about their political activity."

"The digital humanities have some internal tensions, such as the occasional divide between builders and theorizers, coders and non-coders. But the field, as a whole, seems to be developing an in-group, out-group dynamic that threatens to replicate the culture of Big Theory back in the 80s and 90s, which was alienating to so many people… So, the digital humanities seem more exclusive, more cliquish, than they did even one year ago. There are identifiable stars who know they are stars. And some of the senior figures in the field, like Alan Liu, seem like gods among us.  And maybe most important of all: There’s money, most obviously represented by Brett Bobley from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities—looking just a little like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park… The growing tendency of the digital humanities to become an elite community—always pursuing the cutting edge—may leave most of us behind, struggling to catch up with limited support." What the fuck is the digital humanities!?

"The necessity of the present moment is driven by a failure of imagination, or more properly, a refusal to imagine and a blockage of the imaginative faculty. If politics is the contest of the delineation of the contours of the social, economic and cultural; that is to say, the establishment of the conditions for how we shall live, then we don’t have much of it at the moment. We have the ‘administration of things’, and the best that we can manage is elite-driven technocratic tinkering. We need to revive our faculties of imagination, in a future anterior mode… That is a political task, and let there be no mistake about what we’re engaged in. So, in fact, secular ecologists need to work against the ‘end of days’; and to do so with an eye to the long term, not the short term noise of rabid denialism. “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” isn’t a bad slogan, still. We need to be realistic to confront the effects of the Real."

"None went as far as Huaxi in combining the strict political control of the ruling Communist party with the get-rich-quick economics of the market - and the results are being hailed as a model for the nation to follow. Each household's assets are listed in detail: size of the family, value of their property, average level of education, number of members of the Communist party, as well as how many cars, mobile phones, televisions, washing machines, computers, air-conditioning units, motorbikes, cameras, fridges and stereo systems they own… Xie'en says political stability is the base for rapid growth. "I think every era has a different formula for success. The most important thing is to be flexible and open to new ways to thinking. We must do whatever works," he says. "We are not communist. We are 100% shareholder owned." The burgeoning Chinese economy continues to evade the categories we in the west have for political philosophy. How do you define this odd suburb.

"Confucian-inspired intellectuals like Jiang Qing, have put forward an innovative proposal for a tricameral legislature. Legislators in one chamber would be selected based on merit and competency, and in the others based on elections of some kind. One elected chamber may be reserved only for Communist party members, the other for representatives elected by everyday Chinese. Such a tricameral legislature, its proponents believe, would better ensure that political decisions are made by more educated and enlightened representatives, instead of rank populism. It's intriguing to contemplate China evolving into some sort of innovative democratic experiment, combining tricameralism with all the high-tech features of deliberative democracy methods to mold a new type of political accountability, as well as separation of powers. Daniel Bell, professor at Tsinghua University, says China may be groping toward "a political model that works better than western-style democracy"."

"Cibelle, for me, is the avant-garde. Not in her music so much as her cultural activities, her global position. She’s very into performance, dress, shoes and clothes. She’s cloud-centric and globally mobile. She comes from a social movement rather than a recording label or a publishing house. She’s a syncretic multi-artist model-actress web personality, with a catchy soundtrack. Her fans are her participants. And she’s female, young, and Brazilian… That somebody who personifies a culture we don’t quite have yet. It could be a pretty good culture, if its activists know what they are doing. I look at Cibelle and I get the reassured feeling that I get from Brian Eno. It’s not that I love everything that guy creates, or that I embrace every idea among Eno’s many skyrocketing ideas, but, y’know, Brian Eno has fucking got it going on. As a creative, you can see or hear stuff that Brian Eno was doing thirty years ago, and you can think, “Hey, that might work right now. I should try that.”"

"Cibelle, for me, is the avant-garde. Not in her music so much as her cultural activities, her global position. She’s very into performance, dress, shoes and clothes. She’s cloud-centric and globally mobile. She comes from a social movement rather than a recording label or a publishing house. She’s a syncretic multi-artist model-actress web personality, with a catchy soundtrack. Her fans are her participants. And she’s female, young, and Brazilian… That somebody who personifies a culture we don’t quite have yet. It could be a pretty good culture, if its activists know what they are doing. I look at Cibelle and I get the reassured feeling that I get from Brian Eno. It’s not that I love everything that guy creates, or that I embrace every idea among Eno’s many skyrocketing ideas, but, y’know, Brian Eno has fucking got it going on. As a creative, you can see or hear stuff that Brian Eno was doing thirty years ago, and you can think, “Hey, that might work right now. I should try that.”"

"Incredible Cardboard Furniture – An 8 step Instructable for designing your own cardboard furniture plus the exceptional work of a French collective of cardboard furniture makers. 50 Digital Wood Joints – Innovative joinery is awesome and under-the-radar, but sure to be a trend to watch for 2011 & 2012. 3D Printing Chairs from Refrigerators – Eco was not just a designer fad; it’s the new m.o. These 3D printed chairs demonstrate the possibilities of re-use with digital fabrication. The Origins of the Exclamation Lamp – This delightful lamp has a 3D printed framework and fully customizable lasercut panels. This article describes the evolution of the Exclamation Lamp from idea to prototype to final product. Create Your Own Chair with SketchChair – We’re all about the democratization of design, and that’s why this incredible app makes our #1 spot. Based on your sketch, this program generates files suitable for digital fabrication — allowing you to fully create your very own chair design."