From Anathem:

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their empoyees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?

Gary McFarland - Pecos Pete
Al Hirt - Harlem Hendo
Jack Wilkins - Red Clay
Monty Alexander - Love And Happiness
Quincy Jones - Summer In The City
Ike & Tina - Getting Nasty
Jeremy Steig - Waves
S.O.U.L. - Burning Spear
Natural Yogurt Band - Voodoo
Roberta Flack - Trying Times
Monk Higgins - A Good Man Is Gone
Lone - Girl
Michna - Believe In It
Q-Burn's Abstract Message - Book Of Changes
DJ Sun - Ten
DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like (pt 3)
Brothomstates - Adozenaday
DJ Food - Freedom (Fila Brazillia mix)
Wagon Christ - Bend Over
Caribou - The Spiritually Immature Mansion
Big Daddy Kane - Raw
Four Tet - Untabgle
Binray - Grimm Dub
Dynamic Syncopation - Dynamism
Bonobo - Recurring
Ultramagnetic MCs - Critical Beatdown
Aaron Spectre - Dulcimer Track
Luke Vibert - Voyage Into The Unknown
David Last - Makeout Stakeout
Flying Lotus - Parisian Goldfish
Pumpkin - Here Comes That Beat
Aphex Twin - Iz Us
Opiate - Try A Balloon
Twerk - From Green To Brown
Day Might Same - Catch Release
Drexciya - Astronomical guidepost
Busta Rhymes - Light Your Ass On Fire
Quantic - Death Of Revolution
Ghislain Poirier - La Ronde
Cut Chemist - Storm (w Mr Lif & Edan)
Ill Gates - The Skizza

Gleaned from a perusal of this year's delicious bookmarks, listed in vaguely chronological order.

First off, why the political world desperately needs people who understand technology. Second, how technologists can get involved in politics. And third, why that hasn't happened yet.

I'm going to strangle the council with their own stupid hats.

Had those boys read Dune, they might have thought twice about occupying Iraq. Not least because of the sandworms.

ACK WTF OMG NEED AUTO_DETECT_LINE_ENDINGS PWND N00B r0X0rZZZZZZZ

For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less.

If internet entrepreneurs created “Protestr” as a web 2.0 tool for activists, no repressive goverment would leave it unblocked. But blocking a tool that is mostly used for amusement or communication between friends has consequences - the users looking for cute cat videos get annoyed that YouTube is blocked… and learn about their government’s willingness to constrain speech...

Yogaball — the greatest sport you haven't played — has reached a crossroads.

If a African Chihuahua dog gets pregnant in the Netherlands they’ll blame it on hip-hop.

I found out that if you put the phono or quarter-inch jack halfway in, it filters the high frequency. Now I just got the bass part of the sample. I was like, "Oh, shit, this is the craziest thing on the planet!"

1) the fallout following the Imus incident, including the identity of the real culprits, and their roles in perpetuating stereotypes; 2) the disproportionate impact of negative media on the African American community; 3) the beneficiaries of negative and stereotypical media messages; and finally, some Industry Ears recommendations to address these problems.

Rich on the SEED Conference:

it was pretty good

maybe a little repetitive and most of the questions were like, how can i run my company like you guys except take fewer risks?

and they'd be like, well, we certainly aren't getting rich, but we don't work 24/7 and are pretty fucking happy

and people would scratch their heads

Susan Faludi's Op-Ed in today's NYTimes is one of the coolest pieces of cultural/political criticism I've read:

Sept. 11 cracked the plaster on that master narrative of American prowess because it so exactly duplicated the terms of the early Indian wars, right down to the fecklessness of our leaders and the failures of our military strategies. Like its early American antecedents, the 9/11 attack was a homeland incursion against civilian targets by non-European, non-Christian combatants who fought under the flag of no recognized nation. Like the “different type of war” heralded by President Bush, the 17th and 18th century “troubles” — as one Puritan chronicler of Metacom’s Rebellion called them, refusing to grant them “the name of a war” — seemed to have no battlefield conventions, no constraints and no end.

Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.

Jessica Lynch to Jack Bauer, it begins to tie together a lot of important clues.

Scratch notes from PDF:

1. A great vibe and great people. I suggest that PDF is to IPDI as SXSW is to most tech conferences: Beyond the standard kabuki of vendor-pitches and celebrity presentations, there's a smart idealism and subculture that is excellent.

2. An extra mega interesting-looking book, heartily recommended by Noel and Beka: Dream: Re-imagining Politics In The Age Of Fantasy. From the dust jacket: "What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald's commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much."

3. Aldon showed me a hack to synch his blog with his twitter with his Facebook status, using TwitterFeed.com. Twitter also became an ad-hoc back-channel chatroom when Confabb, the "official" conference web presence, didn't work. Consensus was that Twitter should add some kind of grouping/tagging capability to make networked microblogging more effective. I'm not sure I agree. Hoppin is excited about a new similar service called Jaiku.

4. Also buzzing: Freebase.com, an open repository for structured data. Change.org, which I never caught what exactly it IS, but everyone seemed really excited by it. Bokardo.com looks smart.

5. A good conversation lead by Winer about open hardware/software platforms. Worth investigating: OpenMoko, which claims to be an open mobile platform, and Rockbox which ditto for music.

In October, I jokingly predicted that Image Macros, previously confined to LiveJournal-Land, would soon emigrate into Blogland-Proper. I'd like to say that I consequently feel way vindicated by the recent LOLCATZ epidemic. I picture it as a chaotic procession of strangely-captioned felines migrating outward from LJ across xkcd's map of the internet on their invisible bicycles.

Of course, it's also possible I'm just inaccurately perceiving the trend's chronology.

Footnote: Great post from Anil considering it all w/r/t Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I am, as always, a sucker for academic examinations of internet silliness. Lest we begin to think such things may be unimportant.

Writing tonight exhausted on the train home from a way fun Personal Democracy conference.

I've been reading Before The Storm, Rick Perlstein's book on Barry Goldwater and The Rise Of American Conservatism. An old hat to some readers, I know, but totally new and interesting to this compsci/theater major. Plus Jon Chait called it the bible of the left-wing blogosphere, so I figured I had better check it out. Plus I'm reading it simultaneously with this crazy anthology of space opera, and so am finding all kinds of exciting Goldwater/Heinlein Libertarian/Militarist parallels.

Here, an excerpt, a fascinating intersection of political history and audio production history. It's in the discussion of the LBJ campaign's awesome 1964 Daisy Girl Ad, which, watch it if you haven't:

When DDB (LBJ's ad agency) scraped its civil rights spots... it was Tony Schwartz whom they called upon. Schwartz was a sui generis American genius, a sculptor in sound, a manufacturer of moods. He was the inventor of the first portable tape recorder, with which he took to the streets to produce LPs that were celebrations of all things audible: cabdrivers' chatter, Times Square at rush hour, Jamaican songs sung by a shop girl at Macy's. He also produced commercials. His masterpiece was a series of radio spots for American Airlines. He sold the romance of America's great cities by crafting the aural equivilant of skylines. For one spot, Shcwartz waited for an overcast day in his West Side Manhattan neighborhood and recorded Hudson River foghorns while hiring a local hobo called Moondog to walk around with the bells, drums, and pots and pans he perpetually carried on his back: instant San Francisco. The commercials brought an immediate spike in the airline's bookings.

(Perlstein cites this NPR profile as his source, which I havent listened to yet.) It is way reminiscent of Ramyond Scott, another intense American musique-concrete pioneer of the 1960s whose work focused on radio-ad production.

And Schwartz was the brain behind the Daisy Girl. It's similarly stunning to remember that there was a time in US politics when both candidates contested to see who could appear more ANTI war, rather than today's basically-unquestioned who-can-appear-more-militarist contest.

More visualized Facebook networks: From Rich, from Emily, from Andrew. Consider me hypnotized.

Over the past few months, it's been great to see so many great bloggers rise to the defense of Pandora, which has been in danger of being destroyed by a sudden hike in licensing fees. Its demise once seemed inevitable, but we have so far won a surprising stay of execution, and astoundingly might even win this battle altogether.

But it's important to remember that the issues here are way bigger than Pandora. Pandora is basically a mutant. ("Freakishly innovative," as Nancy Scola puts it.) It's grown to fill the bizzare nonsensical contours of current US net-radio law, giving users as much customizability as is legally possible, but no more. The result is mega-useful, but also inherently fragile. Any tiny change in current regulations will pose a real challenge to Pandora's legality and business model.

But net-radio law needs more than tiny changes, it needs huge sweeping reform. Not to retread the obvious, but it's been written by RIAA lobbyists to reflect that consortium's own priorities. It hurts artists, it hurts listeners, and it hurts innovation of all kinds.

Example: My personal frustration this week was falling in love with a Public Radio show, American Routes. It came on FM randomly while I was driving somewhere, and I was instantly enamored. This guy draws lines between bluegrass, jazz, R&B, rock; he'd play ten killer songs from totally different genres and you could hear the same melodic / lyrical themes connecting them. From an hour of listening, I made a list of three records I want to buy.

So this is clearly a good show for any artist featured on it. If you own copyright to this music, you should want everyone to listen to this show as often as possible. So can I get a podcast?

Unfortunately, we can't sell or otherwise distribute copies of American Routes on tapes or CDs because each show contains so much copyrighted music that it isn't financially feasible for us to get clearance for all of it. With the same reason, we can't archive American Routes as a whole on our website or provide podcasting.

So this is clearly idiotic. My point is that we, meaning online music fans, need to think much bigger than fighting to save the status quo. The current surge of activism focuses on HR2060, which is important and a good start; but what should come next?

Btw, Pandora isnt the only awesome mutant produced by the current laws. WFMU's Coffee2Go is currently my favorite podcast. DJ Noah's solution to the problem is brilliantly simple: sidestep the RIAA altogether and only play unsigned or independently-released records. Freaking brilliant, and hopefully a harbinger of the new music economy to come.