A Bit More Detail

I was distressed to read Mat Honan’s Gismodo article ”How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”, substantially because of my own extensive Flickr collection but also because Flickr is, well, normative for me.

The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That’s what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

Even the notion of Flickr as an archive—as the place where you store all your photos as a backup—is becoming increasingly quaint as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Amazon, Apple, and a host of others scramble to serve online gigs to our hungry desktops.

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

Chris Bertram’s Crooked Timber post ”The death of Flickr?”, starting with a simple paragraph by Bertram stating that he’d mourn the site’s disappearance because of the real-world relationships it fostered, started off an interesting discussion thread.

If not Flickr, what should someone interested in sharing images use?

linked to journalist Catherine Solyom’s interview in the National Post with fugitive hacker Christopher Doyon. Doyon, allegedly one of the coordinators of the Anonymous movement of cyber-hackers, here in this article claims to have global reach and access to everything.

Q: Anonymous started out as online pranksters but has gotten a whole lot more serious in the last two years. What happened?
A: I believe Egypt was really a turning point for us emotionally in Anonymous. Obviously there was always that sort of prankster edge to us. But people often ask me, “Why are you so mean nowadays?” It started in Egypt – when you work for days to set up live video feeds and the first thing you watch through those feeds is people killing your friends with machine guns – that becomes personal. And then it’s not just Egypt, it’s Libya, Tunisia, over and over again these Freedom Ops are really what gave us a sort of take-no prisoners attitude. We get to know these people. It may not be the same as you and I sitting here, but when you Skype with people and spend hours and hours talking with them on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and they share their hopes and their dreams with you for their country, their future, when they tell you how they’re risking their lives so their children can have a better future in some far-off land, you bond with those people and they become your friends and family.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Is this last sentence really true? Or is this just bragging?

What Andrew Barton said at Acts of Minor Treason. Building fiction universes which make sense, and which–when they diverge from the world we know–do so in ways that are readily comprehensible, is something that’s not only important for science fiction, either. Plausible characters and settings and plots count everywhere.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really wrap one’s head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon’s withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that “the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.” Presumably, the implied conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie’s style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn’t figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an “espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency,” which really narrows it down – and, hell, I imagine it’s easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

Me, my guilty pleasure is Star Trek tie-in novels, most specifically the ones that have been written in a shared continuity over the past fifteen or so years.

What can I say? Well, not only do I like reading but I am a Star Trek fan. I do like revisiting many of the characters and settings of the television series and movies in print. The novels written in a shared continuity explore, with an enjoyable degree of consistency and at least a minimal level of skill, a universe that’s fleshed out, and in many cases given considerably greater and more plausible detail than any of the canonical productions ever have or are likely to go into. There’s even an active online community: I know at least four people on my Livejournal friends list through Trek literature, either as readers or (in at least one case) as a writer. (The TrekBBS Trek literature forum can be a fun place to hang out.)

Is this high literature? No, but I don’t think everything I read has to be high literature. Is it the only literature I read? No. (The only fiction? No.) So, what’s the harm?

And you?

When the right-wing National Post comes up with such a bitingly ironic headline for Natalie Alcoba’s article on Mayor Rob Ford, it’s a safe bet that it’s slipping. (And when, as here, the comments seem to be equally divided between supporters and opponents of the mayor, something’s up.)

Mayor Rob Ford joined members of Canada’s ethnic press at City Hall on Monday to emphasize “the need to respect press freedom.”

The occasion marked the United Nation’s World Press Freedom Day, which was May 3.

“The day serves as a reminder that violations of press freedom occur in countries around the world where journalists, editors, publishers are harassed, detained, attacked and killed,” said Mayor Ford, who has himself been embroiled in a public dispute with the Toronto Star after a confrontation with a reporter outside his home last week.

The Mayor has threatened not to take part in press conferences if a Star reporter is present. Mr. Ford accuses Star reporter Daniel Dale of spying on his house.

Mr. Dale denies the allegation, saying he was in the area last Wednesday to inspect a piece of parkland that the Mayor wants to purchase next to his house.

The Mayor did not take questions after he read the proclamation on Monday.

The extended interview of Alternet’s Joshua Holland with Charles Johnson, the blogger behind Little Green Footballs, makes for remarkable reading. The mechanics of the transition of Little Green Footballs from crazy right-wing blog to something altogether different is important, I think.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

[. . .]

JH: [. . .A]long the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.

Librarian and blogger Michael Steeleworthy has made a stirring post regarding the strongly negative consequences of Canadian federal government budget cuts on the libraries of Canada: jobs lost, serviced dropped, the works.

These budget cuts are a knock-out punch to how public information is accessed and used across the country. The cuts not only affect the library community and possibly your civil-service-friend who lives down the road. They will affect the manner in which our society is able to find and use public information.  If public data is no longer collected (see StatCan), preserved (see LAC, NADP, CCA), disseminated and used (see PDS/DSP and cuts at departmental libraries), then does the information even exist in the first place? There will be less government and public information, fewer means to access this information, and fewer opportunities to do so.

Take a moment and recall the freedom you have been afforded to speak freely in this nation.  The utility of that freedom is dependent on your ability to access the information you use to learn, to criticize, to praise, or to condemn.  If knowledge is power, then a public whose national information centres and access points are ill-funded is a weakling. Libraries and archives provide Canadians with direct access to key government information, and for that very reason, they should be funded to the hilt.

This is where I get to my point: We are now facing a situation in Canada where government information has suddenly become far more difficult to collect, to access, and to use. The funding cuts that Canada’s libraries and archives face is an affront to the proper functioning of a contemporary democratic society. These cuts will impede the country’s ability to access public and government information, which will make it difficult for Canadians to criticize government practices, past and present.

I mentioned on Twitter that these cuts show us that the work of librarians and archivists are crucial to the nation’s interest. We are not mere record keepers, and neither do we spend our days merely dusting cobwebs off of old books. We are the people who maintain collections of public information, and we are the people who provide and nurture access to information. Many of us see ourselves as guardians of the public’s right to access information.  If we take on that guardianship, then we must defend and protect these collections and access points. I’m not talking about a Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 job. I’m talking about advocacy, which doesn’t have an on/off switch. Either you do it or you don’t.

Spread the word, as he suggests.

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster raises the possibility of bringing an asteroid into lunar orbit, for scientific and space-settlement purposes both.
• Daniel Drezner is pleasantly surprised that the situation of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng hasn’t led to anything like a breakdown of Sino-American relations.
• Eastern Approaches notes the Polish holiday of “Flag Day” on the 2nd of May, commemorating the substantial Polish participation in the conquest of Berlin in 1945.
• Far Outliers’ Joel discusses the Canary Islands and the role they played in the emerging imperium, both vis-a-vis Portugal and the later imperial strategies of unified Spain.
• Geocurrents describes the Sino-Soviet border disputes in eastern Siberia in 1969 that killed hundreds of people, nearly led to a Sino-Soviet war, and played a critical role in deciding the future of the world.
• Language Hat starts a discussion about the depressing plight of non-Russian languages inside Russia that quickly expands to include discussions of Turkish immigrants in Russia, the situation of Gaelic in Ireland, and Canada’s own language situation.
• Laywers, Guns and Money reviews a book describing how environmentalism in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen helps to legitimate anti-immigrant sentiment.
• At NewAPPSBlog, Mohan Matthen makes the contrarian argument–compelling, but I think ultimately incorrect–that a “Oui” outcome in the 1995 Québec referendum would have been good for Québec and rump Canada both.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell discusses the consequences of Bo Xilai’s wiretapping of other officials in China, in the context of ubiquitous state surveillance generally.

The Occupy movement has done very well for itself by any standards, never mind the standards of a somewhat controversial mid-ranking international magazine that made a one-off proposal that went massively, globally viral. The time was right for globally coordinated protests dealing with income inequality, unpopular political systems, and the like. (2011 was such a busy year.)

Is the Occupy movement purely something of 2011, though? Almost all the encampments have been taken down worldwide, by the protests or by police, the mass street protests have stopped, and the movement is dealing with some negative PR from (among other things) some violent protesters. (Black Bloc wrecks it for everyone.)

Do you think the Occupy movement is still relevant? Or is it useful now only as a reference point? What is to be done with the movement’s legacy if that’s the case?

Discuss.

In an early scene in Joss Wheden’s superhero epic The Avengers, team leader Nick Fury bets a newly thawed Captain America that he won’t believe how insane society has become since the supersoldier was freeze-dried in 1945. An hour into the film, Cap slips Fury a ten-spot.

Small moments like these make The Avengers, opening Friday in the United States, one of the best comic book movies in years, despite the third act’s inevitable CGI explosions and seen-it-all-before fight scenes.

[. . .]

Whedon succeeds in crafting the wittiest superhero movie in years. Instead of cranking out a generic narrative that forces each character to plod through predictable bits of “growth,” Whedon reinvigorates the clutch of Marvel Comics superheroes that first came together in 1963, with a script bristling with sly surprises while remaining true to each character’s essence.

The Avengers also serves as rare proof that every now and then, a master plan actually leads to masterful results. After releasing Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Entertainment peppered a string of standalone superhero flicks with brief appearances by Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. Those snippets set the table for this all-star smackdown. It was the most meticulously orchestrated tease in Hollywood history, and the payoff for this five-year rollout was well worth the wait.