Comments

1
LULZ! NERDS SOMETHING SOMETHING

TL;DR

I BET THAT PLACE SMELLS LIKE ARMPIT.
2
OK, Nietzsche was the Enlightenment's troll, I got that. Still seems to raise more questions than it answers, such as: who were the Enlightenment's Three Billy Goats Gruff?
3

The three Gruffyes Gruffing said:

Billy cannot fuck the tv up by passiveness and or non-passiveness?

billy must obey except if asked to fuck up the tv?

if a tv attacks billy he must run?

Am I in the same page???
4
Apparently Sarah missed the part of the conference where they tell you to NOT feed the troll, lol.

Anyway, don't be fooled by the Arab Spring. These movements are the products brave, smart, hardworking people making it happen. The technology enables them, but we shouldn't let that obscure the real story: the people.

We have no similar hope in this country, where the "left" is mostly concerned with moral purity and parading its incredible superiority over those white trash ni..... what? yeah. About 20% of the US population identifies as liberal, that that's the only group liberals care to communicate with. So fuck twitter.

As for Nietzsche, who I have actually read (as opposed to just getting the summary version off iTunes U), I agree that he was a marvelous troll, but the whole interweb thing really makes me think more of Foucault (who I know about from iTunes U!), especially his discussion of the Panopticon.

It's pretty obvious that Google and Zuckerberg have some sort of post-liberal ideal of total transparency. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you might expect some hippy to make a hippy-dippy song about, "Imagine no more secrets, if everyone knew everything and no one had anything to hide..." cue the tambourine. That these companies get to broker this data doesn't dissuade them from supporting total transparency, either.

However, me being a cynic and this world being full of assholes, it's clear to me that this will just end up being another tool of conformity and oppression of the weak by the powerful. Maybe not a big deal, considering how much conformity and oppression we've got going on, but probably not helping. I'm sure these are not original thoughts on my part.

What Wikileaks and to some extent Anonymous are trying to do (does Anonymous actually try to do anything?) is to reverse the "polarity" on the Panopticon, to make the guards completely visible to the prisoners. This is a good thing, because power is a zero-sum game, and it needs to change hands.

Anyway, enough procrastination. I'd be interested to learn how the internet can lead to the widespread dissemination of facts and ideas that aren't "stupid but cool" memes. Right now there is so much fragmentation and "silo-ing" going on, figuring out how to create a non-corrupt alternative to mass media with mass reach seems like an obvious and important project.
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Or, for more (more MORE!) on ROFLCon Summit, check out arts writer Matt Stangle's great interviews with two complete sellouts!!!!!11
6
All my life I've wished Sarah would call me "surprisingly attractive".

There are already "internet political groups" like the Pirate Party that occupy real seats of elected office in several European countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party

Also, yeah, that Matrix dude was weird.
7
Sarah, the word Internet should be capitalized throughout your coverage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_conventions

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