by Manuel DeLanda

The plan of the essay is as follows. I will begin with a few definitions of technical terms ("source code", "compiler", "operating system") which are necessary to follow the rest of the paper. I will then discuss a few of the ideas put forward by open-source philosophers (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond) focusing not on their weaknesses but on their practical consequences. In particular, Stallman's achievements go beyond the creation of programs and involve the design of a contract (the GNU General Public License, or GPL) which has been arguably as crucial to the success of the movement as any piece of software. The spirit of the license is clearly informed by Stallman's moral philosophy but its unintended consequences go far beyond it. Similarly, Eric Raymond's attempts at an ethnography of the movement, and to distill "rules" which capture its dynamics, fall short of success but he has in addition provided good material to study those unintended consequences....

(A Glitch Lecture by ∆¥∆)

A twitter user who logs and archives every key he presses on his computer keyboard:

39doc↵of↵↓↵↓↵↓↵ar↓↵it was runningoh ok↵this morning the code i was writing↵last night i mentioned it was running slow↵like 10 fps↵now it's 4

0 fps↵there thanks :)↵there was somethingthere was something i wforgot←→ to tweak↵so it wasn't approximating as many things as it could be↵:

IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist, Seth Price presents an essay challenging the traditional photo essay format.

1. Ritualized Unknowing People keep trying to get a handle on what’s happening. There’s a fear that others are hastening to make startling connections among the raw material, tracing lines between points we didn’t even know existed. Exacerbating this anxiety is the fact that despite its supposed insistence on the consolidation of knowledge and the worth of information, the Internet produces ritualized unknowing. You could say, however, that this is a good thing, for it provokes a desire to remystify the frenzy of technological change through ritual, through a personal and allegorical rehearsal of what is perceived to be a manic and distorting increase in density, a compression exponentially telescoping in reach and magnitude.