Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Cheating Hubby, UFOs, Black Sites

CHEATER

I came across this little gem this morning. The Sun reports a scandal in Britain involving a nosy woman's recent discovery of her husband's car outside the home of a new female acquaintance. The cheating hubby just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Google's Street View Mobile rolled by taking snap shots for the new internet program launched last year.

Aside from the obvious infringement on privacy rights this scandal so brilliantly illustrates, I'm interested in how Google Streetview opens up a whole lot of new possibilities for consumerism, blackmail, advertising, and other forms of accumulation. Are we going to have to start Google Streetviewing all of the possible locations we've been to in every city around the world to make sure we're not spotted doing anything shady? Are we then going to have to contact Google begging for them to remove our images? At what cost? It's already pretty crazy that Google has access to most of my e-mails, this blog, all of my gChats, the documents I've backed up for my senior project, and is also working on compiling a comprehensive collection of printed matter.

I wonder if there are any Google Streetview watchdog teams out there who alert others that the van is rolling through to take some photos. I also wonder if any businesses have tried to exploit Google Streetview for advertising their products and services.

Also on the Sun website and linked with this article is an entry on an alleged UFO sighting in East London on Streetview. Here's the link JIC:

ALIENS

***

Another piece that might interest some of you is Mark Danner's recent piece in the New York Review on secret prisons and torture. It's very very disturbing and extremely well-written. I highly recommend it. In certain parts of the piece he cites interviews with ex-inmates who spent months and in some cases years not knowing which country they were in. I think it's pretty wild to try to conceptualize being in a place that you think might be Afghanistan, Poland or Cuba and just not having any idea.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Hyperopia/Hysteria

"We interrupt this recession to bring you news of another crisis that is much more pleasant to deal with. Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse. "

image and excerpt from: "Oversaving, a Burden for our Times,"
NYTimes Science section / John Tierney, March 23rd, 2009

I encourage everyone to examine this article, along with the "further readings" enlisted by the Times. The "empirical research"* carried out by these Harvard and Columbia consumer-psycho-analysts could not be clearer: in order to survive the recession we must pathologize conscientious consumer practices ("saving") as "hyperopic" (and from the image, hysteric) paranoid delusions carried out by hoarders of labor and reserve-capital...

More in-depth conspiracy-theory critique on the coalescence of consumer-market analysts, cognitive psychological research practices, and mass consumption after my senior project is due.

* "He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday."
--Is this what the professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School considers a controlled experiment?

Sunday, March 29, 2009

thanks rj



every 4 years marks that special time in global consumer consciousness when nationalist-masculinist impulses step to the forefront of the world scene. yes.. the world cup.

i think i remember gasping out loud the first time i saw the german police logo from the 2006 world cup. could that black patch be more strategically placed in order to *not* reproduce a fascist aesthetic?

as for the other one... its a caricature i saw on some guy's flickr account. also by a german guy.

Welcome, Bienvenus, Willkommen, Benvenuti, Bienvenidos!

Dear 'comrades,'


I hope everyone had a nice spring break. Once you all respond and join the blog, I will change the 'permissions' so that everyone can edit the format and layout in the spirit of democracy.

Below is a striking piece of advertising I found in the Frankfurt airport last summer.




















I also added some links to some websites relevant to our project. The Anti-Advertising Agency has some really great stuff (including the image I took for the top of the blog). People should feel free to change the header, the layout, or the title of the blog.