Iso Brown is a multimedia artist from Strasbourg who I jammed with at the VJ festival, Contact Europe in Milan. He also makes music which was handy since one of the DJs who was supposed to be playing during our sets just didn't show up!
In 1993 I made a prediction that the Internet would have replaced the phone system in ten years time. A naive statement indeed but interestingly enough, it looks like 2003 will be the year that the telcos begin shifting their voice call infrastructure over to IP. Sprint plans to move half of its 8 million local lines from hard-wired circuits to packet networks in the next six years.
Again, old news but still funny. What happens when you get wto.org mixed up with www.gatt.org and invite culture-jammers instead of World Trade Organisation representatives to your conference... Ouch!
The Yes Men deliver an excellent lecture in Finland. Why you should always read the fine print.
"In Urdu, the world for Profit is fayda. Al Qaida means The Word, The Word of God, The Law. So, in India some of us call the War Against Terror - The Word Vs. The Profit (no pun intended)..."
Just finished reading two contrasting speeches on Sept. 11, one by the author and social activist, Arundhati Roy, the other by Dr. Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist with strongly influence over the current Bush Administration. No conflict in terms of forseeing difficulties for the US over its current foreign policy but fundamental opposition in terms of how to proceed.
"But it isn't necessary to be `anti-national' to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap peoples' minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
Come September, Arundhati Roy
"The underlying principled issue is essentially unsolvable because there is ultimately no practical way of addressing the 'democratic deficit' at the global level. But the problem can be mitigated by a degree of American moderation within a system of soverign nation-states".
Has History Restarted Since September 11?, Dr. Francis Fukuyama
New word of the day (for me at least, on the net this is old news...) - Hybrot - a robot powered on rat brain cells sold by K-Team. The Khepera II is controlled by a network of neurons culled from rat embryos. Lovely.