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On the galactic setting where the Culture exists:

The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long
lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and
complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations,
colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages,
renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and
whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the
Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring
civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who
might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been
there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular
retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal
universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.

On the ships and their Minds:

Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above
inter-planetary - are sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working
largely in hyperspace to take advantage of the higher lightspeed there)
bear the same relation to the fabric of the ship as a human brain does
to the human body . . . The Culture's largest vessels - apart from
certain art-works and a few Eccentrics - are the General Systems
Vehicles of the Contact section. (Contact is the part of the Culture
concerned with discovering, cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and -
if thought prudent - interacting with other civilisations; its rationale
and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast
and very large craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions
of people and machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the
Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything
that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any
GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last
resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the
whole contained within each part.

On law:

The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course,
agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing
that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not
being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and
stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal
forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture.

On politics:

Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever
they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at
any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some
sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine -
who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may
cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined
mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it
is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence,
given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually
implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine,
with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers
than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few
rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a
person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire
for it.

On why most people in the Culture live in Orbitals:

The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one
planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass
6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to
build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times
that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50
billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as
over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the
land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would
do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make
Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example
comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with
and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through
collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the
construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose
conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average
Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown
dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the
amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed
with negligible effect.

1. Declare the internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways or public education.

2. Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide.

3. Declare a “Net Neutrality” standard forbidding Internet service providers from discriminating among content based on origin, application or type.

4. Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” our goal should be “Every Child Connected.”

5. Commit to building a Connected Democracy where it becomes commonplace for local as well as national government proceedings to be heard by anyone any time and over time.

6. Create a National Tech Corps, because as our country becomes more reliant on 21st century communications to maintain and build our economy we need to protect our communications infrastructure.

We've spent some time looking through the candidates' policy statements on technology, the media, education, transparency and infrastructure

to connect p2p/a2k
(peer-to-peer/access to knowledge) technoscience politics to the
politics of permaculture practices and to the politics of pro-choice
consensual non-normalizing biomedicine.

The terraces, forming an outdoor terrain that extends over the whole surface of the city

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http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/152/zonumb3.jpg

http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/7959/thingps9.jpg

good clear picture of [CapitalistMan]
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/148/imgadz.gif

a a a a a a a a melody got me a a a a a a a a melody got me a a a melody got me are we are we melody got me are are melody got me don don a dont dont melody got me dont e a a dont e dont ev melody got me dont eve dont even dont even worry
about a thing

The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.

What is Codework?

Codework is a practice, not a product.

It is praxis, part and parcel of the critique of everyday life.

It is not canonic, although it is taken as such.

It is not a genre, although it is taken as such.

The term is relatively new and should always be renewed.

We are suffused with code and its intermingling with surface phenomena.

Wave-trains of very low frequency radio pulses for example.

Phenomenology of chickadee calls.

Codework is not a metaphor, not metaphorical.

It exists precisely in the obdurate interstice between the real and the symbolic. It exists in the arrow.

It is not a set of procedures or perceptions. It is the noise in the system. It is not the encapsulation or object of the noise or the system.

It is continuous; it is parasitic; it is thetic.

When it becomes metaphor, masterpiece, artwork, it is still-born; it is of no interest except as cultural residue: it is of great interest to critics, gallerists, editors.

When it is not collectible, not a thing, virtual or otherwise, it is not of interest to critics, gallerists, editors.

Things have already taken up its name, as if pictures in an exhibition.

This is nothing more than the continuous reification, territorialization, conquest, of the real - as if the real were always already cleansed, available for the taking - as if the real were already transformed into capital.

Capital is the encapsulation, objectification, of code. Capital drives the code-conference, the code-book, the code-movement, the code-artist, the code-masterpiece; capital drives the technology.

In short: Capital drives code into metaphor.

In short: Metaphor drives code into capital.

In short, but of greater difficulty: Capital drives metaphor into code.

In production, simpler: Metaphor drives capital into code.

The driving of metaphor, code, or capital is not codework.

Codework is the labor of code, subject to thermodynamics.

Codework is demonstrative, demonstrative fragment, experiment, partial- inscription, partial-object, the thing prior to its presentation, the linguistic kernel of the pre-linguistic. Code is the thetic, the gestural, of the demonstrative.

It the gesture that never quite takes. It is the noise inherent in the gestural.

However: Codework will become a subject or a sub-genre or a venue or an artwork or an artist or a dealer or a collector. However: This is not codework, or: What I describe above is not codework; after all, names are subsumed beneath the sign (Emblematic) of capital - as if something is being accomplished. (Hackers who are not hackers are unhacked.)

To code is not to produce codework; it is to produce code on the level of the code or interface. Bridged code, embedded code, is not codework; the irreversible spew of cellular automata is codework, all the better if the rules are noisy. The cultural production of codework abjures intensifications, strange attractors, descriptions such as this (which is the oldest game in the book). The hunt and reception of short-wave number codes is codework. Writers on the edge are circumscribed by codework, malfunctioned psychoanalytics, scatologies. Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Blacks, are endlessly coded and decoded; the codes are dissolute, partial, always already incomplete: the differend is codework.

To speak against the differend is codework; tumors are codework, metastases. The useless sequences of DNA, RNA.

Be wary of the violence of the legible text. Beware the metaphor which institutionalizes, the text which defines, the text of positivities, not negations, the circumscribing text, inscribing text; beware of the producers and institutions of these texts, whose stake is in hardening of definitions, control, capital, slaughter: Texts slaughter.

And texts slaughter texts.
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We want to save the Earth's biosphere, settle the oceans and space, end hunger and poverty, utilize alternative sources of energy, bring about a better democracy and economy to the world, and generally provide a standard of living and quality of life far beyond anything mankind has ever experienced. http://www.luf.org/

--
The Millennial Project 2.0

The Millennial Project is a comprehensive plan for space development, beginning with the terrestrial cultivation of an environmentally sustainable civilization and Post-Industrial culture and culminating, far in the future, in the colonization of our immediate stellar neighborhood. The TMP2 project is specifically a project of the Living Universe Foundation community to continually update and revise the content of the original plan as described by Marshal T. Savage in his book The Millennial Project.

--
At The Seasteading Institute, we work to enable seasteading communities - floating cities - which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for government. The most successful can then inspire change in governments around the world.

--
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups
chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations
which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and
eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space
(including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
--

The Open Source Ecology wiki,
home of the Global Village Construction Set,
developing community-based solutions for re-inventing local production.

--

RepRap is about making self-replicating machines, and making them freely available for the benefit of everyone. We are using 3D printing to do this, but if you have other technologies that can copy themselves and that can be made freely available to all, then this is the place for you too.

My friend, I have no problem with the thought of a galactic civilization vastly unlike our own... full of strange beings who look nothing like me even in their own imaginations... pursuing pleasures and experiences I can't begin to empathize with... trading in a marketplace of unimaginable goods... allying to pursue incomprehensible objectives... people whose life-stories I could never understand.

>/ 50 don't make no money. U gotta side with the jews.
[ Cut to a room, fancy hotel, Gerber-blanc & mauve. A contemporary is in the game for billions. ]

[Credits] digital on Gabbapention
[ A ball. ]

test 1

clashes [...] between careerism as a means of actualizing and subverting the self, establish the voice of creativity as a vulnerable protagonist that is taken under fire by the chaos.

actualizing an imagined scroll of the Cyrenaic school, a dialog at the wake of Aristippus of Cyrene.

Never mind humanist, postmodernism may well be the last cultural movement that's 100% human.

You may laugh at this prediction now, but you won't laugh in 2012: the point at which postmodernism turns into posthumanism is the moment when Arnold Schwartzenegger becomes president of the US. That's the point at which the pomo fight between the authentic and the fake morphs into the posthuman fight between flesh and digital flesh.

― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 30 October 2004 07:05 (8 years ago) Permalink
What I mean is that he will be elected to 'terminate' Islamic fundamentalism, a dialectic that will by that point be a bit tired, but that he will actually be the first 'terminator president', and herald in an age of unprecedented man-machine combination.

― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 30 October 2004 07:09 (8 years ago) Permalink
And if you ask me what will the cultural life be like in that new posthuman world, I'd say that, just as there as continuities between modernism and postmodernism, so there will be continuities between the postmodern and the posthuman. The rockist questions about authenticity will not go away -- in fact, they'll become, if anything, more central. But with a twist: it will be the clones and machines which will harp on most on authenticity and humanity, whereas the humans will insist on artificiality. The future (and you read it here first, folks!) is Robot Rockism.

― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 30 October 2004 07:46 (8 years ago) Permalink

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