Posts Tagged ‘barcode’
Wikileaks, Napster, and the Ayatollah Flanagan
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks
Wikileaks and Napster
In an Assange interview published by the Guardian on Friday 3 December 2010, Assange says:
“Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has …power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.”
In other words, he says the only Western speech that is ‘free’ is speech that does not threaten “the fiscal blockade”.
The commodity, in the case of Wikileaks, that is threatened is safe/private intelligence. We might call it ‘safely encrypted intelligence’.
The commodity in the case of Napster was monetized, commodified, marketed music.
Napster was savaged by the music industry because Napster represented a significant threat to the business. They were actually able to shut it down through the legal system. Wikileaks is being savaged by governments and also the media around the world. The media is savaging Wikileaks because Wikileaks is fulfilling a job typically done by the press. Governments are savaging Wikileaks because Wikileaks is publishing their secret information.
Up for the challenge
The first challenge is: viivakoodi, barcode, código de parras, codice a barre…
I’ve always enjoyed a challenge – or rather, I’ve always hated to turn my back on a challenge, ever since I was a girl and the roughest, toughest boy in the playground dared me to go up on the swing with him, standing face to face, as high as it would go…
Well actually, this challenge, set by Finnish visual poet, Satu Kaikkonen, wasn’t half so scary – in fact, it was pure pleasure. Time for a Vispo is a new blog run by Satu where she gives a weekly challenge to create a vispo. The 1. challenge, issued on Monday 28 June, is barcode.
id card is my response. Created in Flash, it’s a random coded e-poem with voices – it’s an update of a remix I created for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX
Screenshot of id card - a remixworx e-poem created in Flash by crissxross
R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is a collaborative blog for digital art and e-poetry remixing, started by Randy Adams (runran) in November 2006. Barcodes have featured a number of times in remixworx so I also slipped a few other remixes into The 1. challenge. See the collection under the remixworx barcode tag, including:
seepage by runran
artifact (bicycle – 2111) by runran
artifact (rusted sergio mix) by babel (Chris Joseph)
Worx by babel