The Inside (Out)

This wasn’t the post I was going to write, but seeing as I’ve utterly forgotten what it was meant to be this will have to do.

“And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction” – Spook Country, William Gibson

I’ve written briefly before about the idea of everting cyberspace as described by William Gibson in Spook Country not my favourite of his books but I find that it grows on me. I’ve been keeping an eye on technology, often with social networking applications that are their primary use, with this in mind. If you will allow me a slightly bizarre tangent, as humans we have been thinking and writing about the breaking or trauma of “real space” for goodness only knows how long. Fairy tales and their like often revolve around places in time or space where the mundane is fundamentally torn in an unspecified way. In light of this it’d perhaps not surprising that when we create, or attempt to, technologies or platforms that run along side and break into real space we think about them in similar ways. Science fiction could be considered fantasy with computers; the same basic drive but a different expression. But enough of my over educated posturing. Hopefully you can all understand why I was more than a little excited when I saw this :

"Attendees receive RFID badges that uniquely identify and track them across the conference space. Location information is incredibly accurate—visitors' exact locations and movements are monitored in real time, and used to drive revolutionary social networking features which completely change the conference experience.

The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests."

I am looking forward to seeing how this works at the conference, indeed it’s the ideal place for this sort of thing to work. I am unsure of the wider potential for long term use but would love to see it being used in clubs, munches, festivals and other semi-closed/semi-public environments.

Jane : tweed/literary theory/academic fan/feminist/coffee addict

Sell the sky

Things have been somewhat intense for the past few months and as tends to happen I fell out of the habbit of blogging. Again. Never fear, dear reader(s), I have a number of posts in mind as soon as I finish this cup of coffee. Or maybe next week.

Losing my religion and finding my spirituality

A small warning, this post is going to contain the phrase "I believe" quite a bit because it is about my religion and my response to the institution built up around it (for those of you who don't want to read any further, it's mostly negative).

I often say I've been a Christian all my life but this isn't strictly accurate, I was raised to Christianity and then after a few secret years of Not Being Christian I chose it for myself as a teenager. As such I have an interesting perspective of the church tempered by a certain amount of over exposure to its workings. I do not get on well with the church. On the whole I believe that although the church is a natural if regrettable extension of the organization of Christianity (for simplicities sake lets say that Christianity is the spirituality and the church is the organization or cultus if we're going very Andrew Rilstone) like any organization it has twisted to strive for control and simplicity in its message, two things which go directly against the founding tenants of Christianity. My personal belief is that Christianity is a spirituality by the marginalized for the marginalized, something to help to free us and give us the chance to be whole as people. I am aware that my views are not shared by the church. I also have an understanding of the bible in context, not just as an artifact of its time but as twisted by translation and institutional agendas many of which I do not trust. I believe that the insistence on utterly literal readings of the bible and clinging to certain passages are therefore not merely unwise but actively work against the intentions of Christianity. You can therefore understand as a feminist how I react to the abstinence only movement and its place in the church. I, for the record, have had sex whilst unmarried and being as I have no desire to get married will almost certainly continue to do so. I went through a brief period of believing in not having sex before marriage myself and so am not perhaps as enlightened as I could be but eventually after a certain amount of exposure to the negative side effects of it's practical application I changed my mind.

This week being as I've had some time on my hands I've been posting on the Midwest Teen Sex Show website, a fine piece of work by the way and I encourage all of you to take a look. A video response had been posted on Youtube to their abstinence only show and I, fool that I am, browsed through the comments until I unshockingly came upon a number of Christian responses that I felt could use a little perspective. The response to my response was rather interesting, I was informed by one Scott after a small lesson in etymology (a presumption that I was unaware of what the word Christian meant) that as I had opinions which differed from the current general understanding of the bible by the church I was in fact not a Christian at all and this is what this tangent strewn post is mostly about. I have some rather more moderate comments from Rachel on debate in Christianity but this is what I'd like to focus on.
It is a given that the modern day church is focusing on a small number of "sins" and elevating them whilst glossing over or ignoring others. Their motives are suspect in that these "sins" also seem to correlate nicely with the dominant social, and patriarchal, agenda. However what I find deeply ironic is that, as Scott and the rest of the Church are happily doing, in claiming to understand the whole of and be enforcing Gods plan they are in fact committing a much larger sin than the one they accuse me of. This appears to go unnoticed by many Christians. Quite frankly if they're going to try to enforce values from the early Church I'd much rather they looked into having female leaders and holding their goods in common.

Those silly women

Even though Tasers have only recently been introduced the the UK police force, our very first Taser related death was only recently, and they're being kept away from our civilians I read enough US based blogs to be reasonably well informed of the growing fears about Taser abuse (I'm not capping up that damn word or putting an ® after it each time, it looks silly). Although I am obviously not in any danger of getting my charming hands on one and therefore realize this is not aimed at me, I sometimes just have to be impressed at the sheer horror of some marketing ploys. I am of course referring to the leopard print Taser/MP3 player which less famously is also "available in four designer colors". Against my better instincts to not seek out things that will put up my blood pressure I wandered over the the website to take a look at this for myself and was confronted with some rather interesting ads at the top of the screen where the slogans are colour coded to the Tasers. Needless to say they are very American in a big button pushing sort of way, I shall include a brief rundown of some of my favourites below.
Fashion With A Bite - Leopard print. A simple leopard fur background with the slogan on top, because when looking for a substitute for lethal force we all know that women want something their friends can envy (you don't seriously think that's aimed at men do you?) I feel that I should make some sort of witty remark about how I might buy a tweed print Taser here but no, I really wouldn't.
Police Proven - Black. This gem shows a police officer in a tshirt leaning against a patrol car, sadly he isn't actually Tasering anyone in the shot but I suspect that might be a little less "consumer friendly" even if more accurate. Indeed none of these show the Taser in action.
I Will Control My Own Destiny - Purple. A professional looking women superimposed on a busy slightly faded street with blurred cars and people in the background. She stares directly out with what I can only assume is a "fuck you all, I've got a Taser" look. Whilst I appreciate that they're trying to push the whole power for women part it's slightly over ridden by the fact that the underlying message is that to 'control your own destiny' you are so beset from all sides by dangerous men that you need to carry a Taser with you at all times or learn to accept the fact that you can never leave your house without an escort. It could be worse I suppose, they could have made it pink.
There When I Can't Be - Blue. A man standing at an airport with what are presumably pictures of his wife and children shown next to him. I'm not sure if they thought that having a voice screaming "fear for the lives of your family when you must leave them in the hands of women, fear, fear" was overkill and so went for this instead, but I like to think so.

I'll still be here when the last poor soul has left the room

I realize this may be unfashionable but I have a sad sort of affection for many of the secular and pagan influenced trappings of Christmas, yule having been appropriated so many times it's difficult to trace all of the traditions any more. I was rather more pleased than I will readily admit to discover that the place that I will be spending Christmas has a formal dresscode for all of it's meals and I half suspect for leaving the room. I have risen to the challenge, although with a number of non-standard dresses, only to realize with horror that I was short of seamed holdups so off I set to Agent Provocateur with only a few days left. Upon entering the shop for once the first thing to draw my eye was the fairly epic que of 10 odd people, all men. Oh dear. Now I realize that I don't seem the type, or quite frankly the shape, to indulge in what I like to think of as proper underwear and you certainly can't tell from what I wear over it but I do have something of weakness. Nor must you think that I dislike having partners buy it for me. I realize that I am, as mentioned, something of an awkward shape and that others may have less trouble but the thing about Agent Provocateur is that they have a number of different designers do their rather wonderful stock and as such how and how well the underwear fits can vary wildly and should really be dealt with in person not by a panicked boyfriend or husband desperately scrolling through his phone looking for your measurements. And, well, buying your partner underwear for Christmas has always seemed a little tacky to me. Who knows, maybe I'm looking at this entirely wrong tinged with a mild irritation at having to be the only lady in a long que of visibly uncomfortable men. All things considered it could be much worse, they could be buying diamonds.

The future starts today

Last week I was at a launch party and on the way in I was given a jigsaw piece which I was informed was a "passport to the future". As it turned out the future was an art installation of sorts with trees and leaves in a large room and a small glass house, "if this is the future" I proclaimed doing my best to gesture with a half full champagne glass whilst in a corset "where's my fucking jetpack". Those of you of a certain persuasion will recognise my base plagiarism as working from a number of sources, the most notable being a Threadless shirt and the slogans integration into the new Warren Ellis project Doktor Sleepless. The future as we are told is now, and this has never been pushed home more directly in literature than with William Gibsons shift from writing the vague future to the very carefully dated present. The first time I read Pattern Recognition many years ago I fell in love, the book (not my own) was then whisked out of the country and I embarked on a long but worthwhile hunt to track down my own copy in what turned out to be the dry period between the first and second prints runs. It's not just because it's a book about fandom, although it is and should not be underestimated as such, but it's a consideration of what technology can do now, what cyberpunk can be now from the author who invented it. Spook Country continued in this vein much to my delight and functions as a sort of sequel without simply repeating the first one. The reason that I find this new directions resonates with me is that it's possible, now, all of his concepts are possible and somehow seem just around the corner should we pull ourselves together and work on it.
How can we cause cyberspace to evert in London (or anywhere else for that matter) and what would we do if we did?