Die vergangenen Tage waren voller Krieg; und wie Antwortet mein Körper und Geist? Mit drei Nächten voller Wärme. In dem Traum aus dem ich gerade erwacht bin, kann ich mich endlich in deine Seite kuscheln, mich an dich schmiegen, dich halten und drücken. Und du, im vollem Wissen über die Tage, im Wissen über die Kraft der Erlösung durch diese sanfte Heimlichkeit, du sagst nur “Und, besser?”, ohne wirklich eine Antwort zu erwarten.
The lives of lee miller arrived yesterday and kept my awake till early in the morning. Her perception off WW2 is astonishing. With the surrealist eye and the realization that “This is a new and disillusioning world. Peace with a world full of crooks who have no honor, no integrity and no shame is not what anyone fought for.” (1945, Page 147)
And only once the adjective fearless is used to describe her, and i still can no grok the essence of the word.
Please be fearless - it’s the perfect balance.
I just posted a little feature request on the Flickr Ideas Forum. You could also understand it as a open letter to Flickr.
Dear Flickr Goddess,
i would like to ask for a very simple feature: I want access to ALL my photos ALL the time, unless i canceled / deleted my account.
There is a very simple solution:
I would like to a see a separation between the public view of my photo stream and how i with my account see the photo stream.
My view always includes all my pictures. It is my data, and i should always have access to it.
The public view for everyone else can be limited to the 200 pictures.
I don’t mind all the other limitations on the upload and set’s etc. But i would like to have full access to MY data. I am totally willing to pay for sharing. To give everybody the possibility to access my pictures. But i am NOT willing to pay to get access to MY data.
Why?
Well, i put “Privacy Wars” into the topic for a reason: With the recent privacy issues on Facebook, more and more people started to realize to what extend a company has control over their data. The asynchronous access to my photos and the resulting dependency is a major problem of the current privacy issues. With a similar dependency Facebook is able to adjust the privacy terms and therefor control the users data.
In my opinion Flickr always had a very good understanding of sharing and privacy. 90% of the decisions Flickr made in the last years related to that topic where transparent and comprehensible. They in general went into the direction to empower the user.
I know that some people at Flickr understand the current issues of the “Privacy Wars” very well. It would be wonderful if Flickr could send out the right signal to the Flickr Users.
“We understand: You need the free access to your data, we give it to you.”
Even if that means to adjust the Terms of Services.
Thanks
occam, 2010-06-11
As I mentioned before, one good solution of the current fundamental privacy problems might be the use of a decentralized social web. The idea isn’t new but the talk on Freedom in the Cloud by Eben Moglen on February 2nd 2010, outlined the broader context that was needed to understand the puzzle of problems.
As a direct reaction to the talk, the Diaspora projects now starts taking off and already collected >10 times the amount of money they asked for.
However, both Diaspora and Eben Moglen don’t mention one of the major crucial problems: The accessibility of the huge amount of data we collect from our friends and us.
The semantic web and the so called “triple-store” provide the technology to store all the information in one place with the huge possibility to combine data in ways we never thought of before. However, what is still missing is the easy access to all information in such a triple-store.
But before we come to possible solutions, let us imagine the “Mensch-Maschine”, the cyborg, us IT-humans, in ten years.
In ten years, we might have a device we can carry around, that constantly accumulates information’s about what we are doing. It stores the streets and ways we walk, it continuously takes pictures of our environment, records audio, recognizes text, speech, music, voices and faces. We then can review the menu from the Asia restaurant, just because we looked at it. We can always roll-back in time and access a moment we missed, or forgot. And that is the main point, our forgetfulness. Who would not like to have device that remembers for you? Because we are obviously not able to handle it all?! Imagine you could always access the “memories” of your childhood.
You can build such a device already, it might be a bit clumsy and and less fancy, but all the components and technologies are available.
In the ideal world, such a device is only accessible to us and we can always decide what we want to share and what not. Also, if Catherine shares some information with Jules, only Jules should be able to read it, and not Jim.
With sharing and the semantic web the device starts to unfold the full potential. The device will not just store the information about us, but also provide us with the data we got from our friends. The combined data might unfold a view of the world, we never saw before. More or less directly with the eyes from our friends.
The possibility of such a device should make clear how fundamentally important the discussion about privacy in the social network is.
But what is possible now? What could be the outcome of the Diaspora project?
The Diaspora project might provide two essential features:
The combined data store, at best a triple-store, holds the potential to a new way to access information’s about our friends and us. We no longer have to visit multiple websites, go through our RSS reader, check e-mails, IM and micro-blogging - instead everything gets accumulated into one storage. To access the information’s we want, we apply filters. We select a group of people, set a time-frame and get all updates from the different sources.
The current web technologies make it possible to provide easy access to data, but they hardly scale as soon as the amount of data gets bigger. Long lists of micro blogging messages are very hard to go through without the proper context.
The proper context, or ways of accessing information’s are very easy to outline.
Future applications should provide the functionality to focus on a certain context. The view should be different if we select a person, a group or a location. If we select a location, we want to see what persons and topics are related to it. However, we want to see a map, not a long lists of elements.
The fact that a decentralized social web will store the information’s on the users hard disk, holds the possibility for dynamic desktop applications. Such a application could go beyond the current web techniques and try new ways of visualizing the semantic web.
I have specific ideas about such a desktop application and hope that i can bring them into some sort of a visual demo. Hopefully in another post.
What else? The open source aspect of the Diaspora project will not prevent the commercial copycats. With the resources of bigger companies, it might even be possible to outrun the project, provide a “even nicer” user interface, or certain specific functionality. However, the open source world has learned a lot in the last 10 years. People “demanded” a proper web browser and Mozilla was born. If people keep demanding a direct control over their data and actually have the alternatives, sites like Facebook might never surface again.
Or let my rephrase that: Your data should have the same cultural and legal protection as your body. You better demand that.
A full and more extended (male) liberation might never happen, without the transformation of (male) violence into something positive. Or at least it should be understood, accepted (!) and included in a form that does no or fewer damages.
The (male) violence is the major factor of separation between the genders.
Abortion is violence as well. It is the necessary and justified murder of a person, one (!) act of violence we might have to accept.
It is not the acceptance of the violent act itself, it is the acceptance of the violent aspects of a human being. The instinct of self-preservation or self-protection of the freedom of one person, not the protection of a nation.
i ask the male population to understand and reflect on their violence. I don’t ask for the acceptance of rape.
i don’t ask “what is justified or not”, i ask for the reasons and motivations, i ask for the influences and structures that support violence. How does violence influence male identity? What aspects of the normal daily life are (indirect) violent?
This reflection might be the only way to solve the current victim-hood situation of the male/female conflict.
But it is not just that. I posted this in contrast to the extract from susie bright’s book, because of the direct connections between sex and violence. Both of them play a major part in (male) liberation.
how does your mother look like? i saw a picture of your father, but i wonder about your mother.
sometimes when wandering around this city, i go to the huge local cathedral, sit down and watch all the tourists get in and out… sometimes a few locals hang around as well, drawing something. So i sit and eat something, or read, or take a picture.
i try to grok the whole human, and so i have to try and grok the church institution. The rules and rules and rules and rules… and wait, there is a feeling i recognize. So why all these rules? That doesn’t fit together.
Oh how much i believe in us humans, in that very sacred human feeling. How much i believe that it comes from us, the fearless, and not from somewhere above.
i thought of writing you, since i saw your pictures. but i am afraid of the walls of that religion. it already makes me blue.
i will listen to nina simone, you can sing a rainbow. i think she understood.
the atheist
And with all the noises and sounds and colors that i discovered,
everything seems to be answered.
Everything shines in beauty.
And one open question gushes out of a blank gray trite.
Heroine and martyr bowed out. Tortured, tipped over.
I have to come to terms with the desperate ones,
on the bridge to nevermore, we disappear,
one by one.
flickr was so nice to provide the referrer data from the last years. So, i went over the list to see who is using some of the pictures from my stream.
Special dead link: http://single.de/mitglieder/TiLi83/dialog
Hoorrray for CC!
Dvorak’s No. 9, Chopin, Kraftwerk, Einstürzende Neubauten, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Carmina Burana. It is strange to realize, that i listened to the same music 20 years ago, as a kid, sitting in front of my sisters stereo, with exactly the same feeling as today. I still like all of them, for the very same “reasons”.
Wer ist nur auf diese Absurde Idee gekommen,
es würde sich verbrauchen,
es wäre begrenzt,
geh sorgsam damit um,
eines Tages ist nichts mehr davon da.
Als ob man mit 90 nichts mehr Empfinden würde.
Und der Umstand des Aufhören,
der Veränderung,
ob es sich je beruhigen wird.
Kann mich nicht ablenken.
Es ist in mir,
es ist im Nacht Bus von Sao Paulo nach Rio,
schlaflos an hunderten Hotels vorbei.
Es ist hier, in dieser Besetzung,
in diesem Muster aus flicken, in diesem Raum,
nur gestaltet, verändert, nach dem wenigen, nach dem minimalem, dem Wichtigen.
Es ist die Konsequenz,
es ist alles nur die Konsequenz der Unaufhörlichkeit.
Es bleibt in mir.
Egal in welcher Form, in welcher Größe, in welchen Umfang und mit welchen Ausgang.
Egal wie das hier und jetzt ist,
wie die Geschichte gelaufen ist.
Es bleibt.
Und lass es hunderte sein.
Und was ich hier nicht ertragen kann,
ist der Ausgang,
diese Unmöglichkeit.
Als ob ich aufhören würde zu Empfinden.
Als ob es euch nicht mehr Betreffen würde.
Und du, du Unbekanntes.
Setzt dich neben mich und lausch der Stille.
Ein Jahr ohne ein Wort. Ohne ein gesprochenes Wort.
Ohne einen Menschen der Verstehen würde.
Ich kann euer Schweigen nicht mehr ertragen.
Das Schweigen was ich ständig ernte.
Ich kann mein Schweigen nicht mehr Ertragen.
Mein Schweigen über mich.
Die Helden der Stille in ständiger Inkonsequenz.
Und ich überlege das Schweigen zu brechen.
Überlege ob ich die schmerzen Ertrage.
Den Ausgang etwas ändern, zumindest Wissen das es verstanden wird.
Zumindest irgendwie die Unmöglichkeit etwas besser begreifen?
Zumindest wissen wie es Euch geht,
zumindest Wissen das Ihr liebt.
Mein Schweigen ist nur die Gewissheit das bisher niemand ähnlich Empfunden hat.
Niemand hat an sich geglaubt,
meist glaubten sie nur den anderen.
Wir sitzen in dem lieben Café und ich schweige.
Und ich hätte Stunden erzählen können,
am Ende hättet Ihr vielleicht Verstanden,
hättet euch um eine Lösung bemüht.
Vielleicht hätte ich auch Geheimnissen gelauscht,
die ich schon ewig gespürt habe.
Aber könnt Ihr meine Angst verstehen,
wieder nur Schweigen zu ernten?
Ich erkläre, und man schweigt,
ich frage, und man schweigt,
ich bitte um Antwort, und man schweigt,
ich schweige, und man hört nicht mal zu.
— occam Feb 2010
I was going through the presentation “code of our own” that talked about woman and code and different ways of learning programming. Under the pictures of slide 14 it says:
“Boys tend to be incompetent together and figure stuff out in the early teenage years without shame. Consider starting a band as an example. Girls are socially rewarded at that age for demonstrating competence, maturity, not looking stupid. We can work on that skill now, as adults, with respect.”
Beside the wide range of very different (social) issues mentioned here, (the major one being puberty?!), the named incompetence between teenage boys made me wonder about the perception.
So how did some nerdy boys from the 80’s learn all the fancy assembler skills, cracking game copy protections and writing code? Short answer: With a friend.
If i ask around in my male coder circles, the majority of people had the following introduction into the world of computers.
After one or two years of programming in different languages, you gained enough basic knowledge about the computer, how it works and how everything builds upon each other. This became the base for every new learning process in the future.
These two years are usually filled with exchange. With, “can you try if this runs on your computer?”, “did you try this version?”, “did you notice this feature?”. Developing software always involved other people, even so the coding itself was something you did alone at night - the lack of distractions helps to concentrate.
The presentation also mentions the fear of exposing the “not knowing” to a larger group of people. This totally applies for all genders and might be the main reason for learning with a good friend - because you could ask the questions and exchange without any embarrassment.
I totally see that working in a small group is a very efficient way of learning. Writing an application together, to have a specific task that everyone can work on. I spent the last week at a wonderful hacker squat. The exchange is always astonishing, to inspire each other, to share and gain knowledge, to meet new people. It’s no surprise that hackerspaces become so successful.
However, in the context of the current discourse of woman in open source, i sincerely ask for more differentiations. I totally agree with the existence of all issues. But there are multiple questions to ask:
A clear separation is needed. I fear that in the process of getting more genders into the IT world, we might build up more walls between them. Please, let us tear them down instead.
ps: Yes, i am afraid i did not see the related actual talk of that presentation :(
Let’s continue the little movie review from the Rotterdam Film Festival.
Today i saw Adrift and Air Doll, who both have love / sex in contrast to our society as topic. Even so both Asian, they come from totally different perspectives.
Air Doll by Hirokazu Koreeda from Japan, is all about the emptiness, the non-feeling, the heartless artificial surface and the lack of any emotional substance. The fear to feel, the possible calculated risk of getting hurt.
Koreeda also made the wonderful “Nobody Knows” and one of my all time favorites, “Maborosi”. It’s again a very solid good work and lets the audience think about common problems in the society. The air doll sex toy as metaphor for the empty human beings.
From the absolute opposite direction came Adrift (Choi voi, 2009), a viatnames movie by the rather new director Chuyên Bui Thac. It portraits a young married couple and their relationships to other men and woman. Their environments, desires, emotions and adventures.
It wasn’t really the intensity of the emotions, but rather the wide range of different situations, unique characters and authentic story telling, that made this movie so moving. A constant change, always development and even the small characters become a certain depth in this progress. The sensibility for the characters was astonishing and quite remarkable for the current times. A sensibility you only see in very few movies, like La Strada for example.
The director was available for Q&A and provided some background information. The topic of desires and sexuality is rather privat in the Vietnamese culture, and Adrift is intentionally hitting that nerve. Also, his portray of very strong female, and rather weak male characters divided the Vietnamese audience.
Last but not least, the soundtrack is a wonderful mixture of modern instruments with classic Vietnamese folk music. Something i have never heard before.
some of them are from me
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