http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

A map of unemployment in the US since January 2007.

In Googled, The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta quotes Google’s Larry Paige at a 2002 Stanford lecture:

“If we solve search, that means you can answer any question, which means you can do basically anything.” (94)

Wired tells us that McAfee just issued a report indicating that critical infrastructures worldwide are under near constant attack from nations like the United States and China. Is it just a matter of time before this Cold War surfaces? Read more here.

Google recently applied for a patent to sniff out where wireless users are located based on the packets they send.  See here. Via Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the NYSE’s Project Alpha, its new high-speed trading hub being built in New Jersey. While I blog this, I’m listening to a fascinating lecture by Kevin Slavin on high-frequency trading. The transition of M-C-M’ to M-M’ that Jeffrey Nealon suggests operates at the base of capital today is not only free of commodities it is free of any kind of human place, which is reduced now only to electronics located at the intersection of real estate values and latency.

The phenomenological world of non-places that we saw in the early 1990s (and that was undone by wireless communication technologies) proves now to have been a rehearsal for a world run by non-places from which humans themselves are absent.

My friend and next-door neighbor Frank Lyman put this video up at the blog for Coursesmart, his start-up specializing in digital textbooks.

This is a much smarter version of Apple’s book reader and really seems to work as a textbook-replacement app.

As I watched it, I realized something else which I hadn’t thought of. When used as a networked book, the iPad may well be on at the same time as a laptop or a desktop computer. The disconnect between the two will be the tricky thing to handle. Will you want to have the ability to copy text from the iPad and put it in the other machine? Or is that disconnect going to be productive?

On the down side, Dan Visel over at the if:book blog laments that the iPad locks us down with a proprietary system. Indeed it does and, as Dan says, “maybe technology’s become something we let others understand for us.”

Not only that, I had hoped that iWork might be rewritten as a set of tools that would allow easy construction of media-rich books for the iPad, but that didn’t happen. So much for the Netlab’s next book being on the iPad (a crazy thought I had).

Also disappointing is that reading on the iPad in the Apple book app is such a solitary experience. All the research that people like the Institute did on networked books was ignored. A pity. Still, I have faith that Coursesmart, other companies, individuals, and even open source efforts will compete with Apple’s book system. That will be a good thing.

On Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self.

This is the first episode of Adam Curtis’s the Century of the Self, a BBC documentary on the rise of Freudian psychology, public relations, and conceptions of the individual over the last century. To what extent do psychology and public relations shape the self under network culture? This is crucial to understand. In part, I think the answer can be found in the disorders that afflict a culture. Neuresthenia and hysteria dominated psychology in the late 19th century, giving way to afflictions like psychosis and neurosis, and more recently to bipolar disorder and asparger’s. This is a thumbnail sketch and I certainly need to elaborate it, but these afflictions could be seen as a map of the unresolved tensions within society. Moreover, popular remedies feedback on society, altering it. Thus, this Wall Street Journal article suggesting that Prozac impacted our way of thinking about the economy, exacerbating the bubble.

Curtis’s documentary also reminds us how the documentary has become a major cultural form in network culture, something I cover in my article on the immediated now.

DHS Page on Fusion Centers:

What sort of response should the Netlab have to fusion centers?