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POPSArtist as Public Servant A successful artwork is one that somehow causes that audience to experience a shift in perception. With this understanding, I was able to modify my orientation from that of an artist creating objects for consumption to that of an artist working as a public servant to create experiences that change people’s ideas of what it means to be a community. agree?/disagree?
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POPSComcast: "The Patriot Act" Mandates We Need Your SSN? (cont.) As you can see in the transcript I attached, she referred me to their legal department. I actually asked for the phone number five to ten seconds before she closed the chat. But when I viewed the chat transcript it says the chat was closed before I asked. That is a neat trick. Can what she told me actually be true? …I don’t believe requires me to provide my SSN just to get Internet service. I think the Comcast rep somehow thinks that Comcast falls under the "Know Your Customer" clause of the Patriot Act. As far as I understand it, that only applies to financial companies or financial intermediaries, neither of which I believe Comcast qualifies as.
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POPSIts OK, get it all out... OK, this boggles my mind, they're outright saying that they are not going to read or respond anyhow, so yeah, go ahead, just get it out of your system...
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POPSWhy the walmart hate? This was clipped from the comments of a consumerist.com article that linked to a video showing the walmart as a virus.
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POPSHow to Kill LOLCats ComplaintRemover is one of the newer entrants into the business of controlling negative content about individuals and businesses on the Web. To point out the problems with the service, Consumerist asks them to remove LOLCats from the Internet. Funny stuff ensues.
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POPSCome See The REAL New China! Jia Zhangke looks at what's really there, rather than what he wants to see. That's something more people should do. On the one hand, he doesn't flatter global capitalism, but he's not blind to the essential progress that China has made either. China's underground auteur may well be a better anthropologist than entertainer. Although his movies sometimes dwell on the mundane to the point of being unwatchable, they are invaluable documents on the true nature of China's modernization. So few people understand what the "New China" is, but it's all here for anyone who bothers to look. He is the definitive realist of his generation, and a strikingly insightful observer of the human condition. His quotes throughout the article are all gems, but too numerous to clip.
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POPSHow Advertising Manipulates Our “Caveman” Brains (& How to Resist) Fortunately, there are ways to go about PROOFING YOUR BRAIN. 1. Change your mindset to “postmore” by challenging culture’s ingrained assumption that “more” of everything is automatically better. 2. Grow your gratitude. Our poor, starved, frozen ancestors would cry tears of joy if they suddenly landed in our culture of abundance. Fostering our appreciation of this bounty can also block the consumerist “cool” pressure to deride so many of our fine, workable possessions as “so last year”. 3. Be enough. We’re constantly told that we aren’t rich enough, glam enough, cool enough, networked enough, etc. This has a powerful insidious effect on our primitive, socially competitive brain circuits. It’s like a toxic substance that turns rational brains into needy toddlers wanting “more, more, more!
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POPSSad Truth--War is here to Stay
Barbara Ehrenreich, in "Blood Rites," her extraordinary 1997 examination of the history of the passions of war, writes of the evolution of the phenomenon: "Meanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures." Saying this, I return to the figure of a million war dead in Iraq, pause in horrified awe that, one, it could be possible, and two, it hasn't made mainstream headlines, where big, round numbers normally scream with significance. The estimate, by the U.K. organization Just Foreign Policy and corroborated by the market research firm Opinion Research Business, extrapolates from data published just over a year ago in the respected British medical journal Lancet, which indicated a violent-death toll, as
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POPSiPhone Scalpers Get Their Comeuppance These "entrepreneurs" who show up at big tech launches and buy merchandise just to resell it are no better than scalpers, and I'm glad the scheme isn't paying off for them. Consumerist had a story earlier this week about a woman who paid $800 to skip to the front of an iPhone line, thinking she'd buy out the whole stock, and resell them... only to have her plans ruined by Apple's two-phone maximum. She lost the dough and I bet she hasn't even sold the two she did get. This is pleasing to me. That's what you get for trying to rip off gadget-fiending geeks! -David M. Ewalt
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