[James Bridle being all super-smart and stuff. -egg]

I first encountered Superstudio at the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm a few years ago, in a recreation of the seminal “New Domestic Architecture” show held at MoMA in 1972. Superstudio were a radical architectural practice who operated in Italy in the late 60s and 70s, proposing a series of vast, impossible conceptual interventions – a rejection of architecture’s decorative concerns in favour of a total architecture, a “total urbanization”, best characterised by the extensive sketches and models for the “Continuous Monument”.

Beginning in 1969, the Continuous Monument proposed a gridded structure which would eventually come to encompass the entire earth, a seamless surface laid over everything, a place of nomadism and possibility and an eversion of the domestic into the public. Long heralded as forerunners of architects-of-scale such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, they have also always seemed to me to be prefiguring the network: a world-scale communication system on and within which we all dwell now. The photocollages, which I have been somewhat obsessively reproducing in Google Earth, also seem to point towards a land art for the internet, of which I have written previously.

via How to see through the Cloud | booktwo.org.

[Wow, turns out to be a really interesting character. -egg]

Ladar Levison was Edward Snowden’s email provider, until the FBI came calling. For the first time, he talks about his odd childhood and the new snooping capability he thinks the feds have developed.

via The Real Story of Lavabit’s Founder.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-done-deal/2011/09/02/gIQAsAqjwJ_blog.html

[Über-geeky and totally fascinating rant against word processors and WYSIWYG. I got to it via http://bit.ly/19xjVeG — the original rant is better, but the comments thread is *fantastic*. -egg]

The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. That is the claim I shall defend below. It will probably strike you as bizarre at first sight. If I am against word processors, what do I propose: that we write in longhand, or use a mechanical typewriter? No. While there are things to be said in favor of these modes of text preparation I take it for granted that most readers of this essay will do most of their writing using a computer, as I do. My claim is that there are much better ways of preparing text, using a computer, than the word processor.

via Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient.

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible.

I also recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer or local network of computers from the Internet. (The name comes from the literal gap of air between the computer and the Internet; the word predates wireless networks.)

But this is more complicated than it sounds, and requires explanation.

…

Since working with Snowden’s NSA files, I have tried to maintain a single air-gapped computer. It turned out to be harder than I expected, and I have ten rules for anyone trying to do the same:

via Schneier on Security: Air Gaps.

The honest faith of insiders that their bureaucratic mission is true and critical is no substitute for credible evidence. A dozen years of experience has produced many public overstatements and much hype from insiders, but nothing to support the proposition that the program works at all, much less that its marginal contribution is significant enough to justify its enormous costs in money, freedom, and destabilization of internet security. No rational cost-benefit analysis could justify such a leap of faith.

via Fact: the NSA gets negligible intel from Americans’ metadata. So end collection | Yochai Benkler | Comment is free | theguardian.com.

Deadpan Comedy: Surreal Drawing of a Dystopian Future by Samuel Gomez | Colossal.

Hand-Cut Paper Microorganisms by Charles Clary | Colossal.

While the 40-year-old Danish sculptor hasn’t had an exhibition since last spring, his work is so odd that we couldn’t help but point it out.  Menné takes the very broad ideas of process and change and incorporates them into his installations. He pairs single materials–wax, stone, plastic–with machines that undergo repetive motions so that the objects get warped and molded over time. For example, he had one machine slowly poor acid onto a piece of stone, so that it eventually whithered into a fragmented pebble. Sort of like watching erosion happen in real-time.

via Sculptures By Henrik Menné Aren’t Finished Until They Get Destroyed | The Creators Project.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/why-americans-love-guns/

“The Hollywood version of the Wild West had a huge impact,” Bell says. “One of the most shocking things in the Vietnam War, which was all run by Baby Boomers, is we had an actual Army edict that we wouldn’t fire unless we were fired upon. Well, that came straight out of a diet of Westerns that came out after mothers got upset about all the violence on TV. All of a sudden we get into a war, and they’re saying we can’t fire unless we’re fired upon? That’s straight out of the myth of the Old West, but it never happened in the Old West. It’s a dangerous belief.”

Still, our frontier roots mean that Americans may never give up the idea that we’re all gun-wielding cowboys who can make it on our own in the wild.

“Other cultures didn’t have the resources of land that the United States did,” Richardson says. “That’s one of the many things that set apart the American experience from, say, Europe or Asia. Of course, ‘open land’ is a huge misnomer, as if the land was not in use, as if there were not people here. But still this notion of the availability or the supposed availability of land certainly determined America’s arc. It determined American history.”