“Is SEO Killing America?”
Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, and director of engagement for Expert Labs. He was the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010, and won the CampaignTech Innovator award in 2011.
Johnson’s combination of experience as a developer, working in politics, entrepreneurism, and non-profit work gives him a unique perspective on media and culture. His life is dedicated to giving people greater access to the truth about what’s going on in their communities, their cities and their governments. He still claims that he learned all he needs to know from a two year tour as the late-shift waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, GA.
“Everyone knows Andy Warhol’s quip that someday everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Behind the humor—or perhaps I should say “behind the cynicism”—of that remark is the dark prospect of significant cultural diminishment. A quarter-hour’s fame is not fame. On the contrary, it is the demotic parody of fame; it is mere celebrity. It is worth pausing to consider how much of our cultural life—even in its most august precincts—is caught up in the voracious logic of celebrity. It is a logic that builds obsolescence into the banner of achievement and requires that seriousness abdicate before the palace of notoriety and its sound-bite culture.”
— Roger Kimball
(Source: weeklystandard.com)
(Source: veganlove)
(Source: sisterpearl)
“What we’ve seen over the last 30 years is a war on the human imagination. That’s the other starting point for this book—that in 2008 we had this crash, and all these assumptions we’ve been told we’ve had to accept for 30 years came crashing to the ground along with the market. One of them is the assumption that markets are actually self-sustaining. Obviously not true. Another one was that the people running them are competent. For years we were told that they aren’t very nice people—they’re greedy bastards, actually—but they know what they’re doing. All other systems just don’t work. These guys are incredibly bright, they’re incredibly competent. No, it turns out actually that they don’t even understand the working of their own financial instruments, or as far as they do, they’re engaged in scams. They trashed the entire system. Assumption number three is that all debts ought to be repaid. Actually, no, debts don’t really need to be repaid, because AIG, who owes money, can wave a variety of different magic wands and debts can be made to disappear. Once you understand that the narrative we’ve been handed has been false, you’d think this would be the moment when you start thinking about larger questions: Why do we have an economy? What is debt? What is money? How could these things be organized differently? What do we need to keep and what do we change? You would think this would be the moment for international discussion about the basic assumptions that we’ve been making, and it seemed for about two weeks that it was going to happen.”
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David Graeber (via azspot)
BUT BUT BUT CAPITALISM IS OBVIOUSLY MORALLY SUPERIOR!!!!!
(via khealywu)
The Five Album Challenge
Having access to as much media as possible all at the same time is eroding my attention span. In an effort to be more present, I’ve challenged myself to have only five albums on my iPod Nano at a time. It’s been an interesting way to keep me from feeling overstimulated and frantic. Here are the five albums I’m listening to right now.
“While Gingrich and Santorum don’t agree on whether the 58th Speaker of the House ever favored cap-and-trade legislation, they do share a common disdain for the Environmental Protection Agency. If he is elected president, Gingrich said he would abolish the EPA and replace it with something he calls the Environmental Solutions Agency. He also said he would fundamentally overhaul the Department of Interior and on his first day in office, he would sign an executive order approving the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.”
While I generally agree with Chris Hedges in his comments about the events in Oakland on January 28th, these are some powerful images showing the continued disproportional force used by police departments across the country.
Not the Middle East. Not Europe. This is here in America.
