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Small-time political feuds among inconsequential figures you elected.

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Local News

Artificial Familiarity

You're starving, alone, and scandalously dressed like a Communist superhero, but do you eat off the tree of hegemony and find yourself trapped by its tendril-branches?
You’re starving, alone, and scandalously dressed like a Communist superhero, but do you eat off the tree of hegemony and find yourself trapped by its tendril-branches?

Familiarity is a result of sedimented experience which, when functioning properly, allows us to move through life almost without conscious thought. It’s easy to pay complete attention to audiobooks while using dangerous woodworking tools when one is familiar with the shop and all the various material manipulations that take place there. This kind of situation, where the body performs in a familiar sphere, seems to lend more power to conscious thought and amplify concentration. Other familiarity-building routines for the body like yoga, martial arts, tantric sex, and sports are often purported to have this same effect. It should be no surprise, really, that kinetic engagement with the world should stimulate all parts of the body, including the brain.

In complement of kinetic familiarity there is artificial familiarity. You may have read other works by me or, in fact, read this same piece repeatedly. I do change, but with enough sedimented experiences of this change, reading something new I’ve written would still be a familiar experience. This is not a bad thing, but I can’t gesture, smile, or involve my body in this exchange. Granted, we are both performing familiar kinetic routines when I type and you click around with your mouse, but these are secondary nuisances to be done away with as quickly as possible, or so it would seem. I do not use a pen or a printing press, and you do not read paper because these impede artificial familiarity. On the surface, this is fantastic because I could never afford to print as many copies as this site distributes digitally. However, something very pernicious is going on, worthy of all the scare packed up in the word ‘artificial’. At the same time as the divorce of the familiar from the body deepens, artificial familiarity becomes more and more superficially like kinetic familiarity. Photographs become colored, move, then become three-dimensional, and bodily sensations which seem entirely kinetic are produced just by watching 3d blockbusters like Avatar. The impetus for this amplified artificial familiarity could be found in civilization’s lack of intimate naturalistic kinetic familiarity, or perhaps it has got something to do with the dualistic religious fetish for that immortal spirit outside of the body. We have, after all, told stories for as long as we’ve had words.

Augmented Reality, referring to future devices along the lines of automated navigation systems, is perhaps an overly optimistic phrase. Rather than augmenting and adding to the richness of life, as the woodworker listens to audiobooks while at work, Augmented Reality seems aimed at replacing as much kinetic familiarity with artificial familiarity as is technologically possible. Indeed, artificial familiarity may go much further than that, at which point it becomes true Artificial Familiarity or AF–which is how I would characterize Augmented Reality. It’s not hard at all to imagine that a sufficiently advanced AF device could completely replace the human capacity to become familiar with the world, which sounds like a horrifying proposition, but the human tendency is actually to dislike and fear the unfamiliar, so a device that would completely eliminate the unfamiliar would sell quicker than the iPhone. In short, kinetic familiarity’s being usurped by artificial familiarity, and AF systems are working on taking that over for you next. Things may very soon be much worse than Baudrillard, Heidegger, or Marx probably ever imagined. Move over, Constituting Yourself, hegemony’s got you all figured out and you don’t know how much you’d love to finally know what it is you love.

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Editorial Hate Law Local News Politics Status Quo

Christian Stork: The Megalomania of Aaron Swartz Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz


Massachusetts District U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (Courtesy: Wikipedia)
Massachusetts District U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

WASHINGTON — In a not-so-stirring defense of academic conglomerate JSTOR, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said of Aaron Swartz‘s offenses, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” While common sense and lore would tend to at least lend more sympathy to Robin Hood- or Jean Valjean-type characters, who might be at least functioning out of some concern for others, Ms. Ortiz remained steadfast in her pursuit of recent “an Hero” Mr. Swartz, trying to see him put in jail for potentially the rest of his life.

Over at WhoWhatWhy Christian Stork does a nice little breakdown of this U.S. attorney’s wading into murky waters of civil asset forfeiture, one particular case in which she agreed to help confiscate a rundown, mom-and-pop Massachusetts motel because because “from 2001 to 2008, .05 [percent of at least 125,000 visitors] were arrested for drug crimes on the property.” This was a theft just like Aaron Swartz’s. Except not it was not a theft in the high-minded name of educating the world’s downtrodden, but in that of fattening the pockets of law enforcement agencies, treating poor drug abusers as criminals, alongside those who might dare house them.

Mr. Stork paints a disturbing picture of a civil asset forfeiture system in which being in debt vis-a-vis a mortgage — meaning that a bank, and its lawyers, has some has some skin in the game — means that the owners of this motel would have been in an even better position to disavow their affiliation with three handfuls of guest drug offenses. But alas they ran out of lawyer money, and the government all at once took five decades of family property worth $1.5 million.

Mr. Stork also outlines a direct financial, not an external ethical, motive for law enforcement to take on these kinds of civil asset forfeitures. He cites the testimony of a DEA agent claiming that federal attorneys never go after anything with less than $50,000 in equity. Additionally, local law enforcement, for cooperating with the feds, can look to take home up to 80 percent of what was seized. That’s a major incentive to turn a blind eye to a violation of property rights. In fact it’s more of an incentive to turn a blind eye to property-rights violations than the Pirate Party ever had: It’s money straight to the bank!

The same prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz, who sought to lock up Aaron Swartz for his failure to respect property rights of the proprietors of academic information also sought to seize a family’s business because an extreme minority of their clientele used drugs. Mr. Stork’s article makes clear that this was ultimately the DEA’s initiative, with Ms. Ortiz simply acting as its lawyer. But that doesn’t change that this U.S. attorney lacks any consistency in her modus operandi. It’s pretty obvious that the low rates for staying at this establishment, Motel Caswell, made it an even more tempting target.

Ms. Ortiz’s office released a statement about the seizure, saying: “The government believed that this was an important case . . . because of the deterrent message it sends to others who may turn a blind eye to crime occurring at their place of business.” But Mr. Stork shows this is shmoax because local crime rates dictate that there would have been just as much of a rationale for seizing nearby Walmart, Home Depot, Applebees, Motel 6 and IHOP. But those are large businesses, and no matter how many people shoot up or each other inside, they’ll have the lawyers to keep the whomever or the DEA at bay.

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Editorial Hate Local Local News

Lebal Drocer, Inc. Purchases Human Being

RICHMOND, VA. — “We just seen the opportunity, and I couldn’t pass it up. I had to own a slave,” said Internet Chronicle Publisher Frank Mason, speaking to clerical staff and press called to a conference at 1000 Monument Ave. With Jeff Schapiro from the Times-Dispatch busily taking notes, Mr. Mason continued, lamenting that he could only purchase a worker’s mortal flesh, “his gametes but never his soul.” He emphasized every syllable with a bang on the marble table top.

“God ain’t legalized that yet,” said Mr. Mason with a dry, wheezing laugh, before ejecting a runny stream of “baccy” from between tarred lips into a spittoon two meters away, carved apparently from a human skull.

“See that spitoon over there?” he said, gesticulating for reporters and Richmond business leaders. “That there’s a Czech. You can tell by the shape of the unity lobe.”

Editor of Chronicle.su — and lifelong friend of Mr. Mason’s — Kilgoar Trout complained that he was given no say in the matter. “Frank wanted to own a human being, he said. He said it’d make him feel powerful. It does.”

Lebal Drocer is a limited liability corporation. In God’s new America NAFTA and GATT have railroaded the communist unions that used to effectively clip and snip job creators. Those days are over. 1999 and Seattle came and went.

And they lost.

In addition to having assembled Virginia business leaders and various Saudi investors to show off what he called “his new Chinese,” Frank Mason told Internet Chronicle enthusiasts present that he was encouraging staff to obtain concealed-carry permits as soon as possible, and to fasten as many rails as possible to any “tricked-out rifles” staff might have hoarded in secret rooms in their basements. “That one’s putting a clampdown on on everything holy. Like my grandpappy used to say, Jesus won’t tolerate no clip with less capacity than days in his months,” adding, “And I ain’t talking about February!”

It was at this point that Raymond H. Boone of the Richmond Free-Press left the conference.

Editor Kilgoar Trout shared his concern that the company was moving too quickly away from the model of documenting the most frightening developments in cybersecurity and the out-of-control, privately bought-out surveillance state. “With this new venture into human trafficking,” said Mr. Trout to the publisher of Southside’s Community Weekly, “Frank’s really hijacking my religion of peace.”