The following video is a short excerpt from a PBS documentary about the history of blue jeans.
Where did blue jeans begin? This iconic American garment can be traced to fabrics woven in India, France and Italy and a knowledge of indigo dying from Africa and brought to the colonies in the trade of enslaved people. Blue jeans’ roots are as deep and entangled as the nation’s.
Artist Sarah Ross created some interesting designs of clothes to circumvent cities’ hostile architecture:
Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
From a short article by Jan-Jaap Oerlemans on the privacy risks of automated open source intelligence:
[T]raditional OSINT has evolved into a professional and intrusive practice. With the use of tools hundreds of online sources can be queried simultaneously. These sources are diverse and can range from publicly available data on social media services, to location data generated by advertisements on apps on mobile phones, to leaked user data. Automated OSINT interferes with the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data more seriously than before.
The current move towards vaccination certificate mandates risks excluding certain people. As Alyna C Smith, Deputy Director at PICUM, explains this approach for increasing vaccination rates risks having other side-effects.
[T]hey also create a genuine risk of deepening mistrust and exclusion for undocumented people, while failing to address the underlying reasons for disparate vaccine uptake. Just as worrying, the heightened policing that inevitably comes with the widening use of certificates is likely to push undocumented people further into the margins.
The following is a video from Youtube channel Pop Culture Detective discussing the recruitment methods used by the US in Holywood films:
The sequel to the 1996 mega-blockbuster “Independence Day” hit theaters this summer but there was something a little strange about many of the trailers. What looks like a clever marketing campaign centered on joining the fictional “Earth Space Defense” was actually a cross-branded recruitment tool for the US Army. It’s part of a multi-million dollar joint advertising venture between 20th Century Fox and the United States Military.
In this older article from Dave Young he writes about the change of how we interact with computers and their filesystems. He notes how the hierarchical structure of files and folders is being replaced by an app-centric interface.
In the following scientific article on the use of data sets in AI research the authors found that there is an “increasing concentration on fewer and fewer datasets introduced by a few elite institutions”:
Two interesting quotes from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde concerning file-sharing in an article at TorrentFreak. First, he mentions how file-sharing “paved the way for legal streaming services”:
“File-sharing has definitely helped the rise of services like Spotify and Netflix,” Sunde told M3, noting that this wasn’t what the Pirate Bay team envisioned. Instead, they wanted to move the power back from large companies to individual artists.”
An interesting report on the deployments of biometric and behavioural mass surveillance in EU Member States was recently published. The report was commissioned by the commissioned by the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament.
In an opinion piece at The Financial Times, Izabella Kaminska compares the creation of Meta/Facebook’s metaverse to the creation of Las Vegas during The Great Depression of the 1930:
In the long run, if there is any moral to the Las Vegas story it’s that if you want to bootstrap a fantasy realm for the purpose of enriching a small elite at the expense of users, it helps to have a repressed, desperate and captured demographic within your proximity. With the metaverse it’s unlikely to be any different. You’re still going to be the product. You may be more accepting of it, but only because base reality is getting more and more like historic Boulder City by the day.