Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is reputed to be the best book ever written on Web 2.0. But why the strange silence on questions of copyright, privacy and ownership?

The computer inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of mankind's extinction. Iain Boal brings three critical histories of modernity's futuramas back down to earth

Courtesy of the Financial Times, the latest news on the financial sector's most self-allegorizing activity: death hedging.  Or more prosaically, the develpment of 'longevity derivatives' and associated indices, through which fund managers can hedge against the risk that people (not to speak of broker-dealers) might not die soon enough.  In this update, Deutsche Börse has introduced live (so to speak) data feeds from undertakers to find out the age of the bodies they bury.

Death data drive new market

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants
 

The emerging capitalist War On Global Warming concentrates on adapting technology and behaviour – particularly other nation-states’ – to mitigate environmental damage. Transformative technological and social innovation is better than meddling micro-action, argues James Woudhuysen

'Waves', writes Armin Medosch, 'are the sort of invisible work horses of electronic mass society, but the waves as such are generally ignored.' Here, in his catalogue essay for the show Waves which he co-curated with Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, (Riga, August, 2006), he explains how the concept of the show developed out of a desire to build a new media art discourse from the bottom up, starting with its two 'fundamental layers': code and (electromagnetic) waves.

Launched in July 2006, Norfolk Open Link is the largest community wireless broadband network in the UK and is apparently the only network in the UK that offers free mobile internet access for public sector employees, the business community and the general public.  The network covers much of Norwich city centre and other 'key' locations including the University of East Anglia and Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.  It is managed by Norfolk County Council and is fully funded by the East of England Development Agency (EEDA).  The following links describe the project in m

Another biopolitics update (and no, contra Foti/Dyer-Witherford there's nothing 'subversive' about it this time either).  Like many other employers, presumably, Swedish telecoms group Ericsson has decided that being 35 years old or more makes its workers useless to the dynamic, fast-moving etc etc hi-tech sector.  The difference is that Ericsson is actually trying to make them leave, using 'voluntary' redundancy packages.  (Imagine staying on in a company whose Human Resources director has effectively declared that not having grown up with a Playstation and a

If his controversial Gaia theory claimed to offer a holistic vision of planetary self-regulation, James Lovelock’s answer to global warming is anything but. Advocating a return to nuclear power, energy isolationism for Britain, and meat cultures grown in vats, his theories sound more cold war than new age. Interviewing him this January, novelist James Flint sampled the fall-out from an avenging Gaia

Andrew Goffey reviews Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire by Luciana Parisi

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting