Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Google Has Been Tracking Just About Everything We Buy Online

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Polls Wrong Again: Is There Any Pattern Here?
… if to constituent power there correspond revolutions, revolts, and new constitutions, namely, a violence that puts in place and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is necessary to think entirely different strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that has only been knocked down with a constituent violence will resurge in another form, in the unceasing, unwinnable, desolate dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, between the violence that puts the juridical in place and violence that preserves it.

A form-of-life is that which ceaselessly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself to live, without negating them, but simply by using them.

Because power is constituted through the inclusive exclusion of anarchy, the only possibility of thinking a true anarchy coincides with the lucid exposition of the anarchy internal to power. Anarchy is what becomes thinkable only at the point where we grasp and render destitute the anarchy of power.

… there is form-of-life only where there is contemplation of a potential. Certainly there can only be contemplation of a potential in a work. But in contemplation, the work is deactivated and rendered inoperative, and in this way, restored to possibility, opened to a new possible use. That form of life is truly poetic that, in its own work, contemplates its own potential to do and not do and finds peace in it. The truth that contemporary art never manages to bring to expression is inoperativity, which it seeks at all costs to make into a work.

The Arcanum of politics is in our form-of-life, and yet precisely for this reason we cannot manage to penetrate it. It is so intimate and close that if we seek to grasp it, it leaves us holding only the ungraspable, tedious everyday. It is like the forms of the cities or houses where we have lived, which coincide perfectly with the life we have frittered away in them, and perhaps precisely for this reason, it seems suddenly impenetrable to us, while other times, at a stroke, it is collectively innervated and seems to unveil to us its secret.
Agamben, The Use of Bodies

Police investigating terrorism funding have dismantled multiple layers of an organised crime syndicate that allegedly imported more than seven tonnes of illegal tobacco worth $9 million, with the arrest of eight men across south-west Sydney. Strike force investigators descended on ...


Incentives Work as brewery offers free beer for info on stolen van 42 minutes later it was located.l


Game of Thrones finale: rogue water bottles and a record number of viewers


Over 1 million Australians tuned into Foxtel to watch the GoT saga draw to a close, but two mistakes had fans fuming.
 “Still, while Ms. Sorokin made excuses for her actions, she did not apologize for her character: “I’m not a good person.”” (NYT)



Skunkworks: Inside the Innovation Labs of 3 Fortune 500 Companies



  • At the Facebook AI Research lab, the online publisher is teaching robots how to learn. It promises to share the results with its friends….
  • Levi’s Eureka Innovation Lab in San Francisco uses lasers, pigments, and ingenuity to keep the jeansmaker technologically fashion-forward…
  • At the Pittsburgh-area test track of Argo AI, majority shareholder Ford is running its first self-driving cars through their paces….






The Internet Is Fragmenting And Information Is Being Balkanized. Here’s How

A separate internet for some, Facebook-mediated sovereignty for others: whether the information borders are drawn up by individual countries, coalitions, or global internet platforms, one thing is clear – the open internet that its early creators dreamed of is already gone. – BBC


Google Has Been Tracking Just About Everything We Buy Online


You know how many vendors want us to leave email addresses when we buy online? Well, Google knows all about that. It says it doesn’t do anything with the data. Maybe! “Google offers users a compromise that involves trading products and web services in exchange for data that the company will collect through a variety of means you may not know about and have little to no control over. That data is then used to help Google target ads, a division of its business that’s largely responsible for it becoming one of the most valuable corporations on Earth.” – The Verge 


In the last decades of the 19th century, séances abounded, and austere sects speculated about geology. Darwin’s world was awash with spiritualized  science  


It’s Almost Impossible To Tell If Your iPhone Has Been Hacked Vice

 BuzzFeedNews: “…Thanks to its open, freewheeling public platform, and stance on free speech, Twitter has been a hothouse for ginning up disinformation, harassment, andoutrage. A lot of these problems were caused, the company’s leadership believes, by product decisions made early in its existence. And in very Silicon Valley fashion, the San Francisco–based company is now trying to solve these institutional problems with product fixes, without killing its platform’s open, real-time magic. But it isn’t exactly sure what those fixes are, and it knows that massive changes to its product, rolled out widely, might even make things worse. So, yes, the company is fundamentally overhauling its product, but it’s starting with baby steps on twttr…”

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