Today, I had the honour of delivering the keynote lecture at BobCatsss, an annual nternational conference on information management. The conference’s main venue is the beautiful KIT, our national colonial museum. My lecture was titled ‘Privacy is the cornerstone of personal safety’; it’s about counterterrorism surveillance, general data collection, the lack of data hygiene and medical hacks. You can download the slides here (PDF, 1.4 MB).
Something bugs me about the public comments after Steve Jobs’ death. Yes, he had pancreatic cancer; yes, it was discovered at such an early stage that an immediate operation might have saved his life. Yes, Jobs initially refused the procedure: he abhorred the notion that somebody would open up his body and fiddle with his insides. Instead, he opted for a strictly vegan diet. That tidbit of news made him fodder for skeptics. Oh dear: yet another dumbo who believed [...] » Verder lezen »
[Translation of Fideel, which appeared in the newspaper 'Het Parool'.] Father Yaseen has a photo studio in Bagdad, where people have come for years and years to have their portrait taken. The pictures are oddly formal. For portraits of brothers and sisters, for instance, only three poses are available; in all three the brother sits in a chair, while his sister stands behind him. And photographing was never easy: the photographer may never touch the women, so that it could [...] » Verder lezen »
For years, it was unclear how the networking site Facebook makes profit. The amount of daily traffic a site generates weighs heavily in deciding the monetary worth of a web site, but invariably, there comes a time when actual revenue starts counting and mere ‘hits’ are no longer sufficient. How does Facebook earn its money? Advertisements that visitors can click on Facebook won’t do the trick: their range is far too generic. You’re never presented with ads that bear a [...] » Verder lezen »
(Article in the catalog of the ‘Embody’ exhibition by Chaja Hertog and Nir Nadler, Israel, 2008. I met Nir while I was a mentor at Das Arts, where I had co-assembled the block ‘Who is I?’. I fell in love with Nir’s work and we became friends, which is how I was introduced to his wife Chaja, whose work I found equally impressive. Thus, I gladly wrote something for the booklet publishe for their exhibition. // Bijdrage aan de catalogus [...] » Verder lezen »
[Originally published in Het Parool; translation by Anonymous, at Enturbulation.org.] The unexpected effect of the internet is, organizing becomes easy. The costs of gathering information and getting people together have been reduced alarmingly: no printing is required, no shipping, no “snowball” list of phone numbers, no member administration, no desk clerk. Apart from that, internet enables evenly distributed participation and variety in different kinds of contribution, without anyone having to direct, or plan or distribute tasks. Mary will start an [...] » Verder lezen »
Critique of Andrew Keen’s The cult of the amateur Deciding upon the manner of my response to Mr Keen’s book required much, much more time than composing the response itself. It’s truly seductive to be scathing about the The Cult of the Amateur. Making an inventory of the book’s sloppy argumentation, its fallacious reasoning, its myopic stance, its uncritical praise of copyright, its unwitting foot soldiery of the entertainment industry, its selective choice of facts and its misquotations would be [...] » Verder lezen »
[translation of my column for Het Parool: Kinderporno: niet bestrijden maar verstoppen of February 19, 2008.] Last year October, Dutch Parliament demanded that the Department of Justice would legally bind ISPs to implement a filter that would block sites containing child pornography. ‘Providers can no longer look the other way; they should be forced to take their social responsibility. It is an outrage that they don’t comply voluntarily,’ member of Parliament Van der Staaij said during the debate. (Webwereld, October [...] » Verder lezen »
And again, I find the Pink Ribbon campaign infuriating. Last year, after I had become acquainted with breast cancer firsthand, the campaign made me feel like a baby seal: I was treated as a cuddly doe-eyed pet that anybody who was half famous expressed their heartfelt concerns about, but who wasn’t allowed to utter a word herself. It was a glamour campaign from which stories about amputations, chemo, radiotherapy, forced menopause and – yuk! – loss, fear and death were [...] » Verder lezen »
by staff writer Karin Pankhurst Metaverse Messenger, March 21 2006 The sheer amount of casinos and clubs present in Second Life suggest that there is quite some money to be made by owning one. After all, a slot machine typically coughs up less dollars than it swallows, and additionally, popular places get so-called ‘presence money’ from the Lindens. However, most owners seem to operate at a loss. What’s more surprising: not all of them mind. As a poll conducted earlier [...] » Verder lezen »
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