All power to the Soviets!

January 21, 2014 Leave a comment

Today was the 90th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Bolshevik revolutionary and first Premier of the Soviet Union.

Regular readers will know that I count myself a committed communist, so it will be no surprise to learn that Lenin is one of my political heroes. What he had – and what is missing from much of radical scene today – was an understanding that the central questions in any political struggle concern power – who has it, and what they do with it. “Who, whom?”, as Lenin succinctly put it.

This insight was given practical form in Lenin’s famous April Theses, delivered to the Bolsheviks on his return to Petrograd from exile in 1917. These few paragraphs, outlining a programme for action in the tumultuous days following the fall of tsarism, form one of the most influential documents in history – without them the October Revolution would not have happened, events in the 20th century would have taken a dramatically different course, and the world we know today would never have come into being.

I know from experience that my enthusiasm for Leninism is not widely shared, even on the left, which is perhaps understandable in light of how the Soviet Union developed in the years after Lenin’s death. It’s a shame though, because the key question that faces those of us trying to change the world today is the same one that the Bolsheviks grappled with a century ago – what force can we mobilise to counter the power of capital, which keeps us in subjugation? The answer, now as it was then, involves the organisation of the working class through a revolutionary party, a task that Lenin successfully accomplished. We could do worse than try to follow his example.

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2013: The Year in Review – Part 2: Blogging

December 31, 2013 Leave a comment

The less said about this the better probably; the liveliness and relevance of my limited output this past year can perhaps be gauged by the observation that close to half of the posts I did manage were either obituaries or concerned historical subjects.

Anyway, here’s our top ten posts by traffic:

  1. Second Life demographics – a brief review
  2. On Second Life and addiction
  3. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
  4. Second Life, with graphics, on the iPhone?
  5. Free Pussy Riot!
  6. Zombie Epidemiology
  7. There is no land beyond the Volga
  8. What’s up
  9. Ferrisburg, Vermont
  10. The Social Network

Mostly old favourites, though I was glad to see that our commemoration of the heroes of Stalingrad made the list, since I think it was our best post of the year. I was also encouraged by the popularity of our “Free Pussy Riot!” message, which, who knows, may have been the crucial factor that persuaded President Putin to pardon Nadezhda and Maria (though I’m not entirely sure that everyone who viewed the post after searching for “second life free pussy” would have been similarly satisfied).

We continue to draw traffic from all corners of the globe; a total of 100 countries from Albania to Vietnam. Here’s the top ten:

  1. United States
  2. United Kingdom
  3. Canada
  4. Germany
  5. Australia
  6. France
  7. India
  8. Brazil
  9. Italy
  10. Sweden

So what of next year? Will I keep this blog going? I think so. I know that I have a guaranteed audience; my future self. I always enjoy looking back at my old posts, and reading what I thought about this and that. I’m annoyed that I didn’t write more this year; there were lots of stories that should have inspired me, and would have fitted in well with our general themes – stuff like the Chinese going to the moon, legalised pot in Uruguay (and Colorado and Washington), the omission of internet addiction from the DSM 5 (though Internet Gaming Disorder did make it into section III) – but now I’ll have to trust my unreliable memory to record my reaction to these events. That should spur me to more activity, for a while at least.

And will there be more Second Life content, like I promised not so long ago? Unfortunately my tablet broke down shortly after I posted that, so things will be on hold until I get round to fixing it. Don’t hold your breath…

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2013: The Year in Review – Part 1: Culture

December 29, 2013 Leave a comment

After my poor showing on the cultural front in 2012 I set myself some rather modest targets for this year; every month get two new records, read two new books, and see two new films. How hard could that be? Harder than I thought evidently.

I didn’t do too badly with music, managing to acquire 30 albums, mostly new stuff, and getting along a few live shows too.

Here’s this year’s mix tape (and here it is on Spotify, with a couple of substitutions for tracks that aren’t available):

Untitled 28 – The Twilight Sad (Killed My Parents and Hit the Road)
Nil – The Twilight Sad (No One Can Ever Know)
Holy – Frightened Rabbit (Pedestrian Verse)
Xcommunication – My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (I See Good Spirits And I See Bad Spirits)
Girls Are The New Boys – Saloon ((This Is) What We Call Progress)
Partners in Crime – The Strokes (Comedown Machine)
Subway – Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Mosquito)
S.O.S. In Bel Air – Phoenix (Bankrupt!)
Husbands – Savages (Silence Yourself)
Magic Bullet – Wire (Change Becomes Us)
W/ Glass In Foot – Guided By Voices (English Little League)
Turn Each Other Inside Out – Primal Scream (More Light)
I Sat By The Ocean – Queens of the Stone Age (Like Clockwork)
Bad For My Body – Deap Vally (Sistrionix)
Bagboy – Pixies (Bagboy)
Tomorrow Tomorrow – Eleanor Friedberger (Personal Record)
Athsma Attack – The Fiery Furnaces (Gallowsbird’s Barkl)
Navy Nurse – The Fiery Furnaces (Widow City)
Canary Island – Houndstooth (Ride Out The Dark)
Morningstar – Grant Hart (The Argument)
Low F – Superchunk (I Hate Music)
Pandora’s Box – Throwing Muses (Throwing Muses)
Hitch – Speedy Ortiz (Major Arcana)
State Of Mine – Sebadoh (Defend Yourself)
Joan Of Arc – Arcade Fire (Reflektor)
Opiates – Throwing Muses (Purgatory/Paradise)
No Shelter – Blouse (Imperium)
Turning Violent – The Flaming Lips (The Terror)
I Need My Girl – The National (Trouble Will Find Me)
Only Tomorrow – My Bloody Valentine (mbv)

I’d have to admit that my musical tastes haven’t changed much in the last 20 years, hence the somewhat retro look of the above selection. My favourite album of the year – Major Arcana by Speedy Ortiz – is a new band’s debut, but the sound is distinctly 90s. Similarly the concerts I attended – Pixies, The Breeders – had a definite nostalgic edge.

It’s downhill from here I’m afraid. I only managed eight full-length novels, though in my defence I would say that I was on a bit of a modernist binge, and books like Gravity’s Rainbow, To the Lighthouse and Umbrella take a while to get through. Rewarding though, and in particular I found Will Self’s tale of psychiatric exploration and wartime loss both structurally intriguing and professionally fascinating, which made it my favourite read this year. In lieu of serious literature I did consume a lot of shorter pieces; reviews, essays, medical and political articles, and rather too many blog posts and other bits of online trivia. I like to think that this is a reflection of the fragmented nature of contemporary cultural discourse, but it probably has more to do with my ageing brain’s declining attention span.

My cinematic experience was similarly underwhelming; I just about managed one film a month. Behind the Candelabra was probably the best of these, and I also liked Before Midnight, though it wasn’t quite as enjoyable as the previous instalments in the series.

So, pass marks for music, but could do better for books and movies. Will things improve over the next twelve months? I’m not sure that I’ll see more films, since I seem to have lost my old cinema habit, but I have bought a few volumes that were on the critics’ “Best of 2013” lists, so I might catch up on current literary trends, albeit a year behind. We’ll see.

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The Spy in the Cab

December 9, 2013 Leave a comment

As if we denizens of Second Life were not paranoid enough already, we learned today that US and UK intelligence agencies have been covertly recording our in-world activity over the last few years.

In reports published in the Guardian and the New York Times, drawing on files provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, it was revealed that the spooks viewed virtual worlds like SL and World of Warcraft as a “target-rich communication network”, which could be used by terrorists and subversives as a tool to plot the overthrow of Western civilisation. At one point “so many C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life … that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions”, and “while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications”.

Interestingly, while Blizzard have denied they were aware of the WoW snooping, both Philip Rosedale and the current Linden Lab management declined to do likewise when invited to comment by the NYT, which also reported that Cory Ondrejka, then Chief Technology Officer at LL (and also apparently “a former Navy officer who had worked at the N.S.A. with a top-secret security clearance”) had “visited the [NSA’s] headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members”.

I used to believe that no one would ever bother to trawl through the minutiae of SL interaction looking for subversion, but it seems that my faith in the anonymity of the virtual crowd has been badly misplaced. It’s certainly made me think about some of the political conversations I’ve had with people in SL over the years, which, for all I know, may have triggered all sorts of automated warning bells, and landed me on some agency’s watch list. Scary stuff. I’ll certainly be more circumspect in the future.

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Nelson Mandela RIP

December 6, 2013 Leave a comment

I’m not going to try to summarise Nelson Mandela’s many contributions to the progress of humanity; that’s been well covered elsewhere, though it should be noted that much of the mainstream media have presented a rather toned-down take on Mandela’s politics, glossing over his more radical side. More than a few of the world leaders now rushing to eulogise Mandela have more in common with his oppressors than the man whose legacy they seek to appropriate.

Mandela’s passing has reminded me once again what a long time ago the 1980s were; looking back at some of the political questions that seemed so important to me in those days – the fight against apartheid, the Cold War, the war in Ireland, and no doubt others I’ve long forgotten – it seems like another planet. On the other hand, the fundamental injustices that underlay the struggles we were involved in back then are still around today; some of them in new forms, but others depressingly familiar.

It can seem that the fight to make a better world is endless, and that our foes hold all the advantages, but the greatest lesson that Mandela taught us was the necessity of taking the long view; it may take decades, and at times things might seem hopeless, but history is on the side of progress, and we will win in the end.

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Once more unto the breach

November 30, 2013 Leave a comment

Back at the start of the month I renewed my SL premium membership, for about $80 (though it didn’t actually cost me any real money, since I never spend any of my monthly stipend, so I had accumulated enough Linden dollars to cover it), and for the last few weeks I’ve been wandering around the grid again, trying to get back into my virtual life after an absence of nearly two years.

I’d love to say that I’ve been as excited as I was when I first ventured into Second Life, over six years ago now, but sadly it’s all been somewhat underwhelming. This may partly be due to technical factors; I’m using the Lumiya viewer on a particularly cheap Android tablet, and the short draw distances and sluggish movement don’t make for a terribly immersive experience. Also, just about all the places I used to hang out seem to have disappeared, and the few friends I had are all long gone, so there’s no sense of familiarity.

I suspect though that the main problem is that, without the novelty and the hype of the early days, I’m coming face to face with the fact that virtual reality is actually fairly dull. I think that I’ve always sort of known that, but have been reluctant to admit it to myself, since it implies that this whole blogging project has been a complete waste of time.

Still, SLS is hardly the most egregious example of inefficiency in my life, so I guess I’ll keep plugging away. Who knows, I may stumble across something interesting again, and rediscover my joie de vivre virtuelle…

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First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait

October 31, 2013 Leave a comment

Sad news about Lou Reed this week. I have to admit that I’ve never been a great fan of Reed’s post-Velvets work – I have a copy of Transformer of course, but it’s on vinyl, so I haven’t listened to it for years – but The Velvet Underground & Nico is still one of my all-time favourites. I’m especially fond of I’m Waiting for the Man, which always reminds me of the one and only time I bought dope in NYC (at Washington Square Park rather than uptown), when I managed to score $20 worth of the city’s finest cardboard.

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CD

October 16, 2013 Leave a comment

So here we are at post number 400. Looking back over the six and a half years it has taken us to get this far, I can’t avoid noticing that we have strayed somewhat from the purpose we outlined in our very first post:

My intention is … to wander around the likes of Second Life and report back on what I find, enlightening readers with erudite comments on the interaction that occurs there.

Regular readers will recall that the main reason for our recent lack of SL-related content is that my desktop computer is far too ancient to run the current iteration of the viewer. It’s about 18 months since I resolved to get a new(er) box, but I haven’t got around to it yet, partly because I’m too cheap to buy a brand new machine, and too lazy to order and fit the parts to upgrade my old one, but mostly because I never actually use my desktop these days, as my IT needs are all satisfied by my smartphone, from the comfort of my couch.

I had been waiting for Linden Lab to release an iPhone viewer, but there were no signs that was ever going to happen, so last week I finally lost patience, bought myself a cheap Android tablet, installed TPV Lumiya, and got myself back on the grid:

image

This set up is less than perfect; although Lumiya does have a fairly decent 3D mode the draw distance isn’t great, and it tends to slow down alarmingly if there are more than a couple of other people about. It’s hard to go to specific places too, since it isn’t possible to type in coordinates directly; instead one has to acquire and click on an SLURL via the web, which is a bit of a hassle. (Of course I haven’t bothered to RTFM, so there might be an easier way to get around; if anyone knows, please enlighten me.)

Nevertheless we are, potentially, back in the virtual world business; look out for some SL updates in the weeks ahead, before my attention inevitably wanders…

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My God Is The Sun

October 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Normally around now is when we start posting gloomy pieces about the falling leaves, the lengthening nights, and the looming onset of yet another brutal North European winter (usually shoehorning the change of season into some clumsy metaphor for the dread of mortality), but this year my characteristic summer contentment has persisted well past August for the first time in while, and I’m actually feeling fairly upbeat about the coming months.

This may be because I had a relatively straight-edge summer – I didn’t sign the pledge or anything, but I did largely eschew intoxication in favour of healthy outdoor pursuits. Back in high school they told us that a natural high was sweeter than any drug, and while I probably wouldn’t go that far, I will say that it was different, and it’s certainly left me in a better physical shape than I’ve been for ages. Perhaps it’s this echo of youthful vitality that’s allowing me to face the winter without the gnawing subconscious fear that I won’t see the spring, or it could just be that I spent enough time in the open air to be healed by the fire from above.

Either way, I can feel my natural slothfulness reasserting itself, so I expect I’ll soon be slipping into my default winter mode of minimal exertion and comforting overconsumption, and undoing all the good work I did over the summer. On the positive side this should mean that I have time to devote to more cerebral pursuits, like reading and watching movies, or even blogging, so there might be a little more activity in this space than there has been of late.

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September 11th 1973

September 11, 2013 Leave a comment

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the US-backed military coup in Chile, which overthrew the left-leaning government of Salvador Allende and ushered in the brutal rule of General Augusto Pinochet. The suffering endured by opponents of the junta in the years that followed has been well documented, but despite this Pinochet escaped justice, thanks to his friends in the West.

Still, it’s heartening to know that workers in this country were on the right side, even if the government was not; while Pinochet was praised by the powerful for his early adoption of monetarist policies, weapons shipments to his regime were stopped by union action. Many Chilean refugees were welcomed into working-class communities and some remain here to this day – I count their children among my friends. The memory of that solidarity will continue to inspire long after the dictators are forgotten.

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