Posts by Russell Brown
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This seems the perfect place to post the recent BBC Imagine documentary: 'Ai Weiwei: Without fear or favour'.
It's here in full on YouTube:
Ai Weiwei is an extraordinary man -- he seems to virtually define what an artist is.
I was struck by the way I liked every single work in the film, from his early New York street photography to the sculptures and Beijing's "birds nest" Olympic stadium. Absolutely inspiring, in both aesthetic and political terms.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Laurence Millar,
Would love to watch the Media7 show this week, but sadly the wise folk at TVNZ tell me that “This Video is only available within New Zealand due to International Rights Agreements”
Which shouldn’t be happening, but sometimes does. I’ve notified the appropriate people.
It’ll also end up on YouTube, hopefully – although I see last week’s ep still isn’t there.
How much do you get for the international rights Russell?
Giggle.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Kracklite,
Anyway, I’m not saying that such simpleminded thinking as I have seen elsewhere is happening here, but please keep it in mind when following through with the implications…
Of course. Good call.
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Muse: TV Review: Good Gods Almighty!, in reply to James Griffin,
We did, however, talk about the acid-rock group Ragnarok because, quite frankly, when you're dealing with Norse Gods in New Zealand, how can you not?
You guys are awesome.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I count wet liberals, moderate liberals, centrists, moderate Euro-style Tories, and libertarians among my inner circle of friends. Yet we never let our political beliefs get in the way of our friendship, because for the most part we have too much intellect to let it derail. And we all manage to poke fun at Tea Party nutbars while we’re at it.
This is Craig and I. We might go hammer-and-tongs online occasionally, but we are friends in the real world. Although, ironically, we only became friends via the internet.
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Muse: TV Review: Good Gods Almighty!, in reply to BenWilson,
I do…I was just reading about Ragnarök and realized it ends with a big flood too. Doh!
Because I'm like that, when I saw "Ragnarok", I thought of the New Zealand acid-rock band from the 70s. Who are actually on MySpace.
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Speaker: What PACE actually does, in reply to jessica scott,
I was told that if I thought I could find work, then I shouldn’t be allowed on the dole. The benefit was there only for people who had absolutely no other options, and was not a stop-gap. I was also told very angrily that I wasn’t allowed on the PACE scheme as I didn’t have a proven record of working as an artist- I had graduated a few months before hand.
Luckily I moved flats and therefore moved to a different WINZ zone and was given a much nicer case worker. I think I was on the dole for a few months and eventually got work in a gallery under the taskforce green scheme, which was brilliant.
Um, all of this is lunatic.
The dole ideally is a stopgap, to tide you over until you find work.
And the “proven record” thing is pure bullshit. The Work & Income website says it’s for people “willing and able” to pursue a career in the arts.
It’s frightening how much the case worker lottery can dictate your experience.
But also: good old Taskforce Green.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
It seems to me, after observing Assange for a while and confirmed by so many of the indicators in that interview Mark links to above, that here is a case of Aspergers.
Yes, me too, but it seemed to be overdoing it to put it in the review. I do think it has shaped my view of him somewhat. Not least in that I see personal tics I've learned not to encourage in my own kids.
He also reminds me of the young hacker types I'd occasionally interact with as a computer journalist: absolutely convinced of their own rectitude even when they did really stupid things.
A brilliant hacker, unusual relationships with people, inability to read social cues, doing the logical but not always advisable thing, infuriating his supporters. Supremely confident that he is right but a bit paranoid. Puzzled by the fall out.
I think inability to anticipate or empathise with the actions of others is in there too. His "they have to be punished" response when the NYT didn't do the "right" thing was completely OTT. But, hey, those people did the wrong thing.
There's some discussion upthread about modelling everything as a cryptographic problem. Assange seems to approach problems this way quite often -- including via quantum physics. The problem is, like quantum physics, this doesn't always work in meatspace, which is populated by people who don't do what they're supposed to.
There is actually ASD all over this. Bradley Manning doesn't seem neurotypical, and Adrian Lamo is Asperger. The hacker kids behind Anonymous, who knows?
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At the end of it he talks about going back to his job as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. But that’s not going to happen now.
Wowzers. Although hardly surprising from the criminal enterprise that is the Russian government.
I'm hoping he hasn't got a whole lot of stuff in Moscow that he can't collect now.
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Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Don Christie,
The HuffPo reference was tongue in cheek (although if direct payment to writers is an issue most blogging sites would be seen as invalid) – the point being that the Internet has been more effective than the NYT.
I’m not sure even that’s true in a retail news sense. My guess is that most people have consumed these stories via conventional news outlets.
I was thinking about this today, watching Wikileaks fire out Egypt-related cable links on Twitter. It’s actually quite a hard and unsatisfying form of news to consume – you don’t know anything about who’s writing, what the context is, what the public position was, what happened next, etc.
I’m honestly not trying to pick a Wikileaks/Internet-vs-MSM argument here. But I was surprised in reading the book at the way nearly all the value in Cablegate and the war diaries was added by the partner media organisations. They developed and wrote the stories (sometimes, not necessarily the right stories) and especially in the case of The Guardian, created new ways of telling them.
By contrast, Wikileaks has a brilliantly sophisticated system for soliciting leaks, and a pretty good one for presenting source material – but it’s obvious to me now why the earlier solo efforts didn’t make as much impact as they might have. The example cited in the book was ‘Collateral Murder’ vs Sy Hersh’s superb reporting on Abu Ghraib.
Anyway thanks for the argument. I’m finding it quite helpful!