Ryan Fritsch • Utopos.net

Cycling is a Priority

Ryan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:01:47 -0400

This about sums it all up: best of intentions, terrible execution.

Back on the Hustings

Ryan — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:43:04 -0400

And starting tomorrow I'm pleased to say, as I'm working for quite an excellent advocacy organization! Back to the coffee grind.

The Junk Mail Effect

Ryan — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:12:51 -0400

Hot on the heels of LCBO's voluntary plastic bag ban, the coming into force of Canada's (flimsy) Do Not Telemarket List, and the accelerating pace of judgments against e-mail spammers, ForestEthics has released a report tabulating the carbon footprint of the American junk mail industry.

Their result? Junk mail’s contribution to climate change was calculated as the equivalent of running more than nine million cars for a year, the carbon output of seven combined US states, or the emissions generated by heating nearly 13 million homes for the winter. It is also responsible for the cutting of some 100 million trees.

Their solution? A Do Not Mail Registry, similar in design and intent of similar do not spam and do not telemarket exclusion registries.

I'm wary of the efficacy of such lists -- it would seem to provide unsavory operators with a list of confirmed good contacts -- but you can't deny the shift in mindset it represents against the nearly unrestrained right of commercial advertising to besiege our minds with a plague of fantasies.

What's next, a ban on outdoor urban billboard advertising?

Nostaligia: Lego

Ryan — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:37:59 -0400

Two of the best sets my parents bought me.

Last Day in the Library

Ryan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:00:19 -0400

I celebrated my last day in the library with the newly minted english translation of Vattimo's Art's Claim to Truth and this lovely view from the 12th floor of the Robart's Library. You can sit directly before this huge window with your feet up on the heat register below. Tourists love the view too. Over the last two months I've taken four shots of couples in front of the even bigger window in the "red apex" of the 13th floor.

Vattimo's book is an interesting way to conclude my research into law and aesthetics. He adopts the work of a 1950's philosopher named Pareyson who argues that 20th art achieved autonomy through the revelation that each great work resonates with a "law of the work" that simultaneously synthesizes the coherency in form and content of the work, and which necessarily exceeds itself and opens onto an interpretative multiplicity and iterability heralding the death of metaphysic foundationalism. So on the one hand you have this act of recognition of this conspicuously undefined and pneumenal "law of art" but also notions that this law is constituted to be endlessly interpreted. It strikes me as a bit of an odd mix of the ancient greek aesthetic of rhythm and Georges Bataille, and would seem to have something to say about HLA Hart's classic "rule of recognition" or Dworkin's "chain novel" as the basis for inscribing law's absent authority. None of that would be terribly convincing though, which is perhaps why Vattimo runs with this a bit more to ultimately create a mash-up between Heidegger's ontology and Gadamer's hermeneutics. Which, of course, I think Levinas exceeds with an ethics of imagination (after all, there's no ambiguity of authority in a state of perfect unknowability). But it might also be a convenient way of exploring the internecine step between being, language and sensing, which is the crux of Levinasian aesthetics as I understand it.

Anyway, thesis completion, here I come.

Numa Base Jelly Time Rickroll

Ryan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:15:45 -0400

Someone has done the academe of contemporary cultural study a great favor by creating an interactive timeline of memes on the internet.

Free Books

Ryan — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:09:12 -0400

40 places to find free, unabridged books online. Enjoy!

DIY subversion

Ryan — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:37:17 -0400

Here's one way to get off the grid:

Everyday is Cyclist Awareness Day

Ryan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:34:51 -0400

http://youtube.com/watch?v=oSQJP40PcGI&hl=en&fs=1

Everyday is Cyclist Awareness Day

Photoshop Diplomacy

Ryan — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:40:34 -0400

The revelation that Iran manipulated images of recent weapons exercises to include more missiles has predictably set alight the internet meme machine. I like this image in particular. It reminds me of a great Mark Twain quote: "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense."

Step 2: Put your kid in that box

Ryan — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:35:08 -0400

From the Smithsonian's Flickr stream of historic, public domain photos, a shot commemorating the end of being able to ship your children by postal mail:

Reads the caption: "This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples."

Reposted from BoingBoing.

Suits me

Ryan — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:03:16 -0400

Israeli suit manufacturer Bagir apparently clothes 1 in 6 European men. And now they are going to start doing it with plastic bottles.

Their new line of Eco-Gir clothing replaces wool and whatnot in favor of recycled plastic bottles. It takes about 30 pop bottles to fashion a complete suit that retails for $200. Lining and all.

No word on what happens if you put Mentos in the pocket of a suit made strictly from bottles of Diet Coke.

I do know what the Harry Rosen men's clothing store intends to do. So says Larry Rosen, Chairman and CEO, in response to my inquiry:

"Thank you for your e mail and for your patronage.

We will certainly be investigating the line of Eco-Gir clothing you mentioned, although we have no immediate plans to carry the Bagir line at this time. A new initiative we have undertaken is to ensure the recyclability of all our bags and boxes this year, as we do feel strongly about the environment."

Classifying Curiosities

Ryan — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:56:31 -0400

I try not to repost all the glorious tidbits of miscellany I enjoy everyday from BoingBoing, but this piece is too incredible not to pass along.

Takeshi Miyakawa Design has come up with the perfect metaphor for our digital age. In an era when everything is miscellaneous, what better conceptual container than a recursively self-deconstructing fractal cabinet of wonders to put them in?

Cabinets of curiosities (also known by their far superior German name, Wunderkammer)have a long history. They became popular during the renaissance as a way for the wealthy and educated to display their knowledge of the world. Acting as a sort of periodic table of the elements for class, owners would display their finest and rarest curiosities in the upper-most drawers and arrange them based on their relation to other objects, either according to popular pseudo-scientific concepts such as "the humors", Ptolemaic cosmologies, or even Goethe's geologic models of Europe.

Takeshi's cabinet is therefore the perfect contemporary inversion of this concept, having no particular beginning or end and thereby placing every object in an unmediated relation with the others.

Copyfight Update

Ryan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:59:37 -0400

Here is the one 12-minute presentation Canadians need to watch to inform themselves of the ongoing Canadian copyright "debate".

The Harper Conversatives have proposed new legislation that will make many non-commercial aspects of "fair use" illegal on the internet, restricting Canadian creativity, commentary, and parody.

Prof. Geist's argument is that harshly restrictive intellectual property laws inhibit collective creativity, hamper incentives to develop new business, distribution and monetization models, pander to narrow "old-media" interests, and put Canada at a competitive disadvantage. He makes his argument by debunking copyright "myths" including the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM, aka anti-circumvention) technologies that lock down legitimate non-commercial acts such as home recording; the validity of locking consumers to the manufacturers closed standard (which is also anti-competitive); and the inability of content producers to protect themselves and profit under more open regimes.

In effect, these proposals place a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of a minority few who simply can not be trusted to act in the public or cultural interest. Just last week, none other than Microsoft demonstrated this by declaring that it would no longer support its DRM-laden commercial music standard. Not only did this leave hundreds of thousands of honest consumers with worthless and unplayable music collections, it doubly punishes them for choosing to trust the corporation and buy their music rather than download DRM-free copies with the added flexibility to play on non-Microsoft music players and be sampled and remixed into new songs.

More info at Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Worldometers

Ryan — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:51:15 -0400

Watch the counter on human births tick by, a life a second, and tell me that Worldometers is anything other than an absolutely incredible website. It gives you an amazing sense of the living earth, its dynamism, and cumulative human activity by giving you something to sense. 6.6 billion is a big number, but it seems more tactile when watching the population ticker flit by. With every tick, I try to recall someone I know as if they were just being born. It is a heady experience to try and conceive of a life with every second, potential and actual lived experience and meaning compressed into a moment replaced only by the next and the next. What a wealth -- and what a burden. Probably your entire world will be exhausted in about 100 ticks. And for all that exhaustion, you then have to figure the sensation needs to be repeated another 66 million times before you've accounted for the human population of earth.

Try the same experiment with the other tracked objects. Testing the limits of the imagination to track the number of bikes produced in a minute (can you visualize 100 bikes as each pops into existence?) or the number of lightening strikes per second on earth (about 100) gives you a good sense of your sense of the earth, and your slice of it, on a daily basis.

The Spiritual Algorithm

Ryan — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:41:34 -0400

This is the first result of a Google Images search for "uncompromising beauty."

That's right -- it is the Excalibur 5, a window so convenient to wash that it truly is a beautiful thing. While grit and grime flit from this window like dandruff, the mind is set free to fret about other aesthetic matters. Such as the dangerous prevalence of order. Or the madness of having your wishes realized.

Now, changing the tense to create a non-existent word, "uncompromised beauty" nevertheless conjures the mien of courage precedent to any enduring existence. And indeed we find this:

This is no mere landscape though. It is framed by an advert which offers that "You Need Not Sacrifice Convenience For the Uncompromised Beauty This Parcel Presents!"

Google seems to have a curious privilege for confabulating beauty with "convenience" in one sense or another. It isn't clear which. Though in both examples it seems to be the convenience of having the time to think about things other than these beautiful things. In which case beauty would exist only to negate the things in which it is vested (things or concepts), and therefore exist effectively nowhere.

This is different from ascribing an "essence" to beauty as that which is uncompromising and uncompromisable. Essences have no home by definition, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they wouldn't find one in Google either. However, the twinge of melancholy in every beautiful object is that it is merely a trace or shadow of the beautiful essential potential. As a search engine, Google is a concept of concepts to which one would not be faulted for turning to divine hidden patterns. Can it be trusted to do so? In this case, Google seems to be up to something. There's a pattern displayed in these two images that seems to promote the value of convenience as pre-eminent to the essence of beauty. If we then search for the un-essence of beauty, what will we find?

Defining by negation, "compromised beauty" ranks this as the most representative image:

According to its parent website, this is an image from the 1990 Indian film "Haseena Atombomb". It is reviewed as "a masterpiece of gutter-trash-art. It is a breathtaking slice of the bizarre and the macabre as well as a searing sociopolitical indictment and commentary on a society gone haywire." The plot includes the following episode: "The film switches back to the present, and Atomic, having been rescued by Tubby on the emaciated Pegasus clone skips off homeward to enjoy her wedding to local stud, Cool Joe and village law enforcer who is one hell of a fellow. He also goes for white when it comes to transport - the four legged kind that is. Just as the marriage is about to be consummated the bliss is shattered as the vengeful goons who had been thrashed by Tubby return to satisfy their "animal lust"."

I'd say inverse Google is bang on. Atomically so.

Code / Law I

Ryan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:51:12 -0400

BoingBoing.com today has great fuel to fire the liberating relationship between language and computer code.

The first example from Penguin Publishing charges six authors with the task of writing "digital fiction" to tell stories in ways never before attempted. The authors take up the challenge through diverse means, such as using an interactive Google Map to confabulate physical location and narrative chaptering. It's a remarkable effect well beyond mere "set pieces". As we all commonly now see even our own cities and localities through the lens of the Google Map (I use it at at least three or four times a week to navigate Toronto) the effect brings the reader into a familiar (if not merely familiarly abstract) proximity with an otherwise unknown and distant space and time, and which need not necessarily be depicted in the story itself.

Then, in a particularly Perec-ian turn that is the literary equivalent of peeking in the neighbor's window, the reader can also click on the "green tabs" for descriptions, info, sidebars, images, and sounds peripheral to the main narrative yet -- by virtual of the underlying map -- are not devoid of context.

The second example on BoingBoing is an in-house production ("Gadget 13") that blends the classic gameplay of Breakout with a block of quoted text. By bouncing puck off paddle, the quote can be physically shaved of words in a visceral sort of textual deconstruction in which neither the author or the reader have complete control of a constantly shifting meaning.

All of this is interesting to me because it shows how computer code can be used to liberate accepted hegemony of textual production. Of which, as a lawyer and human rights advocate, I clearly have a vested interest in overcoming. The experience of a statute, for example, is entirely one-dimensional: utterly abstracted from its subjects, swaddled in a grammar of artifice and the arcane, disambiguated only where referenced and referring to a disembodied network of regulations and policy directives, requiring complex rules of procedure to interpret and determine, and therefore nearly inaccessible to most people. Consider instead the possibility of a "digital statute" -- a true "law code" -- which can embed all the reports relied upon by Parliamentary committee in promulgating the statute, or which features a "time slider" that allows you to scroll back and forth between revisions, or which allows the reader to click on a single word to bloom it into a "mind map" infographic that shows every instance of its use in Hansard or by NGO advocates.

Recognizing interpretive "Law 2.0" functions as the "official statute" relied upon by courts would go a long way to making it a truly public document. The potential as I see it is that experiments in language and code of this kind can liberate and make accessible the "meta text" of a statute beyond the highly trained lawyer-as-canton or the judicial interpreter as omnipotent gatekeeper. It does, in other words, facilitate a more immediate and indeed coherent connection -- just as in the Penguin Google Map story -- between the general and the specific, or between the rule, its expression and re-presentation in language, and its application to specific cases. Along with the infinite number of other "green tab" potentialities effaced by one-dimensional re-presentation.

Coherence is not overrated

Ryan — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:31:19 -0400

Since returning to civilian life two weeks ago I've been gleefully working on my thesis like a madman. It took almost a week and a half of steady work just to review all the notes I had accumulated from my last six months at McGill and during subsequent year and a half of articling and lawyering. Its pretty amazing to see it all come together, whatever it is. Tables of Contents can be such thrilling and reassuring beacons, but also somewhat melancholy. I unfortunately did have to ditch the rhizomaic double-helixical structure I imagined the thesis taking in the interests of actually finishing the god damn thing.

I make a lot of hay out of Chris Jordan's 2006-2007Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait series. Based on statistical data, he uses incredibly oversized canvases to show the "simultaneity" of otherwise discrete every day acts, such as flying in a plane or disposing of a plastic bottle. In our ego-centric world, these acts are often only experienced (and thus known and reacted upon) in the microscopic abstract as individual acts or in the macroscopic abstract as statistical figures in a government report somewhere. An encounter with Jordan's 20-foot photographs is a true confrontation and a chance to look at consumption otherwise than tiny individual acts or inconceivable wholes. Knowing that each individual object in the photograph was arranged by the artists hand further impresses the sense that each object has a life beyond the moment the consumer makes use of it.

"Jet Trails" depicts 11,000 jet trails -- equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours

"Plastic Bottles" Depicts two million plastic bottle beverages, the number used in the US every five minutes

Demonstrations at China's Toronto Consulate...

Ryan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:28:12 -0400

It is really inspiring to wake up with a morning air that gently carries aloft the emotional cries of sovereignty, freedom, self-determination and peace.

As with yesterday (and the day before that, and frequently last week), hundreds of demonstrators have taken up position in front of Toronto's Chinese consulate a few blocks from my house. I'm not often taken with marches and chants, but this morning I felt compelled to walked over and pitch in for a little while. The spineless lack of global state outrage and condemnation of China is viciously inexcusable. I am deeply disappointed in Canada for its mute and tacit acceptance of what is nothing less than China's sadistic and opportunistic state massacre and obvious attempt to round-up dissenters prior to the Olympics. And indeed the message of the protest today was very clear: "Stop The Killing! Stop The Killing! Stop the Killing!"

The particularly inspiring video below brings the wider issue into focus. It shows a demonstrator from last Monday's gathering successfully scaling the entire building and raising the Tibetan flag over the consulate. Brilliant.

Obama wins Texas

Ryan — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:39:37 -0500

With all votes tallied and the proportional representation formula applied, it seems as though Obama has won Texas in terms of both delegates and the popular vote.

Which brings up an interesting point: no one seems to care, the story is already being buried, and Clinton certainly isn't going to honor her offer to drop out if Ohio and/or Texas were lost.

Much like the post-facto determination that Al Gore won the 2000 election, there seems to be a greater compulsion or need to instantiate electoral certainty rather than electoral truth. Indeed, the very question is why such a determination was only "post facto". Post facto of what? How can making the final tally be post facto of an election that hasn't been counted? Until the vote is counted the will of the people is not really known -- in theory.

The reality is that the magical suspension of an election is mistaken (or mischaracterized) as a crisis demanding immediate resolution. TV news networks define their reputation on the ability to "call" the election, concession speeches quickly follow and the narrative of finality trumps all other considerations. This artifice is what Derrida calls a "coup de force" narrative. The crisis designation ultimately demands a resolution whether it is real or imagined. An election is rendered as little more than a highly ritualized and rigorously reported coup. It is a fiction serving no interest but of the person who controls the media message.

What's so wrong about allowing the presence of democracy linger for a few days?