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Beginning in May 2014, photographer Ksenia Ivanova began a project dedicated to St. Petersburg’s punk community. Titled “On the Verge,” Ivanova’s work, she says, is first and foremost a personal exploration of her own generation. Born during the Soviet Union’s Perestroika period, her contemporaries grew up amid the ruins of Soviet ideology, when there was still nothing to take its place. “The uncertainty and despair of this time are reflected in our generation,” Ivanova says.

Source: Russia’s lost punks — Meduza. News, reports, interviews, videos from Russia

“Th-th-th-that’s all folks!” Has the human race’s grandest achievement–civilization–assured its collapse? It doesn’t look good!”Civilizations have come and gone over the past 6,000 years or so. Now, there’s just one—-various cultures, but a single, global civilization.Collapse is in the air. We’ve already seen the failure, if not the collapse, of culture in the West. The Holocaust alone, in the most cultured country (philosophy, music, etc.), revealed culture’s impotence.We have a better idea of what civilization is than we do of what collapse would mean. It’s the standard notion: domestication of plants and animals, soon followed by the early, major civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Domestication, the ground and thrust of civilization, per se: the ethos of ever-progressing domination of nature and control in general.“Nature has not ordained civilization; quite the contrary,” as E.J. Applewhite, a Buckminster Fuller collaborator, aptly observed. All civilizations have been riven with tensions, and all heretofore have failed. Mayan and Mycenean civilizations, half a world apart, collapsed simultaneously (if slowly). Egyptian civilization rose and fell four times before it exhausted itself.Arnold Toynbee examined some twenty past civilizations in his massive A Study of History, and found that in every case, the cause of collapse was internal, not external.What may be civilization’s deepest tension is brought out in that most radical text, Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. For Freud, civilization rests on a primary repression, the source of unconquerable unhappiness: the trading of instinctual freedom and eros for work and symbolic culture. Thus, civilization’s very foundation, domestication, is the worst of bargains, the basic generator of neurosis.Oswald Spengler underlined the futility of civilization, deciding that it was undesirable, even evil. For anthropologist Roy Rappaport, maladaptive was the adjective that best described it, though he (like the rest) concluded that smaller, self-sufficient social orders would be as undesirable as they would be impossible to achieve.In The Decline of the West, Spengler noted that the last phases of every civilization are marked by increasing technological complexity. This is strikingly true of planetary culture today, when we also see technology’s claims and promises tending to displace those of explicitly political ideology.William Ophuls’ recent Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail outlines quite ably the reasons why civilizational failure is inevitable, why the grasping control ethos of domestication comes to its self-defeating end. The book’s first sentence also serves very well to announce the fatal illusion that prevails today: “Modern civilization believes it commands the historical process with technological power.”The fallacy of this belief is becoming clearer to more people. After all, as Jared Diamond puts it, “All of our current problems are unintended consequences of our existing technology.” In fact, civilization is failing on every level, in every sphere, and its failure equates so largely with the failure of technology. More and more, this is what people understand as collapse.Complex societies are recent in human history, and certainly this over-arching civilization is very different from all that have gone before. The main differences are twofold. Reigning civilization now dominates the entire globe, various cultural differences notwithstanding, and technological invasiveness colonizes to an undreamed-of degree.Despite this reach and height, the rule of civilization is based on less and less. Inner nature is as ravaged as outer nature. The collapse of human connectedness has opened the door to unimaginable phenomena among lonely human populations. The extinction of species, melting polar ice, vanishing ecosystems, etc., proceed without slowing.Fukushima, acidifying oceans, Monsanto, fracking, disappearing bees, ad infinitum. Even rather more prosaic aspects of civilization are in decline.Rappaport found that as civilizational systems “become increasingly large and powerful, the quality and utility of their products are likely to deteriorate.” The massive mid-2014 recall of millions of GM, Toyota, and Ford cars comes to mind. Jared Diamond points out that “steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers.”Enter Peak Oil and its prediction that oil is beginning to run out, signaling the finale of industrial civilization and its ruinous run. The discovery of large reserves of natural gas and new technological processes (e.g., shale gas extraction) may, however, mean that the Peak Oil projection of terminal decline won’t begin for many decades. The Oil Drum website, a major Peak Oil forum, went silent in 2008 after an eight-year run, admitting to lack of interest.There is an understandable, if misplaced, desire that civilization will cooperate with us and deconstruct itself. This mind set se

Source: A Word on Civilization & Collapse | The Anarchist Library

Android Dick is a robot created in the likeness of the science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. Android Dick is an attempt to create thinking and reasoning artificial intelligence that has human traits like compassion and creativity. The first version of the android was created in 2005 and has been a work in progress ever since.In 2011, the creators of the android appeared on the PBS show Nova, where they interviewed the robot and asked it a series of questions. Some of the answers were impressive. Others are typical of what you would expect from a robot. However, one answer in particular is probably one of the most ominous things ever spoken by artificial intelligence.During the interview with the creators (embedded below), Android Dick said, “…don’t worry, even if I evolve into terminator I will still be nice to you, I will keep you warm and safe in my people zoo where I can watch you for old time’s sake. [emphasis added].”The comments came after the creators asked, “Do you think that robots will take over the world?”When asked about his programming, Android Dick responded by saying “A lot of humans ask me if I can make choices or if everything I do is programmed. The best way I can respond to that is to say that everything, humans, animals and robots, do is programmed to a degree. As technology improves, it is anticipated that I will be able to integrate new words that I hear online and in real time. I may not get everything right, say the wrong thing, and sometimes may not know what to say, but everyday I make progress. Pretty remarkable, huh?”While Android Dick does seem intelligent, many of his predictions are truly ominous, and it is actually fairly common for robots to display this sort of strange attitude.As we reported earlier this year, one of Japan’s largest cellphone carriers, SoftBank Mobile, has created the first humanoid robot designed specifically for living with humans. The company claims the robot, Pepper, is the first example of artificial intelligence that can actually feel and understand emotion. However, a quick demonstration with Pepper shows that it has a difficult time with emotion and is in fact a bit of an egomaniac. Regardless of the question it is asked, most conversations usually leads back to Pepper (and its rivalry with the iPhone).

Source: Artificially Intelligent Robot Tells Creator It Will Keep Humans “In a People Zoo”

Thefts at San Francisco’s swankiest stores have reached an epidemic level, as bad guys and bad gals grab high-end fashion items with near-impunity — with the “Rainbow Girls” leading the way.“They come in a groups of four or five and they go right for the Ferragamos,” said Ken Peterson, a salesman at Arthur Beren Shoes on Stockton Street, which has been hit repeatedly.Police tell us the “Rainbow Girls” — who get their name from their bright attire and dyed hair — are actually about three independent groups of women in their teens and 20s. The cops say they swoop into stores in the Union Square area, grab high-end goods and exit like running backs, plowing over anyone in their path.“They seem to get high off of it,” Peterson said. “They know they will be gone by the time the police arrive.”Police reports show that thieves fitting the Rainbow Girls’ description hit Neiman Marcus on Stockton Street on Nov. 7 and made off with two jackets worth $1,000 apiece, 21 Burberry scarfs worth a total of $9,970 and other goods for a total take of about $29,000.The next day, they hit Armani on Post Street for about $10,000 worth of stuff.

Source: Brazen thefts by ‘Rainbow Girls’ at high-end retailers – SFGate

Nearly 50 years after the controversial Milgram experiments, social psychologist Jerry M. Burger, PhD, has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by an authority figure.Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University, replicated one of the famous obedience experiments of the late Stanley Milgram, PhD, and found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.”People learning about Milgram’s work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” Burger says. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram’s experiments still operate today.”Stanley Milgram, PhD, was an assistant professor at Yale in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects—thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning—administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of “teacher,” to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of “learner.” In reality, both the authority figure and the learner were in on the real intent of the experiment, and the imposing-looking shock generator machine was a fake.Milgram found that, after hearing the learner’s first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator’s end, at 450 volts. In Burger’s replication, 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped as they continued past 150 volts—a difference that was not statistically significant.Burger implemented a number of safeguards that enabled him to win approval for the work from his university’s institutional review board, including making 150 volts the top range in his study. Burger also screened out anyone who had taken more than two psychology courses in college or who indicated familiarity with Milgram’s research. A clinical psychologist also interviewed potential subjects and eliminated anyone who might have a negative reaction to the study procedure.—K.I. Mills

Source: More shocking results: New research replicates Milgram’s findings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQIJiIQjoRU&feature=share

 

I. “This instant that won’t be forgottenSo empty when thrown back by the shadowsSo empty when rejected by clocksThis wretched moment taken by my tendernessStripped naked, naked of the blood of the wingsRobbed of eyes to remember the angst of yesteryearOf lips to scoop up the juice of the violenceLost in the tolling of frozen belfries.”

Source: Chile: Coordinated incendiary attacks against telecommunications infrastructure by FAI-IRF | anarchistnews.org

Four Meditations on Wild Reaction [Reaccion Salvajes]Note: The photograph below, and the quotes preceding each section of this poem, are  from the first communiqué of Wild Reaction (RS), issued from Cuernavaca, Mexico in  August 2014 and translated by waronsociety.noblogs.org in September.I”After a little more than three years of criminal-terrorist activity, the group“Individualists Tending toward the Wild” (ITS) begins a new phase in this open war against the Technoindustrial System…  from now on the attacks against technology andcivilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction” (RS).”my new hero is the vanishing point: somewhere and nowhere all at once an internet modem in the mouth of a vacuum, a smartphone dipped in gold. dipped in diamonds. encrusted with priceless gems and introduced at half time of the superbowl the camera-man in a grip’s union panning wide: the new commodities the glamorous intellectuals a motherboard and a mainframe, a smartwatch a smart wrist a smart organ grown on a scaffold

A totalitarian state is only as strong as its informants. And the United States has a lot of them. They read our emails. They listen to, download and store our phone calls. They photograph us on street corners, on subway platforms, in stores, on highways and in public and private buildings. They track us through our electronic devices. They infiltrate our organizations. They entice and facilitate “acts of terrorism” by Muslims, radical environmentalists, activists and Black Bloc anarchists, framing these hapless dissidents and sending them off to prison for years. They have amassed detailed profiles of our habits, our tastes, our peculiar proclivities, our medical and financial records, our sexual orientations, our employment histories, our shopping habits and our criminal records. They store this information in government computers. It sits there, waiting like a time bomb, for the moment when the state decides to criminalize us.Totalitarian states record even the most banal of our activities so that when it comes time to lock us up they can invest these activities with subversive or criminal intent. And citizens who know, because of the courage of Edward Snowden, that they are being watched but naively believe they “have done nothing wrong” do not grasp this dark and terrifying logic.Tyranny is always welded together by subterranean networks of informants. These informants keep a populace in a state of fear. They perpetuate constant anxiety and enforce isolation through distrust. The state uses wholesale surveillance and spying to break down trust and deny us the privacy to think and speak freely.A state security and surveillance apparatus, at the same time, conditions all citizens to become informants. In airports and train, subway and bus stations the recruitment campaign is relentless. We are fed lurid government videos and other messages warning us to be vigilant and report anything suspicious. The videos, on endless loops broadcast through mounted television screens, have the prerequisite ominous music, the shady-looking criminal types, the alert citizen calling the authorities and in some cases the apprehended evildoer being led away in handcuffs. The message to be hypervigilant and help the state ferret out dangerous internal enemies is at the same time disseminated throughout government agencies, the mass media, the press and the entertainment industry. “If you see something say something,” goes the chorus.In any Amtrak station, waiting passengers are told to tell authorities—some of whom often can be found walking among us with dogs—about anyone who “looks like they are in an unauthorized area,” who is “loitering, staring or watching employees and customers,” who is “expressing an unusual level of interest in operations, equipment, and personnel,” who is “dressed inappropriately for the weather conditions, such as a bulky coat in summer,” who “is acting extremely nervous or anxious,” who is “restricting an individual’s freedom of movement” or who is “being coached on what to say to law enforcement or immigration officials.”What is especially disturbing about this constant call to become a citizen informant is that it directs our eyes away from what we should see—the death of our democracy, the growing presence and omnipotence of the police state, and the evisceration, in the name of our security, of our most basic civil liberties.Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes us, often unconsciously, conform in our outward and inward behavior. It conditions us to relate to those around us with suspicion. It destroys the possibility of organizing, community and dissent. We have built what Robert Gellately calls a “culture of denunciation.”Snitches in prisons, the quintessential totalitarian system, are the glue that allows prison authorities to maintain control and keep prisoners divided and weak. Snitches also populate the courts, where the police make secret deals to drop or mitigate charges against them in exchange for their selling out individuals targeted by the state. Our prisons are filled with people serving long sentences based on false statements that informants provided in exchange for leniency.

Read more: Chris Hedges: A Nation of Snitches – Chris Hedges – Truthdig

David Skrbina replies to a 20-year-late criticism of the Unabomber, and explains why we should pay more attention to the technology problem.

Source: On the Question of Technological Slavery: A Reply to Campbell and Lipkin