for some time, Jean Baudrillard, has died in Paris following a long illness. One of the best places to read him and about him in English is CTheory, which is where I was first immersed in his writings.
Keepgoing.org:
The Big Fish. Subhed: “Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website.” It is nice to see CTHEORY cited there. While Carl busy doing the CTHEORY website, I was working at the other end with the editors, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, in my first net job.
Seven years ago
today, Jerry Garcia died. I was never really much of a ‘Head, though I went to a few shows over the years, but I remember Jerry’s death really clearly. I was working for Arthur and Marilouise Kroker at CTHEORY at the time, in the office we kept at Concordia on Bishop St. Although generally we took August off, for some reason (I don’t remember now), I was at work that day. And when the news broke, it was the first time I remember watching a story develop entirely on the Internet. It was before weblogs existed as such (though there were a couple), but through virtual communities, personal sites, news sites, and fan sites, the news got out very quickly. The diversity of the Internet coverage was so much richer and complete than anything in the mainstream media that it was a revelation of the power of the media. Though I think the whole weblogging = journalism idea misses the point, I trace back my interest in keeping a weblog to that day above all.
CTHEORY
CTHEORY: Carl has done an excellent front-end redesign. Arthur and Marilouise, with Eugene Thacker, have added a super-feature, Tech Flesh. Coming soon, Tech Flesh Multimedia.
He said he could
solve it in 15 minutes, and it looks like Vicente Fox is making good on his boast. I first got interested in the Zapatistas when I copy edited and layed out Ricardo Dominguez’s article in CTHEORY almost 5 years ago now. But I’m still pretty skeptical – things like anti-indigenous actions by a state are mostly institutional things, and it’s not clear that a political shift can really get to the root of the problem. At that, however, a political shift away from the PRI in Mexico is a bit more than switching governing parties in the US or Canada – it is a bit closer to the sort of systemic change that might really mean this thing could be solved in a reasonable manner.