Brain manipulation via electricity.

Sally Adee does what makes Wired actually good, underneath the manic trend-jumping and the boosting of dubious shiny gadgets. She takes a cyberpunk-seeming story, explains it is already happening, and points out social implications.

The cyberpunk story goes like this. Putting some electrodes on your brain can double the rate at which you learn. Why? Because it turns off the inner voice that constantly tells you how much a mess you’re making of life:

Me without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head; I’eve experienced something close to it during 2-hour Iyengar yoga classes, but the fragile peace in my head would be shattered almost the second I set foot outside the calm of the studio. I had certainly never experienced instant zen in the frustrating middle of something I was terrible at.

And once you realise how much self-doubt drags us back, you can’t help but wonder where it comes from:

could school-age girls use the zappy cap while studying math to drown out the voices that tell them they can’t do math because they’re girls? How many studies have found a link between invasive stereotypes and poor test performance?

Apparently at some point Lyotard was channeling Warren Ellis:

The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body

Shocking. The UK’s major construction firms maintained a blacklist of troublemakers to be denied work — radicals, trade unionists, or simply workers who pointed out on-site safety issues. According to the investigator at the Information Commissioner’s Office:

the relationship between the Consulting Association [which maintained the blacklist] and the police and security services appeared to have been nurtured when the organisation went under an earlier guise as the Economic League, at a time when the state was keen to liaise with major building firms to discover as much as it could about Irish construction workers amid the threat of IRA terrorism.

Of course this stuff just gets easier and easier as time goes by. I’d bet money that some counterpart to the Consulting Association is right now identifying troublemakers from facebook or linkedin, selling their names to one employer or another. Perhaps the police are collaborating, perhaps they aren’t — it maybe matters less than it once did, as police records are only one information source among many.

Community Organizing, a system of social campaigining, concentrates attention on linking local residents into a political group, identifying their common interests and turning these into the goals of campaigning.

It is most associated with the civil rights movement in the United States, where the work of Saul Alinksy was crucial in giving it shape, both through his direct involvement in campaigning and through books such as Rules for Radicals. More recently, Barack Obama’s involvement gave it greater prominence.

Unlike many USian ideas, this went decades without really taking root in the UK. Perhaps this is a result of it targetting local communities, rather than the free-floating trend-following activist international. Perhaps not.

But now it’s starting to change. Citizens UK are pushing community organizing in London and beyond. They’ve had impressive success in forcing the Living Wage onto the political agenda. There’s even a MA Course at Queen Mary.

For me to judge community organizing based on books and the internet seems entirely alien to its principles. Still, I can’t deny loving some Alinsky’s combination of community-building with tactically-planned attacks on the powers that be. In his words, “

The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.

“

I had always assumed that

Dracula

was the first vampire story. I was wrong.

When it was published in 1897, vampires had already spent a half-century or more in the public eye.

Most prominently, there was Varney the Vampire, a penny dreadful in 1847-9. And before that was John Polidori’s

The Vampyre

— a book written in the same holiday when Mary Shelley dreamt up Frankenstein.

Old essay by Alex Ross on the sacralization of classical music, particularly the decline of applause after each movement.

I have a rosy image of the hubbub of pre-20th century concert halls as a creative benefit, something which would naturally be appreciated by musicians and composers.

Not so. Many apparently loathed it. Musicians would plant people in the audience to applaud

their

solo. To prevent this, Gustav Mahler went so far as “hiring detectives to patrol the theater”.

But for entirely eliminating applause after each movement, Ross blames conductor Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski dreamt of the concert-hall as a “Temple of Music”, where the audience should ” listen in spiritual silence and then return home refreshed and strengthened” [not his words]

This essay by Alan Moore has since been turned into a book. I quoted this segment on LJ years ago, but think it’s worth fishing back out of the memory-hole:

Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbours were agreeable. These publications came with sheet-music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth-rug or the horsehair sofa

Also, at the end Moore has tacked on a fairly sensible social/feminist argument for better, not less, porn:

Rather than functioning as a release for our quite ordinary sexual imaginings, porn functions as another social tether, as control-leash, lure and lash combined in one, a cattle-prod that looks just like a carrot. Dangling temptingly before us everywhere we look it leads us on. Then, in the guilty aftermath of our indulgences, it converts handily into a rod of shame with which to flog ourselves.

Something which should exist, but (as far as I know) doesn’t: parks cultivated specifically to provide trees for climbing.

We have elaborate topiary — but only with the aim of looking pretty. It would presumably be easy to cultivate trees with convenient bends, branches at arm-height, and all the stuff you’d want to make a nice climbing tree. You’d need many decades for them to grow up. After that, though, you’d have a fantastic and pretty place.

Presumably it would currently be an insurance nightmare to do this. But that wouldn’t have been the case 50 or 100 years ago. So why aren’t there tree-climbing parks?

[This partly triggered by Aaron Swartz’s plea to replace spectacles with experiences:

The world is weirdly disappointing that way. Billions of dollars are spent making and watching people explore mysterious tunnels, chase down alleys, and fly as if by magic, but there’s hardly a single opportunity to actually do any of these things.

]

From the B&T comment on a Mail on Sunday investigative report showing the role of McKinsey in both drafting and profiting from the destruction of the NHS: “

when the economy enters a long depression, securing lines of revenue from the taxpayer becomes a more important profit strategy for business.

“

I suspect not only is this true, but there will be some academic economics research trying to put numbers to it.

This NY Times feature covers corporate analysis of custonmer data, particularly around identifying times when people are likely to change their shopping habits. Major events like giving birth apparently shake up your shopping habits, with the result that pregnant women are a prime target for advertising:

[a Target statistician] was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Since this is close to my professional life, I’m less shocked than I might be. If anything I’m surprised Target only worked this out in the last decade; I’d thought the big shops had been working in this way since the 90s or before.

But part of the joy of journalism is a kind of Verfremdungseffect: pointing up things I’ve placidly accepted, but which in fact are strange or objectionable.