[iDC] iDC Digest, Vol 79, Issue 4

[{ brad brace }]

the continuous cultural bail-outs, conceptual ponzi-schemes,
and insider quid-pro-quo ("critical mobility...") are
finally coming to a joyously redemptive end; the options for
(non-complicit) artists will no longer be reductively
dependent on obstructionist oligarchical art-agencies

to celebrate this event and concurrent devaluations, I've
quickly (without any funding,) designed a FREEE pinback
button appropriated from US Federal Currency Seals:
ENCUMBRANCE EXCLUSION EQUIVOCATION (only $2.99 for shipping,
delivered anywhere); provide cash, cheque, or paypal with
delivery address via bbrace at eskimo.com

http://bradbrace.net/EEE.html

awesome!

/:b


On Mon, 5 Sep 2011, John Sobol wrote:

> Yes I fully expected to be taken to task for suggesting that India was
> colonized by a literate culture, but I still maintain that this is the case.
>
>
> It is of course true that literacy existed in India thousands of years
> before it did in what became Britain. Yet literacy belonged almost
> exclusively to elite castes throughout Indian history, and the great bulk of
> popular culture and society remained very much oral even as periodically
> great literatures flourished. Significantly, the printing press did not
> appear in India until it was imported from the west in the mid-19th century.
> And in the 18th century, as Britain gained political and military control of
> India, the relative rates of popular literacy in India and England were
> massively tilted in favour of England, a disparity that would only intensify
> over the next two centuries. I believe that it was precisely that disparity
> in popular literacy that enabled the colonization of oral India. For
> example, England's (also Scotland's) unprecedented rates of popular literacy
> in these years fuelled the Industrial revolution, among other literate
> social developments, which made even starker the difference in economic and
> administrative (and of course military) power between oral India and
> literate England. In the end it took someone of Ghandi's unique genius, able
> to understand and bridge both oral and literate political cultures and
> social dynamics, to successfully lead mostly oral India out from under the
> colonial thumb of literate imperialism.
>
> Yet I maintain that in the realm of food, for example, this same process -
> western literate colonization of oral India - is happening today, with
> highly literate transnational (but based in the west) corporations like
> Monsanto and Cargill, whose every atom is defined by literate thinking and
> practices (patents, factories, genetic science, financial systems, etc.) and
> shaped by university-trained MBAs and statisticians and agronomists and
> marketers and lobbyists, actively attacking and usurping ancient Indian oral
> agricultural practices, communities and cultures with truly catastrophic
> results.
>
> And this is happening because even if rates of popular literacy are much
> closer today than they were centuries ago, the popular deployment of complex
> literate systems in daily life is still very unequal. (At least that is my
> impression based on a modest degree of traveling in India. Even if,
> increasingly, there are urban centres in India that are - in some respects
> anyway - as literate as Paris or London.) And the solution to this problem
> is not the upgrading of oral Indian systems to match western literate
> systems. On the contrary, that is suicide, because those literate systems
> are unsustainable and are in the process of killing our planet. In my
> opinion what is needed are bridges between users of oral and digital systems
> that make use of literacy but are not ruled by it, to create a sustainable
> future
>
> One small example of a community moving in this direction is described in my
> blog post of yesterday, titled Array of Words and the Manilla Street Kids
> Digital Gift Economy.
>
> Regards,
> John
> --
> blog: www.youareyourmedia.com
>




=============

PROXY Gallery
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global islands project:
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"We fill the craters left by the bombs
And once again we sing
And once again we sow
Because life never surrenders."
-- anonymous Vietnamese poem

"Nothing can be said about the sea."
-- Mr Selvam, Akkrapattai, India 2004

"... for every star-driven enterprise there are corollary
benefits for those who support it and keep their mouths shut."
-- John Young, NYC 2010

"Shikata ga nai -- There's nothing we can do about it."
-- Japanese tsunami survivors, 2011

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/:b