Book of Lies

This week we read from Book of Lies.

Grant Morrison:: “Pop Magic!” All about how to do magic.

Best quote: “If I’d stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music?”

Mark Pesce:: “The Executable Dreamtime” All about how language obscures reality.

Best quote: “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three million times is civilisation.”

Hakim Bey:: “Sorcery” All about sorcery

Best quote: “A poem can act as a spell and vice versa - but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature - it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies.”

Hakim Bey:: “Media Hex: The occult assault on institutions” All about Immediatist organisations and their attack on traditional organisations

Best quote: “Let the bastards produce their own bad luck out of their inner sadness at being evil assholes, out of their atavistic superstition (without which they wouldn’t be such media-wizards), out of their fear of otherness, out of their repressed sexuality.”

Super stuff that made me happy in the middle of finals.

For our final for technologies of persuasion we are building a technology of persuasion: a website with a model for rating website privacy policies that makes it easy for people to share their ratings to create a community resource that is a watchdog for privacy.

The very practise of rating sites will convince people of how little their privacy is valued or protected online and if enough people are persuaded to start caring about these issues there will be an incentive for companies to take more care of our personal data.

It’s currently still being built. Will be available in the next week as it’s in the ITP Winter Show.

14 December 2005 | persuasion | Comments