Scrawled in Wax

Since everyone is talking about it, here’s the NYT piece on trolling and ‘malwebolence’. I’m still convinced that much of ‘commenter culture’ and trolling is about the performance of cultural capital, the attempt to publicly display one’s capacity to ‘do contemporary culture’. But rather than more traditional late-capitalist attempts – i.e. displays of status, success, wealth etc. – we are instead left with people who engage in one-upmanship at any cost, finding whatever way possible to outdo others. The question though: what does the word ‘outdo’ actually mean here? What is it that is going on in that moment when one ‘falls for trolling’ and from where does the feeling of either success or humiliation stem? What is lost or gained and by what scale are these things measured?

Hey, speaking of assholes online who you don’t want to hear from, here’s my first guest post. It’s a few musical recommendations over at my pal Matthew’s blog, The Quixotic Engineer. It was fun to write and I appreciate the opportunity. I’ve also mentioned to a couple of people recently that I would welcome guest posts from any of you, particularly ‘think pieces’ on tech/pop culture phenomena. I’ll write a full post ‘sending out the call’ later, but in the meantime, let me know if you’re interested.

Bit random, but here’s a solid hip-hop vid, “Throw Your Hands Up“, from Toronto crew Notes to Self, who I used to be friends with. My favourite bit is where Matt (MC Swamp Donkey), chastises wallflowers at a club by calling them ‘J.D. Salingers’. Nice. If you’re not impressed at first though, wait for the middle verse by Rage Rosh.

Danah Boyd threw up a post asking people for ideas and the comments section turned interesting at the end. I’ve yet to respond but this Eric character seems like he’d be worth talking to (why am I not in a program in the ‘Department of Informatics’?). He suggested that the internet requires something like a post-textual approach to identity. Before, I’ve gestured towards the idea that textual approaches to the ‘net are always doomed to fail, but I can’t yet formulate a decent response. I think Deleuze and Haraway would be useful places to start, but for the time being, I’m still struggling.

Finally, I was trying to put together a Muxtape of songs that contained answering machine messages. Something about the deferred sense of human contact that I like – seems appropriate somehow. Anyway, anyone got any suggestions? I was only able to come up with four.