The Smithian

Google’s history of anti-social social networks and anti-trust trust relations that deceptively breach online consumer privacy and trust has already begun to threaten its longstanding web hegemony and its vaunted brand. Now the company’s repeatedly defensive and dishonest responses to charges that its specially equipped Street View cars surreptitiously collected private internet communications—including emails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, and postings on websites and social networks—could signal a tipping point.

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The Arab Spring was one of the first truly real-time global news events. Thousands of personal accounts, broadcast through Twitter, email, and weblog, mingled with the reports of newscasters and mainstream journalists to weave a living, breathing fabric of stories. In a new novel called Kapow!, British author Adam Thirlwell tries to replicate the experience in print.

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“There is a price to pay for speaking the truth,” reads the signature on e-mails coming from West’s office. “There is a bigger price for living a lie.” So when his view of the commander-in-chief changed from adoration to disappointment, West was moved to proclaim it out loud. He had already been lobbing rhetorical grenades in the direction of the Oval Office, calling the president “spineless” for his failure to make poor and working people a policy priority and “milquetoast” for kowtowing to corporate interests during the economic crisis. But in an interview with Truthdig, ­published last May, West…called Obama “the black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” And then he said he wanted to “slap him,” as the article put it, “on the side of his head.” In the white world of mainstream media, the interview made a few headlines. But in precincts of the left, and among certain African-American scholars, it unleashed a tide of anguish.

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Pass through security into the headquarters of Obama 2012, and the effect is like stepping into the world’s most high-tech dorm room. Spanning the entire floor of a Chicago skyscraper, the campaign’s nerve center boasts a ping-pong table, a staff of 300…They don’t use phones up here; most of the digital team weren’t even issued any. Instead, campaign workers communicate mostly by e-mail, G-chat and Twitter. Rows of young staffers, some perched on yoga balls, are quietly coding new online tools to engage supporters…and tracking metrics of volunteers recruited and new voters registered. An energetic hum fills the room, punctuated only by mouse clicks.

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A worldwide network of hackers has managed to gain access to the most secure networks on the Internet…Anonymous, has infiltrated networks of the CIA, Interpol, email accounts of presidents, and has taken down the major web properties of global corporations. During its near-eight years of existence, Anonymous hackers have exposed a huge network of neo-Nazis in Germany and a stealth online child pornography ring. No one knows how wide the Anonymous hackers’ network stretches across continents, nor how many people belong to the Internet-based group…

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The emoticon has migrated from the emails and texts of teenagers to the correspondence of professionals…

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for the book, ‘Spam Jam,’ they peeked into a forgotten junk mail folder and created an illustrated story that depicts a world we secretly yearn for. the book contains 52 pages of original illustrations. printed on igepa paper, it is divided into three parts: spam data, spam messages and spam future.

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