Naming Shit (Like our site / platform name)

[originalhat]

Lets collaborate on ideas for naming our site here, @thewong.

Things to consider-

• we need to use this in our URL, or at least something similar to
• we want something that will reflect our intended purpose / goal; c.f. #1
• something that 'goes after' our media content (trans-media)?

  Ideas From Discussion

• New Gamers Guide
• Trendr
• ?

---

Lets try to be as critical of our naming ideas as possible, e.g.:

New Gamers Guide

• we're not really just looking at just games (although catchy)
• will we in-turn exclude potential users because of this "alienation"
• blah blah blah

[originalhat]

ping @thewong manifesto / site name?

[thewong]

Telesthesiac

A Manifesto of Digital Disobedience

[thewong]

define: telethesiac

A being or person afflicted by telethesia, a modern neuorses that shapes perception by distanced and digital topologies, i.e., thoughts and states of being that are distilled through the digital lenses of networks, media and technology. These include all users and personas that participate in cybernetic and digital communities (gamers, hackers, fans, otakus, media generators, etc.) - reference McKenzie Wark

[thewong]

An Introduction to Digital Disobedience

Something is rotten in the state of popular culture

45 years ago this month, a French radical by the name of Rene Viénet cataloged the May '68 riots that sprung up violently on the campus grounds of the University of Paris at Nanterre. As a member of the avant-garde and anarchist organization called the Situationist International, Viénet of course began to work with the organization's ring-leader, Guy Debord, to make sure that revolution may actually come to fruition, even while the cumbersome weight of the military industrial complex crushed the lives and spirits of millions of vulnerable workers and students. Unwittingly however, Viénet would write one phrase on the side of a decrepit office building that would echo throughout the mausoleums of failed international revolutions of the last half of the 20th century, and even occupy the hearts and minds of New York City students in the fall of 2011. The graffiti read: "Beneath the pavement, the beach". What youth culture, counterculture, and subcultures of the late 20th century have understood this to mean is quite simple: beyond the modern streets that govern our lives of work, school, and everyday city life exists a world of play, art, creativity, spirit and radicalized freedom. That beach is our utopia; a "non-place" that we can strive for. However, it seems that each time we turn on the news, our idyllic beach is becoming littered and plundered by the same classes that constructed the streets. The beach is quickly turning into another strip-mall or porn site in our social imaginations. And the question we are faced with everyday is: what are we to do now?

Now more than ever, in a post-Occupy world - where the punks, pinkos, commies, hippies, anarchists, workers, unionists and students have lost; where Wall Street has regained its state of centrality and transnational influence, where the entire planet is burned at the stake for the sake of a stock; where robots and networks control the geopolitical landscapes with a simple click of a button; where the immanence of the apocalypse is not only welcomed, but has become our next fetishistic fantasy - it may be time for us to remember one final phrase from Viénet that defends this manifesto's existence: "our ideas are on everybody's minds". This phrase is our manifesto of digital disobedience. As McKenzie Wark writes simply, "Everybody knows....We know [that the system is] broken; we know the sockpuppets have nothing to say". We all know that "SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT", and it is most specifically articulated in our expressive forms that span several different sorts of medias and mediums.

Now, while the subcultures of revolution have all seemed to be absorbed by pop-punk bands, Urban Outfitters, and Twitter hacktivism, it is time for one very important and revolutionary social persona - the Nerd - to reclaim itself from the clutches of cultural mistranslation (CBS' "The Big Bang Theory") and appropriation (Chris Hardwick's "The Nerdist") to face the digital and analog problems of the information age with a hard-edged and uncompromising critical lens. Why "the Nerd", you may ask? Following in the footsteps of Wark's "The Hacker Manifesto", we will argue that in our internet communities, users have developed the digital personas of "the gamer", "the fan", "the player", and "the hacker" to all fulfill the peripheral mission of the Nerd. The Nerd in Western culture and the Otaku in Eastern culture is the weird one, the hidden one, the enthusiastic one, the secret and occult one that remains underground and subversive, the specialized and talented one that can code, game, and digitally create new meanings with fellow telethesiacs. Since we exist in an era in which information systems and cybernetics define our everyday lives, it may be best to find revolutionary thought in that which is digitally (re)formed by the Nerd. The media studies guru Henry Jenkins has termed these internet and participatory forms of popular culture as "convergent media", forms that combine old ideologies with new technological advancements. These forms that exist are not independent of each other; they are dependent on the World Wide Web and by who distributes them. The forms that all telethesiacs should analyze include video and board games, comics and manga, anime and cartoons, digitalized and remixed music, television and cinema, contemporary literature and art, and most importantly, youth and internet culture. We must never forget that even if "our ideas are on everybody's minds", these ideas are going to be on everybody's media devices.

[originalhat]

Brown like

[thewong]

wong clean up and be more specific at the end

[originalhat]

wong KNOW WHAT UP LASLODASDOLSALL

[originalhat]

project / repo renamed