skandalon

art design poster machine computer retro vintage apple store consumption capitalism economy electronic information shopping disaffection psychiatry

✖ Via Retrofuturs: “iTunes store / Sociology of objects”

Previously on Skandalon : Stéphane Massa-Bidal. Follow him on Tumblr.

The quote he’s using in this illustration is attributed to Tammy Faye Bakker. She’s also purportedly said “I wake up every morning and I wish I were dead, and so does Jim”. Cheaper and maybe less effective, I would say. I’ll come back to it.

• Jul 30, 2010 link notes tagged: art design poster machine computer retro vintage Apple store consumption capitalism economy electronic information shopping disaffection psychiatry

communication commune community hippies united_states life together vintage politic economy family value

✖ Via

LIFE – Hosted by Google: “The Youth Communes; New way of living confronts the U.S.” July 18th, 1969. Photo by John Olson

• Jul 26, 2010 link notes tagged: communication commune community hippies United-States life together vintage politic economy family value

I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 195

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jul 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis consumption customer money economy credit debt identity existence reality being

Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ».

✖ Via Le Monde: “Me Metzner: “Qui a fabriqué Jérôme Kerviel”?”, Chroniques Judiciaires, by Pascale Robert Diard, June 25th, 2010

• Jul 21, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author pathology fantasy knowledge reality economy lost loser representation anxiety critic desire Kerviel destruction money bank capitalism

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

✖ Via Telegraph.co.uk: “How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price” by Rowena Mason, June 30th, 2010

• Jun 30, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology economy finance lost loser money oil broker alcohol chaos

To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD.
Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.
We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here.
But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten.

✖ Via Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, University of Chicago Press, [1972]2000, p. 481 [Google books preview]

Think midle eastern wars, energy crisis, Europe financial crisis, unexplainable killing sprees and so forth.

Previously on Skandalon

• May 25, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology media ecology cybernetic deception despair lost confusion generation history context politic economy energy war destruction murder killing spree

economy news europe crisis destruction lost debt greece

✖ Via The New York Times: “2009 Debt As A Pourcentage of G.D.P.” By Kevin Quealy and Karl Russell (Sources: European Commission; Eurostat; Bloomberg)

“Greece’s debt troubles are far from unique. Thirteen of the 27 European Union countries face debts equal or more than 60 percent of their gross domestic product, the limit set by the European Commission. And that group includes some of the rgion’s biggest economies, such as Britain and France.”

Read the related article “A Trillion for Europe, With Doubts Attached” by By Landon Thomas Jr. and Jack Ewing (May 11, 2010).

• May 16, 2010 link notes tagged: economy news Europe crisis destruction lost debt Greece

Ethical issues aside, the banks also did poorly at their core job, which is managing risk. And, while there are plenty of honest, capable people in finance, the ease with which investors looked past Wall Street’s failings seems like a classic case of what the social psychologist Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Festinger argued that when beliefs come into conflict with reality we think up explanations that shape reality to our beliefs, rather than vice versa. He used the example of the Millerites, a millenarian religious sect that came to believe that Jesus Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844. He didn’t. But not all the Millerites abandoned their faith. Many set about constructing elaborate rationalizations to justify their belief, arguing that Christ had returned spiritually, or that the event had occurred in Heaven, if not on earth. Similarly, when people’s faith in Wall Street as an honest broker, a smart allocator of capital, and a path to personal wealth was disappointed, they managed to explain things away.

✖ Via The New Yorker: “Déjà Vu” by James Surowiecki, May 3rd, 2010, p. 25

About James Surowiecki:

“James Surowiecki has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. He writes The Financial Page. Surowiecki came to The New Yorker from Slate, where he wrote the Moneybox column. He has also been a contributing editor at Fortune and a staff writer at Talk. Previously, he was the business columnist for New York magazine. He has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Lingua Franca, and has written on subjects ranging from Silicon Valley to college basketball.” (more)

More importantly, James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004)

• May 03, 2010 link notes tagged: communication bank finance greed cognition faith reality economy theory crowd capitalism fraud lost loser

Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the U.S. consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself !!!

✖ Via Reuters: “Goldman’s “Fabulous” Fab’s conflicted love letters” by Steve Eder and Karey Wutkowski, Apr 25, 2010

Here are some more excerpts from Fabrice Tourre’s email:

“The SEC’s complaint only included Tourre referring to himself as “fabulous Fab” and talking about “standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight… It’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own investor ;)”

Fabrice Tourre

” is a London-based Executive Director at Goldman Sachs who was charged by the SEC on 16 April 2010 in a $1 billion landmark fraud case.” (wikipedia)

You may remember Jerome Kerviel’s case.

• Apr 27, 2010 link notes tagged: technology economy capital capitalism bank money news America fraud destruction lost loser

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

✖ Via Edward Tufte: “Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment” March 7th, 2010

“Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence, which have received 40 awards for content and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He received his PhD in political Science from Yale University and BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University.”

Previously on Skandalon

• Mar 08, 2010 link notes reblogged from feltron [via] tagged: communication design visualization data statistics politic economy

technology communication economy business tumblr social

✖ Via Mashable: “Tumblr Hits Major Milestones, Plans to Start Generating Revenue” by Stan Schroeder, March 8, 2010

“Last but not least, Tumblr plans to launch two revenue generating features next month. Details are scarce (all we know is they’ll be powered by the widget, pictured below), but with constant talk of Twitter’s revenue generating plans (which are still completely open to interpretation), it’ll be interesting to see how Tumblr plans to tackle the issue. Its success (or lack thereof) might pave the way for microblogging networks (although Tumblr arguably stands in the middle, between blogging and microblogging), an area traditionally devoid of revenue.

About Mashable:

“Mashable is an Internet news blog, started by Pete Cashmore in July 2005. With a reported 7+ million monthly pageviews and an Alexa ranking just over 400, it ranks as one of the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, Apple and startups, but it also reports on less high-profile social networking and social media sites. Mashable is popular on many social networks. As of December 21, 2009, it has over 1.8 million Twitter followers, over 90,000 fans on Facebook, and over 330,000 RSS subscribers.” (wikipedia)

Check Mashable’s “About Us” page.

First spotted via Oueb Niouzes.

• Mar 08, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication economy business Tumblr social

animal art author biology book communication economy human illustration illustrator life technology beastness david_jaclin

✖ Via Beastness by David Jaclin (self-published, 2009). Cover illustration by Antoine Corbineau

Read an excerpt from the book (in French). Buy the book online. Check out David’s blog 10 Secondes Tigre.

“Beastness” is the contraction of “fitness” (in a biological sense) and “beast”. It’s the name David Jaclin gave to the evolution of the relationship’s economy (“business”) bonding humans and animals since the dawn of time to the present day.

• Feb 26, 2010 link notes tagged: animal art author biology book communication economy human illustration illustrator life technology beastness David Jaclin

✖ Via The Consumerist: “Man Bulldozes Home After Foreclosure” by Chris Walters, Feb 18, 2010

“A man in Ohio grew so angry at his bank for refusing to work with him to keep his home that he bulldozed it. He told WLWT News, “As far as what the bank is going to get, I plan on giving them back what was on this hill exactly (as) it was. I brought it out of the ground and I plan on putting it back in the ground.” (more)

On YouTube, someone left the following comment:

“I guess he couldn’t fly his house into the IRS office”

• Feb 23, 2010 link notes tagged: communication lost destruction economy individual loser society self-destruction

technology communication plane_crash destruction suicide self_destruction building lost loser alone society economy

✖ Via The Daily Dunklin Democrat: “Man angry at IRS crashes plane into building” Feb. 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Jack Plunkett)

“Firefighters work on putting out a fire at a seven-story building after a small private plane crashed into a building that houses the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas on Thursday Feb. 18, 2010.” (more)

“The 2010 Austin plane crash occurred on February 18, 2010, when Andrew Joseph Stack III, flying his Piper Cherokee PA-28-236 (Aircraft registration: N2889D) plane, crashed into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, United States. Two people were killed (including the pilot), and thirteen injured. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) field office is located in the four-story office building along with other state and federal government agencies. Prior to the crash, Stack had posted a manifesto dated February 18, 2010 to his business website.” (wikipedia)

• Feb 22, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication plane crash destruction suicide self-destruction building lost loser alone society economy

technology communication bomb destruction terror terrorism economy history

✖ Via

Wikimedia Commons: Bomb in Wall Street, 1920

“The Wall Street bombing occurred at 12:01 p.m. on September 16, 1920, in the Financial District of New York City. The blast killed 38 and seriously injured 143. It was more deadly than the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 and remained the deadliest bomb attack on U.S. soil until the Bath School bombings in Bath Township, Michigan seven years later.

At noon, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City and stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments. The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young and worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. It caused over $2 million in property damage and wrecked most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building.” (wikipedia)

• Feb 22, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication bomb destruction terror terrorism economy history