darkmatter

‘The Message’ or at least a version of the rhythm track spills out of the Buick’s windows. From my vantage point the sound leaks through from the concerns of another age. I’m sat in the car parked next to it in an industrial lot. Remembering. People pissing on the stairs because they just don’t care. But the lyrics belonged to some other place, equally distant, vicariously sampled. The Buick itself whispers ‘old timer’ at upstarts in their hybrid imports. Young Turks with nervous smiles, never really sure what they’re laughing about except that when the laughter ends, the trouble begins.

If you surf the net you’ll eventually come across the buzz over the one laptop per child initiative. Simply put, it’s a scheme to make very low cost, open-source software based wireless laptops available to the children of the so-called ‘Third World’. Clearly, such a venture cannot alter core structural neo-liberal global inequalities, but should opening up technology to the economically improvished be welcomed?

Techno-utopianist Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the non-profit olpc, seemingly is aware of the limits of such a project. Even he admits it is not able to address basic issues of survival, such access to clean water.

This is an interview with Michael Hardt conducted by Nate Holdren (nateholdren@gmail.com) originally for Greenpepper Magazine in October 2006. The interview productively addresses a range of key concepts in Hardt (and Negri’s) thinking - multitude, democracy, immaterial labour, resistance - and how the understanding potentially differs from Virno, Lenin, Zizek and Agamben.

Hip-Hop has emerged as a serious area of study in the US. This article in the San Francisco Chronicle - ACADEMIC HIP-HOP? YES, YES Y’ALL by Reyhan Harmanci gives a useful overview of the rise of Hip-Hop studies in the academy.

This is a short article on racism and mental health in The Guardian (2 April 2007). The author succinctly argues that the continuing high levels of psychotic illness in people of African and Caribbean origin in the UK is of epidemic proportions and asks why nothing is being done about it.