The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

This video explains how those plastic bits in face washes, scrubs, and toothpastes can hurt ecosystems By now, most of us know that if we want our consciences to be as squeaky clean as our faces, we have to ditch our most beloved scrubbing products. While microbeads — the tiny plastic bits most commonly found in face washes, scrubs, and toothpastes — might do great things for your pores, they could also quietly wreak havoc on the environment by steadily streaming into the Great Lakes and oceans. Couldn’t care less about fish? Get this: Through the magic of the food chain, these little plastic beads actually carry the potential to come back around and screw with human health.

Culture and admin Béatrice Hibou, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris, 2012. 223 pp., €17.00 pb., 978 2 70717 439 0. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, Zone Books, New York, 2012. 182 pp., £19.95 hb., 978 1 93540 826 0. The ascendancy of neoliberalism was accompanied by all sorts of mendacious advertising for the rollback of the state. Bureaucracy became a byword for everything oppressive, rigid and inefficient about the planner-state, everything that marketization promised to dissolve into supple flows and individual solutions.

More evidence of Roundup's link to kidney, liver damage ShareThis Scientists report worrisome changes to liver and kidney genes in rats, adding to evidence that a popular herbicide may be toxic August 28, 2015 By Brian Bienkowski Environmental Health News Long-term exposure to tiny amounts of Roundup—thousands of times lower than what is permitted in U.S. drinking water—may lead to serious problems in the liver and kidneys, according to a new study. The study looked at the function of genes in these organs and bolsters a controversial 2012 study that found rats exposed to small amounts of the herbicide Roundup in their drinking water had liver and kidney damage.

Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory: Amazon.co.uk: Trebor Scholz For those interested in the theorization and operations of the Internet in the age of the "Web 2.0" hallucination, this volume is required reading. The book came from the 2009 "Internet as Playground and Factory" conference at the New School. As an attendee of the conference I can attest it was a fantastic event. MyBrain.net - Geert Lovink The colonization of real-time and other trends in Web 2.0 The neurological turn in recent web criticism exploits "the obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness". Geert Lovink turns the discussion to the politics of network architecture, exploring connections between the colonization of real-time and the rise of the national web. "Sociality is the capacity of being several things at once." G. H.

Facebook 'dead and buried to teens', research finds Facebook is 'dead and buried' to older teenagers, an extensive European study has found, as the key age group moves on to Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Researching the Facebook use of 16-18 year olds in eight EU countries, the Global Social Media Impact Study found that as parents and older users saturate Facebook, its younger users are shifting to alternative platforms. "Facebook is not just on the slide - it is basically dead and buried," wrote Daniel Miller, lead anthropologist on the research team, who is professor of material culture of University College London. "Mostly they feel embarrassed to even be associated with it. Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives." "What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person’s decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request," wrote Miller.

Mute Vol 2, No. 0 − Precarious Reader Cheap Chinese John Barker on the perilous and exploitative employment of economic migrants essential to capitalist productivity today The Insecurity Lasts a Long Time Anthony Iles reviews online magazine Republicart's issue on precarious labour Precarious Straits Marina Vishmidt on the dubious equation of artists with other forms of insecure (service) workers

Magazine Mute Vol. 3, No. 4 - Slave to the Algorithm Buy on Amazon US $9.99 | UK £9.99 | DE €9.99 and other regions, Super Saving free shipping. As the financial crisis fastens its grip ever tighter around the means of human and natural survival, the age of the algorithm has hit full stride. The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies With the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet has begun to take on the characteristics of what the Italian autonomists like Paolo Virno called the social factory. The idea is that since many of us no longer have all that much to offer society, in terms of operating machinery or that sort of thing, the new way of extracting surplus value from our “labor” is to turn our social lives into a kind of covert work that we complete throughout the day, but in forms that can be co-opted by capitalist firms. Work processes, as Virno explains in A Grammar of the Multitude [Semiotext(e); 2004], become diverse, but social life begins to homogenize itself in the sense that our identity becomes something we all must prove in the public sphere—we all become concerned with the self as brand. This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. How worried should we be about this?

Can We All Just Admit Google Is An Evil Empire? ⚙ Co Google is kicking off 2014 with some good old-fashioned privacy infringement. The search giant’s recent decision to link Gmail addresses to Google+ was met with considerable backlash among users who don't want their inboxes exposed to spam. But according to former Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment on his blog, we really shouldn’t be surprised at all: To be clear, for anyone who thinks Google is some benevolent, selfless entity handing out free services to everyone out of the goodness of its heart: Google’s leadership, threatened by the attention and advertising relevance of Facebook, is betting the company on Google+ at all costs. To that end, writes Arment, Google will do anything up to and including angering the users of its core products and services if that meant propping up Google+ against Facebook’s overwhelming dominance. But Arment may be missing the forest for the trees in his particular case against Google.

Will the global NSA backlash break the internet? The NSA's ongoing surveillance has spurred many governments to pursue stronger data-protection laws, but there are growing concerns that this backlash could divide the internet along national borders, threatening the principles of openness and fluidity that it was founded upon. In September, Brazil announced plans to build a fiber-optic cable that would route internet traffic away from US servers, theoretically keeping its citizens’ data away from the NSA. The policy has yet to be implemented, and many question whether it will actually be effective, but others appear to be following Brazil’s lead.