Tech + Nique
"It was a good game. Both teams played hard." "It was a good game. Both teams played hard." "It was a good game. Both teams played hard." "It was a good game. Both teams played hard." "It was a good game. Both teams played hard."	"The Human Highlight Reel"

Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, #133:

The subordination of information to the repetition of communication means the enslavement of its producers to the interests of its owners. It is the hacker class that taps the virtuality of information, but it is the vectoralist class that owns and controls the means of production of information on an industrial scale. Their interests lie in extracting as much margin as possible from information, in commodifying it to the nth degree. Information that exists solely as private property is no longer free, for it is chained to the repetition of the property form.

[DJ Premier cuts]
"Check the technique…" (3x)
"Check the technique … if you can follow it"

From the March Madness Video On Demand service, presented by NCAAsports.com:

Looking for VIP access? VIP registration for 2007 is now closed. All visitors registering now will be granted General Admission access. VIP members get access to games faster than General Admission members. Be sure to sign up early in 2008 to receive VIP access.

From luxury suite to T1 connection: as the sports stadium becomes wholly virtualized, it is access speed rather than spatial location that is the primary determinant of class superiority.

smithers:

[Aside] Jean Baudrillard, dead at 77.

I didn't know Baudrillard but through his work, and he most certainly had no idea who I was, yet here I write. Seems pretty unreal (ahem).

I had heard of him early in my graduate days as the "French McLuhan", which held a certain cachet for me, since I was a big McLuhan fan going back to my undergraduate days. I sort of poked around with some Baudrillard-related material for a while, and then my friend Greg Duquette pulled out Simulations at a conference several years ago. I was immediately captivated by its slick minimal black cover, and would be captivated by its contents shortly thereafter. During my master's degree I was taking a course on Foucault with Debra Shogan (author of The Making of High Performance Athletes), and all I kept wanting to know was why Baudrillard thought we should forget this guy.

Baudrillard insinuated himself into sportsBabel as I started to knit together the synapses between his work and my understanding of the sporting world. I once surmised that neither he nor Radiohead's Thom Yorke had spent much time at the fitness club. I got snarky with him for having one of my ideas 25 years earlier than me — and writing far more eloquently on the topic, to boot. And I speculated how the Olympics might intersect with his semiotically-driven World War Four.

The thing is, I was going to get to meet him this summer as part of my doctoral studies, which I was obviously quite excited about. Upon his death, I was (selfishly) pretty bummed out about my lost opportunity and didn't know what to write in memoriam, even though I felt like I should write something given his influence on my early work.

So I didn't write, instead aimlessly staring at the screen and wandering around my usual internet comfort zones. One stop was to Google Analytics to check the stats for sportsBabel. In checking my referrer logs, I am able to see what search strings visitors typed into search engines to arrive at my site (the tactility of which I am sure he would have greatly appreciated). Given the various appearances that Baudrillard has made here over time, I was not surprised to see his name appear in the logs following his death. But one search string caught my eye:

What could this cryptic snatch of text mean? What could this individual possibly have been searching for?

And then I realized that Baudrillard maintained a sense of humour to the last. His ultimate ruse? Forever manifesting himself as noise to someone else's desired signal in the data-networks of the world.

Smile, M. Baudrillard: post-funeral, you will have achieved your true legacy by fully completing your passage — as an image — to a new home in the hyperreal.

Je vous oublierai …

[Exit]