Monday, March 25, 2019

Water is Life: The New Delhi Remix

For decades, the region of South Asia has been struggling against the same political revanchism which has blighted other nations, a.k.a. the bigotry, fear-mongering, and the scapegoating of minorities by kleptocratic elites. Yet the ordinary citizens of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have also been doing some wonderful and amazing things to make their communities better.

Citizen journalist Dhruv Rathee reports on New Delhi's restoration of a local lake, transforming what was once a pestilential and polluted wasteland into an eco-friendly water treatment plant, a scenic public park, and a source of civic pride (be sure to click on the CC button for the English subtitles):


 

"Delhi's Amazing Lake Revival! | Ground Report by Dhruv Rathee". January 27, 2019.

Friday, March 22, 2019

This is How You Crush Kleptocratic Fascist Scum...

...like a grape:



(From the fine folks at Some More News.)

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Games for the 7.7 Billion

Two landmark announcements from the world of videogames: first, Scott Benson and Beth Hockenberry, two of the creators of the brilliant Night in the Woods, have formed a videogame cooperative called The Glory Society (their feed is here).

The videogame industry, like every other media industry, is a place where amazingly creative artists and fan communities are locked in struggle against toxic business models and ruthless corporate oligopolies. One of the best ways for those artists and communities to resist those models and oligopolies is to democratize the production of videogames.

For videogame artists, this means supporting crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, using software projects such as Unity, the world's leading open source videogame engine platform, and creating worker-owned videogame cooperatives (it is worth noting that Valve itself is run on cooperative principles).

The other major news is Google's announcement for Stadia, an online service which will let players play their games on any device which runs the Chrome browser. It is an online service, which means there's no box to purchase, just online experiences to jump into.

Stadia achieves this feat by running the game somewhere on Google's immense worldwide server network. Players connect to their game via Chrome, and can use any input device they wish -- an XboxOne or PS4 controller, a mouse and keyboard, etc. In theory, this should remove much of the pain and suffering involved in playing videogames, ranging from hardware and operating system compatibility to making backup copies of game files (there is the added bonus that Google's servers are 100% powered by renewable energy). We'll have more to say about this in the next issue of Uplink, which will be up this Friday.

Thursday, March 14, 2019

26 Years Of Neoliberal Hell in Four Tweets

Matt Stoller hauls out the Serious-Sam-sized flamethrower and torches the plutocracy's puppet politicians (entire thread is here):

1: Tim Geithner was bailing out banks not because there was 13 dimensional chess going on but because that was his goal. Obama lied about trying to claw back AIG bonuses because he was a liar who lied to get what he wanted, which was a plutocracy run by Ivy League elites. Simple.

2: Bill Clinton lied routinely to push plutocrat-friendly policies because he was a liar who wanted to help rich people. He thought that was the right thing to do, and he was also incredibly greedy. This isn't hard.

3: Obama was a bad President. Bush was a bad President. Clinton was a bad President. These are people who believe they and their friends are better than you, which is why they have money and power and you don't. It's not that hard to understand, it's just hard to accept.

4: In terms of a generational divide, while Obama/Hoyer/Pelosi were fucking up foreclosure policy, @aoc was LIVING THROUGH A FORECLOSURE. You think they have different views of banks? Thank God for millennials, who see markets and commerce are always 100% politically constructed.


Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Yakuza: The Interview

Top-notch interview with Takaya Kuroda (voice of Kiryu) and Daisuke Sato (producer) of Sega's superb and long-running Yakuza videogame franchise, courtesy the fine folks at IGDB (incidentally, the very first voice you'll hear is Doug Cockle, voice-actor of Geralt of Rivia):



Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Union of Europeans

Yanis Varoufakis, messenger from a more fortunate stub, delivers this fiery message to the 515 million citizens of the European Union:


Varoufakis: "[Back in 2016] I could've gotten up on the stage [in Berlin] and could have said, 'this European Union doesn't work, let's disintegrate it. I will now catch a flight of Aegean airlines or whatever -- Lufthansa -- and go to Greece and I'm going to fight there for socialism. And you [Germans] do this here. And then let's exchange notes at some point.' If I had done that, the people in the Volksbuhne would have been grossly disappointed because suddenly they would feel that they're alone. That they are Germans that must fight the German establishment as Germans. And we would feel alone in Greece because we would have to fight the Greek oligarchy as Greeks alone." 
"What we said instead was: let's all get together and fight our oligarchies together, through a common program of change. And that means we are not going to give away the European institutions that are unreformable to those that use them against the many. We're not going to say, the European Investment Bank: do away with it. We're not going to say, the European Central Bank, ah, well, shut it down. We're not going to say that all the various achievements of parliamentarians in Europe, trade unions in Europe, to create some kind of protection of the environment at the European level, at the level of labor markets, that we're going to give them all up." 
"No. We're going to take them over. And we're going to take them over and put them to use, press them into the service of genuine solidarity against the big business cartel, we're going to take them and turn them against both business-as-usual establishment, which is creating the crisis that is feeding the Salvinis [i..e revanchist fascisms], and against the Salvinis."  [4:34-6:23 in video]