Aram Squalls

Black + Otaku = New hybrid subculture?

In the year since we got back to NYC, Dunia and I have noticed a new trend on the streets: black American teens dressed up like Otaku, replete with straightened hair, Hello Kitty knapsacks, and cute gadgets. I guess this was inevitable, but it's interesting to see it finally manifest -- especially after all the science fiction on the subject (Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, etc.)

I've coined an appropriately un-PC term for this phenomenon: "Brotaku." Although, to be fair, Google tells me there are already 117 web pages with this term (most of them appear to be usernames).

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to snap a pic of any of these kids yet, but I'll update the post when we do.

I guess this is kind of a reciprocal movement to the whole Ganguro thing (see below):

Mapping mash-ups + digital music = happy Aram

I love it when rock stars are bigger nerds than me (had dinner with Todd Rundgren once, and all he wanted was to talk about how cool his Mac was).

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails has now risen even higher in my nerdesteem. A month and a half after offering their latest album, The Slip, as a free download on their site (following on the heels of another very successful free download release this spring), the band has created a Google Earth KML file (basically, a link to a spot in GE), showing the volume of downloads from every region on the globe. Pictured above: North America.

Not only is this a fabulously cool thing to do just for the sake of it, but it also provides us with an interesting chunk of data. Apparently, NIN did far more downloads on the coasts than in Middle America, for instance. Maybe this is due to digital divide issues, or maybe industrial music plays better in industrial environments, or maybe it's just plain population density. Who knows? The point is, hooray for NIN. I should have teased my high school girlfriend less for liking them...

Military map mash-up

The FAA has created a Google Map mash-up site listing the location of every single military installation in the USA. What a nice favor to, uh, law abiding airline pilots terrorist splinter cells and crazy white power militias.

Still, it's a pretty good mash-up. Check out SeeAndAvoid.org to play with it.

Seen on my pal Noah's Danger Room blog.

Panic! at the Internets

My friend Alice just published a great article in FirstMonday (an online peer-reviewed academic journal) about the persistence of moral panic over the sexual vulnerability of kids and teens online -- from the great cyberporn panic of 1996 to the tizzy in a teapot over MySpace predators today.

The article's especially timely, given the recent news that Verizon, Sprint and TWC will now be monitoring the bits they carry, and blocking users' access to newsgroups that have been identified as child porn destinations.

Now, I'm against child pornography in all forms, but I hardly think an ineffective witch hunt (honestly, how many microseconds will it take for the pervs to create a viable workaround?) is sufficient justification to destroy the legislatively-enforced protection that ISPs have against culpability for the actions of their users, and to further erode what little privacy we have left in this country.

What's next -- the telcos being held responsible for monitoring the content of our private phone conversations? Oh, wait a second...

From Alice's article:

Thus, I conclude that the furor over MySpace is disproportionate to the amount of harm produced by the site. Indeed, the furor over online predators seems also to be disproportionate. Rather than focusing on nebulous “predators,” it seems that parents, teachers, and social workers should emphasize identifying and preventing abuse in specific, local community settings.

Word to the mothaf*cka, Alice!

God's-eye astigmatism in Google Maps

I was cruising Google Maps this morning, looking at the building in Brooklyn where I grew up, and noticed an interesting anomaly: the satellite view of my old building and the adjacent one are taken from different angles, producing a kind of Escherian paradox that violates the basic tenets of photographic perspective.

Of course, on a rational level I know that the maps data are assembled from millions of individual pics, and that although the seams are "invisible," the algorithm's not (yet) smart enough to account for the distortions and contradictions between its constituent elements.

But on an experiential and emotional level, I personally find the image very jarring. Google Maps and the like give us the false promise of a God's-eye view, a vantage point far above the more pedestrian "street view." As any student of art learns, the perspective an image offers us tells us something about ourselves, or about the positions we're supposed to inhabit. I think the reason so many of us like to look at our childhood homes on Google Maps is to gain the distance, detachment, and illusion of total understanding that the God's-eye view offers; it presents a welcome counterpoint to the confusing, subjective and incomplete memories we keep from our earlier years, and allows us to distance ourselves from the power of those memories.

I'm pretty sure that's why I find this image so unnerving; it punctured my sense of remove, and reminded me that I'm not God -- in fact, I'm not even that far from the location where my childhood took place (about a mile and a half, as the crow flies). The good news is, the view from my new apartment offers a more consistent and convincing angel's-eye view (32nd floor -- not quite God height, but pretty darn high), and I can actually see the old place from my living room window.