Ovi magazine; Wednesday December 8th, 2021

 

The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Wednesday December 8th, 2021

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Before the ‘Age of #Metaverse’: Fantasy, Rhetoric, and Reality of #Malaysia’s “Cyber-SMART Schools” of the 1990s by Dr. Azly Rahman

When discussed within the context of aesthetics of technology and when brought deeper into the analysis of superstructural (ideological) underpinnings of transnational, pan-, and virtual capitalism, Malaysia’s grand design to ‘cybernate’ society and to wire up all of its 10,000 secondary schools situated within its even grander design of The Multimedia Super Corridor, represents an interesting case study and a text to be analyzed via the paradigm of Critical Theory through the means of discourse analysis on “development”.

In this brief analysis of the transfer of discourse on technological change and the heteroglossia surrounding it (see Bakhtin, 1984), I will first present a scenario of change – of how agents of technological change played their role in a world of fantasy reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s statement that “… the future is a different world, they do things differently there…”, and proceed with a brief discourse analysis drawing from ideas proposed by media analysts such as Broughton (1984), Marcuse (1941), and Terkel (1997 ).

Continue reading HERE!

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Gypsy Face #poem & #painting by Nikos Laios

“Your face melts  
With the sunrise
And your green eyes
Drip over the pine trees,
Red lips soft like wax.”

Continue reading HERE!

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Where there are Tailings, No Grass Grows: Serbians Protest against Rio Tinto by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Another fault line has opened in the mining wars. In Serbia, resistance is gathering steam against various deals made between Belgrade and companies that risk environmental degradation and lingering spoliation.

In this regard, the globe’s second largest metals and mining corporation, features prominently. Rio Tinto, bruised in reputation but determined in business, finds itself in a hunting mood in the Balkans, hoping to establish a lithium mine and processing plant in the valley of Jadar.

As the infamous destroyer of the Juukan Gorge Caves outlines in a statement, the Jadar site is intended to “produce battery-grade lithium carbonate, a critical mineral used in large scale batteries for electric vehicles and storing renewable energy”. This greening shift – because all canny mining entities are doing it – promises to “position Rio Tinto as the largest source of lithium supply in Europe for at least the next 15 years.” In an effort to make matters sound even more impressive, Jadar will also “produce borates, which are used in solar panels and wind turbines.”

ntinue reading HERE!

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Screws & Chips 21#19 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

For more Screws & Chips, HERE!

For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Ovi magazine; Saturday November 27th, 2021

 

The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Saturday November 27th, 2021

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Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data. Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and regret. So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the name of experience, destroys imagination even as it celebrates it, and luxuriates in a lowly prurience.

Facebook, in particular, has been trying to push such a model using a tactic all companies in distress have sought to adopt: rebranding. Be it the scandals disclosed by the Facebook papers, the scrutiny over the use of algorithms by the company, the inability to combat galloping misinformation on its platforms, or the stark amorality of the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the chance to seek the metaverse has presented itself.

Enter, then, the world of Meta Platforms, aided by the virtual reality headset company Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. Astute watchers then would have been the strategy afoot at the time; most, however, thought the decision misguided and destined to flop.

Continue reading HERE!

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Wipe your Tears #poem by Shola Balogun

“Child, let your eyelids gleam
Like a thousand suns.
Let your smiles radiate
Like the stars
In the sky at night.”

Continue reading HERE!

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Book review: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir by Joseph Gatt

Published in 1949, simply put, Simone de Beauvoir answers Sigmund Freud’s question: who are women.

The book mixes descriptive accounts of the social and individual lives of women with literary accounts of the social and individual lives of women. That, along with legal and religious views on all matters pertaining to women.

The common thread of the book: men usually live their life cycles without having to worry about getting pregnant, without having to worry about “forced hangovers” once a month which is what menstruations really are. And men usually don’t have to worry about becoming anyone’s sex slave or domestic slave or domination within the household.

So women are mostly reacting on a daily basis, on an hourly basis to these threats.

ntinue reading HERE!

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Mika Toxica 21#12 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

For more Mika Toxica, HERE!

For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Ovi magazine; Wednesday November 17th, 2021

 

The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Wednesday November 17th, 2021

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On the “Metaverse”: Letters to Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, META by Dr. Azly Rahman

Yes, my obsession with analyzing the anatomy, chemistry, ideology, and political-economy continues [Article: “Metaverse? And a Zuckerbergian elegy?” Read HERE!]. The mind-map I created in my plan to write this essay suggests the inextricable-linkages of the fields of Human Geography, Cognitive Psychology, Modern World History, Cultural Studies, and Sociology of the Future — fields I teach and have taught, over the years. Paradigms of sociological research are what I have applied alternatively, to understand the meaning of this “new world” that is being created by those who own the means of production and who will change the nature of the social relations of production.

Here’s my thought on some data collection work: I’d like to know what the post-Millennial generation, those teenagers of today think of the “metaverse.” — of NFTs, cryptocurrency, “digital sneakers”, augmented and virtual worlds, robots, post-Covid-quarantine syndrome, and entry into the “metaverse,”, and a host of other considerations as we speak of the sociology of the future re: metaverse. After all, these teens are the direct and dedicated consumers of digital products and are part of the generation of beings that got happily sucked and vacuumed and hyper-looped into the world of augmented reality this and that.

Continue reading HERE!

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“Human” #poem #painting by Nikos Laios

“Everyday we dig deep
Plunging into the depths,
That’s where the good stuff is”

Continue reading HERE!

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Ephemera 21#27 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

For more Ephemera, HERE!

For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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