Cameras are everywhere. There's probably, if not one in your hand right now, one in your pocket. There's likely one above you now, if you're anywhere public. We've become used to this. Even if you aren't posing for a photo, you may be aware that you'll be posing for one soon. People maintain a camera face. The look forward, prepared, maybe with a gesture or expression they've practiced, even if they don't acknowledge it as practiced. You can see this look, the camera glare, in avatars, in Facebook photos. Even if you don't think someone is taking your photo, I believe subconsciously we now believe someone may be. This is not seen as surveillance, it's seen as desire, social. We live in a constant state of "SAY CHEESE!", the moment someone used to command you to freeze yourself into a state ready for posterity.

This is, arguably, no longer totalitarian, no longer surveillance. We are aware of most of the recording, if at times only dully when we're taking money from the ATM. There is very little special or uncommon intention attached to picture taking.

What I find remarkable about the photos taken in Prague during surveillance in the 70s is that they were taken at a time when doing so is an obvious attempt at social control by an obviously totalitarian regime. The question back then "perhaps someone is watching me" was enough to curtail cultural freedoms, empower the political engine, disparage contrary behavior and criticism. It was a tool of fear.

The opposite may be true now, the greatest tool of social control might be the modern terror "perhaps NOBODY is watching me".

These images are beautiful and mundane. They reveal a layer of daily activity that wasn't naturally captured. In that sense the monitoring by a police state become weird antique objects, so genuine they seem like they must be staged.

(Editing by Duncan Robson. Music by Joel Robson. http://joelrobson.bandcamp.com/track/three-point-landinghttp://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThreePointLanding)

Some look at memes, remixes and the constant stream of web culture and dismiss it. Just a cat that wants a cheezburger. Just Scumbag Steve or Tron Guy or Me Gusta. But there's more under the surface. ROFLCon peeled this back and showed the common behind meme-making, the habitual remixer, the socially awkward penguin. The background is the same expressive subversive impulses we've always seen in human culture, naturally taking shape in the latest technology, mutating quickly. It's an informational ouroboros, a radically consuming impermanent whirlwind, and those dismissing it are missing out on the distilled state of our times: fame, criticism, obsessiveness, struggling for individuality.

Also, this Three Point Landing mix from the supercuts panel is goddamn fantastic.

Database normalization ties relationships together across tables so that there's no redundancy, allows those relationships to be updated consistently in the fewest places. Your identity online is becoming normalized through tech and convention.

At one time (long ago) it was peculiar, perhaps anathema, to use your "real name" online. You used a handle. The idea there would exist a normalized relationship between that handle and other records, and that these relationships had any reflection of the real world (discarded term: meat space) was thought of as dystopian, creepy. This is no longer the case.

Handles in a sense still exist, but as projects and brands, rarely as primary personal identities. The expectation, accepted behavior now is that your real name, and everything that goes with it is also your online identity. You promote your name as a commodity, you treat your identity like a start up.

Denormalization, on the other hand, is duplication of information across tables, so while there's excellent performance, the data can easily become disparate, can drift. One record may, but doesn’t necessarily, contain something from another record.

I'd argue that the normalization of identity, and the obvious fact that for a lot of people -- young people, tech people -- there is little or no separation between online-offline, means that we get operationally a kind of Victorian society. There may be a lot of identities, but the space is small, so the social pressures to behave "properly" is enormous. Through normalization the ability to maneuver is limited. It’s unforgiving.

The web used to be, not very long ago, a hodge podge of frontier towns. Some rougher than others. Most interesting. "Online", when it was a frontier, was wild. Imagine, a hundred years ago, you pick up your stuff and move across the country looking for work. You don’t know anyone where you’re going, they don’t know you. It’s a reinvention, you have the ability to live as essentially a new personality. Before the great normalization no one could look at your Facebook page, or blog, or tweets, or a thousand other artifacts that you’ve built up about yourself. Migrating physically now means little since centrally, in the information space, you’re pinpointed.

I’ve accepted that I will never entirely feel comfortable with this change. I come from online frontier towns. I don’t necessarily make very good online company. I have unrealistic affection for the uncouth, chaotic and perhaps embarrassingly named handles of the early days. I understand there are pros and cons, that having an online identity tied to your offline self that you use wisely can connect you with people that share your interests, and there are great rewards to that.

But God help you if you fuck up. You won’t be hanged, you’ll be shunned from polite society and you can't change your handle.

As enthusiastic as the US hurls probes at Mars to crawl the deserts, scratching around for a hint of water and life, the Soviets propelled craft after craft at Venus, hoping for some demystification. They were tenacious.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union no one has attempted to put a lander on Venus. Why? Doesn't Venus deserve as much love as Mars? Perhaps. The goals were legendary, anthropomorphic. The Soviets very soon found a completely hostile place. Finding life on Venus, assuming this is always a thinly veiled goal of any interplanetary mission, is fantastically unlikely. But Venus has other mysteries, still has mysteries.

Now scientists have discovered that magnetic reconnection also happens on Venus, a planet with no intrinsic magnetic field. The finding, reported today in Science1, suggests that magnetic reconnection may generate auroras on Venus, and could have contributed to the loss of a thick, water-rich atmosphere that scientists believe surrounded the planet during its early history, some 4 billion years ago. ... more »

The landing of a craft on Venus at all is incredibly difficult.

Surface temps of 475C, an atmosphere so thick that probes get crushed. Think it's hard getting a submersible to the bottom of the marianas trench? Try sending it through space first. Also, once you're in the atmosphere, it's so dense that you're gonna have trouble getting your probe to the ground before your power runs out. Which is what happened to Venera-4. Venera-5 and 6 were crushed 18km above the surface. But the Soviets didn't stop.

That the Soviets were able to do it several times with the technology of the era is remarkable. That they didn't stop after failures was equally remarkable.