Over the next six months, the game is to attempt to put together a conference happening somewhere in the Boston area whose theme is “Fame and Celebrity On The Internet”. The guest list is to include a vast and disturbing menagerie of every important amateur internet celebrity and internet culture meme-seed in the last two decades.
This includes everyone from the creator of Homestar to the guy whose asshole is Goatse. Everyone from Numa Numa kid to the guy who started YTMND. Everyone from the guy who traded up from a paperclip to a house to the people who began the lolcat.
I’m process blogging the entire project at roflcon.org. Stay tuned!
As Blake wisely said, “Sure both of their ages added is still less than either one of ours, but if we multiply their ages we get how old we’ll be when we figure out what to do with our lives!”
Well, looks like the usual press of school and LSATs have turned my brief hiatus into something of a larger break. It’ll be safe to lay this Shit Is Bananas to rest until further notice. But, I’m definitely planning to put together another blog (i.e. Secret Diary of Lena Chen, some process blog for the Free Culture Space, etc) at some point this year. Stay tuned…
I’ll be out all this week on a family trip to Turkey, so, TSIB will be officially on hiatus-mode until next week, Sept 5th. I’ll be sure to drop a photo or two if I can grab some semi-reliable internet access over there.
Depending on her schedule, ever talented and brilliant Christina will be guestblogging here and being a powerhouse contender over at Dork and the Ivy.
Stevie Levitt, writer of Freakonomics and kind-of-a-big-deal in the Cool Economics arena, recently did a fairly interesting op-ed with the NYT where he discusses how one goes about designing effective terrorist plots.
His proposal: roving bands of terrorist shooters coordinated to attack at similar times, in true economist fashion, maximizing terror for minimal cost.
If anything, it’s worth reading from the varyingly insightful and/or pompous comments that various readers have posted in response.
What’s morbidly interesting in this respect is that is that the op-ed suggests that acts of terrorism can be approached as a design problem more than a military problem (since the aim isn’t to destroy the opponent’s ability to resist). And, insofar as terrorist cells do their part in innovating in their chosen industry (terror), we can approach terrorism as an organizational design problem as well.
I wonder if it’s a useful way to explaining why terrorist cells have in fact NOT done something similar to Levitt’s suggestion. In the very least, you wonder if different kinds of terrorist organizations innovate in unique patterns, and how these innovations are shared across various groups — particularly a group like Al-Qaeda, which functions as a series of independent cells.
