Attention Economy - August 26, 2023

Google celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ 112th birthday with a Doodle. [Source: CSMonitor.com] More here about Borges.

• Jorge Luis Borges: The man behind the Google Doodle - CSMonitor.com 082411
  Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, poet, and philosopher, earned a special Google Doodle Wednesday. The search engine giant celebrated what would have been the author’s 112th birthday. While he was not a sci-fi writer himself, Borges contributed much to science fiction. He’s best known for writing about dreams, labyrinths, libraries, animals, fictional writers, religion, and God. His most famous works were “Ficciones” and “The Aleph.” Unable to support himself as a writer, he worked as a librarian, a lecturer and a professor of literature, teaching at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1954, one of his short stories, “Emma Zunz,” was made into a film under the name “Days of Hate.” In the late 1950’s, Borges had lost his sight completely, but continued to write. Having never learned to read Braille, he received the help of his mother, to whom he was very close.
• Barefoot into Cyberspace - The Book! | The Barefoot Technologist
  Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you are likely to read, Barefoot Into Cyberspace is the ultimate guided tour of the hopes and ideals that are increasingly shaping world events. Beginning at the Chaos Communications Congress of December 2009, where WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg first presented their world-changing plans to a select audience of the planet’s most skilful and motivated hackers, Barefoot Into Cyberspace interweaves an insider’s take on the drama that ensued with a thoughtful mix of personal reflections and conversations with key figures in the community aimed at testing the hopes and dreams of the early internet pioneers against the realities of the web today. [available as free CC accessible texts HTML, PDF, ePub]
• The Barefoot Technologist | Becky Hogge’s website
  Becky Hogge is a freelance optimist. Her writing on information politics, human rights and technology has appeared regularly in UK political magazine the New Statesman, and she has also been published in, among others, Index on Censorship, the Guardian, Prospect, Dazed and Confused and The Face. View her porfolio. For two years, Becky was the managing editor, and then technology director, of the award-winning global politics magazine openDemocracy.net. During her time with openDemocracy she helped establish the China environment website chinadialogue.net – the world’s first truly bilingual blog – along with editor Isabel Hilton.
• BBC - Outriders: Barefoot with Becky Hogge 081711
  Becky Hogge’s book - Barefoot into Cyberspace follows her journey through Germany’s legendary Chaos Computer Club through meetings with extraordinary hackers like Rop Gonggrijp and Julian Assange and asks some tricky questions about the nature of online new radicals and activists. We talked about the politics of code and the people who work on making our online environment open.
• What Is Bitcoin? : Planet Money : NPR 082411
  Planet Money: “The U.S. has the dollar. Japan has the yen. Now some people are trying to invent a new currency that’s not tied to any country or government. It’s called bitcoin. Bitcoin is a lot like cash — for the online universe. It doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. You can’t hold bitcoins in your hand because they just live on computers and the Internet. We talked with Gavin Andresen, a programmer whose done a lot of work on bitcoin. He says there is no center to the whole bitcoin system. It’s not like there’s one computer somewhere storing all the information. It’s run by the people who use it. For Gavin, that’s a big part of the appeal.”