Andrew Hodges: The Alan Turing: Enigma (1983/2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, computing, cryptography, history of computing, mathematics, war
The full story behind the persecuted genius of wartime codebreaking and the computer revolution.
A new edition to celebrate Alan Turing’s centenary, includes a new foreword by the author and a preface by Douglas Hofstadter.
Alan Turing was the extraordinary Cambridge mathematician who masterminded the cracking of the German Enigma ciphers and transformed the Second World War. But his vision went far beyond this crucial achievement. Before the war he had formulated the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer.
Turing’s far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing committed suicide and one of Britain’s greatest scientific minds was lost.
First published in 1983, Burnett Books
Centenary edition
With Foreword by Douglas Hofstadter
Publisher Vintage, Random House, 2012
ISBN 1448137810, 9781448137817
624 pages
notes by the author
publisher
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Comment (0)Medea Benjamin: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, afghanistan, drones, military, war
Weeks after the 2002 American invasion of Afghanistan, Medea Benjamin visited that country. There, on the ground, talking with victims of the strikes, she learned the reality behind the “precision bombs” on which U.S. forces were becoming increasingly reliant. Now, with the use of drones escalating at a meteoric pace, Benjamin has written this book as a call to action: “It is meant to wake a sleeping public,” she writes, “lulled into thinking that drones are good, that targeted killings are making us safer.”
Drone Warfare is a comprehensive look at the growing menace of robotic warfare, with an extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who “pilots” these unmanned planes, who are the victims and what are the legal and moral implications. In vivid, readable style, the book also looks at what activists, lawyers and scientists are doing to ground the drones, and ways to move forward.
In reality, writes Benjamin, the assassinations we are carrying out via drones will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing—to us.
Foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher OR Books, New York/London, May 2012
ISBN 1935928813, 9781935928812
262 pages
author’s talk (August 2012)
Comment (0)Vice Magazine: The Syria Issue (November 2012)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · activism, arab spring, hip hop, journalism, music, photography, revolution, syria, war
Special issue on Syrian civil war, featuring work of Robert King.
“VICE commissioned renowned war photographer and videographer Robert King to embed with the ragtag troops of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, smack dab in the heart of a conflict that is ripping Syria apart. He returned with footage that has made us very scared and very sad for the future of the country. We’ve compiled Robert’s footage into a series of raw, largely unedited vignettes that present a snapshot of the ancient city as it crumbles and burns while its citizens are killed indiscriminately.” (Editors)
Vice Magazine, Volume 19, Number 11
Publisher John Martin, November 2012
148 pages
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Malkit Shoshan: Atlas Of The Conflict, Israel-Palestine (2010/2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, history, israel, palestine, politics, urban planning, war
The Atlas of the Conflict maps the processes and mechanisms behind the shaping of Israel-Palestine over the past 100 years. Over 500 maps and diagrams provide a detailed territorial analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, explored through themes such as borders, settlements, land ownership, archaeological and cultural heritage sites, control of natural resources, landscaping, wars and treaties. A lexicon, drawing on many different information sources, provides a commentary on the conflict from various perspectives. As a whole, the book offers insights not only into the specific situation of Israel-Palestine, but also into the phenomenon of spatial planning used as a political instrument.
In the early 20th century, waves of Jewish immigrants swept across the country of Palestine, seeking to impress onto it a new nation. It took over 50 years of local and international transitions to redeem the land; dressing it with uniformity, a new identity, a new landscape, a new people and a new culture while ignoring an existing landscape, an existing people, an existing culture and an existing nation.
In 1948 one nation celebrated its formal recognition by the international community and the other grieved amidst its ruins. This atlas of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict maps the processes and mechanisms behind the modification of the country during the past 100 years, both on a policy level and in its implementations on the ground. With over 500 maps and diagrams this is an indispensable reference book on the conflict. There are lessons to be learnt from the atlas on a broader front, from the withdrawal of the colonial powers in the early 20th century to the forced division of the Middle East and the ongoing wars and disputes over territory and resources.
Maps, plans and diagrams give a neutral, apolitical overview of the protracted conflict in Israel and Palestine.
The book won the Leipzig Art Book Fair’s Golden Letter award for “most beautiful book in the world.” Malkit Shoshan is an Amsterdam-based Israeli architect and founder/director of FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory).
Originally published by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010
Publisher Publication Studio, Portland, OR, 2012
Jank Edition series
ISBN 9789064506888
478 pages
review (Yousef Munayyer, Palestine Center)
review (Esther Zandberg, Haaretz)
review (Régine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art.com)
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Stephen Graham: Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, iraq, israel, military, neoliberalism, security, surveillance, technology, terrorism, urbanism, war
A powerful exposé of how political violence operates through the spaces of urban life.
Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political violence through the sites, spaces, infrastructure and symbols of the world’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas.
Drawing on a wealth of original research, Stephen Graham shows how Western militaries and security forces now perceive all urban terrain as a conflict zone inhabited by lurking shadow enemies. Urban inhabitants have become targets that need to be continually tracked, scanned and controlled. Graham examines the transformation of Western armies into high-tech urban counter-insurgency forces. He looks at the militarization and surveillance of international borders, the use of ‘security’ concerns to suppress democratic dissent, and the enacting of legislation to suspend civilian law. In doing so, he reveals how the New Military Urbanism permeates the entire fabric of urban life, from subway and transport networks hardwired with high-tech ‘command and control’ systems to the insidious militarization of a popular culture corrupted by the all-pervasive discourse of ‘terrorism.’
Publisher Verso Books, London, 2010
ISBN 1844678369, 9781844678365
432 pages
review (Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian)
review (Jeff Heydon, review31)
review (George Steinmetz)
review (Alice O’Connor)
review (Jennifer Light)
FBI Files on Albert Einstein (1932-1955)
Filed under records | Tags: · history, history of science, invention, physics, politics, science, war
Released through the Freedom of Information Act.
Publisher Federal Bureau of Information, undated
FBI Records: The Vault series
1449 pages
Gerald Raunig: A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as Social Movement (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, activism, film, labour, machine, philosophy, precariat, precarity, protest, social movements, theatre, war
In this “concise philosophy of the machine,” Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of films, literature, and performance—from the role of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s fiction to Vittorio de Sica’s Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” to the deus ex machina of Greek drama—Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives.
Translated by Aileen Derieg
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2010
Volume 5 of Semiotext(e) intervention series
ISBN 1584350857, 9781584350859
128 pages
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