Ultimately stunning in its revelations, Lutz Dammbeck’s THE NET explores the incredibly complex back-story of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th Century web of technology – a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting counter cultural responses to the cybernetic revolution. For those who resist these intrusive systems of technological control, the Unabomber has come to symbolize an ultimate figure of Refusal. For those that embrace it, as did and do the early champions of media art like Marshall McLuhan, Nam June Paik, and Stewart Brand, the promises of worldwide networking and instantaneous communication outweighed the perils. Dambeck’s conceptual quest links these multiple nodes of cultural and political thought like the Internet itself. Circling through themes of utopianism, anarchism, terrorism, CIA, LSD, MK-ULTRA, Tim Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, THE NET exposes conspiracies and upheavals, secrets and cover-ups along the way.
Watch the documentary video: The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet
ABC7 in Denver, Colorado brought media attention to the potential side effects of Zicam when it reported on a station employee who lost her sense of smell after using Zicam to treat a cold. The employee was diagnosed with anosmia, a condition that likely will result in the permanent loss of her sense of smell.
The station received an outpouring of user feedback following its report. ABC7 reported that within a week of running the story, they already had received 80 reports from people injured by zinc nasal spray. Most of those experiencing serious side effects had used Zicam. The others had used Cold Eeze.
Below is a copy of an email being forwarded around the net:
Read this and avoid this medicine! It would be better to endure the cold.
Well, the cold season is drawing near, and we should be careful in selecting cold medicine products. Also, I did go the “Zicam” website, and the health side effects are for real.
This is true go to the website at the end……
I need to warn you about a product on the market and
hopefully you will pass it on to as many people as possible. I felt like I was coming down with a cold last Friday and because I’m around sick family members so much I wanted to possibly head it off. I used Zicam, which is a gel nose spray which claims to keep a cold from becoming “full blown.” Immediately I had an intense, horrible burning in my nasal/sinus passages. The skin on my face hurt to touch and I had pain and burning so that it hurt to move my head. My husband was there and kept asking if I wanted to go to the ER but the thought of getting in a car was overwhelming. My face was burning hot and my nasal passages were so swollen that I couldn’t breathe through my nose and I could see the swelling when I looked in the mirror. It lasted for about three hours and it was Labor Day weekend and I couldn’t see a Dr. until Tuesday. I have seen two ENT specialists in the last two days because I have lost, totally lost all ability to taste or smell. They both told me the same thing and suggested an immediate course of action. This is called “chemical trauma ” and most times is permanent. I’m going to have a CT scan on Monday and am on a high dose of the steroid, Prednisone for two weeks. If there is even a thread of the olfactory nerve left, it will help to rejuvenate what is left. I have been on the Internet (just put in Zicam) and there are hundreds of people who have had this happen. I am so angry and devastated and saddened right now that I don’t know how to get through this. I cannot handle the thought of never tasting food again or trying a new recipe or smelling a Thanksgiving turkey. Cooking has been an absolute passion of mine for as long as I can remember and at the moment I don’t see the point of even putting dressing on a salad. I keep thinking that this cannot be happening to me. I suck on a lemon, bite down on a clove of garlic, smell a bottle of ammonia, nail polish remover, anything. I’m starting by telling people I love. PLEASE don’t use Zicam, tell your friends.
Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web, Mark Pesce is now based in Australia and espousing his philosophy of Internet “swarm” audiences and peer-to-peer “hyper-distribution” via the Australian Film, TV and Radio School.
The author of five books, Pesce is a ferociously illuminating technologist, futurist and philosopher. Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the interactive age. He has written himself for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and serves on the editorial board of TRIP magazine.
From 1998 through 2000, Pesce chaired the Interactive Media Program at the University of Southern California’s world-renowned School of Cinema-Television. His mandate – to bring cinema and broadcast television into the interactive era – led him to create a program that encouraged creative vision and is now producing a generation of entertainment professionals shaping the media of the 21st century.
Pesce’s current projects include TRUE HALLUCINATIONS, an opera based on the life and death of ethnobotanist and philosopher Terence McKenna, and The Next Big Thing, a book chronicling the science, business and politics of nanotechnology.
In this interview, Mark Pesce talks about the how the profound changes in technology consumption and distribution are likely to reshape the media landscape in the next couple of years. He describes in depth the legal, financial and philosophical implications of peer-to-peer networking, IPv6, nano-technology, mobile wireless video devices, identity management and theft, copyright and piracy.
Over the past decade, the number of websites glorifying drug usage, providing step-by-step recipes for homemade highs and pushing products through questionable online storefronts has increased exponentially. And tech-savvy teens, undetected by their less-informed parents, are flocking to these sites, using them to score drugs, swap stories and further their habits.
One study found only 6% of websites selling prescription drugs require prescriptions, making “these drugs as easy to buy over the Internet as candy,” said Bo Deitl, chairman of Beau Dietl and Associates, which did the analysis with the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
“Technology has created an environment for kids where they can really stay under the surface — right under adults’ noses,” Spitsbergen said.
Now, he added, finding drug dealers can be as easy as logging onto MySpace.com — and obtaining the drugs as simple as sending a text message.
