Pasolini working on his Olivetti Lettera 22.
> Photo: Dino Pedriali (1975).
Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath; entry no. 61
had a minor crisis when 12ft.io went down yesterday and thankfully it's back now but this seems like a good opportunity to compile a list of similar paywall-evading tools in case 12ft ever gets canned for real:
- 12ft.io: the legend himself. definitely my favorite of the bunch by virtue of being the easiest to use (and the easiest url to remember), but it's configured to disable paywall evasion for a handful of popular sites like the new york times, so you'll have to go elsewhere for those.
- printfriendly: works great; never had any issues with removing paywalls, even on domains that don't work with 12ft.io. since this site is literally designed to make sites print-friendly, it might simplify the overall formatting of the page you're trying to access, which can be a good or bad thing. my only real issue is that the "element zapper" (which lets you remove content blocks from the print-friendly preview) is a little sensitive if you're browsing on a touchscreen device, which means you might accidentally delete a paragraph when you're just trying to scroll. but if that happens you can reload the page and it'll revert everything back to its original state.
- fifteen feet: basically a 12ft clone, minus 12ft's restrictions. haven't used it much since I only discovered it yesterday in the wake of 12ft's 451 error but it seems to do the trick.
- archive.today: an archival tool very similar to the wayback machine, but it also works as a de facto paywall removal tool. (the wayback machine seems to remove paywalls as well, but archive.today has better UX imo and is way faster to use.)
- and an honorable mention for sci-hub: only works for scientific/academic journals, not random news articles, but the other sites listed above only work for random news articles and not academic publications so you gotta have this one in your toolbelt for full coverage. pubmed is your oyster.
Ryuichi Sakamoto - "Life, Life" (from "async")
Words taken from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, spoken by David Sylvian
Curiously I had a dream I met Sakamoto a few days ago, before his death was publicly announced. I don’t remember exactly when I had it, but it’s possible it happened around the time of his death. I don’t know what to make of that. I find this track and “Fullmoon” to be very moving and pertinent to my feelings these days.
Source: youtube.com
“However, mainstream culture has lost its authority. There is a floating notion of values. Technology is progressing by itself. The gears move more and more efficiently. We feel possibilities appearing that exceed our imagination and our horizons. This is clear in the field of bio-technology or in the 5th generation computer. I don’t intend to approve or reject this form of progress. I don’t say, ‘Return to nature,’ ‘Return to pre-modern times.’ I don’t want to go against the current. Still, I’m concerned by a deficient technology, in other words, errors or noises; it absorbs me, and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency. This concern is behind all my work.”
— Ryuichi Sakamoto in his film Tokyo Melody (1985)
Lately, I’ve been rather ambivalent about Tumblr and social media in general. It’s hard to look at all that is happening and not feel nihilistic or conclude we’re doomed. Technology is being heralded as our potential salvation, but it’s just as easily our downfall. We shall see where this AI-powered acceleration of capitalism takes us. Perhaps collapse, perhaps something else entirely on the other side.
Reflecting on Sakamoto’s ruminations on the cultural impact of technology in the 1980s, I wonder about the role of art today and the looming threat of content oversaturation...
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless.
In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges everyone to be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroën, spaghetti, mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nationalization, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. Everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent them from having one about the totality.
Raoul Vaneigem, Basic Banalities (1963)
The worst part of normalized surveillance is the normalization.
It's the thousands of followers who react to your secretly taken videos of noble good deeds with encouragement. It's them feeling cheered up, day made, hearts filled with warmth by your brazen voyeurism.
It's scrolling past a Tumblr post of a reddit post of a Twitter screenshot of a father and daughter sharing an intimate, family moment, oblivious to the tweeter taking a photo of them.
It's minding your business at the grocery store, hearing a weird noise, and realizing some teens are filming a tiktok dance and either did not notice or did not care that you are in the shot.
It's walking home with a mask on because every single condo and floor apartment in your neighborhood has Ring and you don't know what that means for you yet.
It's thinking about talking to a PR person just in case your recurring nightmare of your mental breakdown in the parking lot suddenly going viral comes true, hoping against hope a professional knows the magic set of words that will mitigate the harassment, stop you from losing your job.
It's that reddit post of the Sikh woman who found her and her mustache on the frontpage, forced to turn public humiliation into a teaching moment. It's some jackass redditor posting a couples photo, ostensibly to mock that his fly was down yet 70% of the comments target his girlfriend's appearance. It's seeing a top reddit pic with a headline demonizing a person in it months after you saw this same pic taken down after mods discovered op was lying. It's a lot of reddit.
It's wondering how many times your face has been posted online and if it was in a positive context at least.
It's that this is all normal, that so many of these things feel neutral to individuals, not a risk they're taking on behalf of a stranger.
“The internet is not dead. It is undead and it’s everywhere. […] It crossed the screen, multiplied displays, transcended networks and cables to be at once inert and inevitable. One could imagine shutting down all online access or user activity. We might be unplugged, but this doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. The internet persists offline as a mode of life, surveillance, production, and organization—a form of intense voyeurism coupled with maximum nontransparency. The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment.”
— Hito Steyerl, Too Much World