I first heard of Ani through tape recordings of shows back in the day. I had this 1991 Jazzberry’s tape that i literally wore through. After a series of dreadful events (including a few break-ins and a car fire), i lost almost all of my early boots. Of course, so many of them are burnt into my head that i can recall them without the recording. ::laugh::

This week, Ani announced that she will be putting out an official bootleg series for folks like me who have always appreciated the raw energy of concerts. Every six weeks or so, she will release a new raw concert boot. This is absolutely fantastic!

For the readers here who are not familiar with Ani, you should read her lyrics. She has been one of my biggest inspirations, always reminding me that there is value in fighting the system. Her work is very political and she is one of the strongest independent artists out there, refusing to sell out to the music industry in any form. (All of you EFF-loving readers, you’d love Ani’s political efforts against the music industry. For example, Million You Never Made is an ode to that system.)

You can beat me, you can abuse me, but don’t touch my hair or I’ll kill you.

Designer Joyce Leslie had the nerve to put this on their t-shirts. Understandably, V-Day was outraged and spoke up, calling on the store to recall these stores. According to Newsday, they did precisely that.

Yet Asimov’s reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their “sexiness” on a scale of one to three. Today’s social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, “So-and-so is indeed my friend,” and “I trust so-and-so to see all my other ‘friends.'” These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that’s easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: “If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy.” The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm (“allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself”) is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net’s underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.

This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock’s autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It’s likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as “lack of accord” and “certainty,” to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.

[From Cory Doctorow’s Rise of the Machines in the current Wired magazine.]

With iRobot about to hit the theatres, Cory’s article addresses how Asimov “turned androids into pop culture icons – and invented the science of robotics in the process.” His account is pretty critical and insightful, reminding me that the science fiction literature that i love should not be considered a complete prescriptive tool because the stories written often fail to address the complexities that exist in everyday life.