If the US does go ahead with bombing Syria, some websites are predicting as soon as Thursday, there could well be asymmetric responses, by Syria and her allies Russia and China.
Already tonite the NY times website is down. If parts of the internet do go down, this could disrupt banking, and other sorts of on-line activity. Your email may be hard to reach and Facebook unresponsive. It might be good to have some cash money money on hand, as ATMs use the interwebs as well. But above all, do not panic. Maybe having the internet go down will be a good thing- we will be forced to talk to each other face to face, and will not be distracted to such a great degree. It will also be a good reminder that we should not depend completely on our digital overlords for everything, and have a printed paper trail for important information, not just store it on the NSA cloud.
Update:
Syrian Electronic Army claims responsibility for taking down nytimes, huffingtonpost.com and other sites:
http://boingboing.net/2013/08/27/syrian-electronic-army-boa.html
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
