I used to love the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland when I was a kid. I grew up about 15 miles away from Disneyland, and when I was in elementary school my dad would sometimes tell my teacher I was sick and secretly take me to Disneyland for the day. That way, he explained to me, we could enjoy the park on a weekday without all the lines and tourists. Pirates was one of my favorites because you get to go in this big boat down waterfalls, and there’s lots of fire and destruction and stuff.

I wasn’t crazy about the first Pirates of the Carribean movie, but the second one intrigued me. Partly that’s because it has several well-realized sea monsters. But partly — as I explained in my column last week — it has to do with the interesting politics of the film. This is a story full of giant kraken, and yet the most demonic enemy is the British East India Company. There’s an odd anticolonialist message running under the surface of the flick.

Yes! It’s a release party for my book Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture.

WHERE: City Lights Bookstore (261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco)
WHEN: Thursday, July 27, 7 PM
COST: Free
WHY:

Capitalism is the monster under the bed!

Join me at City Lights Bookstore for an evening devoted to monster movies, economic horror, and a little H.P. Lovecraft. It’s the release party for my book Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Duke University Press). If you like B-movies, pulp horror, and science fiction, it’s high time you found out why class anxiety drives doctors mad and makes androids rape Julie Christie. Plus, you’ll discover how alienated labor turns people into flesh-eating zombies, and what’s really so scary about Tron. There will be a reading followed by a B-movie trivia contest with excellent prizes! Pretend We’re Dead also is the first book published by Duke University Press under a Creative Commons license. W00t!

Here’s what they’re saying about Pretend We’re Dead:

“Pretend We‘re Dead sets our monsters free of the dank laboratory of psychosexual studies and sends them rampaging across the landscape of economic reality. A sweeping, liberating, and wonderfully readable book.”
—Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book

“[A] terrific survey of ‘monster’ movies of the last 20 or so years and pop culture well before that. . . . [Newitz] brings zest and wide ranging cultural references to her topic, plus a knack for presenting complex ideas out of Marx, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Horkheimer, explaining them clearly and using them to illustrate how cinema has become a canvas upon which the culture has been grappling in fantasy with overwork, bad bosses, and meager returns.”
–D.K. Holms, from Quick Stop Entertainment

Even more exciting, The San Francisco Chronicle called me a “monster masher.”

I had a blast at HOPE, and my presentation on implanted RFIDs went quite well. In between learning to pick locks and listening to Sellam Ismail describe the thousands of vintage computers he has in his collection, I managed to write a report for Wired about the subversive, world-changing hacks everywhere in evidence at this antiauthoritarian, pro-technology conference.

And now for something completely different. Harry Potter fans were the topic of my column last week. Specifically, I wrote about a conspiracy of infinitesmal proportions among a subculture of people called “shippers” (from “relationship”) who write online fan fiction (fanfic) about romances between the characters in the Harry Potter books. A woman calling herself Ms. Scribe insinuated herself into several shipper communities and eventually ripped them apart with gossip and flame wars. She did it by conspiring with several fake “sock puppet” identities of her own invention, who would start fights (especially with Ms. Scribe herself). The whole riveting story — and it is riveting — is chronicled in an e-book by Charlotte Lennox. Read my column to find out more (and then read Charlotte’s book!).

This Friday at noon, I’ll be giving a presentation at the HOPE conference in New York. I’m talking about why I turned my body into a security vulnerability by getting a VeriChip RFID implant in my right arm (yes, I still have the implant). Joining me will be Jonathan Westhues, who will give a presentation on the proxmark3 device he designed — among other things, the proxmark3 allows him to clone my RFID implant.

Come see us, or just come to the conference. Organized in part by Emmanuel Goldstein of the legendary 2600 group and ‘zine, it’s the only event I know where progressive activists, hackers and culture jammers get together to scheme about revolution. This year, I vow to go to the lock-picking workshop and learn the basics.

What self-respecting geek could possibly resist the urge to make fun of Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska, who will now go down in history (at least internet history) as the guy who told the Senate Commerce Committee that the internet was “a series of tubes.”

Yes, it’s hilarious when people don’t understand the internet, but in this case Stevens’ incomprehension is also sad. Because the Senator doesn’t understand how the internet works, he voted to keep net neutrality out of the Senate’s version of the new telecommunications bill that’s working its way through Congress. If lawmakers don’t write network neutrality into law, we’re facing an internet whose “tubes” will be pay-to-play. Internet providers like Comcast can cut deals with companies like Google to make the search engine’s services run faster than those of Yahoo!. Or Verizon can choose to run only its own internet telephone service over its network, and if you want to use Skype then you’re going to have to switch providers.

I talked about what the end of network neutrality will mean for you in my column last week.

Wired has posted my latest feature for the magazine online now, so you can read all about whether homo sapiens carries Neanderthal DNA in its genome. (In other words: did Neanderthals and early humans make babies?) A group of genomics experts are working on this question by sequencing fragments of Neanderthal DNA that they’ve gotten from fossilized bones.

This was an incredibly fun article to write in large part because I was describing recent work from Eddy Rubin’s lab. Rubin is a world-famous geneticist who works at UC Berkeley, and also heads up the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek (the same place where the human genome was sequenced). He’s really taken with the idea that the Neanderthal sequence may completely change our perceptions of who we are and where we fit into evolutionary history. Talking with Eddy was great — he’s good at conveying complicated ideas succinctly, and takes genuine pleasure in his work. Plus, he isn’t afraid to be a total goofball.

Of course, the idea that a genetics expert would take on the work traditionally done by paleontologists and anthropologists is controversial in the scientific community. Part of my article is about this issue, and you’ll hear from Neanderthal experts like Erik Trinkaus, who has spent years in the trenches (literally) digging up Neanderthal bones. He raises a number of good points about why sequence tells us less than bones do, and refutes Eddy’s claims about the possible relationships between humans and Neanderthals.

If you want to know what the latest genomics research tells us about cross-breeding between early homo sapiens and Neanderthals, check out the article!

My one regret is that I didn’t have enough space to bring in comments I’d gotten from two amazing thinkers — Randall White and John Hawks. White’s work on the art and culture of early homo sapiens and Neanderthals is completely fascinating — I’d highly recommend his book Prehistoric Art. And John Hawks writes the best anthropology blog in the universe. All hail John Hawks!

My column last week pretended to be about why John Updike’s rant against digital books in the New York Times Book Review was absurd. But it was secretly a column about why bloggers who compare the Internet to the printing press are just plain wrong.

I understand why people make the comparison — both the printing press and the Internet have led to an explosion in new kinds of narrative, and new authors have gotten the means to distribute their work to the masses. But that’s where the similarties end. The printing press, by making books common, turned reading into a private occupation — something that people did in their homes with books in their personal collections. What the printing press did was usher in an era of privately-owned books. But the Internet promises to make books and reading public again. When Google Print and the Internet Archive’s Open Library project make books into something that we can share, that we can own collectively, a radical transformation has taken place. Reading has become a public activity.

That’s what I’m saying, people.

This weekend I will be reading a piece of historical fiction that I wrote — out loud, in public, and (hopefully) to the amusement of all. It’s for an event put on by the lovely Charlie Anders called “Writers in Drag.” The idea is for people to read things they’ve written that fall outside their usual genre (in my case: narrative nonfiction and journalism). What could be less nonfiction-ish than a swashbuckling tale of swordfighting and sex set on a merchant ship riding the high seas of an alternative early eighteenth century? You know that you want to know more. Oh yes.

So come to the Makeout Room at 7 PM this Saturday, 7/8, for Writers in Drag. It’s $3-5 at the door, and all proceeds benefit other magazine!

I will be joined by five other amazing writers, all reading stuff outside their normal repetoire. They are: John Marr, Alana Devich, Mir Tamim Ansary, Carol Queen, and Jennifer Traig.

It’s all Elly’s fault. A couple of weeks ago, I was going nuts trying to figure out what to write in my column. I didn’t want to do another rant about network neutrality, and I was also leery of giving in to my urge to write something about a fantasy novel I was reading. That’s when Elly walked into Ritual, and told me about Brookers.

“She’s this big star on YouTube,” Elly said, “And she just got a giant development deal with NBC because of her vodcast.” She made Brookers sound kind of cool and geeky, like a regular Web dork who happened to get lucky. But when I watched Brookers’ videos, I was really unimpressed. Really. It was like watching a teenager make faces at herself in the mirror — sort of cute, but mostly just annoying. The video that earned Brookers her big development deal had gotten 1.5 million downloads, and it was the only watchable thing she’s made. Unfortunately, however, it was just a response to an Internet meme known as the “Numa Numa Dance.” She was imitating an imitation of an imitation that had been going around the Web for 3 years. Jean Baudrillard is probably writing an essay about Brookers right now.

The more I investigated the Numa Numa Dance, however, the more intrigued I became. I spent the whole afternoon in Ritual drinking coffee and watching video after video of fans all over the world dancing to Moldavian pop music. And I wrote a column about the tangled origins of the Numa Numa Dance.

Then, later that week, I got to go on another episode of the Web’s surliest TV show, Cranky Geeks — and host John Dvorak let me rant about Brookers some more. When you get two rants out of one meme, I think that’s a good score.