Disinfo Archives | Technoccult

TagDisinfo

Disinformation Books Sold to Red Wheel Weiser

June 7, 2012 / Klint Finley

New age publisher Red Wheel Weiser, probably best known to Technoccult readers for the Weiser Books line of occult books, has agreed to acquire Disinformation Books from the Disinformation Company for an undisclosed amount. The news was first reported this week by Publishers Weekly and I’ve confirmed it with Disinfo publisher Gary Baddeley.

The deal only includes the book division, and Disinfo will continue to operate its film production, electronic publishing and website independently. “Expect more disinformation books in the future – I’ve already signed a couple since we made the Red Wheel Weiser deal,” Baddeley says.

Baddeley will continue to work for both Red Wheel Weiser and the Disinformation Company.

Alex Burns on the Creation of The Book of Oblique Strategies

February 27, 2012 / Klint Finley

Alex Burns, who was editor of Disinformation from 1998 to 2008, has made his work The Book of Oblique Strategies available online as a free PDF. It’s not so much a work on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s famous deck. Alex describes it as a channeled work in the vein of Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies.

In addition to the work, Alex has explained how he came to write it and its significance to him. I don’t really understand the work itself and haven’t read the list of prerequisites that Alex suggested. But I appreciate the insight into Alex’s life and work and think anyone else who was shaped by Disinfo during his tenure as editor will appreciate it as well. Characteristic of Alex’s work at Disinfo, the write-up is more link dense Memepool and contains a huge number of references connecting seemingly disparate people and ideas.

My life changed dramatically in the next month. I hit a series of simultaneous inflection points or a Black Swan event cascade that overshadowed the document. REVelation Magazine folded and could not publish my interview with the late ethno-botanist Terence McKenna. 21C Magazine folded and could not publish my interview with space migration advocate Marshall Savage. The real estate sold out the rental house from beneath us. The relationship broke up. The 20th anniversary loomed of my mother’s death in a car accident on 28th March 1978. I experienced a period of referential ideation and had a nervous breakdown that my family helped me to recover from. I then struggled to pull together freelance magazine articles. When reconciliation was impossible with my former girlfriend, I attempted suicide (which influenced a later article on the Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile). A few months later I started to correspond with Richard Metzger and to write for the Disinformation alternative news site. I attended an academic seminar on process philosophy. Sean Healy invited me to This Is Not Art. I negotiated re-enrolling in my undergraduate degree on film and politics. Hence, the ‘Ordeals of Transmutation Fire.’

Alex Burns: The Book of Oblique Strategies

Richard Metzger – Mediapunk Interview

June 23, 2010 / Klint Finley

Richard Metzger

Richard Metzger was the co-founder and creative director of Disinfo. He’s now the online editor at the LA Times’ alt weekly Brand X and the host of his own online talk show Dangerous Minds. He talked to me by phone on May 24th from his home in LA about the end of Hollywood as we know it, the future of advertising, and the circus that is the right-wing media.

You co-wrote a book treatment, which was originally called Hollywood Ending and then you renamed it Free for All, on the subject of digital piracy. Could you tell us about the research you did and the conclusions you came to?

This was written in the beginning of 2007 and I co-wrote this extended treatment, which ended up reading like a mini-book, with my old friend Steven Daly, who is a long-time contributing editor at Vanity Fair*. It was taken from what I had seen as someone who was working in the DVD distribution business and also as someone who was downloading quite a number of things myself , true for Steven as well and so seeing it from that insider’s perspective and as someone who was also doing a lot of downloading. We looked around and that story wasn’t really being told. Parts of the story were being told in a lot of different places, but it had never been told in one place with a narrative arc. Since the time we wrote that treatment, a number of books have come out on the topic, but nothing exactly like what we wrote about.
Continue reading

Richard Metzger on the Gspot

April 2, 2010 / Klint Finley

Richard Metzger

Disinfo co-founder and current Dangerous Minds host Richard Metzger is interviewed by Joseph Matheny on the latest Gspot.

The GSpot: Richard Metzger

Brother Theodore

January 31, 2005 / Klintron

Watched some of the Disinfo DVD with Aaron again the other night and got curious about who Brother Theodore actually is. Here’s a couple of informative links:

Semi-Official Brother Theodore web site

Brother Theodore is Dead.

I also looked into the “Sex Life of Robots” which isn’t available on DVD yet but is making rounds at some festivals it seems, and Rocket Boy, who I couldn’t find any information on.

Disinfo’s Infinity Factory re-runs online

November 26, 2004 / Klintron

Update: Looks like RINF’s video files are down, but you can find a lot of this material on YouTube.

RINF is hosting “re-runs” of the Infinity Factory series on Tuesdays. They also have streams archived, it appears.

RINF: Infinity Factory

They’ve got tons of other interesting stuff here, check them out.

Via Sauceruney.

Disinfo Editor Alex Burns Has a Blog

April 23, 2003 / Klintron

He hasn’t updated it in a while, but it’s worth looking around the archives.

Aspect One: The status and traditional idea of the university is morphing into a new arrangement. Academics are pursuing independent solutions such as Media/Culture, Nettime and Fibreculture instead of the existing journal publishing/tenure-based structure. Research is either being bought up or bubbling out via new forms.

Aspect Two: A cadre of mystics, scholars and thinkers are exploring holonic and integralistic modes of thinking beyond the relativism exalted in the postmodern 1990s. But this isn’t simply due to the Elder Statesmen (and women) of the 1960s consciousness revolution. What’s occuring on the margins is taking quantum leaps (or “qauntum loops”) in strangeness, difficult to capture using age-cohort and social trends techniques. It’s up to a new generation to draw the line and bridge the Boomer/Gen-X/Millennial intergenerational gap.

Alex’s Live Journal

Alex’s blog

Grant Morrison Working on Book with Disinfo Founder

December 24, 2002 / Klintron

According to today’s Disinfo e-newsletter, Invisibles author Grant Morrison is working on a book with Disinfo founder Richard Metzger.

This should be interesting, since Morrison has talked about Invisibles as a “hypersigil” and Metzger has described Disinfo as a sigil.

I wonder if this is in place of the no-longer spoken of collaboration between Morrison, Douglas Rushkoff, and Genesis P. Orridge.

Update: I’m not sure, but I think this might actually be The Disinfo Book of Lies, which Metzger edited and Morrison contributed to.

Interviews with Disinfo Editors

August 21, 2002 / Klintron

New York’s On the Media radio show has a short interview with new Disinfo editor Russ Kick.

RUSS KICK: Well that’s part of it, and– actually the mainstream media does report some important things, but very often it, it’s strange –they’re buried. A good example I just noticed was the shooting at LAX where that gunman killed two people at the El Al Airlines counter.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.

RUSS KICK: That got a lot of coverage, but there was a story in the L.A. Times where, you know, you’re just kind of reading this story about what happened, and then all of a sudden there’s one sentence that says: witnesses said the security guard shot the man once at close range after the attacker had been disarmed and was being held on the floor.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Hm!

RUSS KICK: So that would indicate that– basically he was summarily executed while he was being held down — disarmed. And it gets one sentence in the middle of the article – and that’s it. [LAUGHS] You know, and I think maybe that should have been the headline!

On the Media: Everything You Know is Wrong

Also, Disinfo co-founder and creative director Richard Metzger was recently interviewed in the NY Press.

(via Robot Wisdom)

Grant Morrison Disinfo Nation Interview

March 5, 2001 / Klint Finley

Someone over at Barbelith has posted Disinfo Nation’s interview with Grant Morrison

The post can be found here or it can be found on Freenet (of which a new version was released recently) with the key

interviews/grantmorrison/disinfonation.html

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑

Technoccult

Mutate Your Mind