Benjamin's Blag

crossposting from bsky - glad I stopped using spotify when I did and that I unlinked it from my discord, but still

Trevor Paglen - They Watch the Moon (2010)

“This photograph depicts a classified ‘listening station’ deep in the forests of West Virginia.

The station is located at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a region of approximately 34,000 square kilometers in West Virginia and parts of Maryland.

Within the Quiet Zone, radio transmissions are severely restricted: omnidirectional and high-powered transmissions (such as wireless internet devices and FM radio stations) are not permitted.

The listening station, which forms part of the global ECHELON system, was designed in part to take advantage of a phenomenon called moonbounce.

Moonbounce involves capturing communications and telemetry signals from around the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth.

Electrical transformer substation, by Javier Díaz-Llanos La Roche and Vicente Saavedra Martínez (1988-1989).

Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands - Spain.

© Roberto Conte (2023)

Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

[…]

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good - access to your attention - doesn’t reflect its full social cost.