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Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by lotsofmangos on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:02PM (#8205138)
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

    Showerbath of the Patriarchs
    Meat Cutting Machines
    Notre Dame Zoo
    Sports Pharmacy
    Martyrs Provisions
    Translucent Concrete
    Golden Touch Sawmill
    Center for Functional Recuperation
    Saint Anne Ambulance
    Café Fifth Avenue
    Prolonged Volunteers Street
    Family Boarding House in the Garden
    Hotel of Strangers
    Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by jonstewart on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:45PM (#8205271)
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by ivain on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @11:45PM (#8205843)
And the original French version is here:

http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#formulaire

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by lotsofmangos on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @11:19PM (#8205786)
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by contingencies on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @10:27PM (#8205686)
Great post! Great link! What a writer! Some subsequent portions are really good: half a century earlier expression of Unabomber-style anti-technocratic sentiment imbued with the Parisian aesthetic. Dreams. Sunrise. Pre-brutalist architecture. Things society has almost forgotten, or banished to the Disneyland of yore... powered by travel selfies.
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by sespindola on Thursday August 21, 2014 @12:13AM (#8205905)
I somehow doubt that GCHQ geeks read anti-modernist manifestos.

Depending on the age of the name pickers, I'd say they either went to the Hacienda nightclub at Manchester or saw 24 hours party people[1].

1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by lotsofmangos on Friday August 22, 2014 @01:18PM (#8212993)
Tony Wilson read that manifesto. That is where the name comes from for his nightclub.

Edit - and I wouldn't like to bet on what GCHQ geeks don't read. I suspect their reading is very wide.

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by bcoates on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:45PM (#8205272)
This makes me wonder, how does the NSA choose their goofy codenames?
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by thematt on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @08:27PM (#8205394)
I'm sure they have an app for that. Maybe more than one.
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by koenigdavidmj on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:13PM (#8205176)
...what?
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by ErikRogneby on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:42PM (#8205265)
I think a room full of monkeys wrote this.
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by coldtea on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @07:58PM (#8205313)
For one, it's obviously quite good literature, of the "manifesto" style favored by modernist movements.

Second, it makes perfect sense. It describes things seen in strolling around a city (Paris in this case), listing funny street names and shop titles. Plus some references to older art and poetry movements (namely dada and surealism), regarding their promise of a "fuller life" etc.

Not sure what it has to do with TFA, but surely not the work of a "room full of monkeys".

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by mpyne on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @10:01PM (#8205635)
Certainly not a room full of monkeys, but I'm having great difficulty trying to disprove the hypothesis that this wasn't just a Markov chain generator left to generate a few paragraphs.
Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by coldtea on Thursday August 21, 2014 @05:10AM (#8206510)
Probably it's just like with Perl code. Can look like line noise to someone uninitiated, but if you know the syntax, operators etc you see that it's not and what it does.

For me, who know the surrelist and dadaist history references (and the place, so to speak, this text is coming from -- it's a plea from a bored existential youth for an "exciting" city and an exciting life) every line makes sense and has its place.

What I mean is, it's not absurdist -- like some dadaist poetry. He picked his words to convey a specific message, and the references and metaphors work in this context.

Re:GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance by thibauts on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @10:34PM (#8205703)
In any case I guess the revelance of said paragraphs depends on what the Markov chain generator had been fed. Leaves me wondering if we are or can be, at times (and when), Markov chain generators.