January 5ths

1/5/1944

(Naples 44)

The new sindacos, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist podestás, are stated in the main to be members of the
criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now manoeuvred himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order
depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town-all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a brigadiere who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons they had. This leaves only two Carabinieri to carry on. In so far as anyone rules here at all, it is the Camorra. The Brigadiere gave the usual account of it as a secret and permanent resistance that had evolved over the centuries as a system of self-protection against the bullits and the tax collectors of a succession of foreign governments who had installed themselves in Naples. The people of the Zona di Camorra lived by their own secret laws, recognized only their own secret courts, which imposed only one sentence on the enemy from without or the betrayer from within — death. In the old days, said the Brigadiere, there had been some sort of moral authority, some sort of justice, but now nothing but outright criminality remained.

Book Excerpt Library: "Discuss corruption in Italy" 

1/5/2011

Interesting: Cameras used to watch everything you do. This is a new vanguard of an increasingly dystopian world....People will attempt to evade the system by adopting different alternate personas. It will be a big and lucrative business to create and sell identities.

[1/5/2025: Yesterday I revisited the Black Mirror series which came out in 2011. This was the world it depicted. But in 2011 it was still mostly a fiction. Now it’s the reality. Cinema and TV have warped our minds more than novels would ever do]. 

1/5/2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/5/2048

(Anthony Townes Diary) 

Eben brought the Sony Mavica. It looked so precious and fragile like a delicate piece of crystal with tons of secondary meaning. Otherwise someone would see it as an old junked car. But it’s essentially the generator of the material with which the work is made. When everyone knows it was from 50 years ago, it’s “Hey, my Dad had one of those!” 

Poe: What was the fascination with old cameras in 2048?

The fascination with old cameras in 2048 was driven by the art exhibit "Equality of Vision" at Gallery Moire, which featured the work of photographist Nic Eben. Eben's latest work consisted of "pixel-by-pixel re-creations of digital images captured with late 20th century camera relics like the Sony Mavica, then re-photographed with multi-layer pixel matrix technologies" [4].

This exhibit highlighted a growing interest in the aesthetic qualities of outdated photographic technologies, even as newer digital imaging techniques became more advanced. The act of carefully reconstructing images from obsolete cameras spoke to a desire to preserve and celebrate the visual qualities of the past, even as technology rapidly evolved [4].

This artistic exploration of older camera formats was part of a broader cultural trend in the mid-21st century, where people were seeking meaningful connections to the past amidst the rapid pace of technological change [doc_3, doc_6]. The exhibit at Gallery Moire tapped into this nostalgia and fascination with analog photography, reflecting the ways in which established artistic forms were being reinterpreted through new digital lenses.