Call or email.
Leif Harmsen
leif@harmsen.net
+1 647 827 0546 (voice only)
I'd love to hear your questions, good ideas, dinner invitations, collaboration suggestions, commission proposals, or about you and your work.
I send a quarterly (approx) announcement to all who wish to stay in touch. Simply email and ask to join my list.
It's Not Rocket Science
I could easily have made this website so anyone can post their drivel at my mercy, vote for this vs. that, "like" things, and so forth; but web 2.0 faced nonsense is at best a waste of everyone's time. When inspired to think and write about art, please step up to the plate and do so in complete sentences for an arts journal, newspaper, book, TV, Radio, or on your own website at your own domian like a real grown-up. I for one always enjoy a good interview!
How to Connect
In order to be able to be yourself and connect directly with anyone online, you must legally own and use your own internet domain. Your own domain is the only place on the internet where you have any ownership, control and/or responsibility.
The very first thing anyone should do online is register a unique domain name at a reputable (not sold-out since being accredited) registrar. I can recommend Sibername www.sibername.com which is 100% Canadian, established 2000, is CIRA, Eurid and ICANN accredited and has not been sold since earning these accreditations.
How NOT to Connect
And please, people! No more sharing entire email address-books to 3rd party websites like Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc. etc., and certainly not my name or email address! We should all be wise to such insidious identity proxy frauds by now. Any email via any such manipulative 3rd party domain is spam and will be auto-deleted without exception.
Inasmuch as 'you' are on facebook.com, you are legally the property of Facebook. There's a reason Facebook exclusively establishes itself at its own domain. Follow its good example rather than its bad advice, and exclusively establish yourself at your own domain for the exact same reason.
Still unsure what all the fuss is about?
You are not free to exist independently as yourself at someone else's domain. At another's domain you are at best couch-surfing and a toy of the domain's owner. Being "social-networked" in someone's contrived digital fish-tank is antagonistic to being truly social, as an equal peer on the internet. Privately owned "communities" are NOT communities - they're puppet theatres where the most 'you' can be is a manipulated puppet. To allow your identity to be so abused is demeaning and dangerous to both your person and our society. While the personal, social and political dangers of web 2.0 fraud are huge, a naieve public has yet to achieve an appropriate level of outrage. Far too many of us are hell-bent on learning the hard way. It is not 'your' profile on Facebook, it is Facebook's profile on you.
Any person or machine that promises to make your life easier by socialising "for" you is evil, and pandering to such a thing encourages the worst in everyone. It will attempt to prey on your primal and irrational fear of banishment. "Some things you have to do yourself." Socialising is one. We must all learn to recognise ambitious identity puppeteers and cut any strings to them. If you're going to be online at all it is your responsibility to own yourself there and to connect directly to others as an equal; otherwise when push comes to shove all you can only ever really be online is a pointless, powerless, homeless, unprofessional and undignified pawn.
Shut 'Your' Facebook
