Christopher Butler

February 3rd 2012

Kevin Kelly

(Source: kk.org)

Posted at 3:10pm and tagged with: quote, the-future,.

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What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as in electricity) for long-distant communications is significant as well, enabling all kinds of other achievements. Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect — no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to?

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January 31st 2012

7 notes |#

Alan Mitchell

(Source: ctrl-shift.co.uk)

Posted at 3:04pm and tagged with: quote, data,.

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So there are two classes of data which help solve different types of problem. Big Data is statistical and deals with general trends and patterns; Very Small Data is specific and deals with getting things done: gathering the information needed to make a decision, to make an arrangement, or to get some administrative chore done. Because it’s Very Small and rather mundane and specific, it doesn’t seem as glamorous and important as Big Data. But it is.

In fact, this is where our economy’s next big productivity breakthrough is going to come from: information logistics – getting exactly the right information to and from the right people at the right time so we can solve problems, make decisions, organise and implement things without wasting time and effort looking for the right data or sifting through and discarding the wrong data.

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January 22nd 2012

8 notes |#

Karl Schroeder

(Source: kschroeder.com)

Posted at 9:06pm and tagged with: quote, aliens,.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter…

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January 11th 2012

29 notes |#

Cory Doctorow

(Source: Boing Boing)

Posted at 8:44pm and tagged with: quote,.

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The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies.

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December 5th 2011

22 notes |#

analyst on today’s announcement that the US Postal Service will be making $3billion in cuts to its First Class delivery service.

So, “almost” nothing? That “almost” includes a ton, if you want it to. Here’s just one example—I intend to keep making those as long as I can.

Posted at 7:40am and tagged with: quote, mail,.

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Over time, to the extent the customer service experience gets worse, it will only increase the shift away from mail to alternatives. There’s almost nothing you can’t do online that you can do by mail.

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December 4th 2011

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A passage from Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community, which, though written in 2000, chillingly corresponds to what is going on all around us today. You should read it.

Posted at 8:57pm and tagged with: quote,.

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What does it mean that the same hopes, described in the same words, for a decentralization of power, a deeper and more widespread citizen involvement in matters of state, a great equalizer for ordinary citizens to counter the forces of central control, have been voiced in the popular press for two centuries in reference to steam, electricity, and television? We’ve had enough time to live with steam, electricity, and television to recognize that they did indeed change the world, and to recognize that the utopia of technological millenarians has not yet materialized.

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December 4th 2011

3 notes |#

Charles Taylor (on the problem of film criticism, among other things, and how the Internet is at least in part responsible)

Posted at 6:52pm and tagged with: quote,.

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When a site’s goal is to satisfy the great sucking maw of the Internet with a constant feed of new items, sourced or unsourced, nothing is around long enough to make an impact. When perpetual turnover is the norm, the shallow, silly, and irrelevant rule.

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December 1st 2011

5 notes |#

Charlie Brooker

(Source: Guardian)

Posted at 6:12pm and tagged with: quote, technology,.

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The present day is no less crazy. We routinely do things that just five years ago would scarcely have made sense to us. We tweet along to reality shows; we share videos of strangers dropping cats in bins; we dance in front of Xboxes that can see us, and judge us, and find us sorely lacking. It’s hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn’t somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That’s pretty much all we have left. Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.

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November 29th 2011

3 notes |#

Charlie Stross on worldbuilding

Posted at 4:48pm and tagged with: quote, world-building,.

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The shiny bright City of Tomorrow is also full of slums and favelas.

We get stuff wrong. Property development magnates build gated communities for billionaires that open for business just as the real estate market crashes. The office buildings of a booming middle eastern emirate go up so fast that the municipal sewage system can’t cope so skyscrapers end up being serviced by huge queues of sewage trucks. Country dwellers migrate to cities that can’t expand fast enough to give them adequate housing, so they end up in favelas and shanty towns. And people keep driving ancient automobiles long after Ford or General Motors would like to have sold them a new one…Part of the problem is that we build rafts of infrastructure on top of existing design decisions. Which means that fixing a bad decision requires the abandonment of lots of stuff that depends on it.

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November 24th 2011

3 notes |#

Michael Babwahsingh

(Source: michaelbabwahsingh.com)

Posted at 7:25pm and tagged with: quote,.

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We’ll probably never fully debug our lives. In fact, it is in those “reboot” moments that we are reminded of our dependency on technology, both in its fragility and its power. We have formed a symbiotic relationship with technology, its bonds growing stronger every day. In days to come, we’ll see fantastic changes at blinding speed, and we will always struggle to adapt to them, make sense of them. We will continue to confront the gap that exists between human and machine — indeed, it will always be there (at least I think it will).

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November 18th 2011

6 notes |#

Jaron Lanier (It was hard to know where to start and stop transcribing this—it’s from a video—because he really packs in a ton of interesting ideas into a small verbal space.)

(Source: edge.org)

Posted at 8:58am and tagged with: quote,.

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I’m really kind of astonished at how readily a great many people I know—young people—have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms, in any meaningful way, and traded them for being able to screw around online. There’s a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet to be seen by somebody once in a while gives them enough ego gratification that it’s ok with them to be still living with their parents in their thirties. That’s such a strange tradeoff and if you project that forward obviously it really does become a problem. I think that leads to a world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses—just barely enough to keep the poor in check and they just kind of whither away through attrition or something.

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November 18th 2011

1 note |#

Jack Schulze

(Source: kickerstudio.com)

Posted at 8:30am and tagged with: quote,.

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Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention. There are some people who want to reduce the domain of design to listable, knowable stuff, so it’s easy to talk about. Design is a glamorous, glittering world and this means they can engage without having to actually risk themselves on the outcome of their work. This is damaging. It turns design into something terrified of invention. Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome.

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November 15th 2011

19 notes |#

I just received this book, A House in Space, in the mail from my friend, Michael Babwahsingh. He bookmarked a passage from toward the end of the book that, though spoken decades ago—before much of the technological landscape we know today was created, seems incredibly relevant to our predicament:

I came to realize…that what we were doing was taking a human and making him function in a way he was not designed to. We were trying to function at a higher level of efficiency than we could. I then proceeded to make errors and berate myself. Finally I came to the realization that I’m a fallible human being, that I cannot operate at a hundred percent efficiency, that I am going to make mistakes. when I tried to operate like a machine, I was a gross failure. Now I’m trying to operate as a human being within the limitations I possess…I think a person neediest to more or less re-create himself, to pause and reflect occasionally…I think that in order to act creatively, you have to have certain periods of time when you have to just stop and think and see yourself, and be aware of the situation, and sort of involve yourself in the totality of the experience at hand. We’ve got to appreciate a human being for what he is.

— William Pogue, American Astronaut (page 165)

Posted at 1:42pm and tagged with: quote, book,.

I just received this book, A House in Space, in the mail from my friend, Michael Babwahsingh. He bookmarked a passage from toward the end of the book that, though spoken decades ago—before much of the technological landscape we know today was created, seems incredibly relevant to our predicament:

I came to realize…that what we were doing was taking a human and making him function in a way he was not designed to. We were trying to function at a higher level of efficiency than we could. I then proceeded to make errors and berate myself. Finally I came to the realization that I’m a fallible human being, that I cannot operate at a hundred percent efficiency, that I am going to make mistakes. when I tried to operate like a machine, I was a gross failure. Now I’m trying to operate as a human being within the limitations I possess…I think a person neediest to more or less re-create himself, to pause and reflect occasionally…I think that in order to act creatively, you have to have certain periods of time when you have to just stop and think and see yourself, and be aware of the situation, and sort of involve yourself in the totality of the experience at hand. We’ve got to appreciate a human being for what he is.
— William Pogue, American Astronaut (page 165)

November 15th 2011

8 notes |#

Doug Rushkoff

(Source: hilobrow.com)

Posted at 1:21pm and tagged with: quote,.

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It gets very much like Baudrillard in a way. We lived in a real world where we created value, and understood the value that we created as individuals and groups for one another. Then we systematically disconnected from the real world: from ourselves, from one another, and from the value we create, and reconnected to an artificial landscape of derivative value of working for corporations and false gods and all that. It is in some sense Baudrillard’s three steps of life in the simulacra.

So by now, as Borges would say, we’ve mistaken the map for the territory. We’ve mistaken our jobs for work. We’ve mistaken our bank accounts for savings. We’ve mistaken our 401k investments for our future. We’ve mistaken our property for assets, and our assets for the world. We have these places where we live, then they become property that we own, then they become mortgages that we owe, then they become mortgage-backed loans that our pensions finance, then they become packages of debt, and so on and so on.

We’ve been living in a world where the further up the chain of abstraction you operate, the wealthier you are.

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November 15th 2011

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Doug Rushkoff

(Source: hilobrow.com)

Posted at 11:22am and tagged with: quote,.

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I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist about these things, but I think the reason why we celebrate the Renaissance as a high point of western culture is really a marketing campaign. It was a way for Renaissance monarchs and nation-states, and the industrial age powers that followed, to recast the end of one of the most vibrant human civilizations we’ve had, as a dark, plague-ridden, horrible time.

Historically, the plague arrived after the invention of the chartered corporation, and after central currency was mandated. Central currency became law, and 40 years later you get the plague. People got that poor that quickly. They were no longer allowed to use the land. It shifted from an abundance model to a scarcity model; from an economy based on annual grain production to one based on gold released by the king.

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