Posts tagged #internet killed your *
CLI thoughts
One wonderful thing about having my two eeePCs (both running arch) not use graphical logins — requiring me to run startx if I want my gui (xfce4, natch) — is that I can just stay in the command line universe if I want to. It’s much less distracting here. If I start up nano, I’m just playing with white text on a black background. No flipping around to look at tumblr, no getting distracted momentarily by various maintenance things I could be doing on in the file system. Just a blinking, accusatory cursor. (No properly-functioning built-in spell-check either, of course, but popping out to run aspell every once in a while is not a great hardship.)
It even changes how I write, since I can’t just mouse around in the document. Keeps me from falling into bad ‘edit while you write’ habits.
In related news: for some reason, I find myself unable to write properly in Google Docs. It just doesn’t work. No idea why.
Cross-posting from twitter: thoughts on Vanity Fair’s How A Book Is Born
Computer algorithms can tell me what else sells well. But they can’t find the next The Art of Fielding
It is kind of important to suffix statements like that with “…yet.”
Lemme just break out the #OurNewRoboticOverlords tag here…
(Seriously, though, when a computer can tell me why a book has “literary merit” or not, we’ve solved AI and have much bigger problems on our hands than bookselling.)
Cross-posting from twitter: thoughts on Vanity Fair’s How A Book Is Born
Finished reading the VF article/ebook on Art of Fielding, How A Book Is Born. Interesting. Agree w/writer that publishers fill need that ebooks don’t remove. In fact, publishers may be even more important in the digital world: if everything can be published, how else do we find the good? Computer algorithms can tell me what else sells well. But they can’t find the next The Art of Fielding, can they?
Bestsellers are generally a product of a publisher’s marketing/publicity departments, not necessarily a book’s “merit”. I recall @neilhimself mentioning that American Gods was “marketed as a bestseller”. Publishers help the marketplace decide what’s good. It’s not deterministic; just browse the remaindered table at BN to see publisher bets on bestsellers that didn’t pan out.
Publishers are combination investors, tastemakers, critics, and evangelists. These roles are hard for an author to take on alone.
So, Hi. As Sir Edmund said, I’m a journalist, and technologist, and a writer and advisor to people. I’m a knowledge worker. I manipulate symbols for a living. To use the old phrase, I’m a futurist, and as the Californian thinker on such things, Kevin Kelly, recently wrote, Futurists have a dilemma, he said, as “Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.”
So I won’t be making that many predictions tonight. You’d never believe me. Instead I’ll try to describe the world as I see it from my own experience. In the words of the author William Gibson, “the future is already here, just not evenly distributed”. I’m going to try to fix that a little before the dinner gets cold.
“Justify My Thug” - Jay-Z vs. The Beatles/DJ Dangermouse - The Grey Album
When discussing today’s digimal realms, and the dangers which lurk therein, the general response (and one we have relied upon with great frequency and considerable flourish) is to lay the task of pruning an increasingly horrifying world at the foot of the parent. I’m not saying that this is wrong; who else would do it? Who else could? But I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not possible to hermetically shield these organisms. For one thing, they need oxygen.
The victory condition, the highest goal you can achieve, is to make your children exactly as fucked up as you are.
On The Network Manifesto:
- The internet is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. People have motivations, the internet does not.
- We change the internet more than it changes us. Human motivations may change, but they change very slowly.
- People are messy. The technology we invent is messy, too. Deal with it.
- The internet is not in opposition to traditional media, it’s just more media. All media works better when it works together.
- All reality is virtual. Thought is and has always been virtual. The internet enables us to think together.
- Technology is not the opposite of humanity. Inventing and using technology is one of the defining characteristics of being human.
- The internet can be used for good or bad, but it is a net positive force in the world, because it connects us to each other.
- More information is better than less. Freedom to connect to others is a fundamental human right.
- Access to the internet broadens horizons. Hearing other people’s stories makes us more empathetic, smarter.
- People make the internet what it is. If you don’t like it, make it better.
This is the new Soulwax/2 Many DJs project, which includes 24 hour-long mixes of the starts of songs, combined with animations of their album covers. Very clever. And the juxtapositions are amazing.
Right now, it’s just looping the “INTROVERSY” mix, because it hasn’t launched yet, officially. That’s happening on the 4th. But leave it playing for a bit. I think you’ll like it.
Talk about placing the means of production back into the hands of the workers.
