future of ~the internet~

5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*

ok I watched that vid and now I believe in 5/21

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.

I feel it when I'm wading through a stack of emails, keeping up with an endless Twitter feed, accepting Facebook "friends" from a past I prefer not to remember, or making myself available on the Web to readers to whom I should feel grateful — but instead feel obligated. And it's not a matter of what any of these folks might want me to do, but when. They want it now.

This is not a bias of the Internet itself, but of the way it has changed from an opt-in activity to an "always on" condition of my life.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rushkoff.html

Man needs to discover the concept: "no, thanks".

can you expand on that, aimless

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

Sounds just like talking to people face to face to me.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

sorta touches 12 different subjects, but what do we think of dis guy?

he doesn't seem to understand marx particularly well but he does have some interesting things to say here and there

like I'd never thought about this:

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you."

love lanier, have the new book sitting uncracked on my couch atm

already had this open in another tab lol but haven't read it yet

we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less.

not really sure what 'monetizing more and more' vs 'less and less' means but i'm interested in this idea that thinking all we deserve is 'reputational currency' there's a surplus value thing happening

nice profile of dude in the nyer last month btw

The answer, as I see it anyway, and the path to Jaron's "third way," is new media literacy. People need to know how to work with this stuff. We have to teach programming in our schools – not just because Chinese hackers are going to take down Citibank, but because this is the landscape on which we are spending an increasing amount of our lives. It is the territory on which – and through which – we are going to create and exchange a good portion of the value humans have yet to create for one another.

<3 rushkoff <3

he uses 'hearts and minds' a few times without getting specific, which is a shame

but I like the idea that we can save the middle class by paying people to use facebook

also the idea that what the internet needs is "monetizing more and more" is weird, if Lanier's whole argument is that "digital share cropping" etc. is bad and wrong.

or yes what iatee says

http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647

^ the aforementioned book btw

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

they had fun light thing the other day on why economics is a lot like pro wrestling

hoos, have you ever read the early 90s brigade's books and magazines and articles on networked culture and ~the future~? To me, most of it seems really hokey now and they spent a lot of time barking up irrelevant trees but it was a big deal at the time.

I think a lot of people who really built things in the mid/late 90s were not really connected to any of that, and a lot of the connection with sociological writing came later.

this is the first thing i've read by Jaron Lanier, and i'm totally absorbed. thanks for the link. where's a good place to start with Lanier?

ok starting now you guys have to pay to read my posts, 2 cents is reasonable I think

this is really going to add up

Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered to be biological computers, i.e., they may not be compared to digital computers in any proper sense, and it is very unlikely that humans could be generally replaced by computers easily in few decades, even economically. While transistor count increases according to Moore's law, overall performance rises only very slowly. This is because our productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was.

kinda wish someone would point this out to Kurzweil so he would shut the fuck up already

i wish the future of the internet was this:

https://www.editorsguild.com/userfiles/image/Village%20of%20Damned.jpeg

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

lol

lol @ "let us tweet"

o i c u just said that

I really liked Lanier's essay in Harper's, and I agree with a lot of what he says, but I got a bit worn out reading his book. My problem was mainly that he couldn't resist slipping a little bit of opinion in among some more inarguable truths, and that colored his arguments a bit. But I often have that problem when a good essayist writes a book.

Anyone who wants a heavily monitized Internet should look into late Eighties and early Ninties shareware culture sometime--a similar wave of amateurish sludge, but with guilt-tripping, vindictiveness, scamming, and people threatening to put hexes on you for not buying the full version of their bug-ridden software.

I think that's a misleading comparison. at this point the value of Facebook/YouTube/etc comes from the user input, not the code or service. it's like if we were paying for cable tv just to watch our friends' crappy local tv show.

whereas back in the day, code for basic functional programs was harder to get / more valuable than it is today. the smartphone world today is prob comparable to that era - we'll pay a few bucks for a program on our phone that we'd expect for free on our computer.

I mean that's how I'm reading his argument, tho i can't think of any real means of getting from point x to point y.

BITCOINZ

ha

I still can't see the difference between a YouTube video of someone making their cat dance the Macarena or a badly drawn handmade sign of a tired office worker with the caption "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." There has always been lots and lots of bad user-created crap floating around, and the Internet is just the latest pipeline for it. And I don't see how things would get better if money was introduced into the equation--look at all of those car stickers of Calvin pissing on things or wooden cutouts of fat women in bloomers bending over.

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

I've listened to Geoffrey West's talk on the metabolic theory of ecology extended to cities and companies at least once a week on avg for the past few months. Mind go boom,

dag that sounds v relevant to my interests

It gets at an underlying structure of life that politics and religion have been working through since days gone by. Basically science throwing it's hat into the ring saying "Work together. It's good for you and for us." except w/ power functions. That's what I get from it.

And to bring it back to the net, as more and more people get plugged in, information thoroughput will increase exponentially, making knowledge, wisdom, and cultural exchange that much more efficient. But along with it comes ~equal increases in corruption/error.

http://www.amazon.com/Complex-Adaptive-Systems-Introduction-Computational/dp/0691127026

people who dig this thread might dig this book btw

According to a court document (.pdf), “Sebastian Bowler,” who appeared to be a 25-year-old Englishman and soccer fanatic with a drinking problem (based on the MySpace page he sent Duick), told the plaintiff that he was on a cross-country road trip and would be at her house in a few days. After Bowler wrote that he’d run into some trouble at a motel, Duick received an e-mail from someone purporting to be manager of the motel, who included a bill to Duick saying she was responsible for a TV Bowler had smashed.

Duick freaked out over the e-mails before she received a message directing her to a video explaining she’d been punked by Toyota. The video explained that Bowler was a fictional character, and the whole thing had been an elaborate prank — part of an ad campaign for Toyota’s Matrix car.

Unknown to Duick, someone had signed her up for the campaign at YourOtherYou.com, a web site set up for the prank. The campaign was aimed at 20-something males because the company’s advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, determined that the demographic loves to punk their friends.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/toyota-punkd/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+%28Wired:+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

fuck now i wanna matrix

i don't know why but the tildes in this thread title make it one of my favorite thread titles ever

The campaign was aimed at 20-something males because the company’s advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, determined that the demographic loves to punk their friends.

great marketing idea, no idea how that could go wrong

hoos have you ever read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Cybernetics-Second-Control-Communication-Machine/dp/026273009X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315863212&sr=1-1

kind of dated in methodology, but really the forefather of that shit

i got an early beta invite today to join the singularity and a few email invites to give out. who wants to join the singularity w/ me??

lol

read that in the same voice as "i'm still so excited, you guys"

kind of dated in methodology, but really the forefather of that shit

― mh, Monday, September 12, 2011 9:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm reading gleick's "the information" right now and he mentions this as a v important/historical thing, i'll have to check it out

i was bitching the other day that 'cybernetics' seems like such a dated term now

actor-network theory is better

i'm reading gleick's "the information"

thinking of reading that at some point

highly recommended, amazing shit.