future of ~the internet~

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.

also pleasantly puzzled given that i'm only 35% of the way through the book and we're already in the 1950s in terms of chronology--helluva lot of book left to cover 60 years given the depth with which charlie babbage & morse & claude shannon & alan turing have already been treated.

i don't know about norbert weiner, it's a little bit like recommending a marshall mcluhan book to someone who wants to know about how pay-per-view works

Very true. There's a good layman-targeted book from the same era (maybe his later one?) that is supposed to be good.

hoos should read mcluhan, though

actually, just watch Videodrome and eXistenZ a few times

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Theory-Communication-Claude-Shannon/dp/0252725484/ref=pd_sim_b_2

^ a bit of my way into this, p challenging but rewarding when understood

that is to say, i'm having a tough time with some of it but when i get it it's a good feeling

i have read mcluhan fwiw

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Use-Beings-Cybernetics-Paperback/dp/0306803208/ref=pd_sim_b_1

is this the weiner popularization you guys were talking abt

(avoids 'weiner popularization' jokes)

Probably. I have the more math-oriented one at home but have only browsed it and waved it at people/

lol

btw fwiw a pdf of shannon's orig monograph of "a mathematical theory of communcation" is here

again, having been out of math class for the better part of a decade, i don't pretend to keep up with the whole thing--gleick's book has been a pretty invaluable conceptual guide.

i once met one of claude shannon's grandchildren ... grandchild intimidated me w/ braininess, can't imagine what the man himself was like.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or ap-
proximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer
to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic
aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

this makes me lol every time i reread it

"frequently there is meaning. idgaf."

“Even when you get several stages in, it’s still looking pretty real,” Saatchi creative director Alex Flint said about the campaign in 2008. “I think even the most cynical, anti-advertising guy will appreciate the depth and length to which we’ve gone.”

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

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, September 12, 2011 11:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

YES!

Me too! The tildes make me hear ~THE INTERNET~ as the ~TO YOU~ from this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE7hGMMIyfE

Every goddamn time

future of THE INTERNET

^^ gets it

"there's this bias in any net environment that everything should scale, it's very hard to be satisfied on one level of reality--some venture capitalist always wants to know 'how does this scale?' scale this, motherfucker"

<3 <3 <3

http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/9/22/toward-a-peer-to-peer-economy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+douglasrushkoff+%28Douglas+Rushkoff%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

no thanks

yr welcome

?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+douglasrushkoff+%28Douglas+Rushkoff%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

http://livestre.am/12B4I

there u baby