future of ~the internet~

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_b7lQNiW2GI8/R6MWRH3q8UI/AAAAAAAAAA8/k1-0Jw0YXRM/s320/wired.gif

But one name stands out, maybe because it was designed to. And for the moment it's sticking: zippies. It stands for Zen-inspired professional pagans, according to 50-year-old Fraser Clark, shamanic zippie spokesperson, club manager and editor of Encyclopedia Psychedelica (EPi), the magazine that first identified the "hippies with zip." According to EPi, a zippie is "someone who has balanced their hemispheres to achieve a fusion of the technological and the spiritual. The techno-person understands that rationality, organization, long-term planning, consistency and single-mindedness are necessary to achieve anything solid on the material level. The hippie understands that vision, individuality, spontaneity, flexibility and open-mindedness are crucial to realize anything on the spiritual scale."

Finally read the Lanier. Think much of the crit was handled way upthread, but <3 for reminding me that there was a time when we hoped that everything wouldn't be slathered in advertising and that there might be some alternative ways of funding things.

― stet, Monday, January 23, 2012 12:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tru

so this is a long lecture, 45ish minutes when you cut out the intro, and like a lot of dense lectures its kinda better to watch-with-the-slides than just listen to it, but god i fucking love this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8

still trying to steel myself for a 45 minute video. what has the internet done to my mind

every time I hover over the link I think "maybe if I wait another day someone will summarise the key point inside ~ marks"

he gave a talk at PDF 12 yesterday, shorter and uses the sopa/pipa fight as a case study to touch on some of his larger themes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LNP9f8geCWA#!

son of a bitch

well there it is, regardless

he starts at 1:20

and here's lanier who i think is kind of a old-ass man with old-ass man ideas but i like having him in the tent pissing out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxRSv5Vrqxo&feature=relmfu

http://fiber.google.com/plans/residential/ this seems an amazing deal for US internauts

damn yo!

Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923208

Yhippa 17 hours ago | link

So this guy has been able to find a common schema across several different domains and add rules to it to churn out content. I like the concept. I watched the video in the article and could see how this could be used for instruction in the case where the resources like trained teachers are scarce.

I've had a feeling for a long time that due to the predictability of humans and our processes that it this is inevitable. I think it's great that he can do this for things like instruction but if this were to get "smart" enough that would put a lot of people out of work.

jacobr 4 hours ago | link

Libraries in Sweden, and probably in other countries as well, have their own "algorithms" to decide what to purchase - at a university it could be everything related to a particular topic, for instance. This means that these computer-generated books are in stock in many libraries (at the taxpayer's expense).

Dove 16 hours ago | link

I wonder if he'll ever collide with this guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906456 (Bot written to buy random things each month from Amazon)

And the UK goes from 'a nation of shopkeepers' to 'a nation a botfeeders'...

thats an old story, i think, or that guy has been active a while

i wrote a piece that included that guy and some similar things

http://gawker.com/5901842

what do we think about ~fb search~

garbage in garbage out

I still don't get why anyone 'likes' any product etc

Graph search is some powerful shit; will be way more useful when it's open to the world and not just locked inside FB

it does not seem like powerful shit to me tho I hope it is because anything that cuts into google's revenues can't be bad

I guess in order to do a decent 'future of the internet' prediction one would have to take a look at the start of the internet and compare it to now and extrapolate from there. So, less about the public sector and more about private companies, advertising, data mining. Less about experts and more about everyone's opinion is valid. Less about content and more about presentation. Less about sitting at a terminal and more integrated into every day life. Less anonymity and more whoring yourself out.

Maybe instead of fb search and google ads in the future there will be some kind of monster googlish service everyone uses that simply straight up puts a dollar value on you that fluctuates from day to day, so that if you check in to Starbucks and like this movie and blah blah every time you endorse a product your value goes up, you get higher grade ads, maybe you get a higher quality internet experience too. The more friends that like your stuff the more your value goes up too, so socialization becomes more and more important. The amount of your popularity isn't just some silly hangup leftover from high school it actually has real market value.

I could keep going but i'm going to cut it off there, where it's already incredibly terrifying to me.

Maybe instead of fb search and google ads in the future there will be some kind of monster googlish service everyone uses that simply straight up puts a dollar value on you that fluctuates from day to day, so that if you check in to Starbucks and like this movie and blah blah every time you endorse a product your value goes up, you get higher grade ads, maybe you get a higher quality internet experience too. The more friends that like your stuff the more your value goes up too, so socialization becomes more and more important. The amount of your popularity isn't just some silly hangup leftover from high school it actually has real market value.

the important part is that you can opt out of the whole personal $ value thing. however, opting in gives you a 10% discount off of all products, access to special sales, and faster internet service.

see I am waiting for that part until I start liking 'pepsi' etc on fb

where is my free shit

The reason graph search is so powerful is that the relationship between things is explicit, not just inferred, and so you can query against relationship. Off the top of my head, how about a search something like "create me a playlist of new music from artists mentioned in tweets or blog posts written by posters on ILM who have super compatibility with me".

Which would be a nightmare of APIs to create as a one-off thing, but is actually pretty trivial if the sites involved do some pretty trivial semantic tagging.

Pragmatically speaking, however, that sort of encoding is totally against the way things are trending right now, though, and permissioning gets beyond tricky if people want to prevent advertisers also using the same data.

see I just don't see very many reasons why I would need to do that search

and even if those complex searches were useful they are not things that you'd be doing 50 times a day

No but things can do those searches on your behalf.

I would like a live-updating spotify playlist of that sort of music. I'd like a collation of interesting photographs posted on flickr and facebook and twitter by people I know on any of those services. Graph-style searches are really great for creating filters, and proper personalised filtering is definitely a ~future of the internet~ thing. Manually curating yr blogroll is so 1998.

I mean can advertisers / researchers / etc do cool and wild things with the info in the fb database? for sure. but for my day to day I really don't need or want things that relate to 'groups of people I know'.

sorta like g+'s 'circles' was this killer product cause it lets you group people but that really wasn't that interesting or important

xp

like okay fine, I want to have my blogroll linked to ilx users I know and people from college who I still talk to, okay cool done, that was one thing that I searched for once now and I'm done searching for things.

it's not really an either/or thing! might not be useful to iatee but plenty of others will figure out cool shit to do with it. i'm pretty excited to mess around with it when it's released.

yeah sure people can do cool shit with it the question is whether millions of people are going to find it useful in their day to day lives and not just a toy / slightly improved fb search bar. like what need or need-that-will-be-created is this gonna fill for millions of people.

in terms of data mining, i'm always stoked whenever a major data provider, let alone a giant like facebook, takes steps to open up their data. i don't really care about the masses on this, although i'm prepared to be happily surprised when someone uses the data for unexpectedly good ends. it's more about what it can do for researchers and developers. totally pulling this out of my ass here (eww), but one interesting bit of research might be to look at how local environmental disasters affect facebook users' interest in environmental issues, and how that interest declines or is maintained over the months after the disaster.

i'm hungry for a steak right now - anybody want to ~steakme one?? I'll ~corndog you back later, maybe with like 3 dogs ;) hit me dayoste✧✧✧@stea✧✧✧.st✧✧✧

see I don't think fb is gonna open up that kinda data in the way that you're suggesting i.e. some grad student will be using this in a dissertation. if that really is the case then yeah, I look forward to the kinda info that will be made public but I still don't think it will be particularly useful for some 15 y/o. but I don't think that's going to be the case because that type of data is one of fbs most valuable assets.

everything I read about facebook makes me more glad I opted out

I really only want to listen to whatever records I find at the thrift store this week

this is not * internet * per se but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp89tTDxXuI&feature=youtu.be

its true, i peed my pants

how do you feel about sherry turkle. fun read imo:

http://toptrends.nowandnext.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Alone1.jpg

terrible cover, sorry X(

I watched this google glass preview recently where a google designer unironically said something to the effect of "we designed this because we realized we needed technology to get out of the way more"

I hate the overuse of the world "orwellian" but jfc, you are strapping an android phone to your FUCKING FACE

i haven't read the turkle book but saw her ted talk in school a while back & found it pretty frustrating. she seemed to really ride for the technology-is-impoverishing-discourse argument, comparing text messages, say, to ~real conversation~, without noting any of the corollaries to the fact that we're talking that way, now; that we might be using those texts as part of a bigger, multi-(ugh)-media dialogue; that we're able to talk to people to whom we feel connected, rather than just who we're just born geographically proximate to; that the rhythms are different, scope is different, sense of social space is different, &c&c&c. to her she just saw it as an equivalent transaction but just one that was crudely rendered, yielded less of an immediate & nourishing social kick. i probably don't need to spell out the various empowering/anonymising/pro-social dimensions of remote communication to people reading the technology thread on an internet messageboard, but it kinda bugged me & made me sorta lazily bump her into a kind of generation-divide pile of people (/lost unsalvageable souls) unable to grasp the parameters of a modern life interwoven with technology & sprawling across different platforms (which like i am by no means totally unqualifiedly pro-, just, i am not anti- on the base of it being less neighbourly or w/e).

what's the book like, matt? i am happy to be corrected if this seems like a misrepresentation, & would be interested to hear if it sprawls off into other directions. it's just that it seemed like her basic take, that there's been a switch of platform without equal understanding that there's a lot of context to the new media, seemed off.

too early to tell, i just started it last night online (and kept switching tabs, lol). from the first few pages i think she's going to talk about how the platforms are successful because they offer connection and minimize feelings of vulnerability.. very tiredly true in my experience.

i mean there's a lot of anxious reflection about this stuff which i understand, it sets off my red flags of i smell a reactionary / old person too, but it's a real thing, i don't think it should be just swept aside because lol technology is so empowering or w/e. i mean it is and it isn't. i think we are changing as people, it's hard to pinpoint it or articulate how without having an argument full of holes.

As long as I get to describe and define the form of communication I am plumping for as being thus, I can prove it runs rings around whatever other form of communication you put it up against. Real communication is always fraught with ugly flaws, for example omissions, ambiguities, misunderstandings, oblique motives, outright lies, and all the hazards that come with individual fallibility. But if I can idealize one term of the argument, it wins.

yeah for sure. i feel like i pretty often come at these things indignant that there isn't just some huge chapter of disclaimers & caveats before anyone gets into anything, & maybe it's best that there are just whole books dedicated to different sides of the argument. but i still can't really get with it. i do think that there's such a strange bind relating to feeding any kind of social impulse using the internet. like i really outsource big parts of my diet to it; i talk about photography on ilx in lieu of participating in any irl discussion, & it is, cost-benefit-style, a good decision, it allows me to feed arcane needs in a way i wouldn't be able to without using the weird inhuman proxy we have. & yet you sit there on your bed, having stared at a computer for five hours, feeling nourished but wondering if it qualifies as a satisfying social interaction if the physical-human reality of it was just you, dormant & ignorant of your body, exercising your brain for several dumbstruck hours, immersed in the things that make you feel alive but in a room that has grown dark without you noticing.

xp!, & yes for sure. but that said i think that flaw's probably unavoidable, & a book seeking to democratically overcome it is five thousand pages long & probably some form of weird dos passos-esque social poetry.

Technology out of the way -> getting to data is not encumbered by getting you phone, searching for data, having to use a physical and graphical user interface. Having it just visible or available by voice is seen as "not in the way"

http://youbentmywookie.com/wookie/gallery/0910_wtf/robocop_anatomy.jpg

future of t'internet

Technology out of the way -> getting to data is not encumbered by getting you phone, searching for data, having to use a physical and graphical user interface. Having it just visible or available by voice is seen as "not in the way"

― ☠ ☃ ☠ (mh), Monday, March 25, 2013 2:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I get that, but it only seems "out of the way" in that sense within the very narrow frame of reference of a world in which everyone has smartphones