future of ~the internet~

shoulder unit

haha

I mean it seems a little like describing some new device that makes things cook slightly less badly in your microwave as a "culinary revolution"

i think turkle understands the technologies she's talking about pretty well despite one or two quite minor old-person/non-geek-insider warning signs (after all she's been studying them for decades, teaching at mit).

i would say that she basically handles the concerns you mention, schlump. and she has to, because although she's interested in the 'this is worse' argument, she's also interested in claiming that changes tied up in the various redimensionings of things along time and space and interest and quality axes have introduced blurriness into what had heretofore been some key personal/psychological/social concepts, so that it can be no longer clear what counts as intimacy, spending time with a person, expressing your feelings, etc.

this comes out a bit better against the background of the first half of the book, the ROBOTS half, but i'm not so sure that needs to be read to get the second half, so it might be better to skip if you're kinda gtfo with this robot dog crap. turkle's futurological inclination there is ok i guess but for various reasons you kinda wanna not take it fully seriously. something akin to her interest in second life in the second half of the book, which even granting that publication of her book might have lagged its fieldwork/writing/completion a bit, seems a little too web 2.0-bubble. methodologically favorable for her to focus on it but realistically more of a go-nowhere proposition.

overall the book also has this frustrating quality where she seems to have some definite notions about what her theoretical framework/concepts are and what her claims are, but when they're couched in her popularizing/warning tone and somewhat repetitively given the topical/case-study organization of the chapters, some of the real distinctions she seems to care about tend to get flattened out so that she -sounds- kind of contentless and cassandraish. i think that can be overcome somewhat with some study, but it does seem to have the effect that the initial takeaway can seem glib (or hard not to express glibly).

i am not super techy but fwiw/imo the fascination with & perceived significance of second life in various tech contexts is surreal to me

ty for that post j, that's good to know. i am not on the verge of reading this or anything, book-length takes on things that are so inchoate are sorta just made for reading the reviews of, for me, but it's nice to get a breakdown.

I had completely forgotten about Second Life.

pretty sure second life is sustained entirely by academia at this point.

^

echoing schlumps thx for that post j.

it makes sense, it's a digital online imagined community, which is always going to be fascinating and interesting to research, but you don't have to worry about killing things or chopping down trees or going on quests.

it's very 'do you know anything about techno?" for liberal arts majors

i've literally never met anyone who's used it besides information studies students

bro do u even slife

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/28/your_iphone_kills_jobs/

boss in your pocket

thought he was dead already

I've used TaskRabbit. Handy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory

actor-network theory

latour was the real founder of google

I made a bunch of sites 5-10 years ago, all using Flash CS3 & HTML, and they all made extensive use of frames. Like the site would be split into 2 or 3 frames, and there would be a Flash menu in one of them that called up pages in another frame. A year or so ago i tried putting them on a portfolio site and none of the menus worked, apparently the cross-frame functionality is incompatible with new versions of Flash and the Flash player. I tried briefly to fix them and found out the newer Flash did EVERYTHING differently. Something as simple as making a single button now involved coding a ton of javascript. So eff that.

This post doesn't exactly have anything to do w the future, but I'm hoping there will be browsers where you can select 'Browse the web through a 2004 machine' and all that stuff actually works.

hopefully in the future there will just be a 'make things go back to the way there once were' that somehow changes your whole life

Instrgram filters for your brain

i was incredibly pleased recently to find my old, pre-smart-phone phone, which i hadn't used in ~ 4 years. it still had a charge. i put in a spare SIM card and all my old contacts were still there somehow, many of which i had no idea who they were, and for a second it was like i really had gone back in time. i loved that fucking phone.

did it remember your high score in snake?

that phone didn't have snake. i can't remember what it had actually. i didn't play games on it. it had the internet, but only over GPRS (the "circle" connection on an iPhone, i.e. practically useless) so i never used it. i can vividly remember the anxiety that welled up when i realized i didn't have any reading material for a train ride though. the surreptitious angling for a discarded evening standard on the other side of the carriage.

http://thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

on tim o'reilly, feel like it might have been posted elsewhere on ilx but can't be bothered to find it

there may be some valid points in the article, but i think it's essentially _wrong_ in basically saying corporations on, one side, stallman on the other, and that's it, and that's how its always been. the BSD license dates back to '88 or so, as does the MIT license, which means that they _predate_ the GPL. So the argument that there was a broader more general unix/academic driven notion of open source before the GPL/GNU/etc. is straightforwardly historically correct.

i mean some of the obvious technocratic stuff seems obviously technocratic. but the 'sinister' element of open source is a much more complex and contentious issue, and the folks embracing the term knew basically why they were doing it, and what it meant, and license disputes in the 'free software' world waaay predated o'reilly and i think he had very little effect on how things happened since, for that matter.

Evgeny Morozov is a New York Times guest columnist and the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. His new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Utopianism, is available now. This essay appears in the current issue of The Baffler so goddamn tedious.

Some of it seems painfully otm though, e.g. the Eric Raymond quote - "The implication of [the open source] label is that we intend to convince the corporate world to adopt our way for economic, self-interested, non-ideological reasons,” - no ideology there, no sirree! But yeah would be nice to have the skewering done in less than 500 pages.

well yeah, precisely. everyone knew the GNU approach was about changing computing by forcing software to be free, and had a strong ideological component, and the BSD approach was quite different. basically building cool stuff, sharing it with the world, and hoping the world would want to share back.

but that's not skewering -- that's a well known debate. and GNU has never been anti-business or anti-capital in the least, just pro- free software. furthermore, they've actually supported patent law more than many people would like, because they need it to work in order to enforce the GPL.

I know plenty of folks who basically have the attitude "if i release this GPL then some people won't be able to use it, but I want everyone to use it, so I'm using BSD or public domain licensing or something." Creative commons licenses for example are typically much more BSD-like than GPL like as well. And they're not doing this for ideological reasons, except to the extent their ideology is 'i want to share my cool thing with everyone'.

in fact GPL is usually used _more_ by people out to make money, since they'll use dual licensing schemes where if you need a non-GPL license for a commercial product you can get that too, for an appropriate price. and that's absolutely something promoted by FSF/GNU people!

So this is a much broader issue and I think the article gave a really shallow treatment.

This is awesome. CERN put the very first website back online

Tim B-L should get the Nobel Peace Prize

concur.

Let's wait until Vine brings down the Jong-Un regime /fakejeffjarvis

https://twitter.com/MIAuniverse/status/356553491566706691

IDGI... before the internet crossed what? The Streams?? Venkman said that would be bad.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/08/Googleps1-1024x777.jpg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2013/08/Googleps2-1024x735.jpg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/26/hackers-deface-google-palestine-object-to-google-maps-labeling-of-israel/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

The hackers further went on to suggest that changing the title of Israel on Google Maps to Palestine would be a “revolution” — and suggesting that visitors listen to R&B singer Rihanna and “be cool.”

:P

so horace dediu of Asymco & The Critical Path is starting a new thing significant digits where he gets to take his chartboy schtick to ~video~

first episode is on "the future of the internet" and what happens when internet adoption plateus globally

this is sort of not great as a first 15 mins of discussion (*8 minutes of graphs* "so what do you think?" "uhhh i hadn't seen any of that data before") buuuut it looks like Part 1 of a 5 part discussion and i trust horace's judgement in bringing on guests to believe the other 4 parts will be cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab7yxU7lNHg

In this inaugural episode we open with the biggest question facing the biggest technological innovation of our time: the limit to growth of the Internet. The Internet is the backbone of our post-industrial society as much as the railroad was the backbone of the industrial revolution. Even more so, the diffusion of internet consumption is the fundamental engine of growth at a time when industrial economies are all mired in syndromes of underinvestment and misallocation of resources.

And so it matters greatly if and when the Internet will “inflect” in growth, going from acceleration to deceleration. Mobile computing sustained this acceleration, bringing computing and connectivity to the billions for whom the PC would always be beyond reach. But even with the expansion of device-based usage limits are in sight.

The implications could be profound. Frothy valuations and optimism could evaporate. Venture Capital could find few exits and the “second Internet Bubble” could burst. On the other hand, maybe the data shows that opportunity is largely unmet. Quantity of users is but one proxy. How can growth and business model innovation continue?

To help us think this through I have as my guest Marko Anderson, cofounder of Random [1] and a former colleague at Nokia.

Stay tuned for four more parts:

Part 2: Browsing vs. Apps The HTML5 vs. Native debate and the jobs the Internet is hired to do.
Part 3: Monetize This The problem with business model innovation. When the ad dollars run out, what will take their place?
Part 4: Random How discovery is changing and the value of irrationality.
Part 5: Glass is half full How can we screw this up? Privacy, Surveillance and The Internet Citizen’s Bill of Rights.

creepiest 2 sentences i've read all year

Does the frisson of reading these weird corporate tweets happen because we are rating the social-media manager’s performance on Twitter, like an Olympic judge holding up a score at the end of each tweet (and supplying important metrics to the brand at the same time)? Or does the Denny’s brand’s mewling Twitter intimacy make us feel paternal, bound to support and foster our corporate brand children as they speak to us through the web, learning our native medium?

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/weird-corporate-twitter/

Carles doesn’t even tweet anymore

got 2 keep it fresh bb

soo barrett brown just got 6 years, in part, for sharing a link to an IRC chat

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/22/7871317/barrett-brown-sentencing-anonymous-stratfor

in other The Future is Terrifying news

One day in 2011, Moosa opened the Facebook Messenger app on his iPhone. What he saw was chilling: someone else typing under his name to an activist friend of his in Bahrain. Whoever it was kept posing personal questions prodding for information, and Moosa watched unfold right before eyes. He panicked.

"It was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening?’" he recalls. He changed his password, alerted his friend, and stopped using Facebook Messenger — but the intrusions kept coming.

In another instance, Moosa noticed that someone posing as him solicited his female Facebook friends for sex — part of an effort, it seemed, to blackmail or perhaps defame him in Bahrain’s conservative media. Facebook was only the beginning. Unbeknownst to him, Moosa’s phone and computer had been infected with a highly sophisticated piece of spyware, built and sold in secret. The implant effectively commandeered his digital existence, collecting everything he did or said online.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7861645/finfisher-spyware-let-bahrain-government-hack-political-activist

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-failed-promise-of-deep-links-aa307b3abaa5

I think about this stuff all the time so it's annoying to see something so wrongheaded.

"Right now, though, we could be forgiven for worrying that deep linking is mostly about helping people sell us stuff."

Targeted ads are obnoxious, but it hasn't killed the web yet.

"Most apps are proprietary; you can only create deep links to them if the app’s creator allows you to."

Apps that don't provide deep links aren't going to show up in Google search results. Good luck with that.

"Meanwhile, back on the Web, the bulk of the links we encounter are lazy, manipulative, or mundane. Is it time to play “Taps” over the link’s corpse?"

I'm so sorry for wasting everyone's time here.

well this is the most dystopian commercial i've ever seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1yb-wWwAEQ

did everybody read this http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

cc iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

schlump - its a good piece (well designed, you just keep reading till you get to the end).

I am not sure how the pro-AI lot would destroy the version of the web we have at the moment. The 2nd version is tied into questions of 'well can we destroy most jobs so we can spend even more of our free time looking at cats?'. I think some of these things can co-exist.

Not fancying ILXor's chances of suriving till 2060, but it might outlast facebook.

Probably.