This reminds me of the main character’s school assignment in Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel Rainbows End which doesn’t seem all that sci-fi in 2010:
SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Browsing the archives for the into the great unknown category.
I’ve never bought into the idea that some old schoolers like to rally around about the Internet killing off true creativity and creating a cult of the amateur (Everyone’s an amateur when he/she starts out, and if they keep doing whatever it is for long enough, they become an expert. End of story). But I do feel that the fast paced nature of information these days seems to destroy something of value from the old world even as it hypnotizes us with it’s convenience. Maybe that “something of value” is contemplative thought. When’s the last time you just contemplated something with no real goals in mind?
From Reading in a Digital Age by Sven Birkerts:
READING the Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr on the effect of Google (and online behavior in general), I find myself especially fixated on the idea that contemplative thought is endangered. This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well.
Just the word “collective” makes me shudder. Every time I hear one described, I can’t help but think about the failed experiments of communism and hippy communes. Just mention the former and you’ll get any serious right-wing American frothing at the mouth, and the latter has been a punchline almost since it was conceived. At the centre of our distrust seems to be a fundamental rule: people tend to look out for themselves.
Yes, there are and always will be plenty examples of altruism out there. But the only ones we can really be sure about require someone to toss a grenade and someone else to jump on it. If the threat is not immediate, we just have too much time to wonder about the players and the game they may or may not be playing.
So when bloggers talk about the evils of the more established media industry and band together, guest-blogging, re-blogging, etc., are we really doing it because we truly believe in the cause? Or do we believe that the established media has no place for us while new media does? Are the loudest, most eloquent spokespeople for new media talking about it because they believe it to be better, or because it’s been better for them?
Perhaps the generations that follow mine won’t have to grapple with this particular question because new media will then be the status quo. But for my generation, whose artists grew up with the notion of getting signed by a record label or picked up by a publisher as the one road to making a living doing what you love, new media ventures represent a scary new world. We see the old world crumbling around us while the new one hasn’t even fully formed and we sometimes wonder if we’re crazy to bother. Wouldn’t it be a lot more enjoyable to just sit back and watch the show?
Well Transition Generation, I’m going to make a humble suggestion that may or may not work for us. I haven’t even tried it out myself, but in the spirit of the New World, I’m going to publish it anyway. Here’s the suggestion: We should embrace collectives for what they are – a low overhead and potentially more equitable alternative to corporations. The goal of each: to reach a critical mass through which the ideas of individual members can be promoted more effectively than on their own.
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With posts like “Love in the Time of Layoff: Unemployment Jacked Up My Libido” and “Recession Briefing: Men’s Underwear Sales Dip”, how can you miss? Check out these (and more!) at Recessionwire.
I’ve always been rather serious about art. It’s more about obsession than fun and it often carries the burden and the zeal of a religion. There’s this notion that all the mistakes I’ve ever made, anything I might consider foolish or shameful, is somehow made right by creating something that transcends myself – something that somehow taps into the universal and eternal. I love the way art can turn ugliness into beauty and bring order to what can seem so cruel and random. The flip side of this is a constant dissatisfaction with whatever I create and a feeling of almost frantic discomfort when I don’t feel I’ve created enough.
How much is enough? I don’t know. I’ve written and recorded over sixty songs, finished a novel, designed the websites I use to promote all of this and… that just doesn’t seem like much after having done it. What I do think a lot about is whether I’ll write another song or book and whether they’ll be any good. Or about how I haven’t worked hard enough to market what I have created. Marketing has always seemed like a dark art to me. I’d rather not have to understand it but I know how important it is. Especially now. We’re at this amazing period in human history where everyone has a voice. Never before has the ability to have your ideas reach millions of people been so democratized. The problem now, of course, is how to be heard over the chatter. And anyone looking to do that also has to ask themselves whether or not they deserve to be heard.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher that was very much against the use of “I” in writing. Perhaps because he seemed so sure of himself and I was so unsure of myself, that advice sort of stuck in my head, and I suppose it’s good advice when you’re writing high school essays. In hindsight, I think another high school English teacher gave me something much more valuable when he taught me to hate clichés. Sometimes I still use them because, overused or not, they’re the best say something, but I still hate them and agonize over them. But the “I” thing did a little more harm than good. It instilled this Catholic-like guilt in me, admonishing me to take myself out of my writing in order for it to be more persuasive. It’s also a very journalistic way of looking at the world. Journalists feel they are doing their job better by taking themselves out of the story. The problem is, it’s never true. No matter how objective a piece of writing sounds, it is always written by someone. I think that’s why I like Hunter S. Thompson so much. He saw through all that and decided to go out of his way to be in the news he was reporting. (more…)
TED just posted a fascinating clip from 2002 where Mae Jemison talks about the relationship between the arts and sciences. As someone who is at heart an artist, but who chose to study science in university, I’ve always been painfully aware of the communication barriers between the two worlds. To the artist, science is often too cold and calculating to be any fun. To the scientist, art can be subjective to the point of being irrelevant. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made a case for seeing art and science as complimentary ways of approaching life over thirty years ago, but I think Jemison states their relationship even more eloquently in this video, saying: “Science provides an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a personal experience.” Now the only problem is convincing universities and high schools to teach this way…
Around 12 AM last night, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing got pointed to a major fuck up and wrote about it. That fuck up was owned by none other than Warner Music Group, and since there are about a bazillion blogs on the Internet, Warner would normally have had nothing to worry about. Except that probably everyone who has written a blog post knows of Cory Doctorow. He’s like that kid in the back of the class that never stopped pestering the teacher with questions. You didn’t like him growing up, but then maybe you got to that age where you started doubting your own infallible wisdom just a bit, and you realized how easy it is to compromise between your ideals and “the way it is”. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that turning pissing contests with authority into a business model at the peak of an age where the Corporation has almost complete dominion over us is a pretty decent achievement. It was sort of like watching David and Goliath and knowing how the story ends while you’re watching it unfold. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was hardly mentioned by the mainstream media outlets, but everyone who really matters in terms of the future of the music industry already knows. (more…)
Steven Johnson of The Wall Street Journal posted this article today on how the e-book might fundamentally change the process of reading and writing (therefore changing us). I disagree that Amazon’s Kindle will be what brings e-books mass acceptance. It reminds me of a BlackBerry. Too clunky and ugly. Plus there’s the DRM issue which will hopefully go the way of iTunes DRM. Remember, e-books have been around in one form or another for a while now and have so far managed to be far from revolutionary. That said, once you can combine a DRM-free Amazon with a better e-reader, like the one being developed by Plastic Logic (still not the ideal e-reader, in my opinion, but getting close), then I think we just might start seeing people carrying their libraries around with them… but, as Johnson suggests, it will be more than that:
Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
The world’s in a very strange place right now. On one hand, it feels like it might fall apart at any moment. Worldwide economic collapse, global warming, the always turbulent Middle East. On the other hand, everything seems possible. We’re starting to program DNA, we can engage in worldwide collaboration on any subject, and the U.S. has elected a smart President who believes in science. Wow. Maybe that’s why I ended up musing about alternative energy today. I was thinking about lightning. We’ve known for a long time that a single lightning strike could provide amazing amounts of electricity if we could only harness it. The main problem is that all the electricity is delivered at once. We could never charge a battery fast enough to store it. Meanwhile, hydrogen is a promising fuel source. You can get it from water and you get water as the exhaust when you burn it. The main problem with hydrogen is that you have to use so much energy to separate it from water via any of the known methods (electrolysis being one of them). Well then, wouldn’t it be possible to set up a system that uses a lightning strike to help convert a bunch of water into hydrogen, effectively using the gas as a very volatile quick-charge battery? You’d have to keep the hydrogen from exploding, of course. And there might be something about a lightning strike that makes it fundamentally unsuitable for the task. I’m much more passionate about art than I am about traditional science, and I have to confess that I have no desire to try and build a proof of concept. I did, however, find the idea intriguing enough to whip out the google-fu and see if anyone else had asked a similar question. Turns out, a lot of people had. Some of them are even trying to make a working prototype. Check out these links: (more…)
I’m in love with the Dark Fire guitar from Gibson. It auto tunes to any preset tuning in under a second. That alone is enough to push it to drool-worthy status. It’s also optimized for the world of digital recording. The price is a bit hefty, but I wonder if this signals a new era in music technology. Perhaps the last few die hards have finally let go of the mystique of analog. The economy may be on life support, but this is proof that there are still some folks out there creating some pretty cool stuff. If only we could just trade the bankers and auto execs for more of them.
My generation played with Lego, and we’re currently in the driver’s seat of Web 2.0. I wonder what kind of revolution that the kids who get to play with Siftables will start.
p.s. I want some!
I watched Woody Norris do a fascinating talk on TED last night. He’s invented a device that focuses sound like a laser focuses light. Speakers are messy. They send the signal out to anyone near the speaker. Woody’s device effectively “beams” the sound to whoever it’s pointed at. So yes, if you start hearing voices in your head, you might not need to call the psychiatrist just yet…
After watching this, I found an interview with Woody Norris on Makezine that I thought was interesting. In particular, I found his advice on patents interesting:
I think a lot of inventors are paranoid about sharing their work for fear that it will be stolen. This is a near pathological problem among inventors. File a patent and get over it. You can file a provisional patent with an attorney for $1,000, or you can do it yourself for $80 if you can’t afford an attorney. Then you can talk about it. Expose it. If you are not willing to do this, you don’t really believe in your invention–you are just kidding yourself. I have never had a company steal one of my inventions in over 40 years of doing this; companies are scared to death of being sued. So do your work, get your patent, and then sell it. Stop making excuses.
The patent system can be downright ridiculous and I think it needs major reform. However, Woody Norris talks about it here in a way that reminds us of its purpose: to encourage inventors to publish good ideas by offering them a legal entitlement to receive compensation when others use those ideas. I wonder if start-ups like Cambrian House might end up eventually replacing the patent system. They solve exactly the same problem in a way that seems much more responsive and fair.
I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately as a way to find out about some of the stuff that’s brewing out there just a bit outside of the mainstream. It sort of reminds me of when I’d go into a record store and browse heavy metal CDs, just looking for a band with an interesting name or a great album cover or song names that sent my imagination running. Like anyone else, I still listened a lot to whatever was being played on the radio, but I also enjoyed the excitement of actually finding something myself, without the help of big advertising. Then I’d mercilessly harass my friends about this great band that they absolutely have to hear! My friends are probably very grateful that the Internet has been so successful and I now have an outlet other than them. Feel free, my millions of anonymous friends, to click on to something else, but I’m telling you, you’ll be missing out on me giving you the details on a pretty cool author I ran into on my random Twitter treks… Meet Gretchen Rubin. She’s a writer who, for a while, was stuck in a lawyer’s body. Post-freedom, she’s published four books and has one on the way: The Happiness Project. That’s the one that drew me in to find out some more about her. The premise is pretty cool. It’s a memoir of a year spent trying out all the various tips and tricks, from gurus and scientific studies alike, that are intended to make us happier. Now, there are A LOT of books out there about how to make yourself happier. Hell, there are entire “self help” sections dedicated to it. What makes this one different? Well, I think the really refreshing thing about it is that Gretchen isn’t a guru or a psychologist or a scientist or anyone else you’d expect to be writing on the subject. And she doesn’t pretend to be. Instead, she’s made herself the guinea pig and is giving us her insight on how these ideas work for someone who isn’t trying to sell them. (more…)
Apple did something interesting this Tuesday with its removal of DRM from most of its digital music catalog. Not only was the DRM removed from new music, but you could also get it removed from music you had already purchased – for an “upgrade” fee. I’ve bought a few tunes on from Apple’s music store because it was so easy, and at the time, I saw DRM as a concession we’d just have to make in order to coax the record industry into the 21st century. Yes, I was willing to pay extra for what should have been there (or not there) in the first place. Paying the “upgrade” fee to remove DRM from previously purchased music didn’t make me feel like a complete sucker, though, because I was also getting tracks that were encoded at a better quality. Now the quality is still not CD quality. It’s just closer than what I had before. It’s also closer than the files that I ripped from my CD library when I started the shift towards a hard disk based music library – at a time when storage space was slightly more expensive and I just couldn’t justify taking up more space for a gain in quality I could hardly hear. But here’s what I think is really cool. My “upgrade” was actually a format shift, not unlike the format shift from records to tapes and from tapes to CDs. A file type and encoding is analagous to a tape or CD in that it is a container to make transporting that idea that came from some artist’s head easier, with an acceptable fidelity. The difference is that this format shift was able to happen on the same medium.
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Stuff like this always makes me very proud of and hopeful for my generation. I think both versions are true. The forward version gives a pretty good summary of the world we feel we have been handed. And the reverse version gives a pretty good summary of what the more hopeful among us think we can do with it.
Thanks to Erin for pointing me to it.
Check out some great videos that introduce the ideas of the creative commons to the uninitiated of the world. I think they do a pretty good job at showing the spirit behind the idea in a way that anyone can appreciate. Wanna Work Together?
Creative Commons Mayer & Bettle Animation
Since the creative commons and remix culture often cross paths, it’s no surprise to find a remix of the first video that replaces the single voice narrative with the voices of the commons itself. What is Creative Commons? Wanna Work Together RG Remix
The Obama teams’s commitment to transparency and interaction with constituents seems to be running strong. Check out their posting of the MPAA’s lobbying issues here. The document itself is scary stuff. It represents a fundamental ideology of most big business these days: socialize the risk and policing of people in the interests of big business and privatize the wealth. Remember when the uber-capitalists used to cry in indignation about any form of government regulation? Well, here it is in black and white: the media giants want more regulation in order to protect a dying business model. There are about 50 comments so far, all of them appealing to the Obama team’s commitment to fairness, justice, and economic smarts. With any luck, not only will the American people avoid more crippling laws on top of the DMCA, but they might even be able to roll back some of the most harmful ones. I hope that more Americans weigh in on this, especially as the MPAA also wishes to put more pressure on countries like Canada to conform to their myopic vision of the entertainment market.
This Sunday, Axl Rose finally made good on promises of Chinese Democracy. It’s been seventeen years since the last batch of original music released by Guns n’ Roses and nine years since the title started floating around. Rose’s efforts to record the most expensive album ever have at the very least secured him a legendary role in pop culture. Chinese Democracy is now even defined in Urban Dictionary as: “A promise, often made more than once over an extended period of time, which the person is either unwilling or unable to keep.” While the album could never live up to seventeen years of expectations, it is growing on me. It has a ton of faults along with the scattered (yet numerous) flashes of brilliance, but at the very least, you’ve got to respect the perseverance. The pressure must have been unreal, and to release anything at all at this point shows balls. Hopefully Axl will continue his experimentation and allow videos like this to exist:
I’m reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix