March 7, 2009

This Is for the Nieces and Nephews

"Where Do the Children Play" by Cat Stevens

Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off.

Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
'til there's no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Realtime/Realspace

Nicholas Carr writes:
I'm glad to see that "realtime" is officially one word now rather than two. It's an update long overdue. That space between "real" and "time" had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It's nonstop. It runs together.
Real time is realtime


And...
I was reminded of a haunting passage in a recent New Yorker article about the boom in Japanese cellphone novels:

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”


Realtime, you see, doesn't just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the "intimate portable world" that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.
Realtime kills real space


Rob Horning writes:
Accelerating the flow of information is tantamount to commodifying it, effacing the differences between things. It all becomes data to process; if it slows us down, it is an inconvenient datapoint that warrants a more careful calibration of the information stream—the appropriate response in the realtime world would be to put in place a better filter to remove such troubling material.

Speeding up information consumption for its own sake plays into the fantasy that technology permits a kind of ubiquity, lets us be present everywhere through online interconnections, so the maximum potential opportunities are available to us. We can see what all our friends are doing at all times and receive news from every corner of the world as it happens and so on. But it seems that this ubiquity of online presence is counterbalanced by surfeit of information, which flattens it all and renders no opportunity any more compelling than any other. As Carr explains in the second post, “Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen - the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.” He call the two-dimensional space “realspace,” the companion to realtime.
Realtime and realspace

March 6, 2009

Is Craigslist the world's biggest bordello?




..."At the same time, however, this is a story that underscores how one of the world's newest technologies has become a vital part of one of the world's oldest occupations. For the majority of Craigslist users--the millions who sell sofas, rent rooms, or find Spanish tutors every day--a steamy online brothel juxtaposed with Craigslist's plain-wrap classified pages may seem unlikely. But with the emergence of the Internet as a vital communications medium, it was only a matter of time before sex for hire infiltrated the listings on Craigslist as well."...

More at CNET

March 5, 2009

Survivalism

Survivalism is a commonly used term for the preparedness strategy and subculture of individuals or groups anticipating and making preparations for future possible disruptions in local, regional or worldwide social or political order. Survivalists often prepare for this anticipated disruption by learning skills (e.g., emergency medical training), stockpiling food and water, preparing for self-defense and self-sufficiency, and/or building structures that will help them to survive or "disappear" (e.g., a survival retreat or underground shelter).

The specific preparations made by survivalists depend on the nature of the anticipated disruption(s), some of the most common scenarios being:

  1. Natural disaster clusters, and patterns of apocalyptic planetary crises or Earth changes, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, and severe thunderstorms, etc.
  2. A disaster brought about by the activities of mankind: chemical spills, release of radioactive materials, nuclear or conventional war, or an oppressive government.
  3. General collapse of society, resulting from the unavailability of electricity, fuel, food, and water.
  4. Monetary disruption or economic collapse, stemming from monetary manipulation, hyperinflation, deflation, and/or worldwide economic depression.
  5. Widespread chaos, or some other unexplained apocalyptic event.
More at Wikipedia

On the Web

Blog

Can't You See, It All Makes Perfect Sense



Roger Waters "Perfect Sense I & II" (Live)

Lyrics

March 4, 2009

Toffler on the economy

" The Year 2000 is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the world's economists, traumatized by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past. Economists, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like 1970-only more so.
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.
One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-industrial revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the 'how' of production but the 'why'. It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity.
Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today's economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models-the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces-political, social and ethical-that will transform economic life in the decades before us.
What does 'productivity' or 'efficiency' mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? How are economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by kind of dialectical return to 'cottage industry' based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when 'no growth' replaces 'growth' as an economic objective when GNP ceases to be the holy grail?
Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution.
Under conditions of scarcity, men struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction , we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of 'psychologization', one of the central themes of the super-industrial revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any man has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twentieth century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organisms ability to distinguish illusion from reality."

Alvin Toffler, 'Future Shock', Chapter 10

Let the Products Sell Themselves



"Let the products sell themselves. Fuck advertising, commercial psychology. Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed because of their own blind involvement in their own conditioned minds. Unit bounded together. Morals, ideals, awareness, progress. Let yourselves be heard!"
Minutemen “Shit From an Old Notebook”:

Working hard, or hardly working?

Rob horning writes:

Losing touch with the desire to pursue pleasure through doing things, the pleasure of the sheer fact of being alive and humanly productive, is a fundamental sort of alienation, and, as Dillow notes, Marx’s critique of capitalism pivoted on this idea. “Marx’s gripe with capitalism was that it transformed work from a means of expressing one’s nature into a force for oppressing and demeaning people. So great has been capitalism’s triumph that many of us don’t even appreciate the possibility that Marx could have been right. It’s just taken for granted that work must be alienated drudgery.”

So it is vis-a-vis consumption deskilling: Consumption should take work; it is not work’s opposite. We must be actively engaged for consumption to be meaningful, or life-affirming or some such slop. If we instead look for short cuts to accelerate our processing of leisure goods, we, ironically enough, succeed in making consumption more work-like—at least in terms of how work is falsely conceived under capitalism, as disutility.

More from Marginal Utility

OMRON




"To the machine, the work of the machine, to man the thrill of further creation."

Kazuma Tateisi

Predicting the Future

The SINIC theory grew from the idea that, in order to manage a business by anticipating social needs, it is necessary to predict future society. Based on this theory, OMRON has been able to continually make social proposals marked by foresight. But what exactly is this SINIC theory that enables it to still serve as a compass for guiding OMRON's management more than 30 years since the theory was developed?

The SINIC theory is a future prediction method that OMRON founder Kazuma Tateisi developed and presented at the International Future Research Conference in 1970. Announced in the midst of Japan's rapid-paced economic growth, before PCs and the Internet even existed, this theory drew a highly accurate picture of society up to the middle of the 21st century, including the appearance of the Information Society.

SINIC stands for Seed-Innovation to Need-Impetus Cyclic Evolution. According to the SINIC theory, science, technology and society share a cyclical relationship, mutually impacting and influencing each other in two distinct ways. In one direction, scientific breakthroughs yield new technologies that help society to advance. In the other direction, social needs spur on technological development and expectations for new scientific advancement. Thus, both of these factors affect each other in a cyclical manner, propelling further social evolution.

SINIC theory

More at OMRON

Asteroid's passing was a cosmic near-miss

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

Most people probably didn't notice the cosmic close call. The asteroid was only spotted two days ago and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.


Associated Press

If You Squint It Gets Clearer

From Ars Technica:

A few years back, satellite imagery was the exclusive domain of government entities. But private business has gradually moved in, and over time, the equipment they're sending into space is providing sharper imagery and greater detail. That has left some governments wondering whether the pictures might be revealing a bit too much about sensitive locations. Now, at least one California legislator has taken those worries to an extreme: He wants all government buildings, including schools, to get the low-res treatment from Google Earth and similar services; failure to comply would mean hefty fines and jail time.

For the most part, satellite imagery services have reached agreements with various governments about whether they can photograph sensitive locations and, if so, at what resolution. Similar informal agreements exist with companies such as Microsoft and Google, which provide maps and virtual earth services. For example, as shown here, the images available of the neighborhood near Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC start to get blurry as the service maps areas closer to the White House.

More from Ars Technica

March 3, 2009

Amelie Gillette writes:

If there's one food product that sells itself it's probably candy bars—especially candy bars that have been coating Americans' teeth with caramel for decades, like Snickers. How hard is it to convince people to buy nougat, caramel and peanuts covered in chocolate and a fair amount of nostalgia? Not that hard. Instead of "like taking candy from a baby" the euphamism for an easy task should be "like selling Snickers to America."

Really, all Snickers needs to do is to remind people that their product exists and is still a candy bar and it will be consumed. "Snickers = Candy" Done. Unfortunately, they've chosen the most annoying way possible to do that: a made-up language of grating portmanteaus called Snacklish. It's fchomping snannoying.

More from The Hater

NY Times Freakonomics Q & A With Lawrence Lessig

From Freakonomics:

Q: What are your thoughts on the First Sale Doctrine and the general idea of portability with regard to e-books and other digital media? I am looking forward to the day when my ownership rights are not artificially restricted by the technological limits of the device on which I choose to read/view/listen to them.
– Andy O.

A: The First Sale Doctrine represents an important principle forgotten by copyright extremists — that copyright “protection has never,” as Justice Stevens put it in the Sony Betamax case, “accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work.” But in my view, to restrike a proper balance in the digital age, we need to move away from an architecture of copyright law that triggers regulation upon the copy. Instead, copyright law needs to focus on the economically relevant acts that need to be regulated to create the incentives copyright law should produce — and not on the (impossible, self-defeating, and absurd) objective of regulating every time a computer “copies” a work.

More from Freakonomics

Somewhere Christopher Reeves Is Crying

From Ars Technica:

The rapid advances in stem cell technology have raised hopes that we will eventually be able to produce a variety of specialized adult cell types on demand. But obtaining specialized cells is only part of the solution, as far as medicine is concerned. Functioning adult tissues are collections of different cell types, arranged in three-dimensional space, and that arrangement, along with the contacts among cells, can be essential for the biological function of an organ. If we're going to repair damage caused by injury or disease, we need to produce complete tissues, not just dissociated cells.

More from Ars Technica

March 2, 2009

Stocks near 12-year lows

' The watchword throughout the country became the creed I saw on restaurant walls when I was young:


“In God we trust; all others pay cash.” '


Warren Buffet on 2008 financial woes

March 1, 2009

The Man Becomes the Machine and the Machine Becomes the Man

Nicholas Carr Interview

Arnie Cooper interviews Nicholas Carr at TheSunMagazine.org:

Cooper: But you don’t dispute that the Net is helping to democratize media?

Carr: The Internet has given many people the opportunity to express their views or distribute their creative work. It brings down the economic and technological barriers that once surrounded the media. Here too, though, the rhetoric often exceeds the reality. Though in theory you can reach a global audience through the Internet, the reality is that the vast majority of blogs, for example, are read by very small audiences. Writing one is not all that different from publishing your own photocopied zine in the eighties or being a ham-radio operator in the fifties.

There’s also an exploitative side to the Internet’s democratization of the media. When people post videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, they’re essentially providing free content to a profit-making corporation. I’ve compared this to a sharecropping model, where a company like Yahoo! or Google gives you your own plot of virtual turf and some tools to work it, but they’re the only ones who make any money from your work.

As more and more companies are able to harvest the fruits of free labor, it hurts the professionals who are trying to make a living and who are often very good at what they do. That’s not to take anything away from the amateurs, but if you look at how the rise of blogs has coincided with layoffs of reporters at newspapers, for example, it should give some cause for concern.

More from Arnie Cooper and Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr blogs at Rough Type

Now Playing In An Elevator Near You



Motorhead "Ace of Spades"


Thanks to Rich for the heads up.