theory
Rogue Websites
Treasure Island, 1934If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time. ... more »
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now? ... more »
Richard O'Dwyer, a computing student at Sheffield Hallam University, faces a potential 10-year term in a US jail despite never having been to America or using web servers based in the country. When still a teenager O'Dwyer set up a website, TVShack, which posted links to pirated material. It did not directly host any files, which meant, according to the student's lawyers, that it acted as little more than a Google-type search engine and did not breach copyright. ... more »
But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism. ... more »
The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of section 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, or merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. ... more »
more at findings.comAnything Machines
Just like you, growing up I watched the world of the future replete with tablets. TNG definitely. Everyone's pointed this out already. TNG used tablets the way we believed they'd be used: scattered on desks, casual, connected, always on. I want this, you want this, everybody wants this. They weren't missing from TOS either, or other sci-fi, but TNG stands out as being closest to what we got.
Mostly. If you want to spend a worthwhile 200 hundred dollars on a device, you could do a lot worse than the Kindle Fire or Nook. You could get another much much more expensive Android tablet which just about completely, universally suck. They suck in comparison to the iPad2, which is relatively brilliant. I'm not disappointed with my Kindle Fire because I knew what I was buying. I wasn't buying the future, and I wasn't buying an Anything Machine.
My desktop is an Anything Machine. Put X in, get Y out. Write instructions, write anything. A node upon a vast network. Complete maleability in purpose. Is it a magazine? Sure. A video? Sure. A jukebox, an evolving narrative, a library, a painter's easel, a math cruncher, a galactic telescope, a publisher, a generic mashup machine, sure, all of them. And the interface is the keyboard. And a mouse. For me, as a programmer, to a much lesser degree, the mouse. My desktop is too big to put in my pocket, or scatter in clumps on a work desk, which is why I'm eager for tablets. I want Anything Machines everywhere.
Now whenever I see a TNG rerun and I see them tap-a-tapping upon their PADD I can't help but think, is the soft keyboard better in the 24th century*? Goddamn, I hope so, because I absolutely cannot get anything done on any existing tablet. I want to like them. As I write this, I do so on a netbook, my portable Anything Machine. Why? because the relationship to any construction of language or other set of instructions from a real keyboard to a soft keyboard seems about 10 to 1 to me. That's 5 minutes of my time, or a really frustrating hour.
So here I'm getting cranky. We've been handed a future we weren't really even expecting to be realized and fundamentally my reaction is "fuck, where's my goddamn keyboard". Ungrateful wretch. However, my reaction has some validity (I'd argue) because I still think of computers as primarily Anything Machines and not primarily Consumption Machines. The tablet, the form factor, turns out, is amazingly, perfectly Consumption. I'm not knocking tablets for this, what I'm expressing is that my expectations of them have been wrong, I was caught up in futurism.
* I wonder, given that there are now more "apps" being made than any other recent human endeavor, over time won't this be completely unproductive? If you really want tools that do things, you create them at the lowest, most abstract level which does the greatest number of things. A hammer that only works on one nail and one kind of wood (for $3.99), or the idea of a hammer? Apps, it seems, generally lack the idea of actual applications.
** I also wonder if tablets aren't properly the tools of bureaucracy and militaristic hierarchies. Sometimes when we think about the future and Trek particularly we forget that we're looking at a civilized space navy, and certainly no lack of bureaucracy. The gadget fever masks an ideal future world with a lot of annoying electronic paperwork. Screw that.The Pattern of Decomposing
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955A pattern language, he says, in its essence, is a fundamental worldview: "It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it." In that way, a pattern language, as a parallel structure, invokes a sense of responsibility to and for the world, holding out an alternative to the monoculture. ... more »
Just over 30 years ago, an Englishman named Christopher Alexander tried to revolutionize architecture. In A Pattern Language, Alexander told architects and planners to design homes on emotional and spiritual principles – not on traffic flow. The revolution didn’t quite come. But the book had a surprising influence on another group of experts: the computer scientists who were just beginning to shape the Internet ... more »
I understand that the software patterns, insofar as they refer to objects and programs and so on, can make a program better. That isn't the same thing, because in that sentence “better” could mean merely technically efficient, not actually “good.” Again, if I'm translating from my experience, I would ask that the use of pattern language in software has the tendency to make the program or the thing that is being created is morally profound -- actually has the capacity to play a more significant role in human life. A deeper role in human life. Will it actually make human life better as a result of its injection into a software system? Now, I don't pretend that all the patterns that my colleagues and I wrote down in A Pattern Language are like that. Some of them are profound, and some of them are less so. But, at least it was the constant attempt behind our work. That is what we were after. I don't know whether you, ladies and gentlemen, the members of the software community, are also after that. I have no idea. I haven't heard a whole lot about that. So, I have no idea whether the search for something that helps human life is a formal part of what you are searching for. Or are you primarily searching for - what should I call it - good technical performance? This seems to me a very, very vital issue. ... more »
Who Is Your User, Program?
Start with a Tron quote, then mention “User”. Crazy hippie technologist. I’ll meet you in 1982 by the bus at the Dead show. Bring your printouts.
"User" sounds like an antique term, stereotypical. The idea now made somewhat laughable. User no longer a target, now it’s value, demographics, market share, a bag of other indistinct terms with flair. Often, it’s just the generic slurry barrel known as “traffic”.
Is it? Consider the NYTimes demise of the TimesPeople feature, which was their social network strategy they launched with tons of fanfare (I can make a reasonable guess it was very very expensive). Then, OK, fine, they didn’t think it was working out. Clearly the last to know about this, if they were to know at all, were the Users. Bad marketing? Bad PR? Sure. Sucks for the people on it? Yes.
How much of this could be avoided if we allowed the pesky trouble making term “User” back into conversation?
Not uncommon, at least in the larger organizations I’ve worked in, is avoiding it wholesale. User is the last one to know, routinely, never asked, impersonally responded to, basically nonexistent. Habitually it’s “will Bob downstairs at marketing like this?” “what will Joe in the corner office think?”, nary a thought for the basic User. Not to say these parties should be entirely ignored, not, at least, to the degree the User is. And certainly my argument is that the idea should not only exist but be front and center.
Books written conceptualize a Reader, applications written should conceptualize a User. I’m not talking about refactoring every time you get a complaining email from a single user, but more the larger idea.
Without the faintest doubt in my mind, Government services are guilty. Exemplary about not having a User. But also banks. Very much credit card companies. If you’ve been to the Amex site recently you’ll know that they seem to take particular sadistic pleasure implementing design and features that are exactly the opposite of what you’d ever want. In fact, so insidiously precise is their site at flummoxing any hope of clear use and navigation that I think they deserve an award (currently unnamed) and a large ceremony where other organizational middle managers can show off their atrocities (to one another of course) over an open bar.
Startups have the advantage, they’re small, flexible, hungry, they want User, they need User. Obviously there are other politics involved, but the idea is at least important, User is a Thing, features revolve around it. You may miss the target or misunderstand the User, but it’s there at least.The Day Google Disappeared
"Time Enough at Last" 1959You wake up one morning to the radio and notice a strange tone of rising panic in the voice of Steve Inskeep. The company known as Google is gone. Completely and utterly missing. They did exist, once. Everyone remembers they existed, the word “googling” is still there in the dictionary, you check. Or at least you try to, but you don’t remember the URL for the dictionary, and Chrome is missing from your computer so you have to use Firefox and Bing. You would’ve typed “bing” into Google to get to bing, but now you have to remember to type “bing.com”. You’d use Yahoo, but come on, seriously.
Blogger is gone. Picasa is gone (your aunt’s extensive poodle photos, vapor). Consequently, to fill the gap, and to repeat the growing astonishment, Facebook traffic spikes. Facebook pleasantly chuckles, assured they are now the web proper, and everything else outside around them like duck face reposting medieval fiefs.
People begin to notice a peculiar lack of web ads. When they try to leave comments demanding the advertising be returned immediately, however, the captcha widget they’d been so used to using is also gone.
Appointments are missed. No calendar. Massive amounts of email, gone, not just your gmail address, but the innumerable companies that use Google apps as email for their domain. People wonder if that hotmail account they had so many years ago is still working. SMS use triples, at least by those who don’t have Android phones.
Those phones are still there, just dead. People with iPhones return to 2008’s level of smugness, which is goddamn unbearable for anyone around them to sit through and listen to hours and hours of conversation again about how great the iPhone is (and not be able to complain about them instantly on Twitter).
Work spreadsheets with tasks and miscellaneous data are gone. This is inconvenient for me, probably a disaster for others. If you’re an editor, your week is absolutely fucked. The few that have taken the plunge into using Chromebooks just stare blankly at it, wondering if they still have that Dell and scratched up disk of MS Office 03 somewhere.
Some office workers believe the web itself is gone, since their IT departments had been using Google DNS as a fail over a couple weeks ago and hadn’t set it back. So now addresses don’t resolve.
Website metrics for several years, gone. Sure, you can find a replacement service, perhaps even free. But those years of data, gone.
The several people using Google TV aren’t bothered, because that thing is a total boondoggle and they’re on Netflix too anyway. However, the black smoking hole which was once Youtube causes riots across the globe, since no webisode flavors of the week and no more Maru the cat means that people are suddenly cognizant again of the incompetent governing power structures around them. Broadcast television starts rerunning as much old Hollywood Squares as they can in hopes of quieting the unrest.
We’re all in this together.Susan Sontag In A Bear Suit
Annie LeibovitzThe Venus Project
There's something charming about this addition to the history of utopia, rooted in a time when the future was all capital F "Future" when it was simply given that man's rationality and technology could solve the big basic problems. Monorails. Cybernetics. A computer controlled economy.In a resource-based economy, resources are allocated into the goods and services in consumer demand, based on factors of availability, sustainability and technological advancement. The role of money would be phased out, instead central computers serve a lineup of goods and services (see Star network), which citizens may order upon demand; central computers serve the lineup of goods based on sustainability and the latest in technological advancement; obsolete, unwanted, or unused goods would be recycled, reduced and/or reused, resource waste is a burden the system must eliminate to function efficiently. ... more »
Blank Tapes
Today there was a thread over on Reddit "our children will never know the link between the two", showing a cassette tape and a no 2 pencil. It's a nostalgia thread, everyone repeats and solidifies their memories or misrememberings of the time.
What the original image seemed to miss is that in fact a no 2 pencil was the wrong thing to use to try and rewind or re-spool a cassette tape (you had to angle it against two edges, it really didn't work well), in fact what you were looking for was a pen with an appropriate cap size, specifically, ideally, a bic pen because it fit tightly in the cassette gear.
Most of you probably remember that, it wasn't that long ago. This isn't a post about the "good old days". In fact I hate the idea of the "good old days", they were never quite so good and now rarely as old. I was extremely glad to ditch both vinyl records and cassette tapes. As someone who loves the history of technology though, the cassette has its place. It's a weird in-between place, an interim technology, overlapping records, but with less quality, yet convenient, then dying off effectively the second the iPod was created (2001). And in a very very brief period, the cassette was a Datasette, which was a brilliant, cheap and slow solution bridging expensive storage to what later felt like ubiquitous floppies. (Also quite glad to get rid of those.) The cassette is notable because it was cheap and rewritable. It taught us how to become media.
What's triggering this nostalgia of course is not really about rewinding a cassette with a pencil, it's what the cassette was used for. It was, before we had common anything-machines around us at all times, used for what many describe as theft and piracy.
Mixtapes, recording radio, easily handing off tapes to someone (often with beautifully inventive notes and insets). Mixtapes could be a courting ritual. Recording concerts was par for the course. You may not have done it but someone did, and you listened to them. Sound was viral on a scale as small as a piece of plastic and some magnetic tape.
The specific technology is obsolete but the use then, and the need for the use now, is exactly the same. This is why I'm generally positive about the direction of technology and I don't want to return to the "simpler times" -- people are going to find the equivalent of blank tapes, or put some scotch tape over the the tab slots and record what they want, then embellish and annotate, that's what people do.All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Now he has moved on to machines, but it starts with nature. "In the 1960s, an idea penetrated deep into the public imagination that nature is a self-regulating ecosystem, there is a natural order," Curtis says. "The trouble is, it's not true – as many ecologists have shown, nature is never stable, it's always changing. But the idea took root and spread wider – people started to believe there is an underlying order to the entire world, to how society is structured. Everything became part of a system, like a computer; no more hierarchies, freedom for all, no class, no nation states." What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers. But we have paid a price for this: without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, "The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world." ... more »
Keep The SF's Score Low
∴ notes from ebyx
The original nomadic inhabitants of Cbyx rode Modar from one oasis to the next, beasts captured and trained as cubs. The riders developed an extremely close relationship with the animals, the bond was carried over by legendists as ancient, noble, spiritual. While horses, as large as they were in the north, were not Modar. What were written as saintly men and women of Cbyx nature, quitely and stoically enduring, became Northern horsemen, cantankerous, drunken, combative, wild. And they in turn became fable for teleplays, books, programs. Their iconography graced everything having to do with the North. Of great fascination, and State disapproval was the brief war between the horsemen and the expanding industry of the previous century. The purposing of horses for labor was anathema to the tradition of the Cbyx riders, enough so that the horsemen, who rarely organized, did so enough to cause twenty years of havok for any State loving midlander who happened into their hills.
Feb 18 4:40 a.m.
Brynja took a streetcar. She was entitled to her own automobile, but disliked the quiet resentment that the privilege caused. The streetcars here were old style, electric, clattering. She found them comforting. She wondered about a world where everyone would be allowed an auotmobile, the chaos and inefficiency. She rode with other citizens, the cold night causing them to have bundled up, warming their hands on cups of tea sold at the back. A radio next to the driver relentlessly broadcast static peppered State news.
Feb 13 3:43 a.m.
524F474552 moved carefully around the crater. It had taken days. Before the uplink was removed he’d have had telemetry. Now all robots simply talked to one another. Many had no audio, so a system of semaphore was worked out. Some used lights, some used moving parts. As he rounded a small hill he saw, in the distance, another unit. The other unit acknowledged him by raising an arm. Then it raised another. And another. Its arms began to move directionally, independently. A message. 524F474552 focused attention. “B … E … W … A … R … E”. Well, he thought, that was intriguing.
Feb 06 4:13 p.m.
∴ findings
Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium
To have someone to be able to die for, someone I may follow into exile, someone for whose life I may put myself up as security and pay the price as well. The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal.
Here one may recall Jane Jacobs's important distinction between visual orderliness on one hand and functional working order on the other. The city desk of a newspaper, a rabbit's intestines, or the interior of an aircraft engine may certainly look messy, but each one reflects, sometimes brilliantly, an order related to the function it performs.
Introduction -- Eloquent JavaScript
JavaScript is the language that is, at the moment, mostly being used to do all kinds of clever and horrible things with pages on the World Wide Web.
∴ knotesy
Krautrock - The Rebirth Of Germany Feb 22 9:25 a.m.
"This Is My Home" - Unique Dwelling In East Village Feb 21 10:38 a.m.
Financial Globalization, Inequality, And The Raising Of Public Debt Feb 21 8:44 a.m.
Ptak Science Books: History of Holes series: Holes in Airships (1919 and 1937) Feb 21 4:22 a.m.
Icelandic Anger Brings Debt Forgiveness Feb 20 11:49 a.m.
