theory
Your Totalitarian Regime Is Adorable
Cameras are everywhere. There's probably, if not one in your hand right now, one in your pocket. There's likely one above you now, if you're anywhere public. We've become used to this. Even if you aren't posing for a photo, you may be aware that you'll be posing for one soon. People maintain a camera face. The look forward, prepared, maybe with a gesture or expression they've practiced, even if they don't acknowledge it as practiced. You can see this look, the camera glare, in avatars, in Facebook photos. Even if you don't think someone is taking your photo, I believe subconsciously we now believe someone may be. This is not seen as surveillance, it's seen as desire, social. We live in a constant state of "SAY CHEESE!", the moment someone used to command you to freeze yourself into a state ready for posterity.
This is, arguably, no longer totalitarian, no longer surveillance. We are aware of most of the recording, if at times only dully when we're taking money from the ATM. There is very little special or uncommon intention attached to picture taking.
What I find remarkable about the photos taken in Prague during surveillance in the 70s is that they were taken at a time when doing so is an obvious attempt at social control by an obviously totalitarian regime. The question back then "perhaps someone is watching me" was enough to curtail cultural freedoms, empower the political engine, disparage contrary behavior and criticism. It was a tool of fear.
The opposite may be true now, the greatest tool of social control might be the modern terror "perhaps NOBODY is watching me".
These images are beautiful and mundane. They reveal a layer of daily activity that wasn't naturally captured. In that sense the monitoring by a police state become weird antique objects, so genuine they seem like they must be staged.gallery
Goodbye Frontier Towns
"Dodge boomed with a roar that split the nation’s ears and still echoes in her memory."Database normalization ties relationships together across tables so that there's no redundancy, allows those relationships to be updated consistently in the fewest places. Your identity online is becoming normalized through tech and convention.
At one time (long ago) it was peculiar, perhaps anathema, to use your "real name" online. You used a handle. The idea there would exist a normalized relationship between that handle and other records, and that these relationships had any reflection of the real world (discarded term: meat space) was thought of as dystopian, creepy. This is no longer the case.
Handles in a sense still exist, but as projects and brands, rarely as primary personal identities. The expectation, accepted behavior now is that your real name, and everything that goes with it is also your online identity. You promote your name as a commodity, you treat your identity like a start up.
Denormalization, on the other hand, is duplication of information across tables, so while there's excellent performance, the data can easily become disparate, can drift. One record may, but doesn’t necessarily, contain something from another record.
I'd argue that the normalization of identity, and the obvious fact that for a lot of people -- young people, tech people -- there is little or no separation between online-offline, means that we get operationally a kind of Victorian society. There may be a lot of identities, but the space is small, so the social pressures to behave "properly" is enormous. Through normalization the ability to maneuver is limited. It’s unforgiving.
The web used to be, not very long ago, a hodge podge of frontier towns. Some rougher than others. Most interesting. "Online", when it was a frontier, was wild. Imagine, a hundred years ago, you pick up your stuff and move across the country looking for work. You don’t know anyone where you’re going, they don’t know you. It’s a reinvention, you have the ability to live as essentially a new personality. Before the great normalization no one could look at your Facebook page, or blog, or tweets, or a thousand other artifacts that you’ve built up about yourself. Migrating physically now means little since centrally, in the information space, you’re pinpointed.
I’ve accepted that I will never entirely feel comfortable with this change. I come from online frontier towns. I don’t necessarily make very good online company. I have unrealistic affection for the uncouth, chaotic and perhaps embarrassingly named handles of the early days. I understand there are pros and cons, that having an online identity tied to your offline self that you use wisely can connect you with people that share your interests, and there are great rewards to that.
But God help you if you fuck up. You won’t be hanged, you’ll be shunned from polite society and you can't change your handle.All money is a matter of belief
Aegir HallmundurWhen creating, or even looking at, a banknote design, one of the first things you realise is their inherent and very deliberate imperfections. There’ll be an apparent mis-registration of colour, a strangely ragged line, a discontinuity in a pattern or an odd serif or ligature on a piece of lettering, but it’s exactly how it was designed. Without it, it wouldn’t be right. The design of banknotes represent something I find gloriously poetic — imperfect perfection — if it was perfect by our usual standards, it would be imperfect. Wonderful. ... more »
Banknote patterns fascinate me. I can get lost for hours in all the details, seeing how the patterns fit together, how the lettering works, the tiny security ‘flaws’ - they’re amazing. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. ... more »
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 »
