A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.
This video, so clearly a labor of love, is a marvelous embodiment of that dream. Fittingly, not a word is spoken in the entire 9 minutes.
If art is already there, perhaps we’re closer than we think.
I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.
Much improved!http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!
It’s still a very early release (the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?
Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.
The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!
The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.
Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.
I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.
Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches
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