“quotes”
211 posts under this tag.
I feel — numb. Distant. Detached. Separate. Futile. Tepid. Coward. Been on a media breakdownELZR for too many days now—ScrubsWP, NausicaaWP, The Economist, The New York Times, porn, (Ben Shneiderman’s) interface design articles, Wired, (so many) books. Unprecedented amounts of physical exercise sprinkled throughout (bizarre, I know). Much been thought, outcomes uncertain (to put it hopefully).
Only 30 pages into Finite and Infinite GamesAM I think it’s the best book I’ve read. ”Seriousness,” it says, ”is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.” Been far too serious in my life lately. Too scared.
Stupid death won’t go away. Seems my (maternal) grandfather has lung cancer—most likely metastatic. Brutal prognosis. He’s been staying here at home and I’ve been escaping it all—so far away. So serious.
And yet I’m hopeful now. I can never force myself to post something until I’m hopeful. Until I’ve a plan. Until I’m back. (Too scary otherwise.)
Gonna play.
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
One of my rules for not overflowing this blog with quote posts (admittedly not a very succesful enterprise) is that a quote must bounce on my head on its own for some days, a week or two. Here’s an odd winner.
“Who are you taking me to meet?”
“A guy named Beck. An old acquaintance of mine.”
“But not a friend?”
Carl adopted an uncomfortable grin and shrugged. “We’ve been friends sometimes. We’ve also been collaborators. Business partners. This is how life works, Miranda: After a while, you build a network of people. You pass them bits of data they might be interested in and vice versa. To me, he’s one of those guys.”
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond AgeAM
(Oh and btw, if you care for my unfiltered quotestream check out my Google Notebook. The app is still frustratingly primitive—all the more disappointing coming from Google, beta label notwithstanding—but the notebook’s already several hundred quotes strong.)
As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures1. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.
My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.
The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li ZhenshengWP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News SoldierAM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:
More typical, and more tragic, was Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet). Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, “this world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.
 The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond AgeAM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.
So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.
Good design is much more than just details—it’s details, details, details!
From the surprise interview of Sergey BrinWP, Google’s cofounder, at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. The notes ↓ here are just to guide you, you have to hear either the clip or the full interview at ITConversations to get how wittyEEM this is.
John Battelle: There’s been a dialogue throughout the conference, Google’s come up once or twice, and I wanted to sort of pin some of the highlights of that dialogue and ask you to respond to them.
One of the first that comes to mind is a conversation I had with Terry SemelWP, where he—I asked him about Google—and he said, very respectfully, how much he thinks the technology is extraordinary, and of course how Yahoo! build their search technology, and so on. But, then he pulled back and said: “Let’s judge Google as what it is. Google is now a portal and by my estimation,”—and I may quote him not exactly word for word—”Google is number four.” How do you respond to that framing?
Sergey Brin: Yeah, and I just wasn’t here to see him, but I read a couple of news stories on points like that, but based on my reading of that, that also’d make us the underdog.
Battelle: Um-ha-ha! Very wise! You knew my next question…
Brin: And… I think that’s where we are. Further I’d add to that if you’ve… you’ve had the pleasure of being at the Google cafe…
Battelle: Yeah…
Brin: I think our food is pretty good, we continuously try to improve it, but in terms of… [laughs] kind of the volume…
Battelle: Was that a non sequitur?
Brin: Well the volume and the quantity we try to deliver if we were to rank among cafes and restaurant chains, I mean, I don’t know, we’re not in the top 100 or 1000 even, probably.
Silence. Laughing uproar.
danah boyd’s new essay on digital privacy and intimacy seems to be everywhere right now and yet (or because of that?) I had been studiously avoiding it. It was negligent of me, because it really is that good (and that unsettling).
If gossip is too delicious to turn your back on and Flickr, Bloglines, Xanga, Facebook, etc. provide you with an infinite stream of gossip, you’ll tune in. Yet, the reason that gossip is in your genes is because it’s the human equivalent to grooming. By sharing and receiving gossip, you build a social bond between another human. Yet, what happens when the computer is providing you that gossip asynchronously? I doubt i’m building a meaningful relationship with you when i read your MySpace CuteKitten78. You don’t even know that i’m watching your life. Are you really going to be there when i need you?
Sure, strangers are one thing but what about people you sorta know? I have no doubt that strong ties can be maintained through these systems, provided that other forms of synchronous engagement complement the gossip feed. But i also believe that it gives you a fake sense of intimacy for people you don’t really know that well. And that fake sense of intimacy is both misleading and dreadfully disappointing.
At Blogher, i moderated a panel on “Sensitive Topics” and one of the things that the panelists said over and over again was how hard it was to handle the strangers who contacted them wanting their help. The thing is that to those public bloggers, these are strangers… but those strangers have been following that blogger’s life for quite some time, drawing parallels, finding common ground, feeling connected. It’s a devastating blow to realize that the blogger doesn’t feel the same way. Without that connection, why should they get involved? Often, they do out of a desire to be helpful, a desire to not see someone in pain. This is manageable the first few times. But what happens when there are new people every day? What happens when there are hundreds of people every day?
[...]
Being faced with information overload can be a curse. You want to react, you want to notice. But it can make you exhausted. Worse, it can devastate you.
Facebook is giving me the “gift” of infinite gossip. But i don’t want it. I can’t handle it. And i’m not sure anyone’s really ready to receive the One Ring. But it sure sounds precious upfront.
So again it all comes down to “celebrity”, doesn’t it? I for one didn’t notice that weird, contorted word creeping in but it has become the talisman. It’s what danah is talking about in the above paragraphs: celebrity, painfully confused with intimacy. You can now obsess and lurk Jane Blog as you did Jennifer Aniston through the tabloids—and it will be just as fun and just as empty.
Unless you interact, that is. (And that’s the digital promise and perhaps one possible counter-measure for sanity: to limit your feed to those people you engage meaningfully with.)
Blogging for dollars is the pretty good, pretty interesting cover article from this month’s Business 2.0 about how the mainstream blogs (MSB?WP) like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter, TechCrunch ELZR, Digg or Dooce are monetizing their traffic. Thorough and filled with lots of $ data, what surprised me the most about it was how obviously promotional it was. It’s basically an extended infomercial on blog-advertising, which doesn’t take away that it makes several good insights on media and how technology is turning us into one-man-bandsELZR, but, still, deliberately mislabeling content is just an euphemism for lying.
Ever since I read Paul Graham’s The Submarine I had been on the lookout for PR campaigns and this is one of the clearest (or should I say most blatant?) examples of it I’ve seen. The client? That’s an easy one, John Battelle’s Federated Media1.
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren’t about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms..
Trend articles.. are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it’s straightforward to figure out who the client is.
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