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Ars's Skeptical Take on Wired's NextFest
jamestech writes "Over the weekend, Wired magazine held its 'NextFest' in Chicago, a demonstration of what the future supposedly holds. Arstechnica's Hannibal visited NextFest, and was not impressed. Regarding a dolphin-shaped water vehicle and exoskeletons for the old, he notes, 'if you're being pursued by a senior citizen then you can use the dolphin to escape.' Wired's been more about style rather than tech since the late 90s, but have they finally dropped science in favor of science fiction?"
Or rather, zombie dog points the way to the future.
Seriously, the world is so fucked up today that I'm actually considering having myself exsanguinated and pumped full of near-freezing saline solution just for the chance of really seeing the future -- the really cool and distant future -- and not Wired magazine's take on it.
I'm hoping for a Star Trek spin-off, only with virtual immortality and holodecks with locks on the doors so you can't be interrupted (self-cleaning would be nice too.)
There may be something like only a one-in-a-million chance of success, but hey, if it works, it would be unbelievably excellent.
Besides, I figure civilization's chances aren't much better.
(and If I chicken out, I can alway use the cooling system for my homebuilt PC.)
Wired has gone the way of Red Herring. They just don't know it yet. Perhaps they are going to try to reincarnate as Asmov's Science Fiction.
threer has been little media coverage of this in comparison to Gnomedex IMHO, why would they go opposite of Gnomedex as it seems to be taking off?
Wired has been more eye candy than anything else as long as I've read it
It seems to me that innovation has been lacking lately... there is not a lot to report for 'NextFest' as it were.... at least nothing commercially exciting .... not like black boxes in automobiles, or search engines that really do know what sites you want to see, or maybe RSS in Longhorn...
Geeez, with the amount of innovation being reported in the daily news on almost every major information provider's site, what was the point of NextFest? Its not like you can't turn on the television and find out about the latest in technology...
As I write, there is some story on television about the lineman who now has bionic arms... what were the NextFest promoters thinking?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
"You do not want to incur the wrath of our robotically enhanced, geriatric overlords." Damn! He beat us to it!
It's been about the bad layout.
I hadn't read Wired for many years. I recently "inherited" a subscription from a departed co-worker. The magazine has become a total entertainment rag. I spend less time on an issue of Wired than I do on an issue of Information Week (and it comes out 4 times as often!).
Buy Wired? Nuh-uh.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
There was some Wired bashing in the related Ars thread that I didn't really agree with, and it looks like that theme has been picked up by the slashdot poster. Just to clarify before this degenerates into a pile-on, this article was intended as sardonic, tongue-in-cheek humor. It wasn't intended as a slam on Wired or as a slam on any of the engineers whose hard work I ridiculed mercilessly. If it was a slam on anything, it was a slam on The Future, which has never really been all that it's cracked up to be.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
It's not about what's practical, what's available today, what's cool (how many MP3 player stories do you want to read?), it's about the FUTURE and unfortunately it's not going to be rocket backpacks, cities under the sea and moonbases.
It's going to be about taxes, regulatory regimes, investment timetables and all the other boring crap we put up with today...
I'm happy to see someone like Wired still trying to convince us that the future is bright (the dolphin is seriously cool, by the way) but I for one am giving up hope of believing it.
I am a leaf on the wind
The guy was obviously in a pissy mood. I mean, come one, robotic exoskeletons for the elderly (a bit like that Centurions cartoon that used to be on TV) and he didn't see anything interesting or exciting? Did he have anything more to say about the Dolphin-shaped craft other than the shape reminded him of a dolphin? What about some actual information about what was going on at the show instead of trying to be funny with stupid tales of escaping by water when exeskeleton-enhanced geriatrics chasing after him? Maybe he should have taken some Alka Seltzer for his hangover. Nothing is as easy to spot as an article that's been written by someone in a bad mood, with a hangover, or both. Sheesh!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
God I hope so. I loved that magazine.
Has it ever been anything but style? I'm not sure this even qualifies as science fiction, at least not good, plausible, science fiction. It is reminiscent of the 50's versions of the future though...and it seems that inventors still haven't learned to actually try using their inventions before showing them off...
It's hard to say Wired is lacking anything when it never actually promised something in the first place. The magazine has no mission statement. It accepts contributions from anyone, anywhere. By that fact, Wired could be considered a reflection of our digital lifestyle, and if we don't particularly care for what we see...
ArsTechnica.net?
.com...
I think you mean
Isn't that by definition science fiction? And isn't science fiction a reasonable thing to indulge in from time to time, especially as it is presented as such, ie. as crystal ball gazing rather than as present ay fact? Wired is a completely crap magazine, but not because of articles like this.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Hey, guys, there's a reason most people don't print their text in wildy, wacky colors, and it has nothing to do with coolness, style, culture or any of those dumbass things.
The naysayers are wrong. NextFest was a lot of fun. It was like a science museum on steroids--with real live engineers and scientists there to answer your questions. The Nasa exhibit rocked--especially since the mars-rover programmers were there. Yes, it was subsidized by and represented the military-industrial complex, but that subsidy allowed the art-and-design institutes, the grad students, and even high schoolers to participate.
Here's a copy of my original post from last weekend. I don't think people fully appreciated the wealth of talent that was present:
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations:
* Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use
* Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects.
* Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on interactive media projects.
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls.
* The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have).
* The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
Wired's been more about style rather than tech since the late 90s, but have they finally dropped science in favor of science fiction?
Isn't that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
...and everything sucks including this.
And I'm not talking about the article-- since when has it been hip to bash on Wired? I suppose it's one of those things the tech elite (or ignorant /.'ers) like to do because it reassures them of their status, or perhaps it's mere bandwagon jumping. What exactly is wrong with the magazine? (And give me something more original than the bad layout one liners)
I've had a subscription for several years, and have always found the magazine a worthwhile read. Sure alot of the stuff we already learn from online publications and news sites, but then the magazine offers enough original material to warrant its existence. They're also different than they were a few years ago because of the increasing number of free tech-sites online. Sure they sometimes take a look at the tech of pop-culture, but this may have to do with the increasing adoption of technology in the public realm. This past issue they had an article on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds", and last issue they covered Lucas-- how is this not relevant to the discussion of technology and geek-culture? Both are revolutionary directors who, despite their occasional misteps and flaws, consistently push the art of film-making and its use of technology.
Anyone who has actually read a recent issue of Wired and found nothing of value can't deny that the magazine offers something of value, especially in a world where we see decreasig numbers of hard-technology publications. After all, if Wired were as useless as some of you say it is, why do we keep featuring Wired stories on Slashdot?
The link to Arstechnica (http://arstechnica.net/) is not really to the correct site, Arstechnica...
Instead, you'll get a parked domain rife with popups.
really -- wired has been trash since it was taken over by the same people who ruined SPY MAGAZINE in the late 90s. Their idea of a great layout is just like in GQ.
What they don't seem to know is that GQ and Wired have drastically different demographics.
oh well
Do not commit such blasphemy as to compare Omni with that magazine which does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Omni!
Omni was a magazine of the thinking man.
Wired always was "Ohh, look at us! We are so tragically hip we cannot see over our own pelvis! Look at this game, which you cannot hope to afford the computer to run! Bow before the computer we use to run it! Look at the trends which shall be cool, because we say they are cool! Spend hours reading our tripe because we hide our vacuousness behind insane color choices and bizarre layouts! You are honored just to pay us money!"
Sorry, Wired is to a real magazine what MTV is to real entertainment.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Pictures from the 2005 event.
Information and pictures from the 2004 event.
Finally! Someone who feels the same way I do about Wired! I *HATE* Wired magazine. It's not a tech culture magazine anymore. It's a fashion rag for gadget guys. Gadget guys != technologists. We are technologists. We use technology to make lives better and easier for anyone. Gadget guys are the proverbial fools who are soon parted from their money.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Ars posts an article that isn't about Mac history!
Ah, yes. Wired certainly has a wonderful record at predicting the future. From the Long Boom to Kissing Your Browser Goodbye and a world dominated by Sega, Wired certainly has a fine track record. Keep up the good work guys!
Now sometimes that fiction becomes fact, but in no small part it is because either:
A) Someone states something completely obvious like "Television will change the way people see the world".
or
B) People find certain science fiction concepts so cool, they try to make new technologies emulate the fiction. A good example of this? Star Trek and Cell phones. No, Star Trek didn't create cell phones, but it certainly influenced their direction and design.
Pop culture does that to all aspects. Something becomes engrained and "natural" to us. So we make that idea a reality.
But, no one can predict the future. You can guess of course, and the ones who get lucky tend to be the rich/successful ones. But more often than not people just guess wrong, in no small part because when you guess the future, you are focusing on one single(or maybea handful of things) and assuming that these things will evolve in a vaccum without outside influence. Problem is, very few things evolve in a vaccum, and the wants and needs of a culture change over time too.
All inventions and technology are created to fill a need(be it entertainment, travel, communication, etc). People change, needs change, making the future impossible to ever predict.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Isn't Arstechnica another of Timmy's BLOWJOB BOI groups, like ROLAND?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
...and the girls still won't date you.
I was at the NextFest and was familiar with a lot of the technology being presented. Seeing it in the real world is a lot different than reading about it or seeing it on TV. Compare your live to that of the average citizen of a century or two ago and you get a sense of how much technology and science has shaped our lives. But if your standard of comparison is not reality but the Jetsons, or Star Trek then yes, NextFest would seem rather ordinary.
http://redcone.net
Why do pepole talk to this person? Why do people invite this person who is under investigation by the SEC? Why? Why? Why? Here is a popular science article about the person and his company. Sigh...... http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,20 967,1006786,00.html
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Style is not irrelevant. Portable MP3 players have been around for years. Yet what really popularized them? The stylish iPod.
Fashion has more to do with the future than most geeks are prepared to admit. And, as a recent NYT article pointed out (can't find the link), tech jobs are fleeing the country like rats from a sinking ship, but most of the major artistic design firms -- the ones who put the pretty boxes around the circuits -- are still in NY, LA, Chicago, etc.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Went to a small round table once ~2002 with a newly appointed senior editor at wired who had been brought in from New York Magazine to overhaul the magazine's image and style content strategy. This was just when the mag went to the new format with lots of short, punchy briefs, product matrices and gizmo reviews (and right after they dropped the 3-4 page graphic intro that was ad-dead). He explained that this format tested better with a wider audience than the more geeky tech format (my memory, not his words). This was in no small part precipated by Conde Nast's purchase of the mag.
it's ok though with mags like MAKE taking their place and publishers like O'Reilly staying true to their tech demographic. Hopefully their success will inspire investments in more daring technology coverage.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg186249 45.800
For the cost of a new car you too can pretend you are Iron Man. I would actually get one for my grandpa so he could walk again. It's a pretty neat technology.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
As long as they keep promising flying cars, I'll keep buying Wired's vision of the future.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
do the dolphins have lasers?
If thats the same dolphin water vehical invented by a NZer, i'm impressed. NZ do it again... Buggers!!! These things look fantastic, imagine jetski*submarine. Its a lesure vechical that can go under water... sweet stuff! :)
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I for one, welcome our robotically-enhanced geriatric overlords and their leader, the life-like Philip K. Dick android.
Wired has ALWAYS been "out"... You've just grown up enough by now to realize it.
For instance, at the GE-manufactured checkpoint that I saw, the machine supposedly sniffs you for bomb residue... Truly, the long line of people who just couldn't wait to go through that security checkpoint was probably the most bizarre thing that I saw at the entire NextFest.
Elementary. What you saw there was the future of good-cop-bad-cop pornography, and everyone wanted a piece of that.
I went to FextNest on Sunday and it was lame. The last thing I need is the largest representatives of the military industrial complex shoving their unrealistic, worthless products down my throat. I knew something was wrong when everyone there (gamers, defense industry, robotics, EVERYBODY) was using a Microsoft platform. Felt very much like an interactive advertisement.
I think the oddest idea was the treadmill cum mouse. There was a girl exerting not a little effort while turning what appeared to be bike handles and running around quake 2. The saleslady said that you could even use it to browse the web. I guess the treadmill would also act as the mouse wheel.
But what was baffling was that they weren't promoting it as any kind of exercise equipment; the fellow I talked to even discouraged it, saying that it wasn't built the same way as one in the gym.
The *real* kicker, though, was when I asked how you would move side to side. I figured the handlebars would move on a rail, but the guy insisted, with a certain amount of misplaced pride, that it would be a button on the handlebars, and then using the treadmill to do the actual movement.
I'm a very meek, little person, so it has to be a dumb enough idea for me to tell someone, to their face, that is the most stupid idea I'd ever heard of. Good to know the future is filled with as many useless gadgets as the present.
B.S. At most of the booths there were iMacs. I only saw a couple of booths with PCs, and the GE booth alone had like 5 iMacs. The bomb sniffer at the GE booth was nothing like airport security. It was really cool to go through, though kinda slow. You step in and it shoots puffs up compressed air in sequence from your feet to your head and then back to your feet, which felt really odd but not unpleasant. Then you wait for 15 seconds or so till the green light comes on. The guy at the booth said that it could detect drugs too, but they had that feature turned off (I imagine that if it was on, lots of people would have set it off). Coolest things: 1. Chroino- a small humanoid robot (like a foot tall) with a flexible semi rigid skin. It could get up on its own, dance around, and the skin let it move more fluidly that stiff plastic. Plus it looked really cool (though it could have been a better color). 2. Robot arm DJs- 2 robot arms, each would pick up a record and start randomly scratching it, often taking turns so one could get a new record. Sometimes really cool, sometimes horrible noise. They need to vary between scratching and playing some records, add a microphone so it can sense when it is making noise and adjust, and make them smaller (they looked like they could have swapped their end attachments out and start welding cars together). 3. Motorola booth- tons of the latest mobile phone gagetry, plus tech that turns graphitti into tunes, and some phones that weren't available in the US lst time I checked. Overall, it was cool, but not cool enough to justify me returning next year (though that is because I live at the beach in Alabama). Also, I though the scantily clad women were a plus (although they were moderately clothed compared to some of the people around here...).
Last Post!
Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web.
It is like the 1939 World's fair ... full of fun stuff that will probably never happen. They were talking flying cars 60 years ago. The Hal 9000 is nearly 40. I like idealized views of the future its fun and there's no harm in it.
Except... forget the substance, MTV has style... I don't like it, but it is usually slick... Omni had style... it was wonderful to look at... gorgeous, luxurious... but, forget the lack of substance, Wired's broken serial-killer letter production gives me a freaking headache...
The Admin and the Engineer
will aparently all wear balloons on their heads. I enjoyed myself. After my free subscription renewal, it only cost me like, $3 service charge and I got to talk to PK Dick, sorta.
I read Wired.
It used to be cool and hip before greed and an endless fixation with the stock market took over the editors in the late 90ies. Since then, FastCompany-style commercialism has never gone away even in the dot-bomb bust - Wired is trying to sell readers on its own hipness, relentlessly so. That almost all of its predictions ever were complete failures does not deter them one bit.
The reason I keep reading is that every issue contains at least one absolute gem, something that you would never read anywhere else. And that makes it all worth it. Neil Stephenson's legendary report on the underwater cables - something like 50 incredible pages - was worth about 2 years of buying bla-Wireds right there.
PS: I thought the japanese schoolgirl watch was cool until I went to Tokyo and found - Wired in hand - that it was nothing more than hot air. Not even actual japanese schoolgirls - yes, I asked them - could tell me where to get that stuff. Oh, the disillusionment! I eventually found the item, but it didn't seem to be considered cool or particularly popular.
... duke nukem forever will be the hottest game. evAR.
Want to know who really reads Wired? Graphic designers looking for cool ideas to steal.
If they can consider spending such ammounts of money to "stick a cork in the dam", why can't they consider using similar ammounts of money to combat the initial problem itself? Lower our dependence on fossil fuels which are among teh primary causes of Ozone and atmospheric breakdown.
It just seems silly to me.
My agenda if I ran the world:
1. Get our shit together down here on earth
2. Worry about patching up holes once the root of the problem has been taken care of.
Just my 2 cents on a day I will most likely not live to see. :(
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
The future isn't what it used to be...
It's always been best to take anything Wired does or says skeptically. They push the boundaries of science fiction, from the inside.
--
make install -not war
Wired has always sucked...
I found the article unfunny, too biting of Scott Adam's "The Dilbert Future" type of humor, and disillusioned to the cultural perspectives of Japanese.
That Wired's purpose has always been to create hype so people will buy Wired.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
It makes Slashdot, including goatse links and all, seem like a happy, knowledgeable place to be.
They have been trying to position themselves as the only place anyone should get any technical info from on the Net. Yawn.
Whatever, Hannibal, you sad, stupid clown. Your site is nothing more than a bunch of hardcore Microsoft wackos jerking each other off. No one gives a crap about another one of his hatchet jobs on another site.
Because it's a circus. Negroponte set the template when he created MIT's Media Lab. The goal was only ever to attract funding with high profile media gimmicks, which in practice involved lots of art students pinning carpet onto dumb robots. So he helped start Wired magazine to hype them. It was his baby, and Negroponte was the star columnist.
Depressingly the same philosophy has now infected Sun Labs: see Inside Sun Labs - the best and the 'bots and *especially* Sun's newest star lauds the PT Barnum way .
Good computer science means making computers that don't crash. It's hard to do, and it isn't sexy.
But outside of USA Today, Boing Boing, or NPR Radio - which has dropped the progressive politics in favor of gawp-eyed techno utopianism - I don't think this 80s thinking has very much traction. Go, Hannibal.
I must admit that I was a bit disappointed at NextFest; it was definitely worth the money, but many of the exhibits were either displaying current technologies or cool demos with questionable applications in real-life. On the plus side, security was pretty much non-existent; the barcode tickets weren't actually scanned for admission, it was easy to simply walk in through one of the many open doors and I was able to walk up to the "staff only" balcony running around the exhibit hall (great view). Also, free copies of the current Wired magazine were available.
Without a doubt, my favorite exhibit was Genetic Savings and Clone. They had two cats, Tabouleh and Baba Ganoush, on display and the sales people manning the booth were very eager to talk to people and spoke to me at length regarding the cloning techniques used, issues w/ telomere lengths and the possibility of genetic modifications. On the other end of the spectrum was the guy manning the Segway Centaur booth; he just didn't seem to enjoy being there. Also, I felt a bit sorry for the Army guys manning the Full Spectrum Warrior booth.
All in all a good show, but I think some peoples' expectations were high. It was basically a live digest of the past year of Wired's magazine.
Oh, and regarding the skin and tattoos, yeah that's a Chicago thing :)
jesus, what a whiner. we need tiny, dopey looking electric cars, and an exoskeleton for your grandma might be nice. That way she can take herself to the bathroom. I'm sure 95% of the ideas were dumb, but what do you expect? Raise your hand if you've ever been to a trade show that wasn't mostly garbage.
not everything is a science experiment!
I thought Omni was the magazine of the thinking pornographer.
Prefiguring the confluence of nerd and porn, the Gucciones published both Omni & Penthouse. It's like the internet, in magazine form.
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
At least at NextFest. Maybe one day I'll install that piece of crap plugin so I can see websites like that one. Then again, there's only 8,058,044,651 or so other things to do and see on the 'net today, according to Google. Guess I'll have to miss out on the future.
The writer of that article seems to have lost his geek funk. I say this because even though I wasn't there I was still impressed with the scientifical items that I have seen from pictures on a few different websites.
For instance, look at this, its called the http://www.ledmonthly.com/content/view/55/81/ VeinViewer which will look through your skin and find your veins. The ONLY reason why I don't give blood anymore at the red-cross is because the people getting to my blood are horrible at finding the vein.
I may be alone when I say that I'd like a pillow that when I squeeze it, the other one of the pair lights up showing the user that you're thinking about them. Maybe I'm the only geek who likes women (god I hope not), but the http://www.ledmonthly.com/content/view/51/80/ Interactive Pillows will surely end up on my bed someday. Especially now that I can't get her out of my head.
There are so many inventions that were brought up at the nextfest, I think the writer of that article has lost his funk and is a downward spiral of absolute zero creativeness, and thats sad.
I can still remember seeing Wired atricles in the early 90's formatted with yellow text on a gray and red striped background. Readability?... in a magazine? Who wants that?
I think their art directors are all stuck in a persistant flashback of Max Headroom.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Didn't Omni actually include Sci-Fi short stories? And weren't they the ones who were duped into running the fake story about splicing together cows and tomatoes?
I looked around NextFest and saw that it was never meant for the Slashdot crowd, that it was for the 9,000 inner-city kids who came in on buses on the first day to do school reports, that it was for the parents looking for a neat event to take the ramblers in the minivan to.
Simple, visually stimulating, yet very interactive displays that for the common person capture the imagination beyond the norm - flying cars, self-healing plastic, cloned cats.
Kids got to play in interactive light shows, step into virtual worlds, climb into next gen submersibles, play brainball, shake hands with a robot, watch plastic bleed, etc. etc.
You know, there actually are plenty of expos, conventions for our community - GnomeDex, ComDex, CES, CTIA Wireless, E3, WWDC, etc. most of which are industry-only and would bore the corneas off of most of the public.
NextFest reached its maximum attendance, the place was packed and full of people who I saw having an absolute blast.
From that point of view it was a wild success.
If you can't look at something and understand its purpose, its intent, and properly gauge its success and not explain it or put in into context for your audience, what good are you as a tech reporter?
Being snide and cynical does nothing but to perpetuate the stereotype of being part of the pocket-protector club, living in a Dilbert snowglobe.
Since when was Wired about science and _not_ about science fiction? I don't remember that time. Wired is stuck in the dotcom days like Steve Jobs, they think style is more important than substance. It's always been a fluff mag, but I still read it. You never know where you're going to find a gem of info.
Just swap Solient Green for Wired, and there you go. Since 1995 is too kind, It's always basically had the writing level as People Mag but about technology instead of movie stars, from the start. For what, it is, it is what is. And, sure I've enjoyed a few articles here and there, waiting in various offices.. but it is no CACM, or Popular Science for that matter.
My main gripe is when pseudo nerds start qouting it, not realizing that its the equivalent of qouting Dave Barry, or Erma Bombeck, it may be somewhat amusing, but its not like they're quoting Dennis Ritchie, Linus, or even Bill Gates.
Take that supposed Law about Nazi Analogies that gets linked too much:
1. Would be it would be true.
2. It's not Moore's Law... or Law in any empirical or scientific sense of the word.
3. It's really just a derivative of just about any netiquette guide from pre-Mosaic era, just specific to 1 kind of grossness.
4. Again, its not a true LAW, some guy needed a column, and that was it.