"technology, the driving force behind modern culture, is alienating people"
This view takes the agency away from us and give it to our creations. I believe the reverse is also true, and that alienated people are building and using technology in alienating ways.
Personally, i do not believe that there is a point in time where our use of technology 'went bad.' (Walter Wink, _Ishmael_ et al say it was the agricultural revolution, others say industrial, etc.) Some technology has been designed and used for ill as long as it has existed. And people have different definitions for what counts as "ill" And many technologies have powerful unintended consequences. As a result, some people have felt threatened by technology, some quite reasonably.
I see our art/technology as part of the definition of being human or sentient, and as a part of our evolution to the Next Big Thing (if we do it right), in a Vingean Singularity kind of way.
I'm guessing from what you wrote that you would like novels to be written that *increase* social connection and people's (sense of and actual) own power. I imagine those being key goals of any Singularitarian technology.
ObTopic:
_Shockwave Rider_ rocks! I should read it again. _The Space Merchants_ is another oldie (50s?) that dates well (armed environmental terrorists!).
Love,
Rad
Re:Astute observations with hope for a solution: y
on
The Shockwave Rider
·
· Score: 1
There is no situation which a sufficient application of brute force can't make infinitely worse.
I don't have a server handy (more's the pity) but a site to do just that -- link up those who need to find prior art with those who want to help -- would be a beautiful "market". Many people are into archiving old projects and software. We could watch that 20% rejection of software patents rise.
Life,
John
Great list of stuff so far! Each item so far could be a chapter.
Hand it Out make a business card (yes, the old-fashioned paper kind) with your logo (you do have a logo, right?), the URL, and maybe your name and other contact info, and some pithy (obviously) text about the site. Graphics would be great here; download time is not an issue. Keep the URL handy in your Palm for beaming too.
Load Fast site design and server hardware/software/service choices
Be Text Friendly eases the way for blind, deaf, translation services, low-bandwidth (e.g. wireless) access, it's called maximizing your customer base and Doing the Right Thing
Be Available respond to the listed means of contacting you
Other Research find out who's linking to you (search AltaVista with "link:") watch your log
What are some of the things that you've learned about making a software project (solo or team) work? I don't mean the coding or design per se, but things like work habits, time issues, physical and social enviroment, etc.
No more than a GUI is defined by the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The hard part is grokking the next accretion of interface metaphors, analagous to the last one starting with written language call & return commands, and adding visual point and click. Good interface metaphors are like good physics models, they remain useful even after something "better" comes along.
Hardware is developed afterwards, and my guess is that voice recognition will be more important than immersion video.
We've never lost the command line. The Mac just made it inaccessible. Microsoft is following them mindlessly, ironically just as Apple is slipping in a command line layer.
When I first logged onto the first TinyMUD, I really appreciated the elegance of the economics as a barrier to people mindlessly adding pointless stuff:
If you wanted to make stuff you had to have money.
Wandering around you would occasionally find pennies. If that didn't add up fast enough for you, you could solve various puzzles. The puzzles were created by players and were very creative, as varied as bruteforce logic and linguistic intuition. They generally had some prize at the end, which when sacrificed at the Temple near Town Square would result in a modest bounty.
So you had to not only be willing to learn how to build things, but you had to be somewhat patient and/or willing to get involved in other people's creations.
At least, as a newbie that's what I thought.
Then I learned the many "tricks" that others had, such as pairing up with someone and creating successively more valuable easily accessible prizes (you couldn't sacrifice your own prizes). Of couse the simplest was simply finding (or making!) a friend among the old-timers and having them hand you a few thousand for starters.
So in the end it was another lesson that economics is in large part a social phenomenon. What looked like a beautiful unambiguous system for granting power only commensurate with involvement turned out yet again to be a set of official rules with plenty of the usual real-, er, virtual-world human loopholes.
This World Internet Forum (toward the end of the article, but there was no link) looks interesting. It claims to be "The first global platform for governments to discuss how to use the Internet for the betterment of their citizens."
ObTopic: Ironically, given the tone of the original article, WIF's latest highlighted article, (from December!) is "UK could be set to lead the world by becoming first online society"
The amount of water wasted per chip is also mindboggling, several digits of gallons last time I heard to be vague. However, the waste and environmental ickiness has gone *way* down for every generation of computers made. E.g., many highly toxic or environmentally damaging chemicals that were used during the manufacture process, have been greatly reduced or replaced by safer ones. If the pace of development was *not* so fast, each new computers today would each represent far more environmental damage than they do.
Sometimes I think of us as racing toward some critical mass (like Vernor Vinge's singularities, though more and more I see it as a combination of social and technological dynamics). And I wonder whether we'll "make it" before we destroy ourselves. IMHO, making the paradoxical term "socially-responsible business" come true may be a linchpin of our survival, so radical ownership solutions are worth exploring (see Bookpeople).
Slashdot Mirror
"technology, the driving force behind modern culture, is alienating people"
This view takes the agency away from us and give it to our creations. I believe the reverse is also true, and that alienated people are building and using technology in alienating ways.
Personally, i do not believe that there is a point in time where our use of technology 'went bad.' (Walter Wink, _Ishmael_ et al say it was the agricultural revolution, others say industrial, etc.) Some technology has been designed and used for ill as long as it has existed. And people have different definitions for what counts as "ill" And many technologies have powerful unintended consequences. As a result, some people have felt threatened by technology, some quite reasonably.
I see our art/technology as part of the definition of being human or sentient, and as a part of our evolution to the Next Big Thing (if we do it right), in a Vingean Singularity kind of way.
I'm guessing from what you wrote that you would like novels to be written that *increase* social connection and people's (sense of and actual) own power. I imagine those being key goals of any Singularitarian technology.
ObTopic:
_Shockwave Rider_ rocks! I should read it again. _The Space Merchants_ is another oldie (50s?) that dates well (armed environmental terrorists!).
Love,
Rad
There is no situation which a sufficient application of brute force can't make infinitely worse.
Vita,
Rademir
Another American Willing to Listen
Just another reason to go open source...
Life...
I don't have a server handy (more's the pity) but a site to do just that -- link up those who need to find prior art with those who want to help -- would be a beautiful "market". Many people are into archiving old projects and software. We could watch that 20% rejection of software patents rise. Life, John
That's it! Run multiple flotillas in international waters, tapping into the Internet via satellites? Completely extra-national servers.
Hmm...
Great list of stuff so far! Each item so far could be a chapter.
Hand it Out
make a business card (yes, the old-fashioned paper kind) with your logo (you do have a logo, right?), the URL, and maybe your name and other contact info, and some pithy (obviously) text about the site. Graphics would be great here; download time is not an issue. Keep the URL handy in your Palm for beaming too.
Load Fast
site design and server hardware/software/service choices
Be Text Friendly
eases the way for blind, deaf, translation services, low-bandwidth (e.g. wireless) access, it's called maximizing your customer base and Doing the Right Thing
Be Available
respond to the listed means of contacting you
Other Research
find out who's linking to you (search AltaVista with "link:")
watch your log
Life,
Rademir
P.S. re my .sig, looking for X:GUI+CLI like GUI+CLI:CLI
I won't mention batch processing.
Rademir
What are some of the things that you've learned about making a software project (solo or team) work? I don't mean the coding or design per se, but things like work habits, time issues, physical and social enviroment, etc.
Life,
Rademir
No more than a GUI is defined by the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The hard part is grokking the next accretion of interface metaphors, analagous to the last one starting with written language call & return commands, and adding visual point and click. Good interface metaphors are like good physics models, they remain useful even after something "better" comes along.
Hardware is developed afterwards, and my guess is that voice recognition will be more important than immersion video.
We've never lost the command line. The Mac just made it inaccessible. Microsoft is following them mindlessly, ironically just as Apple is slipping in a command line layer.
Life,
Rademir
When I first logged onto the first TinyMUD, I really appreciated the elegance of the economics as a barrier to people mindlessly adding pointless stuff:
If you wanted to make stuff you had to have money.
Wandering around you would occasionally find pennies. If that didn't add up fast enough for you, you could solve various puzzles. The puzzles were created by players and were very creative, as varied as bruteforce logic and linguistic intuition. They generally had some prize at the end, which when sacrificed at the Temple near Town Square would result in a modest bounty.
So you had to not only be willing to learn how to build things, but you had to be somewhat patient and/or willing to get involved in other people's creations.
At least, as a newbie that's what I thought.
Then I learned the many "tricks" that others had, such as pairing up with someone and creating successively more valuable easily accessible prizes (you couldn't sacrifice your own prizes). Of couse the simplest was simply finding (or making!) a friend among the old-timers and having them hand you a few thousand for starters.
So in the end it was another lesson that economics is in large part a social phenomenon. What looked like a beautiful unambiguous system for granting power only commensurate with involvement turned out yet again to be a set of official rules with plenty of the usual real-, er, virtual-world human loopholes.
Life,
Rademir
This World Internet Forum (toward the end of the article, but there was no link) looks interesting. It claims to be "The first global platform for governments to discuss how to use the Internet for the betterment of their citizens."
ObTopic:
Ironically, given the tone of the original article, WIF's latest highlighted article, (from December!) is "UK could be set to lead the world by becoming first online society"
Sounds like they're into hyperbole.
Life,
Rad
The amount of water wasted per chip is also mindboggling, several digits of gallons last time I heard to be vague. However, the waste and environmental ickiness has gone *way* down for every generation of computers made. E.g., many highly toxic or environmentally damaging chemicals that were used during the manufacture process, have been greatly reduced or replaced by safer ones. If the pace of development was *not* so fast, each new computers today would each represent far more environmental damage than they do.
Sometimes I think of us as racing toward some critical mass (like Vernor Vinge's singularities, though more and more I see it as a combination of social and technological dynamics). And I wonder whether we'll "make it" before we destroy ourselves. IMHO, making the paradoxical term "socially-responsible business" come true may be a linchpin of our survival, so radical ownership solutions are worth exploring (see Bookpeople).
Life,
John