Why would anybody read a novel about Google Glass? You could write one. It’s not impossible. I’ve written a lot of science fiction about head mounted displays. But it’s clear that nobody’s going to be reading novels on Google Glass. How could you? A novel would violate the design principles: of visual images that show up on a network, get a quick, emotional, social response, and then vanish.

The world has a tragic dimension. This world does not always get better. The world has deserts. Deserts aren’t better. People don’t always get better.

Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness?

I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That’s where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online.

The real story is that their founders thought of the gift first, and the means of supporting it second.

The derailing attacks and defensive tweets are typed by fingers belonging to actual humans in front of keyboards.

We’ve all said dumb, offensive shit. This is what friends are for: they help you be a better, kinder human.

]]> storytelling technology culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:litherland/b:a11bd7268ccf/ 2012-04-30T17:15:19+00:00 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/07/120507fa_fact_kushner?currentPage=all litherlandIn one respect, hacking is an act of hypnosis. As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes.

Very few people ever hold language in their hands.

Writing for format.

In one way it's the triumph of the new over the old. On the other hand it doesn't really care about the distinction between the new and the old, in a manner that's dissimilar to the postmodern notion of the pastiche. In this regard we return to Bourriaud's idea that our understanding of time, and thus the future (and the past), are about how we cluster various signs together. By branching out in different directions instead of moving from step one to two to three. Having quickly flipped over to check my mail and messages it occurs to me that a tidy example is the use of threaded and branching messages on facebook, gmail, twitter etc. 

Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks.

We will get those ideas by watching what people are putting together by themselves.

The most power comes when we give people the power to do things themselves.

 [Q]uery whether most [startups] are operating in technology mode or globalization mode. You know you’re on the right track when your answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in X. But the truth is !X.”

This is all happening because we will naturally gravitate to the place with the fastest tempo, because the best stuff appears there first. Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

We invent ideologies to cope with technology.