Activity timeline
March 18, 2010
"There's nothing duller than listening to people talk about indescribable, deeply personal, revelatory experiences: the LSD trip, the vision on the mountaintop. When you live in the Bay Area, you learn to carefully avoid those little triggers in a conversation that can bring on the deluge."
"...not every technology-related process speeds up according to Moore's law.
"For instance... software development... often... slows down as computers get bigger because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake...
"There is another form of slowness... and it interacts with the process of neoteny... Moore's law can be expected to accelerate progress in medicine... This means healthy old age will continue to get healthier and last longer and that the 'youthful' phase of life will also be extended...
"And that means generational shifts in culture and thought will happen less frequently... [emphasis mine] ... People live longer as technology improves, so cultural change actually slows, because it is tied more to the outgoing generational clock than the incoming one.
"So Moore's law makes 'generational' cultural change slow down. But that is just the flip side ...
"It is sometimes claimed that the level of neoteny in humans is not fixed, that it has been rising over the course of human history...
"The twenties are the new teens, and people in their thirties are often still dating, not having settled on a mate or made a decision about whether to have children or not...
"Children want attention. Therefore, young adults, in their newly extended childhood, can now perceive themselves to be finally getting enough attention, through social networks and blogs...
"Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime... the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind."
Lanier is a champion of humanism, but his chosen field requires him to be a dualist -- he believes slightly different things about the nature of the universe depending on which application he's pursuing. Sometimes he's comfortable with a materialist model of things; other times he wants to admit to mystery, though he won't commit to a full expression of that view. In any case, it's a useful concept: none of us are either/or, we're most of us usually both/and. He favors materialism but champions mystery.
March 17, 2010
The section cautioning against Wikipedia bandwagonism (pages 141-147) is of particular interest to the library set. Lanier laments the demise of alternative attempts at describing facts online -- often with their own unique tone or approach to communication, "though they were probably last updated around the time Wikipedia came into being."
"Even in a case in which there is an objective truth that is already known, such as a mathematical proof, Wikipedia distracts the potential for learning how to bring it into the conversation in new ways. Individual voice might not matter to mathematical truth, but it is the core of mathematical communication."
March 16, 2010
March 15, 2010
While reading this book, which concerns in part The Airborne Toxic Event and includes a chapter by the same title, I heard a song on the radio by a band calling themselves The Airborne Toxic Event, of which I'd never heard before that day. The modern condition comprises a toxic cloud, which literally materializes in the novel and chases the main characters around their county.
I expected this book to be historical and deadly serious, in the vein of Underworld. I think, upon research, that I based my expectations on some algorithm comprising the subjects of Libra and Falling Man and the title of Mao II. I was sorely mistaken: this is primarily a novel about structure and words, and though serious it is deadly funny.
"When I told Kevin Kelly about this magical confluence of obsessive people [describing an oud-players forum that runs remarkably well], he immediately asked if there was a particular magical person who tended the oud forum. The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud."
Chalk one up for yewknee/Whiskerino.
"To get online in those days, you... had to have an academic, corporate, or military connection, so the Usenet population was mostly adult and educated. That didn't help [avoid trolls]. Some users still turned into mean idiots online. This is one piece of evidence that it's the design, not the demographic, that concentrates bad behavior."
Or, that "adult and educated" is not an automatic hedge against mean-spiritedness. Lanier mistakenly conflates age with maturity and intelligence with the better angels of our nature.
"People are not universally nasty online... There are reasonable theories about what brings out the best or worst online behaviors... my opinion... is that certain details in the design of the user interface experience of a website are the most important factors."
Lanier expands on this -- anonymity in the service of a goal, minus any connection to one's identity or personality, seems to be the impetus to bad behavior -- but it's a grand claim, that the technology is responsible for the nature. Underneath it is the hint of an assumption that we require technological channels in order to be recklessly mean-spirited, that were the interface a better guardian we might simply act as we ought. It may seem true, and the results may even be the same, but one implies that human nature is the prime mover and the other implies that technology is. Bad design comes from ...
Joshua added New and Selected Poems to his library.
March 11, 2010
Just found a COTA bus pass in here. Which means someone was reading this in Columbus.
IanS replies...
We keep a collection of photographs found in books. We always write the title of the book on the back of the photograph, resulting in a hilarious and strangely poignant found photo collection. (We adopted the practice from Chop Suey Used Books in Richmond)