(no subject)

let's play 'does this paper sound like lord of the rings: redux' or..... wait for it....


TOR??
i am somehow delighted whenever some super abstract tech shit sounds like something you'd hear in a fantasy book.

(source, v interesting paper ) 

(no subject)

If you feel fine using the tools you use, who am I to tell you that there is something wrong with what you are doing? But consider these points:

• Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
• Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
• There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
• Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
• Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

(and, another passage: 

There was an active campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to promote visual elegance in software. That political movement bore fruit when it influenced engineers at companies like Apple and Microsoft who happened to have a chance to steer the directions software was taking before lock-in made their efforts moot. That‟s why we have nice fonts and flexible design options on our screens. It wouldn‟t have happened otherwise. The seemingly unstoppable mainstream momentum in the world of software engineers was pulling computing in the direction of ugly screens, but that fate was avoided before it was too late.

A similar campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternatives whenever possible. Unfortunately, however, the opposite seems to be happening. Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it‟s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking.

- You Are Not A Gadget, Jaron Lanier

ohhh this is a good book.