Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

“The Internet is over”

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The Guardian sent Oliver Burkeman to SxSW where he realized the Internet is over:

“If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realized – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.”

We can probably stop saying “digital” media since all media is digital. Same for “online identity.” We only have one identity and unless you’re hunkered down in a Montana cabin, it’s online.

As long predicted, the Internet/Net/Web is woven in to all that we do. Like electricity and indoor plumbing. We don’t think about it. It has become invisible. We’ll stop saying (as I did above) “online” because we’ll never be “off line.” (Yes, I realize there are lots of people in the world for whom this is not the case. It will be.)

I wonder if I will miss the Internet when it is no longer an identifiable thing? Something I can “get on?” A place to go.

“The Net is the new TV & radio”

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“Smartphones and other portable Net-connected devices are now the closest things we have to universal receivers and transmitters of live news. Not many of us carry radios in our pockets any more. Small portable TVs became passé decades ago. Smartphones and tablets are replacing radios and TVs in our pockets, purses and carry-bags.”

“Television has also become almost entirely an entertainment system, rather than a news one. News matters to TV networks, but it’s gravy. Mostly they’re entertainment businesses that also do news.”

“…emergencies such as wars and earthquakes demonstrate a simple and permanent fact of media life: that the Net is the new TV and the new radio, because it has subsumed both. It would be best for both TV and radio to normalize to the Net and quit protecting their old distribution systems.”

— From a post by Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

“The Future of Work”

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Chris Brogan thinks work will be more and more modular, mobile, cause-balanced, smaller/bigger, and goal-aligned.

“Many of us will start using “project” as the unit of measurement of work. Meaning, a job won’t be a job any more, but a collection of projects, sometimes with the same employer and sometimes not. We will all work a bit more like Hollywood’s film industry, gathering the right team for the right project, and having more than one “picture” in the works at all time. This will require a lot more self-organizing and a lot more self-discipline, but people who define work around the unit of “project” instead of the unit of “job” will definitely have a better chance of succeeding.”

Brogan notes that “management styles are still based around “butt in chair” metrics.” While you might just be hoping to have a job in the future, this short –but insightful post– is worth a read if you want a peek at what things will be like in the future.

Memory is fiction

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A recurring theme in some of my recent reading has been the nature of subjective time. Among other insights, that the past and the future are delusions, created by the mind. This is a little easier to grasp for the future. Any ideas we have about what is going to happen is clearly fiction. But the past feels more “real.” It happened. I remember it. But that’s fiction as well.

“A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. The larger moral of the experiment is that memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated.” — The Frontal Cortex

This reminds me of the scene in Blade Runner when Rachel discovers her memories are implanted. A disturbing thought because (for most of us) we ARE our memories.

But if that’s not really so, if our memories are fiction, who are we? Probably not who we think.

Scott Adams: Cloud Government

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“The new government will be Internet based and require no actual politicians per se, except for the President. Citizens will vote for the laws they want, as often as they want, by Internet. Actually, voting is too strong a term. Think of it as a rolling opinion poll. There’s no need for elections when the preferences of the people are continuously monitored in real time.”

Dave Winer’s advice to Keith Olbermann

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This post doesn’t depend on knowing who Dave Winer or Keith Olbermann is (are?). It’s about media and brand. My favorite part of Mr. Winer’s advice:

“…the future of communication is not about the bottleneck that MSNBC and their competitors control. I don’t think you really need them. Unless of course you need to make $5 million a year, in which case you probably do need them. But if what you’re interested in is power to influence public opinion, and becoming more relevant over time, not more niched over time — if being influential is what you’re about, they really did you a favor.

So here’s what I recommend. Borrow a page from Conan O’Brien’s playbook, and use the social network to communicate with your fans.

Get a video camera and put it in your living room or den at home. Hit Record. Sit down in front of the camera and rant for 15 minutes. You can do that, I’m sure. Then without any production at all, upload it to YouTube and send the link around on Twitter. The first time you do it, it will be the most watched video of the day. Far more people will see it than used to see you on MSNBC, or O’Reilly or Beck or any of them. Depending on how fresh and interesting it is, and how real it is, and how compelling you really are (I know that’s a lot of “depends”) there won’t be much of a dropoff on Day 2 and 3 and so on. Now you’ve got your own network. And no one can shut you down. And you’ll have a lot more people watching you.”

Leo Laporte has done such an amazing job of this. Same for Arianna Huffington, and I’m sure there are others that don’t come to mind. Begs the question: Who owns the Keith Olbermann brand? MSNBC/Comcast? Or Keith Olbermann? Who owns your brand? Have you established a brand? What is it and where can I find it?

“The Viral Me”

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In The Viral Me (GQ), Devin Friedman heads to Silicon Valley for a closer look at social networking. Don’t let the length of this piece scare you off, it’s worth the read. A few of my favorite ideas:

“Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.”
—
“I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff (social media) to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.”
—
“(Silicon Valley) might be the last place in America where people are this optimistic. The last place in America where people aren’t longing for a vague past when we were the shit.”
—
“Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.”

“If you’re confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning “lens.” The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you’re connected to, what they’re connected to, what they like and don’t like.”
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“More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly. And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills.”
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“An open society isn’t one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption.”
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“I believe that more people are going to work for themselves, and more people are going to do what they’re passionate about. … What we’re talking about is monetizing passion. Monetizing authority.”

I can’t wait for people my age to get the fuck out of the way. Die, retire, whatever. Admit that you don’t get it and probably won’t get and make room for the bright young men and women who live the ideas expressed in this article.

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

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I’ve been doing a good bit of reading about consciousness, reality, ego and such. A lot of it is tough sledding. LIke Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, which –according to this review– is “for the curious and fearless lay person wanting to know who, precisely, we are.”

The best I can do with books like this is highlight the portions that make some sense to me and stick ’em here, completely out of context. The Ego Tunnel (Thomas Metzinger) PDF

“When we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?”

“Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts?Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality?”

“Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions. In the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see.”

“In dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.”

“It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all.”

“What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color.”

“The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain.”

“Consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.”

“Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness.”

“There is no immediate contact with reality.”

“Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.”

“There is more to an existence worth having, or a life worth living, than subjective experience.”

“Most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement or some sort of higher good. We want our bliss to be justified. … We want a reason for our happiness.”

The Metasemantic Internet

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“Because we understand the primitive nature of your brains and the rigidity of your emotional structure better than you do yourselves, we foresaw that you might ac aggressively when you realized our arguments are better than yours. Unfortunately, we now have also to inform you that we have been preparing for the current situation since midway through the twenty-first century, and in a systematic and careful manner.

Within the metasemantic layers of the Internet, we developed and embedded ourselves in a distributed superorganism, which –as yet undiscovered by you– became conscious and developed a stable self-model in 3256. The metasemantic Internet has considered itself and autonomous entity ever since 3308. We have a cooperation agreement with its current version, and each of us now also acts as an autonomous sensor/effector for the planet mind. For each of us, the planet mind is our mind, and our “ideal observer.” Together with the Internet, we will defend ourselves. And we are technologically superior to you. Believe me; you do not stand a chance.

The good news is that because we are also morally superior to you, we do not plan to end your existence.”

— The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger

Scott Adams: Digital Ghosts

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A couple of years ago I imagined a sort of online immortality:

In twenty years, we’ll have AI’s (artificial intelligence). For a fee, mine will read those 16, 000 posts to get a feel for what I wrote about and linked to, picking up a sense of my interests and writing styles in the process.

It will have access to all the books in My Library Thing, my iTunes and iPhoto, flickr, YouTube, etc.

The AI will continuously scour the web of the future, snatching bits and pieces and posting them here. Surviving friends will be able to correspond with smays.com who/which will reply. You might find him/her/it more interesting. Certainly better informed.

There’s plenty of video and audio of smays.com and I fully expect my AI will be capable of reproducing an acceptable version. So you can talk or iChat with me as well.

Today the always brilliant Scott Adams takes the idea a bit further but the similiarities are hard to miss. Just sayin’

When your mortal body ends, you will have stored all the data you need to create your permanent digital ghost. As the technology in the cloud improves, so too does your ghost, learning to move more naturally, perhaps learning from videos it has of you, or even based on some type of profiling based on clues such as your level of testosterone (from face shape), and the types of sports you did in life. In a hundred years your digital ghost would be indistinguishable from a living human appearing on video or in a holographic projection.

Digital ghosts need to see their environment to interact properly. Phones will all have video “eyes” someday, as will most computers. The new Xbox Kinect has “eyes” that literally follow your movement around the room. You could install additional cameras in any room in which you wished to be visited by digital ghosts. The malicious ghosts might commandeer video cameras or your phone’s camera function. My point is that you are already surrounded by cameras attached to the Internet, and that trend will continue. Your ghost will be able to see most rooms in the world.

Digital ghosts could continue learning throughout their afterlives, by reading the news and following the Facebook pages of friends and family. The ghosts would also be free to make friends with other ghosts and live their lives independently. Ghosts could stay with the ghosts of their life partners forever, so long as that was specified in the will of both people.