Category Archives: Quotable & Notes

The State, the Press and Hyperdemocracy

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“Information flow is corrosive to institutions, whether that’s a record label or a state ministry. To function in a hyperconnected world, states must hyperconnect, but every point of connection becomes a gap through which the state’s power leaks away.”

“Script kiddies everywhere now have a role model. Like it or not, they will create these systems, they will share what they’ve learned, they will build the apparatus that makes the state as we have known it increasingly ineffectual and irrelevant. Nothing can be done about that. This has already happened.”

Mark Pesce is one of the early pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher. You can read the full article here.

What will 2011 bring for journalism?

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“…syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s just a cost.”

“Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.”

Full article by Clay Shirky

Worried Nation

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“Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers.”
— Christopher Hitchens

Where is Your Mind Right Now?

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This kind of moment has been happening more and more often. The most encouraging part of it is that it doesn’t seem to matter what the content of the scene is, only whether I’m aware enough to absorb it without assessing its implications to my personal interests. When my interests and preferences aren’t informing the picture — when I am not looking at it in terms of what it’s adding or taking away from me — it’s like I can watch it without being there. I am alive and aware without the normal heaviness of being a needy, self-obsessed human being. And that is where beauty is found. — (raptitude.com

This reminds me of the massive amount of data that floods into our brains every second. Every sense is pumping information that gets translated by the mind.

I have this fantasy of waking from a coma with no memory and being bombarded by this… tsunami? … of data. The light, sounds smells hitting my consciousness as if for the first time. What would that be like? Could we survive it?

Our minds (brain?) would throttle it back to something that would not make our heads explode. But what if we want to go the other way? Take the throttle off. Let the data come streaming in. But that’s not right. The data IS streaming in. We’re just not really experiencing it. What if I want ever photon? Every 1 and 0?

It seems logical that we have that capability. The hardware is the same. It must be the software that has robbed us of seeing all the world has to offer.

Perhaps if we reformat and reinstall?