Fortress of Solitude

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I spent some time cleaning up (and rearranging) my home office this weekend. One of our upstairs bedroom was turned into a “man cave” some years ago and I’m spending more and more time there (here).

With just the MacBook and wireless printer to move, it really didn’t take long. In the bad old PC days I had to label wires and cords to have any chance of getting everything hooked back up and working. I have a growing collection of power-strips that are no longer needed.

The room has a nice southern view looking out into the woods behind our house.

In the immortal words of Brian Wilson:

Now it’s dark and I’m alone
but I won’t be afraid
In my room

“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.

Earth Rover

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My human machine is 63 years old today. Like the Mars Rover, it’s holding up very well and making all sorts of discoveries, large and small.

I’ve had to replace no hardware but downloading updates to the OS almost daily.

The biggest mystery to date is to who (whom?) or what the “I” in the previous paragraph refers. It’s clearly not the machine nor all of the data (“memories”) accumulated and stored since the inception date.

The only thing that seems certain is “I” is/am ageless.

Techies and Taciturns

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Olivar Marks blogs about collaboration for ZDNet. He brings up an issue that I’ve been dealing with as I push for an enterprise social networking platform (Yammer) at our company.

“There seems to be a personality type that has a huge appetite for learning and using ever more frequent waves of new technology developments that is independent of any particular demographic, and who are eager to participate in group activities online or off.”

“These folks are often called “early adopters” and “techies” in companies and are leveraged in pilot try outs of new technologies. Their opposite –I call them the Taciturns (habitually reserved and uncommunicative)– are those who have limited interest (or competence and confidence) in collaborating, preferring instead to work solo and communicate on their own terms.”

Okay, I’m squarely in the first group. To the point of being annoying.

“Obviously some of the people who have created the workflows and body of knowledge inside a company through years of service resent the trivialization of their old fashioned ways of working, and some have been led to believe that they need to buck up their ideas and get with it on Twitter, micro/macro blogging, Facebook-in-the-enterprise and other forms of social engagement with their cohorts.”

…and I helped create some of those workflows and bodies of knowledge during the last quarter century but it’s time for some of them to go!

“The Taciturns of all ages generally speaking are laughing inwardly at all the teenage leadership stuff they hear being bandied about, and have often already decided they won’t be participating in any of that.”

What most managers -in my experience- really want is for every employee to immediately open, read and act on every email “from the top.” The notion of a social networking platform is less appealing because they now have to compete for attention with stuff (they consider) less important than theirs (usually everything).

 

Software reconstructs shredded spy files

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“A research team in Germany has developed a computer-software system to piece together some 45 million pages of secret police files ripped into 600 million pieces. The files were torn up nearly 18 years ago by panicking agents of communist East Germany’s dreaded State Security Service (Stasi).

“…piecing together all the 600 million slips of paper by hand would take 30 people 600 to 800 years; their computer program should hopefully be capable of finishing the job in a little more than five years.

 

Story at Nature.com

“The world has moved on”

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“One has only to watch US TV for 10 minutes to conclude that America’s communicators no longer have the intellectual resources and political literacy to mount successful, well-informed propaganda. The Fox Channel is for home-turf idiots. And besides, what would the state-subsidized propagandists be able to boast about? Predator raids in Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Thirty million on part-time work or jobless in the Homeland? America is not the sell it once was, when the economic growth rate was headed up and capitalism seemed capable of delivering on its promises.”

From a post at CounterPunch.org on the growing influence of Al Jazeera

“The enemy has a name now”

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From a scary post by John Pilger:

“Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

If you really believe the problems facing our country can or will be solved with the next election (or a Democrat or a Republican), raise your hand.

“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.