The Blast Shack (Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks)

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I think my first exposure to Bruce Sterling was The Hacker Crackdown (1992). Some years later, I read and enjoyed Distraction (“the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones.”)

He has written the best essay I’ve read on WikiLeaks (The Blast Shack). A few excerpts:

(Bradley Manning’s) war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction.

Bradley’s gonna become a “spy” whose “espionage” consisted of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population

Trying Assange is “the kind of show-trial judo every repressive government fears.”

Everybody wants everybody else’s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.

(Assange is) a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed.

(Assange is ) just what he is; he’s something we don’t yet have words for.

If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does

American diplomats are gonna read those stolen cables, though, because they were supposed to read them anyway, even though they didn’t. Now, they’ve got to read them, with great care, because they might get blindsided otherwise by some wisecrack that they typed up years ago

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked and threadbare superpower in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline.

Julian Assange is “the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid.”

Somebody else said it better

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In a month this blog will be 9 years old. Should be very close to 5,000 posts by then. My friend George has been following along for the last several years and he says the blog has changed. He says I’m much more likely to post a line or two followed by a block quote from some other source. Or a video. Or a photo. George is of the opinion that I used to write longer, original pieces. I’m not sure he’s correct and it would just take some time to check but I’m willing to stipulate that he is right. So, why the change?

  • I’m less sure of my opinions. And, more importantly, feel less need to share them or -thank god- be “right.” I’m pretty sure I would be unable to pass Scott Adams’ “Ignorance Test” on a lot of subjects I’ve expressed opinions on. Oh, and it has finally sunk in that almost nobody really cares what somebody else thinks.
  • More (better?) places to share thoughts/links. When I started this blog in February of 2002, there was no Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Posterous, etc. A lot of the links and block quotes that used to land here, are shared somewhere else.
  • Somebody else said it better. I think this is the Big One. I read more (and more varied) stuff now than at any other time in my life. The web has exposed me to an almost infinite variety of ideas and perspectives. From people who CAN pass the Ignorance Test. Who DO know what they’re talking about. And who express themselves clearly and powerfully. So, if there’s an idea that I think is worth sharing, I link to them with an excerpt to pique your interest.

George is right. smays.com has become more about aggregation and curation. Maybe a little like my personal card catalogue. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back here to find a quote or a video or reference that would otherwise be lost (to me) forever.

Mobile, indestructible dwelling with armoured shell

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“Huge change is no longer in the past or future but in the present. Our society as we know it and have known to be safe is fast-changing. Value systems of yesterday are no longer relevant. A new civilization is ahead of us. This ideological society offers choice; are we able to find alternate ways of living, another model or are our days counted? The changing climate, growing poverty, wars and more are only expanding. This movable nomadic dwelling unit provides shelter from this disconcerting situation.”

More photos

Tiny projector for iPhone/iPad

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Tom Piper demos Laser Pico Projector. A little pricey at $450 but a cool gadget. Just not sure if/when/where I would use it. If the setting is cozy enough for this wee projector, why wouldn’t I just use my laptop or iPad? If I didn’t have those with me, however, the projector (almost exactly same size as iPhone) fits easily in my pocket. What do you think?

Notational Velocity

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I’m always searching for a better app. These days –for me– “better” means simple. Take word processors for example.

On one end of the spectrum is MS Word. The undisputed king of word processors for PC’s. Some people don’t even know they’re using Word. They just take it for granted that this is how you write something on a computer.

I haven’t used Word for years but just looking at the “ribbon” menu, it looks terribly complicated, but that could just be my lack of familiarity. And my guess is it does a LOT of things.

But I only need to do one thing: write. I don’t need any formatting or layout options. Just a few sentences. The fewer the better. I don’t want anything to get in the way of the ideas I struggle to put into words.

Google Docs works great for this. So does Simplenote. Both cloud-based tools. But some folks might want to keep their notes on their computer.

My new favorite tool for this is Notational Velocity, a free, open source application that stores and retrieves notes: “an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval.”

When you begin composing a note in Notational Velocity, the app automatically saves and date/time stamps your work. I’m a big fan of tagging and NV does this cleanly and simply.

I used to be a big fan of putting everything in folders. Within folders. Within folders. NV doesn’t do folders but you really don’t need them.

Each note is indexed in a database and search is lightening fast. So you just create your note and forget about it until you need.

I mentioned Simplenote, the cloud-based note-taking service (with iPhone and iPad apps). Notational Velocity syncs with my Simpenote account so I can create a note in NV and it will automatically be available on all my mobile devices.

If it’s important your writing be “pretty,” Notational Velocity isn’t for you. But if the idea of dropping notes into one “box” and knowing you’ll be able to quickly find them when you need them, it’s a great solution.

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

How the bailout program works

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It is a slow day in a damp little Irish town. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the town, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmers’ Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the pub. The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him “services” on credit. The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note. The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and leaves town. No one produced anything. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

Source unknown

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