Jul 09 2009 LINK
“

How do you make things?

You could lay out the process as a line… start at one end with a bundle of goals and plans… At some point, you get to the end, with a product, a novel, a performance. You’re finished!

You could lay out the process that way. But you’d be doing it wrong.

Making things is a circle.
— As in iterating constantly rather than releasing perfected final products. From Snarkmarket’s collection of essays New Liberal Arts (a laundry list of topics for contemporary study inspired by Kottke’s term ‘liberal arts 2.0’).
Jun 29 2009 LINK
“ The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren’t much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions.
— Matt Taibbi says it like it was in this month’s Rolling Stone.
Jun 23 2009 LINK
“ A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.
— The Onion reports a mindboggling new trend (via Dave Morin).
Jun 17 2009 LINK
“ The net has gone from people being actively participatory to being vicarious.
— Agree and disagree. Society in general has a greater population of passive consumers than it does active producers — the people who actually make things. We’re just seeing this equilibrium replicate itself on the web as the digital world becomes better representative of the physical world. [Comment via a MetaFilter thread on Opera’s new Unite venture.]
May 23 2009 LINK
“ Tech magazines, no matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery.
— Joel Johnson on Wired’s paradoxical favoritism of its print efforts over its online opportunities.
Apr 22 2009 LINK
“ I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account.
— No amount of context can explain this quote from Maureen Dowd in NYT today, but at least have a look at it: her interview with the particularly pithy Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
Apr 20 2009 LINK
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The literary drama was traditionally divided into 5 acts with the climax occurring precisely in the middle of the narrative timeline.

The human life, a traditional drama lived by each of us, is similarly constructed but with a disproportionately long denouement. 

I like the above model much better… Trying to structure my own personal drama — my life — such that it’s always leading up to something.

Apr 07 2009 LINK
“ The Internet’s like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s gonna like it. But, there will be a fundamental change in the human condition. One day we’re all gonna wake up and realize that we’re just servants. It’s captured us.
—

Josh Harris in Ondi Timoner’s Sundance winning documentary We Live in Public.

My mouth hung agape for the entirety of this screening.

Of course the surface level storytelling — extreme oversharing and isolation leading to aggressive hedonism and finally imploding in chaos — was somewhat predictable, but its timely incrimination of our current social media culture is still admittedly shocking. This. Might. Happen. To. Us. Lifestreaming faces much more serious issues than monetization, heh. In embracing it, we’re teetering on the edge of a sort of social sharing and performance insanity.

Or so the film suggests. We’ll by no means meet this chaotic end that Josh Harris depicts in his voyeuristic, totalitarian human installations. His experiments are grand exaggerations. Instead, it’s likely that we’ll evolve to both share more and censor more adeptly. We’re in a process of experimentation and adaptation right now. Constantly learning, sharing, making mistakes, and figuring out the proper rate at which to distribute digital pieces of ourselves to strangers. Our digital self portraits are early studies yet. I doubt we’ll be cutting our ears off anytime soon.

***

So there’s the main theme. I found myself wondering a lot of other things throughout the film, though.

Like, why are startups with webcasting and realtime chatting seen as so provocative today when experiments like Harris’ laid them out a decade ago? We seem newly impressed by the same old things. Our collective memories are so generational, so short. Especially when it comes to web startups!

The web is a unique place for innovation in that its sandbox and toolset remain mostly unchanged. The technical architecture of the web has changed very little (it’s mostly just gotten faster and better connected without substantive change of state) so that new ideas constantly require innovations in concept rather than technology/delivery/assembly. Theoretically there should be an infinite number of permutations and combinations of ‘information ideas’ to create new businesses with, but are we armed with enough cognitive power to keep creating them? You start to get the feeling that so many startups are pushing the same pixels around and hatching clever names for old arrangements. Stale. It’s why I stopped reading TechCrunch for awhile, in fact. But I think we’re on our way out of that rut.

There was no mention of the archival dangers of lifestreaming. Like how posting videos of yourself will cost you a job later. And I’m glad. I think that is one of the most important things that our always-on culture will change. For three reasons: 1) The sheer volume of information increases exponentially with every day such that actually surfacing incriminating information from a hefty stack of digital records will be too difficult 2) The emphasis will continue to shift away from archival content and toward current, real time content such that past online activity will be less easy to access by design 2) The existence of such incriminating evidence for everyone online will serve to normalize it. Holding people to higher standards than we hold ourselves will seem pointless and rude. Launching everything, the better and the worse, into the public sphere serves to make us all more human and acceptable. 

Mar 20 2009 LINK
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Waiting for the end (of winter).
Mar 18 2009 LINK

Re: Feminism

Many have asked if my online alias ‘superfem’ means that I am a ‘super feminist.’

Not exactly.

In today’s clime where most of women’s struggles are for social equality (rather than, say, suffrage), feminism is a tricky movement. It is sensitive and defensive, frequently at odds with itself — an exclusive and pejorative struggle for inclusion.

That’s not to diminish the obvious inequality that still separates men and women. Feminism fights a very, very real problem. I face it all the time, implicitly or explicitly, especially as a female who has been involved in technology for the past dozen years. I manage the disparity by reframing it as an advantageous underdog position — an unwitting opportunity to prove people otherwise. But, it also angers me, awakening a pang of potential feminist energy.

My response to being slighted, however, is usually gender neutral.

When it comes to fixing misperceptions, I prefer not to stand up for my gender on the basis of its biology but rather to defend my individual competency. I think this is true for fixing the larger societal issue as well.

To fight inequality, we should quit using sexist defenses in response to sexist attacks. Where the issue should not be sexual, why allow it to be discussed in sexual terms?

It’s my hope that the gender war will be won this way. Not by plaintive vaginas demanding recognition but by individuals whose real life successes and evangelism finally demonstrate equality. Real women and those who believe in them getting shit done in public life in numbers large enough to make equality undeniable.

We should be proving ourselves, not pretending that our demographics will do it for us.