Aug 29 2009 LINK

Why Not Live a Big Life?

I’m a sucker for a good turn of phrase. The best are aphorisms, blending brevity and cogency with the captivating mysticism of future seers. A good line is deliciously catchy, sticking because of the way it sounds and the way it feels — both seductive. These lines are also rare and not often invented, given the limitations of our relatively overwrought language. Once a good phrase is turned, it’s used into oblivion. Hence our obsession with quotation books and our writing professors’ disdain for clichés. We’re but sheep when it comes to good bits of word and thought. We steal them and run with them.

Such was the case with a phrase that met my glance on the movie screen at a midnight showing recently. As I recall it, a napkin sourced from the 1980’s floated across the screen, barely visible in the snazzy milieu of a penthouse bar scene. The napkin asked in a whimsical serif font: “Why not live a big life?” I stared quizzically at the interrogative napkin as it faded from view. Why not live a big life? Six of the English language’s most popular words of four or fewer letters combined to disarm.

Determined not to let the phrase escape, I mouthed it silently and tucked it into a crevice of my cranium, hiding it safely so I would investigate its source, origins, and usage in popular culture as soon as I returned home. I was sure it was a popular turn of phrase from literature, some gangster movie I hadn’t seen like the Godfather, or even just traditional New Year’s eve motto fodder (hence the napkin) to which I had somehow never been exposed. Once home in the silence of night, I plied Google for meaning:

“Why not live a big life?”

The browser spun for a moment, racking its googolplex brain. Resounding emptiness greeted me much like a great big shrug from the Information Age. Literally, the query returned nothing, save for a rogue product listing from a site that looked manufactured for search spam. No answer to my question! In disbelief, I typed the phrase again, this time sans question mark. And a third time, in disbelief. Again, hollowness from the great big Google machine, the enormous neural network, which indexes billions of disparate texts, thoughts, and communications that originate from millions of sources. Since Google’s founding in the late 1990’s, nearly everything that’s been thought or said since then exists on Google’s servers. Even most academic and cultural utterances from before Google’s founding are known entities to the search machine — it scans everything we upload or reference via text or multimedia from any point in our human history. Google itself is spearheading projects like Book Search and Library Project to incorporate the entire corpus of human knowledge into its index. It is likely, then, that Google should have a match for nearly every permutation and combination of words out there. And indeed, it’s true. Google’s omnipotence has become something of a game to challenge with googlewhacking, a search fetishist’s sport for identifying 2-word search queries for which Google presents only a single result. The pile of these — ‘squirreling dervishes’ ‘inculcating skullduggery’ ‘fibbertigibbet boogers’ are delightful for their absurdity and their confirmation that save for the deliberately fictional, Google knows everything.  It is the Bureau of Information for the great state of Humanity.

So, why would it be that such a simple turn of phrase — an everyman’s interrogative synonym for carpe diem — returns no listings, especially if seems to have already proven its worth strongly enough to be published on a napkin? If it merited material manufacture, it ought to merit digital age usage, right? For that, all I can give you is another great big helpless shrug. Some have suggested that its grammatical impropriety may be to blame. My response is that syntax hasn’t silenced human language ever before, particularly not in today’s unguarded digital parlance. And besides Google counts tens of thousands who are already “living a big life.” The throwing-caution-to-the-wind expressionism is what’s new. We have a gleaming discovery on our hands and I’m unable to explain why.

Now by offering the wisdom to you and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and therefore Google’s hungry bowels, I am destroying our axiom’s rarity. I thought of encoding the magical phrase as a jpg so as not to unleash the text into the search engine, but it seemed like an attempt to control something which won’t be controlled — expression. Because this is one of the simplest and most beautiful instances of expression I’ve felt in awhile, I’d like to share it.

So, enjoy the aphorism while its usage is still nil. It may be the last simple wisdom that is yet unspoken in our digital age.

Jul 21 2009 LINK
“ [A modern economist] is used to measuring the ’standard of living’ by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is ‘better off’ than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption … Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.
— E.F. Schumacher, an underappreciated economist (via SiftStar). Of note: the consumptive black hole toward which we’re trending turbulently. Currently doing some reading on alternatives to the ideal of constant, logarithmic growth. Anyone have suggestions?
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
PhotoAlt

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.