highlights & comments

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Anonymity certainly has a place, but that place needs to be designed carefully. Voting and peer review are preinternet examples of beneficial anonymity. Sometimes it is desirable for people to be free of fear of reprisal or stigma in order to invoke honest opinions.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The ideology of violation does not radiate from the lowest depths of trolldom, but from the highest heights of academia. There are respectable academic conferences devoted to methods of violating sanctities of all kinds.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  I don’t think I’m necessarily any better, or more moral, than the people who tend the lulzy websites. What I’m saying, though, is that the user interface designs that arise from the ideology of the computing cloud make people—all of us—less kind. Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents, but the status quo in the online world.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. Demand more from information than it can give, and you end up with monstrous designs.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The reason I call this an expression of ideology is that there is a strenuously constructed lattice of arguments that decorate this murderous behavior so that it looks grand and new. If the same researchers had done something similar without digital technology, they would at the very least have lost their jobs. Suppose they had spent a couple of years and significant funds figuring out how to rig a washing machine to poison clothing in order to (hypothetically) kill a child once dressed. Or what if they had devoted a lab in an elite university to finding a new way to imperceptibly tamper with skis to cause fatal accidents on the slopes? These are certainly doable projects, but because they are not digital, they don’t support an illusion of ethics.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Korea has one of the most intense online cultures in the world, so it has also suffered some of the most extreme trolling. Korean movie star Choi Jin-sil, sometimes described as the “Nation’s Actress,” committed suicide in 2008 after being hounded online by trolls, but she was only the most famous of a series of similar suicides.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It used to be that government was famous for being impersonal, but in a postpersonal world, that will no longer be a distinction.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Another predictable element of the ideology of violation is that anyone who complains about the rituals of the elite violators will be accused of spreading FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But actually it’s the ideologues who seek publicity. The whole point of publicizing exploits like the attack on pacemakers is the glory. If that notoriety isn’t based on spreading FUD, what is?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  These media certainly have contributed to the current wave of violent radicalism. In all these cases, there was an intent to propagandize, but intent isn’t everything.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating behaviors, but my guess is that clan orientation and its relationship to violence will turn out to be the most important area of study.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We evolved to be both loners and pack members. We are optimized not so much to be one or the other, but to be able to switch between them.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The “wisdom of crowds” effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  albeit imperfectly: by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  an odd lack of curiosity about the limits of crowd wisdom.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  There is never a lesson learned, or a catharsis of victory or defeat. If you win anonymously, no one knows, and if you lose, you just change your pseudonym and start over, without having modified your point of view one bit.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  distributions of outcomes. He suggests making that quadrant taboo for crowds.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of either metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren’t explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If the revenue never appears, then a weird imposition of a database-as-reality ideology will have colored generations of teen peer group and romantic experiences for no business or other purpose.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein?

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  uses of the word, the old use and the new use.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  already have happened. Popular derivative terms like “blogosphere” have become commonplace.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  are perceived by some to form a hive mind, or noosphere.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  of crowds” is the title of a book by James Surowiecki

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one’s worldview.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  it seems pointless to insist that what we already understand must suffice to explain what we don’t understand. What I’m struck by is the lack of intellectual modesty in the computer science community. We are happy to enshrine into engineering designs mere hypotheses—and vague ones at that—about the hardest and most profound questions faced by science, as if we already possess perfect knowledge.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the benefits of semiautomated self-presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  head. We can’t afford to respect our own designs so much.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We all have to live with our imperfect ability to discern the proper boundaries of our circles of empathy. There will always be cases where reasonable people will disagree.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Turing imagined a pristine, crystalline form of existence in the digital realm, and I can imagine it might have been a comfort to imagine a form of life apart from the torments of the body and the politics of sexuality.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  bits don’t mean anything without a cultured person to interpret them. This is not solipsism. You can believe that your mind makes up the world, but a bullet will still kill you. A virtual bullet, however, doesn’t even exist unless there is a person to recognize it as a representation of a bullet. Guns are real in a way that computers are not.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The common use of computers, as we understand them today, as sources for models and metaphors of ourselves is probably about as reliable as the use of the steam engine was back then.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Experiments: The Ship of Theseus Meets the Infinite Library of Borges

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  we’ll ruin personal freedom by enforcing metaphysical ideas on one another.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  to chess itself in the case of the Deep Blue–Kasparov tournament.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  there is more than one possible technological future, and the debate should be about how to best identify and act on whatever freedoms of choice we still have, not about who’s the Luddite.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Real people must have left all those anonymous comments on blogs and video clips, but who knows where they are now, or if they are dead? The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  eat cephalopods—octopus and squid—because I admire their neurological evolution so intensely.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  of our brains so we can live forever in virtual reality.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  the idea of AI has shifted the psychological projection of adorable qualities from computer programs alone to a different target: computer-plus-crowd constructions.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  There’s a way that consciousness and time are bound together. If you try to remove any potential hint of mysteriousness from consciousness, you end up mystifying time in an absurd way.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  A design that shares Twitter’s feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter’s adoration of fragments. We don’t really know, because it is an unexplored design space.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Digital network architectures naturally incubate monopolies.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  No digital image is really distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Casey Gollan

    Is he really a fan of objects?! Benjamin's aura?

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  it’s not as if the forum would really get much better if the software improved. Focusing too much on the software might even make things worse by shifting the focus from the people.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Interesting danger of overdesign.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  same reason that the Linux community didn’t come up with the iPhone: encapsulation serves a purpose.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Treating people as nothing other than parts of nature is an uninspired basis for designing technologies that embody human aspirations. The inverse error is just as misguided: it’s a mistake to treat nature as a person. That is the error that yields confusions like intelligent design.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In Silicon Valley you will meet Buddhists, anarchists, goddess worshippers, Ayn Rand fanatics, self-described Jesus freaks, nihilists, and plenty of libertarians, as well as surprising blends of all of the above and many others who seem to be nonideological. And yet there is one belief system that doesn’t quite mesh with any of these identities that nonetheless serves as a common framework. For lack of a better word, I call it computationalism.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  But Rama also wonders about other kinds of metaphors, ones that don’t obviously fall into the bouba/kiki category. In his current favorite example, Shakespeare has Romeo declare Juliet to be “the sun.” There is no obvious bouba/kiki–like dynamic that would link a young, female, doomed romantic heroine with a bright orb in the sky, yet the metaphor is immediately clear to anyone who hears it.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Logical positivism is the idea that a sentence or another fragment—something you can put in a computer file—means something in a freestanding way that doesn’t require invoking the subjectivity of a human reader. Or, to put it in nerd-speak: “The meaning of a sentence is the instructions to verify it.”

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This is an extremely ambitious vision, because, among other things, it involves the representation of ideas that are usually expressed in natural language (in contracts), and because, at the cloud level, it must reconcile multiple contracts that may often be underspecified and reveal ambiguities and/or contradictions in an emerging system of expressions. But while these problems will be a headache for software developers, they might also ultimately force financiers to become better at describing what they do. They aren’t artists who should be allowed to make ambiguous, impossible-to-parse creations. The need to interoperate more tightly with the “dumbness” of software could help them undertake their work more clearly and safely.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The brain is so desirous of associations that it will then amplify any tiny potential linkage in order to get a usable one.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If we are to give up privacy, we have to do it all at once. Vigilante information violation is a form of assault that degrades society for everyone.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In fact, there is even a tendency to want to think of nature as if she were a hive mind, which she is not. For instance, nature could not maximize the meaning of genes without species.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Human constructions of nature.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques—similar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognize faces—to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn’t be protocol errors if there weren’t any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked-in ontologies like MIDI in human affairs.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We thought there would be an explosion of wealth and of ways to become wealthy, leading to super-Gershwins. A new species of musician would be inspired to suddenly create radically new kinds of music to be performed in virtual worlds, or in the margins of e-books, or to accompany the oiling of fabricating robots.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Broken causality.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  I entered the internet era with extremely high expectations. I eagerly anticipated a chance to experience shock and intensity and new sensations, to be thrust into lush aesthetic wildernesses, and to wake up every morning to a world that was richer in every detail because my mind had been energized by unforeseeable art.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Like Aaron he wants to see leaps in time.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling. I fully expect morphing to become as important a dating skill as kissing.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Amazing/hilarious.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  an idea of progress that is centered on enriching the depth of communication instead of the acquisition of powers.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It might be that in the context of American culture in the social media age, the illusion of certain online benefits—like the notion that you stand anything but a lotterylike chance of earning a living from social networking—is indirectly rational. It might be a semiconscious means to a soothing form of necessary self-deception.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  For instance, instead of saying, “I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting,” you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt. I call this possibility “postsymbolic communication.” It can be a hard idea to think about, but I find it enormously exciting. It would not suggest an annihilation of language as we know it—symbolic communication would continue to exist—but it would give rise to a vivid expansion of meaning.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    Still thinking that Lanier places too much importance on the market and causality on the shift from plush social-contract record companies to Internet distribution.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If we had infinite brains, capable of using an infinite number of words, those words would mean nothing, because each one would have too specific a usage. Our early hominid ancestors were spared from that problem, but with the coming of the internet, we are in danger of encountering it now. Or, more precisely, we are in danger of pretending with such intensity that we are encountering it that it might as well be true.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Some the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  There is huge room for improvement in digital technologies overall. I would love to have telepresence sessions with distant oudists, for instance. But once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it’s always important to step back and focus on the people for a while.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    He seems to be focused on a basic old school sped up kind of letter writing that is the forum/mailing list as the most technology you need. Against rigidity of designed web. Interesting.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

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    Casey Gollan

    This is interesting. People often see computers (aka the cloud) as making books obsolete because we have one machine & network that appears to contain all the content of another medium. This unprecedented access has led to remix and mining of archives as a national past time. Lanier doesn't give enough credit to this (the meme?) as an Internet native form of expression (though I am also quick to criticize those who try to intellectualize memes—that is not the point) but he correctly (if somewhat confusedly and defensively) argues for people to creatively interrogate the possibilities of computers and network technologies: simulation, database. However he has strict morals.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  These are both crucial contributors to culture and democracy. Each pays painful dues and devotes years to honing a craft.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Parts of it can be destroyed without destroying the whole, but that also means that parts can be known without knowing the whole.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Cephalopods + Childhood = Humans + Virtual Reality

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Don’t appropriate something just because there’s a dose of novelty in it, even though you have no idea what it meant to the people who made it originally. Connect, understand, or empathize with the people you appropriate from, to the degree you can.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  I want both to encourage reuse of my music and to interact with the person who hopes to use some of my music in an aggregate work. I might not even demand an ability to veto that other person’s plans, but I want at least a chance at a connection.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Engineers sometimes take on the inherently absurd task of making a deliberately imperfect technology slightly less imperfect. For example, cars are usually designed to reach ridiculous, illegal speeds, because that makes us feel free—and in addition, they come with air bags. This is the absurdity of engineering for the real world.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  mankind has already invented a filtering technology that fixes the problem. It’s called money. The reason for spam, for instance, is that it doesn’t cost anything to send or place it.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It is disappointing to me that pioneering work continues primarily on paper, having become muted online.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The hope that language would be like a computer program has died. Instead, music has changed to become more like a computer program.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  on a typical social networking site, either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)—and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between friends all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  beat because it comes out of a looper or a sequencer.

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    Casey Gollan

    Danger of defaults.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression. A movie like Blade Runner is first-order expression, as was the novel that inspired it, but a mashup in which a scene from the movie is accompanied by the anonymous masher’s favorite song is not in the same league.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  No longer tied to the king, the whorehouse, the military parade, the Church, the sidewalk busker’s cup, or the other ancient and traditional sources of musical patronage, musicians had a chance to diversify, innovate, and be entrepreneurial.

  12 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  forum

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  You can certainly win at gambling with high-tech help, but to do so you must supercede the game you are pretending to play.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Here is a claim I wish I weren’t making, and that I would prefer to be wrong about: popular music created in the industrialized world in the decade from the late 1990s to the late 2000s doesn’t have a distinct style—that is, one that would provide an identity for the young people who grew up with it.

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    Casey Gollan

    O NO HE DIDN'T

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated, not continuous, way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If the internet is really destined to be no more than an ancillary medium, which I would view as a profound defeat, then it at least ought to do whatever it can not to bite the hand that feeds it—that is, it shouldn’t starve the commercial media industries.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Wright has articulated—not in words, but through the creation of a gaming experience—what it would be like to be a god who, while not rethinking every detail of his creation at every moment, occasionally tweaks a self-perpetuating universe.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  mashup stating that I didn’t like the idea, with my reasons.

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    Casey Gollan

    How much respect for others' content is too much?

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Especially on mobile devices, text-entry boxes and software widgets that are devoted purely to Wikipedia are starting to appear, not even bothering to include the web at large. If Wikipedia is treated as the overarching, primary text of the human experience, then of course it will, as if by decree, become “more convenient” than other texts.

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    Casey Gollan

    This is an interesting point. The slight danger of "publishing" a convenient collaborative resource.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  much of the most expressive slang comes from people with limited formal education who are making creative use of the words they know. This is true of pidgin languages, street slang, and so on. The most evocative words are often the most common ones that are used in the widest variety of ways.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  To be a person you have to find a sweet spot in which you both invent yourself and are real.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  2008, some of the leading lights of the open culture movement

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    Casey Gollan

    Still not totally clear what exactly this is. Wikipedia? Creative commons?

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Imagine that you had an endless capacity for vocabulary at the same time that you were inventing language. In that case you could make up an arbitrary new word for each new thing you had to say. A compressed vocabulary might engender less lazy, more evocative words. Maybe the modest brain capacity of early hominids was the source of the limitation of vocabulary size. Whatever the cause, an initially limited vocabulary might be necessary for the emergence of an expressive language. Of course, the vocabulary can always grow later on, once the language has established itself. Modern English has a huge vocabulary.

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    Casey Gollan

    Really relevant to Ted Nelson.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artists’ works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

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    Casey Gollan

    LOL

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once. That isn’t to say that technological progress guarantees moral progress.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  if art is the focus, then interaction is what I crave.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  strikes between cracks in the armor. It uses art to hunt!

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    Casey Gollan

    Art as evolutionary disarmament

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  and anonymity from all involved in order to enhance this fantasy.

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    Casey Gollan

    Isn't the cloud just for stability, scalability, and speed at an effective cost?

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  none of us was ever able to give the dinosaurs any constructive advice about how to survive. And we miss them now more than we have been willing to admit.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  People can make themselves believe in all sorts of fictitious beings, but when those beings are perceived as inhabiting the software tools through which we live our lives, we have to change ourselves in unfortunate ways in order to support our fantasies. We make ourselves dull.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. They seem to offer infinite possibilities and an extraordinary sense of freedom. Real computers are experienced when we deal with large programs. They can trap us in tangles of code and make us slaves to legacy—and not just in matters of obscure technological decisions. Real computers reify our philosophies through the process of lock-in before we are ready.

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    Casey Gollan

    Quashing semantic web fantasies? Isn't he a believer in Nelson's web??

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The transition would not have to be simultaneous and universal, even though the ultimate goal would be to achieve universality.

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    Casey Gollan

    Who is being idealistic now? Universality never seems like a good ideal to me.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  While there is a lot of talk in the air about whether to believe in God or not, I suspect that religious arguments are gradually incorporating coded debates about whether to even believe in people anymore.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Facebook’s assault on privacy and anonymous comments on blogs are both examples of antihuman software design, even though they might seem like opposites. Enforcing radical anti-anonymity puts people in a similar position as radical anonymity. In each case, people are no longer able to define themselves. The digital system sets the rules and boundaries, instead of each person.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  This is a scenario I call “Planet of the Help Desks.” This brings us to India. India’s economy has been soaring at the same time as China’s, much to the amazement of observers everywhere, but on a model that is significantly different from China’s. As Esther Dyson has pointed out, the Indian economy excels in “nonroutine” services.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  You could come up with an invented language in which the letters that compose the words to John Lennon’s “Imagine” instead spell out the instructions for cleaning a refrigerator.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  It’s easy to break into physical cars and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human choice, but not replace it.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But the politically correct dogma that holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  If you didn’t specify the weight of a digital painting in the original definition, it isn’t just weightless, it is less than weightless.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The economy is a tool, and there’s no reason it has to be as open and wild as the many open and wild things of our experience. But it also doesn’t have to be as tied down as some might want. It can and should have an intermediate level of complexity.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  We forget what a wonder, what a breath of fresh air it has been to have creative people make their way in the world of commerce instead of patronage. Patrons gave us Bach and Michelangelo, but it’s unlikely patrons would have given us Vladimir Nabokov, the Beatles, or Stanley Kubrick.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Car accidents kill more people than wars, and yet we love cars. Capitalism is like that. It gives us the buzz of freedom. We adore it even though it has crashed on occasion. We always pretend it will be the other person who is hurt.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  When you come upon a video clip or picture or stretch of writing that has been made available in the web 2.0 manner, you almost never have access to the history or the locality in which it was perceived to have meaning by the anonymous person who left it there. A song might have been tender, or brave, or redemptive in context, but those qualities will usually be lost.

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    Casey Gollan

    Context online

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  software that includes a “strange loop” bears a resemblance to consciousness.

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    Casey Gollan

    Look into this!

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Instead of collections of bits being offered as a product, they would be rendered as a service.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The universe won’t last long enough for every possible combination of elements in a complicated construction like a cell to be tested. Therefore, the only option is to establish as much as possible from the results of each test and proceed incrementally.

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    Casey Gollan

    Argument against comprehensively generative solutions. Finding the needle in generated haystacks, there isn't a needle.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Perhaps it would be better if I could find one single philosophy that I could apply equally to each circumstance, but I find that the best path is to believe different things about aspects of reality when I play these different roles or perform different duties.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  By contrast, it’s been well over a decade since network-based search services appeared, and they are still trapped in the command line era. At this rate, by 2020, we can expect software development to have slowed to a near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The phase of life we call “childhood” was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The thinking goes that within the cloud there will be no need for the numinous halves of traditional oppositions such as syntax/semantics, quantity/quality, content/context, and knowledge/wisdom.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  I suppose amateurs, robots, and an aggregation of amateurs and robots might someday hack genes in the global garage and tweet DNA sequences around the globe at light speed. Or there might be a slightly more sober process that takes place between institutions like high schools and start-up companies.

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    Casey Gollan

    Honestly??

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  No one in the pre–digital cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to him- or herself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.

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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  Will living space become something doled out by the hive? (Would you do it with Wikipedia-style edit wars or Digg-style voting? Or would living space only be inherited, so that your station in life was predetermined? Or would it be allocated at random, reducing the status of free will?)

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    Casey Gollan

    Lanier is looking so far into the future that it is crazy. Who knows what will be? But at least he is a hilarious and inflamatory writer.

    12 months ago
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  Casey Gollan highlighted

  The National Institute of Standards and Technology tests facial recognition systems in the same spirit in which drugs and cars are tested: the public needs to know which ones are trustworthy.

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