highlights & comments

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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  Google came along with the idea of linking advertising and searching, but that business stayed out of the middle of what people actually did online. It had indirect effects, but not direct ones. The early waves of web activity were remarkably energetic and had a personal quality. People created personal “homepages,” and each of them was different, and often strange. The web had flavor. Entrepreneurs naturally sought to create products that would inspire demand (or at least hypothetical advertising opportunities that might someday compete with Google) where there was no lack to be addressed and no need to be filled, other than greed. Google had discovered a new permanently entrenched niche enabled by the nature of digital technology. It turns out that the digital system of representing people and ads so they can be matched is like MIDI. It is an example of how digital technology can cause

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright 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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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  intent, but without, as of this time of writing, commercial achievement.*

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  The grudging relationship between UNIX and the temporal world in which the human body moves and the human mind thinks is a disappointing example of lock-in, but not a disastrous one. Maybe it will even help make it easier for people to appreciate the old-fashioned physical world, as virtual reality gets better.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  Humans are free. We can commit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  There will be a warm mass of patterned silicon with electricity coursing through it, but the 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.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  I have tried to learn to be aware of the troll within myself. I notice that I can suddenly become relieved when someone else in an online exchange is getting pounded or humiliated, because that means I’m safe for the moment. If someone else’s video is being ridiculed on YouTube, then mine is temporarily protected. But that also means I’m complicit in a mob dynamic. Have I ever planted a seed of mob-beckoning ridicule in order to guide the mob to a target other than myself? Yes, I have, though I shouldn’t have.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  Singularity books are as common in a computer science department as Rapture images are in an evangelical bookstore.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  The advertising idea hasn’t made any money so far, because ad dollars appear to be better spent on searches and in web pages. 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.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree— and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.

  6 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  as many have suggested, during the administration of George W. Bush.

  almost 2 years ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Kim Plowright

    Tea party -modelled on Obama campaign but does not have first mover advantage. Aslo, crowds given illusion of power-bullying tactics.

    almost 2 years ago
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  Kim Plowright highlighted

  to create “content,” as in the collectively generated link website Digg.

  almost 2 years ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Kim Plowright

    The law of averages-all the crowd does is correct for humans notoriously faulty understanding of statistics. Secondly, perhaps 'crowdsoyrcing' is little more than the harnessing of wider international markets using the wide net of the Internet.

    almost 2 years ago