It’ll be a few years before we see this trend in Missouri: Glowing, Blinking LEDs for your Mouth, courtesy Japan.
(via NYT)
-
-
Grace Jones sings “Little Drummer Boy” to Peewee Herman. Perhaps the most surreal moment in 80’s children’s programming. And totally awesome. Merry Christmas!
-
What if the world as we know it today isn't the end of history? →
“The idea that something new is possible is spreading. Most favorably, it is giving rise to a new type: the cultural entrepreneur.”
-
The Adventures of Bucakroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension - one of the best movies to make it out of the 80s.
-
When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
— Clay Shirkey in his essay Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
-
We’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest.
— Steve Berlin Johsnson in his speech Old Growth Media and the Future of News
-
The Unabomber Was Right →
Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects – technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves — and also inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside of human desire. Kaczynski writes “modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts.”
read the rest on Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog
