because bored people make bad decisions
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From Wired: five people who’ll make you feel good about the future
(and if you’re visiting the World Science Festival website then have a look at the ‘LiveSearch’ - taking ’suggestions as you type one step’ further. )
“to say this is not to plead for a return to the buggy cart, the steam engine, or the vinyl record. It is to plead for attention - attention to stubbornness, to what will not budge, to the things that people fight for. So it’s to plead for design that takes into account resources that people care about. Such design, we are confident, produces tools that people care about - a kind of tool that seems, despite modern inventiveness, in remarkable short supply. (Take a quick look over the computer applications you have bought, borrowed or downloaded over the past five years and see how many you would actually fight for.)”
The Social Life of Information.
I’d keep my Grandad’s singer sewing machine just to have it around, which I guess would have seemed bizarre when he bought it.
The friend with his walkman mounted in a picture frame is somewhat ununusual. The aesthetics of most electronics are shocking. Apple is the best we seem to have but they only really do one style and it will be interesting to see how it ages.
That’s not to say the quote was just about aesthetics. But where are the things that will last?
I finished my bank holiday by watching Life After People. This is surely inspired by The World Without Us
From the programme I learnt that clay tablets will last longer than any modern media. Interesting if obvious when you think about it. And Ancient Roman concrete lasts better than modern concrete. They didn’t mention the fact that bronze sculpture will pretty much last forever or that copper will just patina, surprising given the potential for CGI of the Statue of Liberty.
They said that film will crumble but didn’t cover the more interesting bit that radio waves and TV broadcasts will never die.
According to the programme the things that will really last are massive stone structures like the Great Wall and, Pyramids. The Hoover Dam will make a valiant effort.
And curiously as Mark Vernon points out, there’s no mention of plastic which Weisman’s book suggests may be around for a very, very long time.
I’ve been reading Cities in Flight
“like everything else in the world requiring an IQ of less than 150, it was computer-controlled. The world-wide dominance of the such machines… had been one of the chief contributors to the present and apparently permanent depression: the coming of semi-intelligent machines into business and technology had created a second Industrial Revolution, in which only the most highly creative human beings, and those most gifted at administration, found themselves with any skills to sell which were worth the world’s money to buy”
Aside from the lovely design (a book with curved corners!) I was interested in this dystopian view of a future formed (perhaps?) from the author’s familiarity with economic depression and cold-war. Novels of the future can be interesting for their views of what will continue as much as the things that will change.
“Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men” - Arthur C Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1984
A Economist debate from the Freedom and its Digital Discontents series:
If the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing
Dick Szafranski (of consultants Toffler Associates) focuses on paradox of choice and surplus complexity. He teeters on technological determinism throughout:
“Technology has imposed the encumbrance of over-choice on us”
John Maeda similarly ascribes motive to technology:
“Technology exists to advance and enhance our world in new ways.”
He makes curious choices of ambivalent technologies; hearing aids , Blackberrys, and cars. He also seems to imply that what we have now is technology, past tools were not technologies, and future technologies will have less problems:
“The bad rap given to technologies today will be only temporary….But we are in a transitional period where technologies are brittle not because they are failing per se – they are just new and experimental.
We voluntarily let technology enter our lives in the infantile state that it currently exists, and the challenge is to wait for it to mature to something we can all be proud of.”
Tim Ferriss makes the point that the question is phrased in the present tense (i.e. “is failing” and not “will fail”) and so votes for Szafranski.
FringeHog explains why Polaroids are the ‘magic cameras’:
More FringeHog-ery, this time on personal energy:
“Human beings can survive for more than a month without food and for five days without water, but the average man, it is said, can’t live more than six hours without plugging in. Now fast forward to the future, say ten years from now. Imagine a world in which energy is abundant, portable and ultimately, personal. In this future electricity is disconnected from the power grid: no more sockets, no more wires.”
Now this might get me interested. I often fear I’m a bit of a luddite. I’m not interested in fancy interfaces or lots of functionality on my phone. Mostly I just want my phone to stop running out of battery.
The thing I would really like for my laptop is instant boot-up. I don’t understand why we all seems to think it is fine for the computer to putter away to itself for a few minutes before it lets you use it.
(I find the welcome message on work computers a bit menacing. “Good morning, Karen. It is 10.15am”. Why does it tell me the time? Just letting me know that it knows what time I got in?)
Now there’s some nice consequences of time to kill chatting with Chris, Vicky, Noush & Olivia (whose company I’m going to miss terribly if I get hauled down the other end of the office) but it just doesn’t seem very efficient.
I guess what I want from my gadgets is summed up by a colleague’s frequent appeal to our management to “perfect the basics before you start tacking bits on”. But there’s plenty of voices out there in “more! add more!” camp so I’ll be spending my mornings chatting for sometime to come.
That’s always been my justification for the chickens and the manual coffee grinder.
I’ve been reading The Stand (much to Iain’s disgust) and The World Without Us (which seemed to merit less disgust) . At the same time I stumbled across the I am Legend inspired We all secretly want to eat dog food in hell which argues that we like apocalyptic movies because
“people do survive, even if they have to endure horrible things in the process”.
So maybe my current enthusiasm is just a sign that I’m stressed. It could be all down to the desire for a cosy catastrophe.
Even at the best of times good-life-ery overlaps with survivalism so it isn’t uncommon for me to be immersed in apocalypta. One minute you’re reading about making butter and then the next it’s how many guns you should keep in your bug out bag.
All this self-awareness doesn’t stop me wanting to see Life After People.
I have no idea if their work is any good but I love The Future Laboratory’s Christmas card.
Neologisms, a cute dog and the money saved goes to a tree charity. If only those neologisms went somewhere.
Any ideas for what Synth-Ethics is?