Innovation is Dead
A place where junk helps.
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To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD.
Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.
We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here.
But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten. ” -
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Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level)’ to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.
We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here.
But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten. ” -
Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, University of Chicago Press, [1972]2000, p. 481 [Google books preview]
Think midle eastern wars, energy crisis, Europe financial crisis, unexplainable killing sprees and so forth.
(via skandalon)
“Infographic” (via Phil Gyford)
Laughing Squid: “A 2.5 Year-Old Uses an iPad for the First Time” by Todd Lappin, April 6th, 2010
“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.
As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.
On the downside, she had the same frustration as many adults, where touching the screen-edge with your thumb while holding the iPad blocks input to all home screen icons. Notice also that she was confused by the splash page for FirstWords Animals, her favorite spelling game: Because the start button looked like a graphic, rather than a conventional button, she couldn’t figure out how to start the game.
Most of all, though, it’s cool to consider that as one of the new Children of Cyberspace, her expectations about computing will be shaped by the fact that she’s growing up in a touchscreen world.”
(via circuitry)
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« Tout dispositif se définit ainsi par sa teneur en nouveauté et créativité, qui marque en même temps sa capacité de se transformer, à moins au contraire d’être rabattu de force sur ses lignes les plus dures, les plus rigides ou solides. En tant qu’elles s’échappent des dimensions de savoir et de pouvoir, les lignes de subjectivation semblent particulièrement capables de tracer des chemins de création, qui ne cessent d’avorter, mais aussi d’être repris, modifiés, jusqu’à la rupture de l’ancien dispositif. » (Deleuze, 1988, p. 51)
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Deleuze, G. (1988) « Foucault, Historien du présent », Le Magazine littéraire, numéro 257, Septembre 1988, pp. 51-52
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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
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Point Omega by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2010, p. 17
And yet, and yet : when one’s alone, “lost in memory”, one could feel compelled to write.
Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega, Don DeLillo.
(via skandalon)
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A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer message from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an “awarness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,” transposition necessarily takes the place of translation.
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Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, Stanford University Press, [1985]1992, p. 265 [Amazon]
“Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.” (wikipedia)
Derrida offers a similar analysis in his essay “Freud and the scene of writing” (1966)
(via skandalon)
The Cutting Edge (via CBS)
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Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town.
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H-Online: “Mac OS X: ‘safer, but less secure’”, March 18, 2010
The quote is from Charlie Miller, a computer security researcher (he has a Ph.D. in mathematics). Learn more about him on Wikipedia and read this recent interview with him.
(via skandalon)
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TWO centuries after Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-1400s there were plenty of books around, but they were expensive and poorly made. In Britain a cartel had a lock on classic works such as Shakespeare’s and Milton’s. The first copyright law, enacted in the early 1700s in the Bard’s home country, was designed to free knowledge by putting books in the public domain after a short period of exclusivity, around 14 years. Laws protecting free speech did not emerge until the late 18th century. Before print became widespread the need was limited. Now the information flows in an era of abundant data are changing the relationship between technology and the role of the state once again. Many of today’s rules look increasingly archaic. Privacy laws were not designed for networks. Rules for document retention presume paper records. And since all the information is interconnected, it needs global rules. New principles for an age of big data sets will need to cover six broad areas: privacy, security, retention, processing, ownership and the integrity of information.
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- The Economist: “A special report on managing information: New rules for big data”, Feb 25th, 2010. (via skandalon)
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