There is an institute in the United States started based on the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil regarding the advent of computer intelligence called The Singularity is Near.
There is a problem with the internet. It has forgotten its roots. It has forgotten HTML. It has forgotten LaTeX. It has forgotten WordPerfect. It has forgotten television. It has forgotten radio. It has forgotten film. It has forgotten phonographs. It has forgotten photographs. It has forgotten the Gutenberg Press. It has forgotten the Alphabet. It has forgotten Arabic Numerals. It has forgotten Hieroglyphics. It has forgotten music. It has forgotten speech.
The internet is fascinated with digital waveforms. They don’t realize that digital waveforms are phenomenally primitive. As a consequence the internet is phenomenally complicated. We have a whole generation trying to use metaphors of analog media equipment represented on digital media equipment. It is complete crap and it does not occur to anyone. Word processors are crap. Spreadsheets are crap. Presentations are crap. Vector Graphics are crap. Audios are crap. Videos are crap. Their formats and editors are crap. Complex useless crap that many people are making a good living making more complicated to guarantee their meal tickets and they don’t even know it. They use words like “organic”, “innovative”, “2.0″, “web”, “village”, “technology”, “entertainment”, “design”, “thinking”, “visual”, “global”, “climate”, “change”, “open”, “source”, “search”, “apple”, “i”, “my”, “face”, “google”, “twit”, “social”, “network”, “pirate”. They hire lots of “numerati”, “literati”, “vidirati”, “audirati”, “timerati”, “grapherati”. The words are meaningless and the people don’t know their assholes from first base. They measure their credibility by their credit rating.
You ask them a “Simple” question and you get the “Complex” answer. They don’t hear the question and don’t speak the answer.
They are shotgun happy pretending to be rifle sad.
Simplicity eats when it is hungry, sleeps when it is tired, doesn’t work or play. Simplicity never leaves and never arrives. Simplicity neither asks nor tells the time. Simplicity is the crooked path that is the shortest distance. Simplicity is periodic and chaotic. Simplicity folows but has no leaders; leads but has no followers.
This is a representation of every musician, band, etc. that creates music as rated on last.fm. The graph was created by sixdegrees.hu using a new visualization tool.
We have all been had. There are thousands of companies out there telling us our content has no monetary value and then using our sweat to make billions on advertising and claiming they are benevolently providing us a service. THERE IS NO BENEVOLENCE ONLY BUSINESS.
Every post you put on the web has value. Every keystroke, every mouse click has value. Corporations are using it to advertise, analyze markets, sell to you. YOU SHOULD HAVE A PIECE OF THE MONETARY PIE.
The problem is not technology. Sending payment to everyone is damned easy. The problem is middle men. MIDDLE MEN MAKE THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING ARTIFICIALLY HIGH.
We can all profit. Everything we do has worth. We can charge for everything. Everytime someone looks at our content we can profit. DEAL DIRECT TO LOWER THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING, DON’T GIVE YOUR WORK AND CONTENT AWAY FOR FREE. THE WEBSITES DON’T. THE CARRIERS DON’T.
You have worth. You have value. YOU MUST BE PAID WHEN YOUR CONTENT IS DISPLAYED.
Stop being a Tube. Stop being a Twit. Stop being a Face. Stop being a Space. Stop Digging. Stop Gurgling. You are not children any more. YOU ARE THE KEY. ENJOY CAPITALISM. DEMAND PAYMENT.
There is a Fair Global Price for everything and it is not Open Source. THE COMMONS WILL ALWAYS BE A TRAGEDY.
There are another two words I would like to introduce into the discussion: “democratization” and “personalization”. We are encountering many new technologies and they are going through phases. Most simply put they are going from specialist who is knowledgeable how to use the technology for the user, to technologist who uses the technology on behalf of a knowledgeable user, to personal where the generalist knowledgeable user interacts with the technology directly.
We are experiencing mass personalization of technology. And this is leading to further phenomena. Personal Cooperation and Personal Corporation. People are as Howard Rheingold www.rheingold.com describes sharing more and more information freely. But they are also discovering the worth of their reputation and knowledge and turning it into a business like Guy Kawasaki www.guykawasaki.com who is using ghost writers on twitter.
I foresee everyone sharing their personal knowledge cooperatively and upon establishing worth selling the best of their personal knowledge corporately.
It is a beautiful future where everyone is personally incorporated and everyone personally outsources to everyone else globally.
Sharing information freely and openly is a dead end game, because we all have to make a living.
Sharing information on a globally set price scale and reputation system that recognizes the worth of the information and work every incorporated individual can provide is Open Capitalism (you heard it here first) and will free us from exploitation.
Let’s turn the race for the bottom back into a personal global race for the top.
I came across this article http://tinyurl.com/58envr in Infosthetics.com regarding a medical iconic language. This lead me to think about iconic languages in general.
What would happen if we developed non-text languages where icons were not just “terms” but were used as “definitions” as well?
Such languages already exist. Chinese Hanyu for example. But what if a new global iconic language were developed?
In my reading I am discovering that even words are treated by our minds iconically as symbolic clusters. If the first and last letter of a word is correct the remaining letters in the word can be in any order. In fact, we do the same things with words themselves. We create word clusters and shuffle them around to create sentences. I think language does not have the formula Chomsky came up with using random sets of words arranged syntactically. Words are symbols and sentence fragments are symbols that we connect together. We do the same thing with lists which are basically paragraph fragments. All these fragments are are arranged according to the rules of a scale-free network not a hard wired linguistic structure. I think that would shake Steven Pinker up.
The thing that is necessary to point out is literacy and numeracy does not make us any more or less intelligent. It is a symbolic system like any other that trains us to think in certain ways to process language and quantities. Whatever we do we are simply learning another, perhaps more efficient way of processing symbols representative of reality. Plato thought that literacy was dumbing down his students because they did not memorize and meditate on what they learned, choosing to write it down and put it on the shelf instead. Are our children any different if they choose to let computers deal with the mechanical aspect of literacy and numeracy so they can concentrate on higher order operations? Do we agonize over our children being unable to weave cloth and tailor clothing?
If Marshall McLuhan is right, we are not past the point where we are pumping old media through the new internet media pipe. Text will always be with us, I think because it is just too darned useful. But we will utilize it differently as we become able to record, replay, produce, publish, communicate and collaborate using non-textual, non-numeric media and move beyond linear and tabular networks and into netular scale-free networks.
Something that occurred to me about phonetic language like English and syllabic language like Arabic versus iconic language like Hanyu Chinese is a phonetic or syllabic language enable you to encode or decode words according to their sound and store and retrieve them based on a simple index. Hanyu on the other hand provides no association between code and sound. You are dependent on the person you hear the word from to provide the association making coding and decoding author dependent. Iconic storage and retrieval indexes are not always obvious either although they do exist based on the subordinate symbols from which words are composed. The internet poses the remedy to this by enabling the automation of the association between sound and icon and definition.
It seems to me that iconic languages as a technology are undergoing a major evolutionary change that could not be achieved without the internet.
Computing is going through an interesting process:
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, Warm smell of Colitas rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
In my province, I have begun pushing for a Design Council. However, I am beginning to wonder if I am just calling every problem a nail or creating another stovepipe. Software as a Service, Database as a Service, Science as a Service, Art as a Service, Design as a Service, Engineering as a Service, Manufacturing as a Service, Inventory as a Service, Sales as a Service, Purchases as a Service, Currency as a Service, Accounting as a Service, Service as a Service… all plugged into the huge amorphous global system we call “The Cloud”.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night.
We are being frontsourced and backsourced, upsourced and downsourced, leftsourced and rightsourced, insourced and outsourced, yesterdaysourced and tomorrowsourced up the ying yang and out the wazoo. I think the economic crisis may just be the tip of the iceburg. We may be in a deep financial dependency, but we may also be entering a 24/7/365 service dependency where we could relinquish all our corporate and personal control to third parties completely losing our ability to independently execute decisions.
There she stood in the doorway; I heard the mission bell.
And I was thinking to myself, “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say,
“Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place. Such a lovely face.”
“There’s plenty of room at the Hotel California. Any time of year, You can find it here.”
The Hotel California. Peter Drucker lit up the candle and called the way “creaming”. We continually seek work offering higher margins and abandon our lower margin work. Our Service Providers are willing to take up the lower margin work and establish a beach head. Instead of assuming control of our supply and rescuing the lower margin demand we forego them. The Service Providers keep the beach head and begin undermining us and we surrender the middle margin work and seek even higher margins. Eventually, we reach the top of the ladder. Either we freeze the state of affairs and impose it downward or we get pushed off the top. How do we impose such a freeze?
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, She got the Mercedes-Benz.
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, That she calls friends.
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
Silicon Valley was the center of the Personal Computer revolution. Berkeley University. Stanford University. Drugs. Affluence. Free sharing of information. Lots of pretty boys at Xerox PARC and IBM dancing to forget. Lots of pretty boys at Apple Computer and Microsoft dancing to remember.
So I called up the Captain, “Please bring me my wine.”
He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here Since nineteen sixty-nine.”
The first ARPANET IMP log – a record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET took place at 10:30PM on October 29, 1969 setting up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer.
And still those voices are calling from far away.
Wake you up in the middle of the night, Just to hear them say,
“Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place. Such a lovely face. “
They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel California.
What a nice surprise, Bring your alibis.
The Hotel California. Apple, IBM PC, MS DOS, Lotus 123, WordPerfect 5, dBaseIIIPlus, MacIntosh, MAC OS, MS Windows, MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, Mobile Phones, Internet, AOL, MMUG, NetScape, MS Explorer, Web 1.0, Laptops, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Chat, Forums, Blogs, Napster, Linux, Apache, MySQL, pHp, DOOM, Cellphones, Web 2.0, Firefox, iPod, iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, Skype, GoogleEarth, Facebook, Twitter, PirateBay, Wikipedia, WoW, SecondLife, iPhone. The permanent digital network data repository of religions, organizations, emotions, locations, actions, possessions, professions, obsessions, transactions and reservations that we are voluntarily contributing to daily. The Service Providers have stipulations in the Terms of Service you agree to permitting them to change the terms at any time without notification. Recently one Service Provider changed the Terms of Service declaring that they owned all member content with no limitations on its use. They backed down, but their weapons test was complete.
Mirrors on the ceiling, Pink champagne on ice.
And she said, “We are all just Prisoners here, of our own device.”
Worldwide data centres with petabytes of personal data connected by fiber optic spinal cords ready to be sliced and diced by domestic and foreign government agencies, corporations, criminals, theives and cyberterrorists looking for gold in the data mine.
And in their master’s chambers, They gathered for the feast.
They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.
Perhaps all these records will not matter to the Always On Generation or to the Zippies. Since everyone’s sins are online no one can be held accountable or no one could be hired. Or everyone could be held accountable and the Republics fall and we enter the Dark Age of a new Dictator Emperor, followed by a God Emperor, followed by a Pope Emperor all with sound legalistic documentation of the inquisitions. This is what happened to the Roman Republic and Roman Europe. Big Brother reigned for 1300 years.
Last thing I remember, I was running for the door.
I had to find the passage back To the place I was before.
“Relax”, said the night man, “We are programmed to receive.”
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
As you drive down that dark desert information highway, look in the rearview mirror, because 1300 years of history might be catching up with us.
The Cloud: “Welcome, To the Hotel California”
2009/02/26 — grant czerepakOn a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, Warm smell of Colitas rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
In my province, I have begun pushing for a Design Council. However, I am beginning to wonder if I am just calling every problem a nail or creating another stovepipe. Software as a Service, Database as a Service, Science as a Service, Art as a Service, Design as a Service, Engineering as a Service, Manufacturing as a Service, Inventory as a Service, Sales as a Service, Purchases as a Service, Currency as a Service, Accounting as a Service, Service as a Service… all plugged into the huge amorphous global system we call “The Cloud”.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, I had to stop for the night.
We are being frontsourced and backsourced, upsourced and downsourced, leftsourced and rightsourced, insourced and outsourced, yesterdaysourced and tomorrowsourced up the ying yang and out the wazoo. I think the economic crisis may just be the tip of the iceburg. We may be in a deep financial dependency, but we may also be entering a 24/7/365 service dependency where we could relinquish all our corporate and personal control to third parties completely losing our ability to independently execute decisions.
There she stood in the doorway; I heard the mission bell.
And I was thinking to myself, “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor, I thought I heard them say,
“Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place. Such a lovely face.”
“There’s plenty of room at the Hotel California. Any time of year, You can find it here.”
The Hotel California. Peter Drucker lit up the candle and called the way “creaming”. We continually seek work offering higher margins and abandon our lower margin work. Our Service Providers are willing to take up the lower margin work and establish a beach head. Instead of assuming control of our supply and rescuing the lower margin demand we forego them. The Service Providers keep the beach head and begin undermining us and we surrender the middle margin work and seek even higher margins. Eventually, we reach the top of the ladder. Either we freeze the state of affairs and impose it downward or we get pushed off the top. How do we impose such a freeze?
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, She got the Mercedes-Benz.
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys, That she calls friends.
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.
Silicon Valley was the center of the Personal Computer revolution. Berkeley University. Stanford University. Drugs. Affluence. Free sharing of information. Lots of pretty boys at Xerox PARC and IBM dancing to forget. Lots of pretty boys at Apple Computer and Microsoft dancing to remember.
So I called up the Captain, “Please bring me my wine.”
He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here Since nineteen sixty-nine.”
The first ARPANET IMP log – a record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET took place at 10:30PM on October 29, 1969 setting up a message transmission to go from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer.
And still those voices are calling from far away.
Wake you up in the middle of the night, Just to hear them say,
“Welcome to the Hotel California. Such a lovely place. Such a lovely face. “
They’re livin’ it up at the Hotel California.
What a nice surprise, Bring your alibis.
The Hotel California. Apple, IBM PC, MS DOS, Lotus 123, WordPerfect 5, dBaseIIIPlus, MacIntosh, MAC OS, MS Windows, MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, Mobile Phones, Internet, AOL, MMUG, NetScape, MS Explorer, Web 1.0, Laptops, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Chat, Forums, Blogs, Napster, Linux, Apache, MySQL, pHp, DOOM, Cellphones, Web 2.0, Firefox, iPod, iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, Skype, GoogleEarth, Facebook, Twitter, PirateBay, Wikipedia, WoW, SecondLife, iPhone. The permanent digital network data repository of religions, organizations, emotions, locations, actions, possessions, professions, obsessions, transactions and reservations that we are voluntarily contributing to daily. The Service Providers have stipulations in the Terms of Service you agree to permitting them to change the terms at any time without notification. Recently one Service Provider changed the Terms of Service declaring that they owned all member content with no limitations on its use. They backed down, but their weapons test was complete.
Mirrors on the ceiling, Pink champagne on ice.
And she said, “We are all just Prisoners here, of our own device.”
Worldwide data centres with petabytes of personal data connected by fiber optic spinal cords ready to be sliced and diced by domestic and foreign government agencies, corporations, criminals, theives and cyberterrorists looking for gold in the data mine.
And in their master’s chambers, They gathered for the feast.
They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.
Perhaps all these records will not matter to the Always On Generation or to the Zippies. Since everyone’s sins are online no one can be held accountable or no one could be hired. Or everyone could be held accountable and the Republics fall and we enter the Dark Age of a new Dictator Emperor, followed by a God Emperor, followed by a Pope Emperor all with sound legalistic documentation of the inquisitions. This is what happened to the Roman Republic and Roman Europe. Big Brother reigned for 1300 years.
Last thing I remember, I was running for the door.
I had to find the passage back To the place I was before.
“Relax”, said the night man, “We are programmed to receive.”
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
As you drive down that dark desert information highway, look in the rearview mirror, because 1300 years of history might be catching up with us.
Thank you for checking in.