Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 35

It’s going to happen

The crew at the Rough Type Curation Lab nearly blew their deadline this year, but at the last moment they’ve coughed up a mixtape for the final evening of 2013. (Spotify required.) It opens with a full-body assault from Supergrass. And then it gets intense. You want to time this so that “The Midnight Choir” ends and “Left of the Dial” begins right at the stroke of twelve. Yes, the Curation Lab thinks at that level of temporal granularity.

Happy 2014, the Year of the BigDog, the Year of the Gla...

Voice from above

Another bulletin from the near future:

“I don’t have a microchip in my head – yet,” says the man charged with transforming Google’s relations with the technology giant’s human users.But Scott Huffman does envisage a world in which Google microphones, embedded in the ceiling, listen to our conversations and interject verbal answers to whatever inquiry is posed.

Ceilings with ears. A dream come true.

It’s clear now that Google and Microsoft have to bury the hatchet, if only to collaborate on a sys...

Underwearables

If there’s one product category ripe for disruptive innovation, it’s lingerie. So it comes as no real surprise that Microsoft researchers have developed a smart bra. The self-quantifying garment is designed, write the researchers, to “perform emotion detection in a mobile, wearable system” as a means of triggering “just-in-time interventions to support behavior modification for emotional eating.”

The smart bra is outfitted with sensors that measure a woman’s stress level by tracking her heart...

My computer, my doppeltweeter

Broadway, as you’ll recall, was the nickname of the fellow that 50 Cent hired to ghost his tweets.”The energy of it is all him,” Broadway said of the simulated stream he produced for his boss. Or, as Baudrillard put it: “Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true.”

Now that we’re all microcelebrities, we need to democratize Broadway. No mortal can keep up with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc., all by himself/herself. There’s just not enough realtime in th...

Rough Type has a new RSS feed

As a result of attacks by hackers intent on selling bootleg viagra and other goodies, Rough Type has made a hasty switch to a new blogging platform (WordPress). As a result, the old RSS feed has been replaced by a new one. If you'd like to continue to subscribe to Rough Type, here's the new subscription link:

http://www.roughtype.com/?feed=rss2

You can also re-subscribe through the home page.

I apologize for the duplicate links in recent days and appreciate your interest in my work.

Nick

Rough Type is experiencing technical difficulties

I guess this is what I get for delaying a software upgrade for seven years. Things should be back to normal reasonably soon....

What realtime is before it's realtime

They say that there's a brief interlude, measured in milliseconds, between the moment a thought arises in the cellular goop of our brain and the moment our conscious mind becomes aware of that thought. That gap, they say, swallows up our free will and all its attendant niceties. After the fact, we pretend that something we think of as "our self" came up with something we think of as "our thought," but that's all just make-believe. In reality, they say, we're mere automatons, run by some inscrutable Oz hiding behind a synaptical curtain. The same thing goes for sensory perception. What you see, touch, hear, smell are all just messages from the past. It takes time for the signals to travel from your sensory organs to your sense-making brain. Milliseconds. You live, literally, in the past. Now is then. Always. As the self-appointed chronicler of realtime, as realtime's most dedicated cyber-scribe, I find this all unendurably depressing. The closer our latency-free networks and devices bring us to realtime, the further realtime recedes. The net trains us to think not in years or seasons or months or weeks or days or hours or even minutes. It trains us to think in...

1964

From Simon Reynolds's interview with Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books: SR: I wanted to ask you about an experience that seems to have been utterly formative and enduringly inspirational: the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. That is a real touchstone moment for you, right? GM: That was a cauldron. It was a tremendously complex experience, struggle, event. A series of events. In a lot of ways, it's been misconstrued: there are many versions of it. Each person had their own version of it. The affair began when there'd been a lot of protests in the Bay Area in the spring of 1964 against racist hiring practices. At the Bank of America, at car dealerships, at the Oakland Tribune —black people were not hired at all for any visible job. So there were no black sales people, no black tellers or clerks. A lot of the organizing for these protests, which involved mass arrests and huge picket lines and publicity, was done on the Berkeley campus. Different political groups would set up a table and distribute leaflets and collect donations and announce picket lines and sit-ins. The business community put a lot of pressure on...

Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful hologram

"For us, of course, it's about keeping Jimi authentically correct." So says Janie Hendrix, explaining the motivation behind her effort to turn her long-dead brother into a Strat-wielding hologram. Tupac Shakur's recent leap from grave to stage was just the first act of what promises to be an orgy of cultural necrophilia. Billboard reports that holographic second comings are in the works not just for Jimi Hendrix but for Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Peter Tosh, and even Rick James. Superfreaky! What could be more authentically correct than an image of an image? I'm really looking forward to seeing the Doors with Jim Morrison back out in front - that guy from the Cult never did it for me - but I admit it may be kind of discomforting to see the rest of the band looking semi-elderly while the Lizard King appears as his perfect, leather-clad 24-year-old self. Jeff Jampol, the Doors' manager, says, "Hopefully, 'Jim Morrison' will be able to walk right up to you, look you in the eye, sing right at you and then turn around and walk away." That's all well and good, but I'm sure Jampol knows that the crowd isn't...

Books ain't music

C30, C60, C90, go!Off the radio, I get a constant flowCause I hit it, pause it, record it and playOr turn it rewind and rub it away! -Bow Wow Wow, 1980 When I turned twelve, in the early 1970s, I received, as a birthday present from my parents, a portable, Realistic-brand cassette tape recorder from Radio Shack. Within hours, I became a music pirate. I had a friend who lived next door, and his older brother had a copy of Abbey Road, an album I had taken a shine to. I carried my recorder over to their house, set its little plastic microphone (it was a mono machine) in front of one of the speakers of their stereo, and proceeded to make a cassette copy of the record. I used the same technique at my own house to record hit songs off the radio as well as make copies of my siblings' and friends' LPs and 45s. It never crossed my mind that I was doing anything wrong. I didn't think of myself as a pirate, and I didn't think of my recordings as being illicit. I was just being a fan. I was hardly unique. Tape recorders, whether reel-to-reel...