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It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed.
The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.
UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, nonabstract reality; it is more like a typewriter than a dance partner. (Perhaps typewriters or word processors ought to always be instantly responsive, like a dance partner—but that is not yet the case.) UNIX tends to “want” to connect to reality as if reality were a network of fast typists.
In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.
You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
Pretty obvious point - and yet we seem to miss it so easily...
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!
The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living.
I say that information doesn’t deserve to be free.
But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.
Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.
I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.
A philosopher like Daniel Dennett is obviously a zombie.
The reason some people are immune to a virus like AIDS is that their particular bodies are obscure to the virus. The reason that computer viruses infect PCs more than Macs is not that a Mac is any better engineered, but that it is relatively obscure. PCs are more commonplace. This means that there is more return on the effort to crack PCs.
What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.
Ironically, advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct. No one—and I mean no one—dares to mash up ads served in the margins of their website by Google.
No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers, but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their own fate.
If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum.
In my view, people have often respected bits too much, resulting in a creeping degradation of their own qualities as human beings.
