My Man Bruce

I’m slightly surprised not to have seen much reference to Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Rant this year. I listened to it today and (as usual) found bits of it apposite and provocative. Some good lines even if one doesn’t entirely agree, and/or hadn’t had occasion to think of it that way –a lot to chew on, follow up, explore in more detail. He’s a luvvim/hateim speaker, like Garrison Keillor in that respect (my spouse can’t abide GK, and knows it’s him within ONE syllable, and OFF goes the radio).

Here’s another way to experience Bruce (8:15, and worth it as an Example), and it (as object, and as Example) will make even more SENSE once you’ve listened to the soundbites below:

So on to the SXSW soundbites:

1. broadband eats everything …the old line guys are trying to live on artificial scarcity, pile up the DRM… (0:18)

2. the native Internet generation cares nothing for the proprieties of 20th century media (0:13)

3. you pitch Google and Wikipedia together, and it’s kind of game over for the 80s (0:32)

4. Reformulating the Four Worlds model to reflect new realities: (2:05)

First: global market world (make it in Shenzhen, ship it to…)
Second: governance at all levels
Third: commons-based peer production a new thing, growing fast with profound effects on general population
Fourth: disorder, parts of the world just falling off that don’t have any of this (fastest-growing part of the planet)

5. commons-based peer production more powerful than people give it credit for (0:30)

6. things that are businesses stop being businesses …CraigsList, the profession of journalism and the Global Precariate(1:39)

7. a new world of laptop gypsies, vulnerable to charlatans, ripoff artists, dunderheads, lynch mobs (0:19)

8. on artistic qualities: repurposing of Harry Potter characters, pastiche: Sow’s Ears aren’t Silk (0:48)

9. mashups in vogue, but a raw source of creativity? no musical staying power, pastiche, epiphenomenon (1:08)

10. Lev Manovich’s ‘Soft Cinema’, and powerful compositing tools in people’s hands (1:47)

11. need a new form of media criticism (0:50)

12. using the term ‘blog’…a passing thing? (0:08)

13. style of discourse: Dig This! (0:28)

14. spam as semiotic pollution, machine-generated robbery and gibberish (0:36)

15. broadcast tv as evil medium that debases (1:58)

16. conventional businesses melting like the Arctic (0:46)

There’s more… Go to Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Rant for the link to the whole thing.

The Testosteronic Phallacy of Dominance and Control

Mud Time creates some bleak mindspaces, and Stephen Downes’ posting of yesterday afternoon Why the Semantic Web Will Fail can perhaps be read in this light. A few trenchant bits:

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.
We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.
And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies – competing entities choreographic their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?
Not a chance.

…The future is not in the Semantic Web (or in Java, or in enterprise computing – all for the same reason). Careers based on that premise will founder. Because the people saying all the semantic-webbish things – speak the same language, standardize your work, orchestrate the services – are the people who will shut down the pipes, change the standards, and look out for their own interests (at the expense of yours).

…The future of the web will be based on personal computing.
Not because everybody in the world is some sort of Ayn-Rand-close [?clone?] backstabbing money-grubbing leech.
But because there’s just enough of them – and they’re the one’s who tend to rise in business. And when they say “give me your data” (or “let me manage your money” or “base your career on my advice”) it’s merely a prelude to their attempting to take you to the cleaners.
If my online world depends on them – and in the Semantic Web, it would – then my online world will fail. Will be a house of cards that will eventually collapse.

I extract these pieces not as a substitute for Stephen’s whole argument, but to challenge you to read and consider the whole thing, with the wish that you’ll come up with something hopeful as an anodyne. But I’m afraid he’s right –and I’d been blithely thinking that it was government meddling that would end the Idyll, but no, it’s those Adamic Market Forces that are the real danger, underlain by their besetting sins of greed and venality, in the service of Interests. It’s a Guy Thing.

Who Knew? the Wet Pet Food Recall

Connoisseurs of the Baroque in the North American food system are surely slavering over the “pet food” scandal, but I have yet to see anybody commenting on the remarkable scale and concentration revealed. Here’s a bit of the San Jose Mercury News coverage:

The recall now covers dog food sold throughout North America under 51 brands and cat food sold under 40 brands, including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba. The food was sold under both store and major brand labels at Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway and other large retailers. The recall covers the company’s “cuts and gravy” style food, which consists of chunks of meat in gravy, sold in cans and small foil pouches, from Dec. 3 to March 6…

So the North American market seems to run on what’s basically commodity pet food, despite the differences in labelling and price… and the Canadian Menu Foods seems to be a pretty big player. Here’s how investcom.com summarizes:

Menu Foods Income Fund is a limited purpose trust established to hold approx. 51% of the partnership units of Menu Foods L. P., which will, in turn, acquire all the securities and assets of Menu Foods Ltd. Menu is a leading North American manufacturer of private-label wet pet food products, selling its products to supermarket retailers, mass merchandisers, pet specialty retailers and other retail and wholesale outlets. Menu currently produces more than 800 million containers of wet pet food per year and is focused on the manufacture and sale of premium private-label wet pet food products.

I saw a news story this morning suggesting that the Problem was thought to be in the wheat gluten used as a “filler”, and snopes.com says that a Menu Foods spokesperson

…said that recalled products were made using wheat gluten purchased from a new supplier, a change that coincided with the onset of complaints about pet illnesses. Since discovering the problem, the company no longer uses that supplier and has instead turned to another source for its wheat gluten (but it is not yet known whether that ingredient was related to the reported pet illnesses).

I have yet to see a story about Senior Citizens made ill by eating pet food paté, but I’ll bet there will be one sometime soon…

Calder’s Odds and Sods

Remaindered at the MIT Press bookstore when I visited a week ago was Angus Calder‘s Gods, Mongrels, and Demons : 101 Brief But Essential Lives. The single Amazon reviewer pretty much pans it, but I disagree after a week-long acquaintance with many of the Brief Lives, and find Dave Hallsworth’s review much more congenial (“Today’s academics, whose knights and emblems have all fallen in the gutter, are unable to differentiate between odds and sods..”). The dust cover offers this additional description:

A compendious assemblage of oddballs, tinks, heidbangers, saints, keelies, nutters, philosophers, freaks & other personages, whether real, imaginary, legendary or mythical from Billy the Kid & Hedy Lamarr to the Scottish Queen of Morocco & Ludwig Witgenstein

Biography is pretty voyeuristic anyhow, so it might as well be entertaining. Most of Calder’s miniatures are 4-6 pages, but some are longer and some shorter –i.e., they’re ideal Bathroom Reading (a genre which ought to be better appreciated). They’ll provoke you into unexpected excursions: the Tricky Sam Nanton profile rekindled my interest in the fine structure of Ellington Orchestra pieces of the late 1930s, and the entry for Lee Miller reminded me of her remarkable WWII photographs and her collaboration with Man Ray [they developed solarisation, aka The Sabattier effect, seen in the middle image below]:
Gary Miller
…and there are lots of people one had never heard of, but is glad to have made acquaintance at last. Racier than Wikipedia (no requirement for neutrality), more British than American in sensibility and vocabulary (trying to discover the meaning of “keelies” led me to WordNavigator.com [which didn’t help], but it took my Chambers Scots Dictionary to point me to “street arabs, pickpockets” and the Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang to specify “an Edinburgh band of young blackguards, ca 1820”), and withal a lot of fun.

Of Twitteration

In 23 years of entanglement with microcomputers (and 45 with computing in general) I’ve often been at the point of wondering “now what’s this going to do for/to me? How’s it going to fit into/transform what I do?”, and I’m there again, thinking about where Twitter fits in my digital evolution.

Twitter seems to assume that its users enjoy pervasive computing (with an extension to mobile appliances that I have no truck with), and a gaggle of like-minded friends. It also assumes (as does IM) that one can tolerate being “interrupt-driven”…

For me, Twitter offers a welcome level of granularity/resolution that fits into my use of the blogworld by offering instantaneous whazzup?, where blog postings are usually more carefully constructed –sort of a bitbucket, into which to tuck the passing thought or interest that I might want to be able to get back to, or eventually fit into an emerging chronotope.

Like Tagging, the primary use for me is as a tool to manage my OWN infoverse, and it’s only secondarily Social. It’s interesting to be able to look back at whatwhens (and I’ve experimented with a variety of them, currently including an autolog.txt Notepad doc on my desktop), to manage one’s own process, and perhaps to build, gradually, a Legacy …though for whom I’m not sure. All this seems a bit solopsistic: it’s for me, for my own appreciation and shifting purposes. If others happen to find it, or think it interesting to follow because they know/knew me in some sense, and have some interest in what I’m up to, so much the better.

There aren’t a lot of people I’m aware of being interested in following the microactivities of, and indeed one can only sustain such attention for a small number. Ron and Bryan are two I’m tracking now, but others might be added, just as I’ve added blogs to my RSS stable (and shed blogs too, of course).

In a few days I’ll be offline for a week-long yoga retreat, and it’ll be interesting to see if Twitter still seems to have resonance for me when I return.

In a deeper or maybe broader sense, as a Phenomenon and an act in the unfolding of Social Computing, danah boyd sees it more clearly than anybody else I’ve read so far:

You write whatever you damn well please and it spams all of the people who agreed to be your friends. The biggest strength AND weakness of Twitter is that it works through your IM client (or Twitterrific) as well as your phone. This means that all of the tech people who spend far too much time bored on their laptops are spamming people at a constant rate. Ah, procrastination devices. If you follow all of your friends on your mobile, you’re in for a hellish (and very expensive) experience.

…I think it’s funny to watch my tech geek friends adopt a social tech. They can’t imagine life without their fingers attached to a keyboard or where they didn’t have all-you-can-eat phone plans. More importantly, the vast majority of their friends are tech geeks too. And their social world is relatively structurally continuous. For most 20/30-somethings, this isn’t so. Work and social are generally separated and there are different friend groups that must be balanced in different ways.

…Like with bulletins, it’s pretty ostentatious to think that your notes are worth pushing to others en masse. It takes a certain kind of personality to think that this kind of spamming is socially appropriate and desirable. Sure, we all love to have a sense of what’s going on, but this is push technology at its most extreme. You’re pushing your views into the attention of others (until they turn it or you off).

(from apophenia)

Addendum: Kathy Sierra’s graph and TwitterVision are essential extensions of the discussion…

On the Force being with one

In answer to Max’s query, Robert Force is HERE, complete with a digital version of In Search of the Wild Dulcimer and musical examples and oh jeez a whole lot of other stuff. Now it’s time to dust off that Mike Rugg rosewood CapriTaurus dulcimer that’s been sitting on the shelf:
dulcimers for two
(it’s the one Kent is playing –and it’s really his, but lives with me until he comes to reclaim it. I’d love to see him, but… The one I’m playing is by Paul Reisler, and resides chez Ron Brunton. These bits of provenance might matter someday.)