Month: January 2009

Obama’s cloud

Read Write Web compares word clouds of Obama’s inaugural speech to those by Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln. Interesting comparison. (RWW’s other inauguration day posts were underwhelming. You don’t really have to post about the inauguration if you don’t have something new and useful to add to the general noise.)

We set up an ad hoc chat room to hang out and discuss the Inauguration while it was happening, and I was reminded that chat feels more like coherent conversation than Twitter. The Inauguration was meaningful, an historic event, but I’m more interested in the real work that starts today.

“All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper…”

“I have been to the mountaintop. I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will, and he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I have seen the promise land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Free Paper

Free Paper

We dropped by Flatbed Press last night for Annette Lawrence’s “Free Paper” exhibition, hosted by Austin Green Art. It was an activist exhibit – Randy Jewart was strongly encouraging, if not requiring, people to sign the ForestEthics Do Not Mail petition. They want to create something similar to the “Do Not Call” registry, which lets you opt out of telemarketing calls. With a “Do Not Mail” registry, you could opt out of hardcopy junk mail, which we seem to tolerate better than the calls or email spams – but the mountains of junk mail are taking down whole forests, which is one point of Lawrence’s exhibition. The exhibition “onstitutes a body of work that addresses issues of excess and consumerism.”

While journals and personal calendars have provided inspiration in previous series, daily junk mail provides the source material for this exhibition. Lawrence explores her concerns about the extreme amount of paper used in the effort to advertise products and services through direct mail. The paper collected over 395 days (thirteen months) weighs a total of 265 pounds. Free Paper is both a commentary on the disposability of consumer culture and an attempt to introduce order and meaning.

Ana Sisnett

I met Ana Sisnett just after she arrived in Austin in 1983. She was very smart and very kind, and we immediately became friends. We crossed paths over the years, and in the 2000s when she became executive director of Austin Free-net, I joined the Board of Directors and, for a time, I was President of the Board. It was wonderful to work with Ana – we talk about building the digital divide; she wanted to blast it out of existence. She understood that digital access would have growing relevance to social and economic justice, and no one was more passionate about justice.

Here’s what I told the Statesman: “She was passionate and powerful in her support of people who are traditionally underserved online. Some people just want to make the system work the way that it should. She was one of those people.” Her daughter Meredith said “She was always willing to teach anyone all that she knows. She was an international teacher of love.”

Resources for hacking consciousness

Clifford Pickover posted at Twitter the url for a very rich web site rich with resources for exploring consciousness… audio and video from Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Tim Leary, Huston Smith, Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex Grey, our pal Mark Pesce, et al. Quote from RAW:

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Also a great quote from Alan Watts:

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.

Note that there’s also a Bill Hicks video page.

Cory Doctorow’s best practices

Cory Doctorow once told me he had a pile of book contracts and writing projects in queue, and I asked him how he managed to produce so much (and blog at boingboing, too) – at the time he was also employed as online activist for th Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was just disciplined – an early riser who committed a daily couple of hours to writing before jumping into the fray.

For the science fiction trade magazine Locus, Cory’s documented the current state of his best practices in Writing in the Age of Distraction.

When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

Whole Earth redux

I’m psyched to see that some, if not all, of the Whole Earth Catalog‘s archives have been published. Whole Earth inspired me throughout my adult life, and led me online via The WELL – I bought my first computer and modem because I found out Stewart Brand and the whole earthers were online. I wanted to hang out with ’em, and that did ultimately happen. I found myself writing for Whole Earth Review and helping edit The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog. When Whole Earth Magazine ran out of funds several years ago, I exchanged email with Danica Remy of the Point Foundation Board and contributed some thoughts about potential web strategy. She was talking then about placing more of the articles online. She and the rest of the board kept the faith and got it done. boingboing reported that all the publications are scanned and online, though the site says “the collection of that work provided on this site is not complete — and probably never will be — but it is a gift to readers who loved the CATALOG and those who are discovering it for the first time.” Okay by me – I still have most of the hardcopies. If you haven’t read Whole Earth before, suggest you take an afternoon to browse… you’ll be amazed how current it all seems. Note how much the reviews look like blog posts – not an accident.

Truth to Power

Rebecca MacKinnon tweeted a pointer to Ai Weiwei’s Truth to Power, a Chinese blog. This links to an interview posted in Chinese and English.

Simon Kirby: Your criticisms of the Olympic Games are not reported in
the official media, but your blog remains online. What is the purpose of
your blog?
Ai Weiwei: I do my blog because this is the only possible channel through
which a person can express a personal opinion in China. No newspaper,
magazine or television channel would ever present your argument or ideas. I
am the most interviewed person in China, even domestically, and yet even if
I say something it cannot be published here: so I am talking to myself – it is
ridiculous. So I felt that a blog might be a good way to create one forum in
which to open one’s mind. Yet every time I sit to write I still hesitate: should
I do it? What will the consequences be?

Reminder that we take so much for granted in the USA.

A pretty unlikely early adopter

Clay Shirky just got some interesting ink (to use a trad media term) in the Guardian UK, which compares him visually to Michael Stipe of REM and quotes him re old media: “2009 is going to be a bloodbath,” albeit one that “may produce greater industry clarity.” [Read it here.]

The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it’s acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that’s it for newspapers. What we saw happen to the Christian Science Monitor [the international paper shifted its daily news operation online] is going to happen three or four dozen times (globally) in the next year. The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.