My friend Bruce and I made a run to the local H.E.B. supermarket this evening, chatting all the way about the economy and families and, of course, groceries, and as we were checking out, I made a fond recollection of my Dad, who absolutely loved the grocery store. He would wander slowly through, pondering various items, buying too much of this or that. Never hurrying to finish and leave... he really loved shopping for groceries. Bruce got this immediately: our parents were raised during the depression, and wandering through a well-stocked supermarket with enough money to buy whatever you might need made them feel just incredibly secure. We take it for granted today, but it really meant something to them.
And we probably shouldn't take it too much for granted. Grocery prices are accelerating, and food items you took for granted before now may be out of reach in a couple of years. What would my Dad think if he was here today?
(Coincidentally I met earlier today with Mary Matthiesen of Conversations for Life! about dying... thinking how profoundly your life changes after your parents have died. We take our supermarkets for granted, and we're in denial about death... we don't talk about it. Mary's thinking (and I heartily agree) that we need more conversations about the reality and implications of death. Because we avoid the subject and hide the fact, it's a huge mystery for so many of us, often experienced as something more traumatic than it needs to be - we've all got stories, she says, of the death of a parent or someone we know, and often the experience is pretty terrible. We don't have a framework for it, or a tradition (they're fading). We fear rather than accept the inevitability.
Pondering this as my eyes get fuzzy.
Visits to the grocery store don't leave me feeling terribly secure.
Live Art Blogging from SXSW Interactive 2008
I've been in a bazillion meetings with Honoria Starbuck since we first worked together in the 90s. An artist, she's always brought art media - lately watercolors - and made very striking, powerfully intuitive visual notes. This year she took her art to SXSW Interactive, and she's captured the watercolors she produced in a book available via Lulu Press. Whether you were at SXSW or not, this is a great book for your coffee table (and your more flexible brain). PDF download is free if you want to preview. Also check out Honoria's Livejournal for more art.
Obviously Arthur C. Clarke was a huge influence on anyone who paid real attention to science fiction over the last few decades. I read Clarke for years, but (like many) I was more influenced by Stanley Kubrick's more poetic interpretation of Clarke's 2001. I read about the film as it was in production and made a commitment to see the full-blown Cinerama version when it was released. My friend Pinky Arnold and I hit the road that summer, thinking we would drive to San Francisco for the summer of love, but were waylaid by beer-guzzling pals in Flagstaff, where we had many adventures before returning to Texas, our California dream unfulfilled. One thing we did accomplish, though, was a Sunday drive to Scottsdale, Arizona with our late friend Bill Morton. We saw 2001 at the Cinerama theatre there. In the year 2001, I wrote a remembrance of that trip for ReWired, called "2001 Blues." I just re-read it and made a few corrections. It's not well written - until recently, my approach to writing was casual and undisciplined. It's slightly interesting, at least, as a consideration of 2001's plot and characters. I don't believe an intelligent machine like the Hal 9000 was ever possible, though Clarke was famous for the accuracy of some of his speculations about the future. Not much that Clarke predicted in 2001 came to pass... we still haven't found evidence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, and we haven't build machines that truly think and are aware, and we haven't flown to Jupiter, mined the moon, or launched commercial space ventures, though we're close to the latter.
Clarke has a final book in press, co-authored with Frederik Pohl, called The Last Theorem. There's also a film in development of his novel Rendezvous with Rama.
Plutopia!
If you're in Austin Monday night for SXSW or otherwise, check out the Plutopia bash at Scholz Garten, 1607 San Jacinto. This most interesting of SXSW evening events is a collaborative gathering of two camps that normally don't pitch tents on the same terrain - green/sustainability advocates and techies.
Plutopia is the name of a collective including futurist, artists, technologists, and green activists that are aligned in their understanding that a sustainability economy is emerging and inevitable, and sustainability will be mediated by technology. If we're to opt out of business-as-usual and rething community organization, building, food production, etc., we'll be experimenting and finding alternatives. The Plutopia event at SXSW (where "Plutopia" was a mashup of "pluralist utopias") is an explosion of art and entertainment that has, as subtext, a creative consideration of possibilities. Bill McKibben will talk about economy, ecology, and community - the subjects of his book, Deep Economy - and The Heather Gold Show is a conversation about "opting out." The live premiere of producer Maggie Duval's Lance Van de Kamp Show is happeniing, too, featuring His Excellency Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There'll be installations by Austin Green Art and The Robot Group. We'll also have performances by pioneer electronic composer Carl Stone, David Demaris, London's Intimate Stranger. And there's more (check out the site). Not sure how we filled the vessel quite so full...
Maggie Duval coordinated the production of this cool little commercial for our big Plutopia event at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a tech/futurist/art/green collective that Derek Woodgate and I instigated. It's turned into a smart mob with crew attached.
Marc English
The latest issue of the Austin Chronicle has a great Marc Savlov profile of my friend Marc English, designer extraordinaire. The quote below has one thought, though I just messaged Marc I think he's really the Joe Strummer of design. (I'm not sure what that means, but I don't know what "Stanley Kubrick of design" means, either. Maybe he's the Marc English of design?) Whatever the case, every time I visit Marc's studio, I feel very down the rabbit hole.
His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. AustinThomas Pynchon Wiki
filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him "the Stanley
Kubrick of design." He fairly burns with passion for his life and work,
and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a
conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and
experimentalism, and his work with Criterion meets at the dirty
crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and
the bottom line, the movement of "product," the allure of the dream
made cardboard, laser-encoded plastic discs, at midnight, beneath a
full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest.
When it was first released, I bought and started reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, then stopped reading for almost a year (okay, I get distracted). I recently jumped in again, and at the rate I'm going, I expect to be through sometime before I move to a nursing home (in case you haven't looked, it's over a thousand pages long, and brilliant - you want to savor it along the way).
Meanwhile I've just discovered the terrific Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which has a section dedicated to Against the Day. This is a huge relief. I've assumed I would have to read the novel at least twice, the second time researching as I go. Not as time consuming as the work you have to do around Joyce's Finnegans Wake, but still pretty challenging. Now I figure I can just refer to the wiki as I go.
Five sci-fi scenarios
MSN Tech & Gadgests has a slide show presentation of sci-fi scenarios "that will come true" : biometrics (already true), space tourism (already barely true), the holodeck (unlikely as shown on Star Trek, but VR environments using holography are likely), and domestic robots (already true, care to Roomba?) There's one more: "self-aware computers." That's what the headline says, but the text below says "...machines driven by artificial intelligence will, within 15 years or so, be handling many routine tasks." Hello? "Artificial intelligence" is not the same as "self-aware computers." Computers already simulate intelligence without being "self-aware." The whole self-awareness thing, Hal 9000 style, is extremely unlikely, though predicted by very smart people. Nobody's smart about everything, and my real difficulty with this is that we don't know enough about "awareness" to know how to create it in a computer, which is essentially a bunch of switches. How we get from switches that simulate logic via sophisticated human-generated programming to a state of "self-awareness" I don't get. If we make enough maps, and we make them increasingly sophisticated, do they become "the territory"?
Tesla Rock!
Very cool idea: using a Tesla coil as a guitar amp. (Thanks to Adam Rice, who posted the link on Twitter).
Better than freeIn a world where digital convergence is accelerating and all media, all data are increasingly digital, copies are super abundant, therefore worthless/free. In that context, what has value? Kevin Kelly's been thinking about this. He explains that what's "scarce and valuable" is stuff that can't be copied. He talks about "eight generatives better than free" - e.g. immediacy, personlization, authenticity, findability...
These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.