Futures
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Notes From An Echo Chamber
Words of wisdom from dotcom entrepreneur, billionaire, Ayn Rand fan etc Mark Cuban: You can find any type of discussion group across the Net that is finite enough to make you a hero. It might just be three people, but in that group, you’re your own David Koresh. And I think that gives people a false sense of wisdom. And I think that’s kind of a hassle right now. Mark Cuban, What I’ve Learned, Esquire >>>
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Meta Blog
A room where bloggers blog about blogging, the Bloggercon conference, San Francisco: The weird thing about live-blogging a conference is that you are multi-tasking on many levels. You are in a room with a laptop on your lap, typing away about what you hear and see. You might snap a digital photo of your fellow participants. But when do you stop blogging and join the discussion going on? And how do you read all the other blogs that people are writing who are sitting right next to you? – Michael Glaser, Mediashift >>>
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The New Game of Life
Fancy joining in a consensual hallucination? Will Wright, creator of the Sims, joins the jostling for supremacy by the different tech and media sectors, their battle for the living room and every other space in which media consumers, producers, participants may soon find themselves. He argues that games have the potential for subsuming almost all other forms of entertainment media. Personalized computer games will eventually recreate the world in our image, in our various images: They will learn what we like to do, what we’re good at, what interests and challenges us. They will observe us. They will record the… >>>
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Patent cupidity
From the Economist’s latest survey of patents and technology: The granting [of] patents “inflames cupidity”, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just. – The Economist, 1851 in The Economist, 2005 >>>
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Beating the Event Horizon
Interviewed by Phillip Dodd for BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves last night, novelist William Gibson talked about the difficulties of writing in an age in which history has its finger pressed down firmly on the fast-forward button – not a cliché in 1984 when it appeared in Neuromancer – with no letting up in sight. Gibson wanted to set Pattern Recognition, his latest novel, in the present. He thought that he’d become ‘a little bit too slick at doing the present-trends-transmogrified-into-an-imaginary-future thing.’ But how to catch it, fix it down on paper, a fictional present in a real present which won’t… >>>
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A Splice of Mice
Mickey isn’t the only mouse trying to wriggle out of the clutches of the masters of code. – Animation World Network Canada last week refused to grant a patent for a genetically modified mouse. Unlike the US, EU and Japan, Canada denies that Harvard’s scientists invented anything when they manipulated mouse genes. Its Supreme Court says the university doesn’t deserve a patent – at least not until the politicians have had a chance to think the ethics of biotech over. – National Post As with Mickey, business concerns slam into public concerns here. It doesn’t make much business sense for… >>>
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Off Switch For Big Media
It’s the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly, argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that there’s been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying. Big media’s next step will be to employ hacking techniques against peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Then, as consumer PR hits rock bottom, the corporates will introduce their own pretty peer-to-peer systems. With corporate peer-to-peer – two incompatible ideas – likely to fail, big media will increasingly concentrate on media projects, like blockbuster… >>>