Wearing a set of goggles that distorts reality isn’t the first thing to come to mind when I imagine freedom.
Make no mistake, Google Glass is a fascinating innovation that has serious transformative power. Hopefully it can have significant benefits for the world that are both fun and educational.
Still, hearing the suggestion of “a future where you spend more time focused on the people you are with and the experiences you are having” seems entirely incongruent with the product being discussed. When spending time with people, isn’t it easier to focus on being with them when you are actually with them?
As for experiences, not everyone is obsessed with their mobile phones when they live their day-to-day lives. Plenty of us actually spend time doing things without being tethered to our devices all day. I know it’s hard for some that are immersed in tech to comprehend this, but it’s true. Seriously, I have friends that do all sorts of things that don’t even involve a plug. Crazy, I know.
To be clear, I’m no luddite. I love technology. I’m especially enamored with it’s abilities to empower people to spread information and unify around common ideals. That said, I fear this quote represents a darker side to the future we are headed towards. One in which we are disconnected from each other, and as a result, humanity. Maybe it’s not either/or… one can only hope.
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Josh Stylman / Racing the Sundown: The Glass Collective: See More, and Farther in response to the Glass Collective Announcement particularly this quote:
=== I do believe that Google Glass will change the way people interact with their world but to claim that something strapped to your face will be less distracting to others than a phone you can put away is absurd. ~future glasshole (via msg)seems to me the most obvious initial apps are professional - jobs where currently people use radios, blueprints, dashboards. maps etc. |
Little Inferno is an iOS game where all you do is burn stuff so you can buy more stuff to burn. No timer, no score, no winning. Just burning stuff.
update: and it’s great!The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate … One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it.
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Paul Ford Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven - Businessweek (via fred-wilson)true. |
Three eras of currency
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation. Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook
As the art of reading after a certain stage in one’s education is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive condensation of thought.
But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than a loss - a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed - he or the pupil.
In every university there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered to his slow reception. They grope for the links but the links do not come. Bowditch said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words “it is evident…” he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.
William James - The Principles of Psychology
America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans. Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs. And also managed to crystallize the experience of seeing your entire planet at once:
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
(People: April 8th, 1974)
“America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans. Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs.”
The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.
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Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, speaking to GQ for a profile of Netflix chief Reed Hastings. This will go down as the year that HBO either made the right choice or the wrong choice not to go after the stand-alone Netflix model. Netflix is coming out swinging with House of Cards and then Arrested Development. HBO continues to hide behind big cable. (via parislemon)good to see someone trying to create real competition in this market. |
