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Martin Spindler recommends stories worth reading on QUOTE.fm. Sign up to follow Martin’s recommendations.
Martin is from Berlin. You can find Martin’s tweets at @mjays and website at mjays.net.
We had some war veterans suggest that Al-Qaeda could put some bombs into our lamps and I was blessed by a right-wing christian woman for my idea. Just smile and breathe. They’re your customers too.
This stereotyping would not be so terrible were it not usually married to a high-pitched tone of moral alarm and indignation. This tone transmits a large and important cultural meme: The idea that when women choose to have sex they should be meting out some sort of cosmic justice; ordering the universe by rules of honor that are essentially fair—instead of, say, procuring their own sexual satisfaction, or merely to ward off boredom.
If Instagram is backing down, that’s great. They should just say so, rather then blaming their customers for misunderstanding.
I don’t understand the construction of what I can only describe as innovation factories. What Google Campus and other such large buildings do is to cut people off from that serendipity. Places where lunch can be had at a desk because the café is downstairs and the coffee machine is only 3 steps away actively disengage people from the area they work in.
First, it has to change our relationship to time. Then it has to change our relationship to space. And, crucially, it has to change our relationship to one another. Individually, each of these transformations can be unsettling, but if you hit all three? Panic!
Finally, and least concretely, energy experts agree that even if there were more investment in research, a price on carbon, and some kind of regulatory framework, we would still lack one vital thing: sufficient facilities to demonstrate and test new energy technologies. Such facilities are typically too expensive for private companies to build. But without a practical way to collectively test and optimize innovative energy technologies, and without some means to share the risks of development, alternative energy sources will continue to have little impact on energy use, given that any new te[…]
Economist Richard Florida calls this a clear case of path dependency -- or, as Gathman put it, (quoting Willliam Faulkner), "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
This is a result of the network’s inherent illegibility, its tendency towards seamlessness and invisibility, from code to “the cloud”. Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless. The job, then, is to make such things visible.
Cars are useful, but driving in a city is kind of like trying to thread a needle while wearing a boxing glove.
And it is between these points, when one generation is ramping up and figuring out what it means to be a native and another is rapidly being left behind that there will be friction, where your actions from decades ago will be judged by the values of the day.
“Don’t spend your time chasing down copycats; make them chase you.”
When you demand nothing less than perfection, and enforce that demand with the threat of death, you are only inviting subordinates to lie to you.
This is sort of the electronic equivalent of a stack overflow, except instead of crashing my program, it burns down my house.
We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn’t even look as cool as Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy[…]
The maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments were a collection of lines and shapes that we overlaid with human intelligence. Now, as we've seen, a map is a collection of lines and shapes with Nick Volmar's (and hundreds of others') intelligence encoded within it. It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality ser[…]
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