3 months ago
- Spacewar as a parable is almost too pat. It was the illegitimate child of the marrying of computers and graphic displays. It was part of no one's grand scheme. It served no grand theory. It was the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters. It was disreputably competitive ("You killed me, Tovar!"). It was an administrative headache. It was merely delightful. Yet Spacewar, if anyone cared to notice, was a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use:
- It was intensely interactive in real time with the computer.
- It encouraged new programming by the user.
- It bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display.
- It served primarily as a communication device between humans.
- It was a game.
- It functioned best on, stand-alone equipment (and diarupted multiple-user equipment).
- It served human interest, not machine. (Spacewar is trivial to a computer.)
- It was delightful.
- In those days of batch processing and passive consumerism (data was something you sent to the manufacturer, like color film), Spaccwar was heresy, uninvited and unwelcome. The hackers made Spacewar, not the planners. When computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over. We are all Computer Bums, all more empowered as individuals and as co-operators. That might enhance things ... like the richness and rigor of spontaneous creation and of human interaction ... of sentient interaction.
5 months ago
Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people aren’t going to want to go on living
»Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
1 year ago
This is the pattern of abuse. Your father is manifest superego, if he tricks you or hurts you enough and you don’t trust him anymore, then you can’t trust anything. So you either find a proxy for a superego— a boyfriend, a religion, political ideology, Dianetics— or you recede into the comfort of narcissism. You surround yourself with image and images, you create narratives that pretend to explain reality but really protect your individuality (“I see what they’re up to, man!”) And you rot from the inside out, which is exactly the state of affairs in America. No outside force can touch us, but they don’t need to. They just need to wait it out.
»http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/05/osama_bin_laden_has_been_kille.html
1 year ago
Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” Woolley said to me when I met with him in London. “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.
»Wall Street, investment bankers, and social good : The New Yorker
1 year ago
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
»Douglas Adams
1 year ago
The only thing that will bring it about will be the people’s will, their readiness to pay a price for it,” he said. “Democracy will not be a gift from Mubarak or Colin Powell.
»A prophetic New Yorker article from 2004
1 year ago
But for all the attention and money these apps and Web sites are getting, adoption has so far been largely confined to pockets of young, technically adept urbanites. Just 4 percent of Americans have tried location-based services, and 1 percent use them weekly, according to Forrester Research. Eighty percent of those who have tried them are men, and 70 percent are between 19 and 35.
»New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30location.html?_r=1&hp
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