Comments on: Once upon a time on the internet

By: sastian

sastian — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:22:30 +0000

I’m vowing a remake. Although I’ve threatened this for the past year, today i put a stake in the ground. but this time with a twist. So lets put the Creative Commons thing to the test. I’m starting a googlezon doc, email me if interested in collaborating.

By: সহেলী

সহেলী — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 23:46:32 +0000

Yeah, I think I’m with Tim.

By: Τιμόθεος

Τιμόθεος — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:05:51 +0000

I’ve decided to go the other way.

By: Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:37:43 +0000

Whoah what’s with the single T? Is this like a 2011 thing? Well, in that case, you can call me Robn.

By: Mat

Mat — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:04:04 +0000

This is my New Year’s resolution; I promise. So far, I’m failing. I have so many thoughts on what’s posted, though, and so many thoughts to turn into posts! But I don’t understand how it’s suddenly February.

By: Saheli

Saheli — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 07:14:03 +0000

The readers also demand more posts that fit the tag ‘Matt Thompson’s voice.’

By: Saheli

Saheli — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:20:58 +0000

“Remember, this was before YouTube. The propagation of video across the internet was still a shaky thing.” This made me laugh out loud for some reason. I remember carefully dowloading and saving flash videos and wmv files to CD so I could spread them around to my friends still on dial up. I’m sure Googlezon was on some of them.

By: John Battelle

John Battelle — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:36:30 +0000

Exactly — narratives rule, especially when you go Far Out. I’m interested in how those narratives can get better in terms of the details, and how to tie them to the Present case.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:16:30 +0000

Maybe the fable vs forecast dichotomy tells us something too: if we really want to imagine Big Changes in the deep future (Batelle's post begins by contrasting big predictions vs simple, easy forecasts), even a decade away, you've got to check your reality principle at the door and go for broad-archetype storytelling. Even when you think about how we describe our whacked-out present, it's in the terms of these skewed storytellers. I mean, sure, there's some homage paid to forward-thinking nonfiction futurists like Marshall McLuhan or Karl Marx or Daniel Bell, but we keep coming back to Orwell and William Gibson and George Lucas and Blade Runner friggin' Minority Report because those were the stories that gave us the language with which to imagine the future, and typically -- because they had freer rein to imagine wilder alternatives -- turned out more accurate than either a 10-year-forecast or our conservative Epcot Center future. NB: This is not an abdication in any way of my "science fiction has no monopoly on ideas" stance, because the other storytellers we use to imagine our present include folks like Homer and Proust and David Foster Wallace, etc. It's the richness of imagination, is the key thing.