Posts by Tim

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009:

His first words are “How much time do I have?”

Fake Steve Jobs explains his non-thinking behind the new Apple tablet:

I started with the big questions. What is a tablet? Who will use it? And for what? If the tablet were a tree, what kind of tree would it be? And what of the word tablet itself? Ta is a Sanskrit root, for “gift.” Blet is Proto-Indo-European meaning “to be perfect while lacking usefulness.” Will you write on a tablet, or just read from it? Or will you just buy it and put it on your desk and look at it a lot and never use it at all? Or will you maybe carry it around and put on the table in restaurants to show the other humanoids in your tribe that you are more advanced and wealthy than they are, and they should fear you because you have powerful magic that they do not understand? You see what I mean? What is the anthropology here? And what about the ergonomics? Can you mount it on a wall? Will it have a shiny surface so that Macolytes can adore themselves as they use it in public? (Yes. It must.) The tablet must look and feel not like something that was made by man — it must feel otherworldly, as if God himself made it and handed it to you.

Can’t wait.

I love stories like these, from poet Robert Creeley:

In the late forties, while living in Littleton, N.H., I had tried to start a magazine with the help of a college friend, Jacob Leed. He was living in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and had an old George Washington handpress. It was on that that we proposed to print the magazine. Then, at an unhappily critical moment, he broke his arm. I came running from New Hampshire

As a follow up to my first linkpost on this topic, I’m adding an exhibit: Apple’s celebrated “Knowledge Navigator” late-80s concept video. Watch it, then come back.

Here’s the thing that’s always struck me about this video. Technologically, it’s wonderfully optimistic. (I love it when the professor flubs the name of the researcher he’s looking for, and the computer figures out the right name, like a Google-search correcting spelling.)

But socially, it’s incredibly conservative. Basically, it treats the computer interface as a synthesis of secretary, research assistant, and wife to the prototypically WASPy-dude professor. He doesn’t even have to learn how to type! Imagine how short his Acknowledgements page will be! And his mom still nags him about his dad’s birthday party! Oh, will life’s problems never go away?

The assumptions are that 1) a breakthrough communication technology and 2) probably quite a bit of time passing won’t produce any social changes at all. It won’t create any new problems, either. It will simply make life easier.

We’re actually usually pretty good at forecasting technological change. But we’re astonishingly bad at predicting social responses to it. This is why most past attempts to predict the future strike us as unintentionally funny in retrospect: it’s the mismatch between their creators’ social imagination and our own — or rather, between the constitutive blindnesses of their creators’ social imagination and our own. We see and say things that they can’t, and (often enough) vice versa.

Nilay Patel, on the whole Apple/Google/AT&T/App Store-avaganza:

I don’t think there’s any good reason the most interesting things about the App Store right now should be procedural details and the number of submissions each reviewer handles a day — somewhere around 80, if you can believe it. I’d rather be talking about new and exciting ways to integrate the iPhone and other mobile devices into my daily life — I’d rather be talking about apps. And the more I think about it, the only way Apple can get back to that is by doing what it should have done in the first place: allowing developers and users to bypass the App Store and sideload apps onto the iPhone themselves.

Every single App Store submission story we’ve covered boils down to the fact that Apple is the single point of control for the iPhone ecosystem, and it’s simply not fast or flexible enough to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation we’re seeing on the platform. Like it or not, what’s happening on the iPhone is leading the entire tech industry, and Apple should be doing everything in its power to enhance that, rather than miring itself in scandal and regulatory investigation. If that means releasing some control over the platform, then so be it — especially since allowing sideloading would make almost all of these problems simply disappear.

See also #8.

Children’s picturebooks for the iPhone/iPod touch.

See Winged Chariot press — I think it’s UK only for the moment.

H/t Alan Jacobs

Just for the record, I totally nailed OutKast’s “B.O.B.” as song of the decade a month ago. I wrote:

OutKast’s B.O.B. is the best because it says YES to everything we are and compresses it to pure energy. It’s our Good Vibrations, our Layla.

Robin (who clean-sweeps his tweets) had a nice addition:

Jeez now I’m listening to it again, and like Harold Bloom’s Hamlet, it’s a Total Work. EVERYTHING is in here.

Here’s Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman with a more expansive explanation:

“B.O.B.” is not just the song of the decade– it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title– aka “Bombs Over Baghdad”, a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later– is only the start of it. In “B.O.B”‘s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear Andr

Quick-hitting today, but here’s an important axiom from Dan Visel at if:book —

the social use of digital media is more transformative than the move to the digital itself

Visel’s responding to Eric Harvey’s “The Social History of the MP3“:

The first widespread music delivery technology to emanate from outside industry control, mp3s, flowing through peer-to-peer networks and other pathways hidden in plain sight, have performed the radical task of separating music from the music industry for the first time in a century. They have facilitated the rise of an enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely, without following the century-old rules of capitalist exchange. Capitalism hasn’t gone away, of course, but mp3s have severely threatened its habits and rituals within music culture. There is nothing inherent or natural about paying for music, and the circulation of mp3s > through unsanctioned networks reaffirms music as a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright. Yet at the same time the Internet largely freed music from its packaged-good status and opened a realm of free-exchange, it also rendered those exciting new rituals very trackable. In the same way that Facebook visually represents “having friends,” the mp3s coursing through file-sharing networks quantify the online social life of music by charting its path.

P.S.: This observation from Harvey’s essay is a great coda to my “How the iPod Changed the Way We Read” —

This might be the most profound social shift of the mp3 era: hoarding and sharing music changed from an activity for eccentrics to the default mode of musical enjoyment for millions.

Henry Jenkins has a solid post on the value and limitations of Twitter. It has two parts, descriptive and normative. Here’s the descriptive part:

Someone recently asked me, “If McCluhan is right and the medium is the message, what is the message of Twitter?” My response: “Here It Is and Here I Am.”

And the normative:

My first impressions were correct that Twitter is no substitute for Blogs or Live Journal. And in so far as people are using it to take on functions once played on blogs, there is a serious loss to digital culture.

I think you can find a lot to talk about in the descriptive part of Jenkins’s account even if you quibble with the normative part. But there are also descriptive claims contained in the normative account. I want to look at just one slice of this:

Three years ago, when I started this blog, if people wanted to direct attention to one of my blog posts, they would write about it in their blog and often feel compelled to spell out more fully why they found it a valuable resource. I got a deeper insight into their thinking and often the posts would spark larger debate. As the function of link sharing has moved into Twitter, much of this additional commentary has dropped off. Most often, the retweets simply condense and pass along my original Tweet. At best, I get a few additional words on the level of “Awesome” or “Inspiring” or “Interesting.” So, in so far as Twitter replaces blogs, we are impoverishing the discourse which occurs on line.

In other words, Twitter acts as a kind of valve, where the energy that would go into 1) writing extended comments and 2) signing a blog of your own gets siphoned off into minimalist links.

I’ll hold off on explaining what I think about this — I’m still formulating it — but I want to note that you could apply this logic to a lot of other kinds of contemporary web discourse, from Facebook “Likes” to Diggs — maybe even things like Instapaper.

There is clearly demand for a minimalist approach to reading and commenting. We like the option of doing “less” and doing it later. Why is this? And what does it change about the way we communicate ideas online?

I fell in love with The Books in 2002, when I heard “Motherless Bastard” from Thought For Food. It begins with an audio sample, a conversation between a father and his daughter, where the dad playfully says, “you have no mother or father.”

“Yeah, I do!”

“No, they left…”

“Daddy…”

And then the hammer falls:

“Don’t touch me, don’t call me that in public.”

That sample was recorded live by The Books’ Nick Zammuto at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Los Angeles. The rest of the track is just an insanely sweet, melancholy, beautiful acoustic instrumental, on cello, banjo, percussion, made just slightly glitchy with some electronic effects. That’s what they do.

In a new interview with Pitchfork, Zammuto and Paul de Jong talk about their process–

NZ: There is a pulse to the material we work with that you can’t find in the mainstream. It’s this unattended documentation of culture. The productions are not made for recording any kind of history, but there’s all this cultural documentation in there anyway.

PDJ: You can’t find it anywhere else. You can’t make it up, you can’t shoot it yourself. If there’s three seconds of beauty in an hour and a half tape, the search is worth it.

— and their new album —

NZ: We’ve been really into hypnotherapy tapes. We’ve been into a lot of spoken-word religious material in the past– just these deeply ego-ed voices. But, with hypnotherapy, the ego disappears– it has this relaxing effect independent of what someone’s saying. We’re interested in that un-self-consciousness. In a bizarre way, it keeps things grounded. There’s always this element of not knowing where you stand that you can hear in almost any voice. It’s a universal quality.

And we have a vast collection of these tiny little musical fragments– like analog synth demos– that are very dated, but we never knew what to do with them. It’s really hard to use them without sounding like genres that everybody’s familiar with. But I think we finally started to crack the code and figured out how to use them in a way that satisfies us. Like, we have this incredible collection of brass sounds, so we kind of have a brass section going.

PDJ: Yeah, it seems to be developing more into the sounds from traditional pop-rock history– like, actual drum sounds. We’re starting to make sense of what to do with something that’s reached a critical mass.