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November 11, 2007

Good reads: William Gibson; Falafel trail; On Britney Spears; 'TheWire' guy; Fossett not found;

William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview

What are the major challenges we face?

Let's go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?

Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag.

After Halloween, our 10-year-old wore a rejected part of his candy-trek costume around my house all night -- a tunic with wide shoulders and a narrow front with large geometric, vaguely oriental symbols in gold paint, bought at a drugstore.

In the kids' network, I've seen him build his character over time, dressing in ever more kingly outfits and grander swords. This grand sandwich board was bringing that persona into reality.

"You look like an avatar," I said.

"Avatar?" He brightened. He knows that word.

Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?

People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we're going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven't really figured out quite how porous it is.

Resistance is futile. Facebook is Borg. Life online is Twitter: Broadcast a message to your friends and fans, 140 characters max.

The Twitter FAQ:

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

Baffling sentence, since the layer of information Twitter adds is everybody's answer, at all times, to the timeless question, "What are you doing?"

Tech author Shelley Powers, who is quoted by the Times' Twitter story (The Global Sympathetic Audience), blogs something more:

I'd rather be alone. I really would, rather be alone.

You are what you eat: FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here. At CQPolitics,

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

On the bright side, your grocery purchases with those supermarket rewards cards also tell the cat food companies to send you coupons.

Do you love me yet? What exactly is Britney Spears trying to tell us?

Smart rock criticism by Ann Powers:

There's no self-realization on "Blackout," nor is there celebration. There's only addiction -- to sex, to powerful men, to exhibitionism. If this is how Spears wants to be perceived, she's even more troubled than the tabloids tell. If it's what those entrusted with her best interests think is most enticing -- and if the marketplace proves them right -- then we're all hooked on some pretty nasty stuff. I wonder, will we ever be able to kick it?

Talking hard: Exclusive Interview with 'The Wire' creator David Simon The former Baltimore Sun reporter:

... Our social framework is "Can I get I promoted now, can I make a buck off it?" The entire country right now is like a pyramid scheme with no other ethic or social framework behind it....

There’s money in 'No Child Left Behind,' there’s money in letting neighborhoods go down in the inner city to the point that they’re uninhabitable, inhospitable to normal life and then buying office real estate and 'rebuilding America.' They can’t fix the culture of the ghetto but they can sure can buy off the real estate and make a profit off it.

Without a trace: Online Fossett Searchers Ask, Was It Worth It? At Wired.

The Internet search of satellite images for Steve Fossett may have been, in hindsight, a colossal waste of time.

He has not been found.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:29 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Thelandsmiths on November 12, 2007 2:29 AM