Digital Reality | Edge.org. An essay by Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. What’s important about digital fabrication: assemblers, social constructs, … More in here than I’ve encountered elsewhere, from one guy. He’s obviously thought about this a lot.
I’m leery of Hitler comparisons, given the observation that political discussions on the web inevitably devolve into parallels between whatever and Nazism, and Trump reminds me more of Berlusconi, but this paragraph from a New Yorker article, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump?mbid=social_facebook, gave me pause:
He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.
I remember when Republicans were vociferously against any form of national identity card in the US; it smacked of Europe in the 30/s. But apparently the same Repulicans insist we need it now to avoid fraud at the ballot. Am I missing something, again?
1. Dialog boxes that congratulate me when, for example, an update is installed. As far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t have to do anything, so why congratulate me? It’s really the developers’ perception of the amount of effort the computer just went through. Perhaps it should say “Thank god, we didn’t fail”
This quote from BoingBoing encapsulates what I was talking with dB and Calder about back east:
“We have given rise to a race of post-human, immortal, uncaring superbeings, called transnational corporations. We humans are their gut-flora, tolerated so long as we help them get on with their metabolic processes, but treated as pathogens when we threaten their well-being.”
In https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us Steven Poole argues against the coercive anti-rational implications of the Nudge thesis. I remember reading Sunnstein’s “Nudge” years ago, and how it opened my eyes to the possibilities of inducing rational behavior on a societal scale. Since the book came out, as the article points out, Western governments have embraced its policy suggestions, in some cases hiring “choice architects” to create policy such that the general populace “did the right thing” by default.
Not far from here to Lessig’s “Tweed-ism” primary thesis. In fact, we might be seeing the breakdown of this in the surging candidacies of Sanders and Trump, as described by Clay Shirky
Gang of Four: Apple / Amazon / Facebook / Google Scott Galloway, Founder of L2 | DLD16 – YouTube.
Whirlwind tour of the state of tech, with some astounding numbers flying by. Summary: winner-takes-all, companies opting out of nations, but not providing the necessaries.
Interesting that Apple decided to get rid of the visual fakery in their look-and-feel, but when I use the fake keyboard it sounds like a typewriter. They should leave the ding in for carriage returns and the zip for line feed.
My friend in New Zealand called the other day, and the first thing he asked: “What’s going on over there?” Good question, and part of what he was talking about was our inability to do anyhing meaningful about gun violence, despite the huge amount of publicity that has accompanied evens in the last couple of years: mass shootings, police shootings of black men, “terrorist” attacks …
The NPR show “On the Media” had at this question this week, and pieced together a series of separate ideas into a coherent story that persuasively lays out why things are the way they are, and how they might be changed. One of those radio shows that has you sitting in your car after you arrive where you’re going.
I think it partly answers my New Zealand friends’ incredulous questions.
Years ago, I wrote a piece called “Lurch” (actually, I got as far as implementing a study for the piece). In it, a DSP chip runs self-modifying code starting from whatever’s in the contents of it’s memory in a sandbox, provided with an external audio input (hooked to an AM radio) and an internal one (hooked to a simple sinewave oscillator). It evolves according to a “goodness” measure provided by a MIDI continuous controller value. A performer sits and drives a mod wheel up and down in response to how well (s)he likes what the hardware is spitting out.
In performance, it usually starts with no audio out, then manages to spit out a few clicks, and, encouraged by the performer, maybe manages to output a munged version of the input signals over time. There’s a recording of one performance here which amazingly spat out the internal oscillator signal practically from the start.
Anyway: I ran into this on CDM today, and it reminded me of this. A performer/builder constructing sound from scratch; the tension of the performance has to do with whether or not the performer will be able to coax out the sound on the fly by constructing the hardware. She’s going for a known result, unlike Lurch which always comes up with something different (when it works at all – early versions blew up the DSP chip in a literal quick puff of smoke by generating illegal instructions).
I still remember one of the responses to the recorded performance: someone wasn’t allowed to play it on the family’s new CD player, because the Dad thought it’d blow up the speakers. Rock’n’roll!
20 oscillators in 20 minutes is action sports, comic gold – cdm createdigitalmusic.