There is nothing more awesome than this. NOTHING.

Rarely does a video make me literally shout for joy. At 1:10 and 2:38, this one did.

That’s the Flyboard from Zapata Racing, and I WANT ONE.

Their official video, with more astounding jetpack/dolphin action (if anyone can translate the French, it’s much appreciated!):

More footage here.

(via Tor.com)

Designing for the cities of the future

Kent Larson offers a fascinating glimpse into new technological and design possibilities aimed at making the cities of the future more accessible, more environment-friendly, more space-efficient, and more liveable:

Yes, please!

The transformable apartment, in particular, seems to be an idea that’s catching on. Hong Kong architect Gary Chang has already made it a reality.

(via TED)

Why libraries matter, cont’d: “Permanent, unlimited, free”

Ursula K. Le Guin. in a must-read post, makes the case for why libraries matter in the digital age:

Libraries are essential because they keep permanent collections — even of unpopular books, even of impermanent, seemingly valueless items — a samizdat from 1940, a newspaper from 1933. Ebooks, including self-published ebooks, would become part of permanent library collections, which could then join the worldwide network of electronic libraries.

The existence or disappearance of a library’s permanent collection isn’t a sexy issue. But it’s absolutely basic to access to information and to the continuity of human knowledge. […]

The goal of the public library has been to give anyone who needs or wants it permanent, unlimited, free access to books. All books.

The goal of the public library in the electronic age is what it always was: to give permanent, unlimited, free access to books — print books, ebooks, all books — to everyone.

She outlines the threat libraries face from stingy corporate publishers:

For a long time most Americans agreed on the importance of the free public library to the well-being of the community and the country. A publisher then would hesitate to be seen deliberately making things hard for libraries. But reactionary ideology has weakened the idea of community; muddy thinking has convinced people that information on the Internet is free; and libraries are being conveniently misrepresented as mere outmoded warehouses for print books. Readers may assume that libraries don’t and won’t buy and circulate ebooks.

In fact, despite the expense of constantly changing technologies, the non-support of voters bleating anti-tax mantras, and the aggressive tactics of corporate publishers, the great public libraries have kept abreast with the electronic age, and they very much want to buy and circulate free ebooks.

Since corporations don’t consider human rights or needs, only corporate profits, they feel free to use tactics that infringe, ignore, or flout the rights of readers. They are in fact practicing commercial censorship. They are keeping books from us.

If the part libraries play in distributing ebooks gets “frictioned” into insignificance, it will be easier for the corporations to take further control of what ebooks you personally can obtain, how long a book will stay on your reader before you have to pay for it again, and whatever else they want to control. If they see profit in doing any of this, they’ll do it. If small publishers try to sell the books they don’t sell, the big corporations will eliminate the small publishers.

And cross-file this under “Books are made of win”:

If ebooks largely replace printed books, and the public libraries are decimated or eliminated as a permanent resource open to everybody, we may be able to access books only through the corporations. It will not be easy to get a book the corporations have decided is unprofitable, outdated, unnecessary, or unpleasing; it may be very difficult to find out whether a text has been cut or tampered with; there may be no way to know that a book ever existed.

Much more here, and as always, worth reading.

(Video via Ebooks for Libraries)

Books are made of win, cont’d: “A momentary stay against confusion”

Clay Shirky says:

[A] book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

The social piece of reading is a kind of penumbra. It’s something that forms around the text and after the fact. The feature of “highlight this passage and immediately see how many other people have highlighted it”? I mean, ZOMG, no. I want my own thoughts rendered as the most recent entry in the constant, long-running popularity contest that is the Internet – in real-time. Pick it up and do anything you like with it. Tell me later who else liked it. Show them to me, introduce them to me, whatever — not right now. Right now I’m reading.

Shirky writes more here — part of a fascinating series on the future of reading (for good or ill).

Nick Carr adds:

We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

I’m sure neither author means to suggest that reading physical books is boring. But it does require a qualitatively different kind of attention than the restless browsing that typically happens on the Net, or the multitasking that our new devices make all too easy.

(h/t The Dish; image via CEN)
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4/15 Update: I see The Dish has now put up a nearly identical post — ironic, considering a previous Dish link to Shirky’s piece (but emphasizing a different topic) inspired mine. Let the record show that I got to this one first.

Books are made of win, cont’d: Chip Kidd gets skanky

…and gives a hilarious and enlightening talk on the creation of some of his iconic book covers:

My job was to ask this question: “What do the stories look like?” [...] We bring stories to the public. The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true. But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something. They all need a face. Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into. [...]

The book designer’s responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. I want you to look at the author’s book and say, “Wow! I need to read that.”

And just as I’m watching this and thinking “That’s another thing that’s lost in an e-book,” Kidd agrees: “Try experiencing that on a Kindle!”

Don’t get me started. Seriously. Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.

Watch the video, though. It’s a lot funnier than the serious quotes I’ve pulled out.

More reasons why books are made of win here.

(via TED)

Technology versus serendipity

Google announces Project Glass:

Like Sherry Turkle, Bob Mondello, and Pico Iyer, Linda Holmes is pushing back against our increasingly “all tech, all virtual, all the time” society:

Convenience is one thing, but I’m not looking for technology to reduce risk to the point where nothing can ever happen to me except the things I’ve already thought of.

Inefficiency exists for a reason. I don’t want to know before I leave exactly when to arrive somewhere so that I don’t have to stand in line, because when I stand in line, I might talk to people. I might take three minutes and think about nothing at all. I might actually look around. [...]

There is a weird sense in which this technology treats everything unintended as if it is unwelcome: It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of figuring anything out for yourself. It advances the notion that we are entitled to a noncorporeal, completely nonpersonal presence we talk to like a person (“Where’s the music section?”) so we don’t have to expend the mental energy to suffer the indignity and inconvenience of potentially taking a wrong turn in a bookstore. We’re not talking here about turn-by-turn navigation that keeps you from heading for Boston and winding up in Charlotte. We’re talking about stamping out every trace of inefficiency in pursuit of a life where every right turn that would most directly have been a left becomes a problem to be solved. [...]

I’m not sure I intend to have a life that’s quite as frictionless as Project Glass envisions. I don’t mind getting lost, and I don’t mind messing up, and I don’t mind walking into the business section instead of the music section, even if it does turn out to be a lot of how-to books by guys with big teeth. I’m not looking for the end of unpredictability.

Yes.

Read the rest here.

Update: YouTuber rebelliouspixels — who’s probably right — thinks Google’s goggles will end up more like this.

“Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved”

Psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle expresses perfectly some of the qualms I have about our plugged-in, always-online, invasively interconnected lives:

The transcript is worth quoting at length (boldface mine):

We expect more from technology and less from each other. And I ask myself, “Why have things come to this?”

And I believe it’s because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we’re designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we’re not so comfortable. We are not so much in control.

These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn’t solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It’s shaping a new way of being.

The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we’re having them. So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Now it’s: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. The problem with this new regime of “I share therefore I am” is that, if we don’t have connection, we don’t feel like ourselves. We almost don’t feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated.

How do you get from isolation to connection? You end up isolated if you don’t cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we’re not able to appreciate who they are. It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely. And if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they’re only going to know how to be lonely.

There’s much more, and the whole video is worth watching. And this seems like an apt place to point out that Kate Bush saw this coming:

A previous post on solitude and the need to unplug here. And I’ve also previously mentioned Bob Mondello’s provocative post on E.M. Forster’s prescient science fiction story “The Machine Stops,” which is worth reading here.

Miscellany, and an apology for long silence

I’ve been away from this blog recently, trying to devote some more time to fiction writing (but not yet quite comfortable enough to talk about that personal creative process, as I know others do). Working on this blog has been, and continues to be, an interesting writing experience — but a reactive one, a curatorial process of finding and commenting on cool things that others have said or done. It’s rewarding to be plugged in to the cultural conversation on the net, adding my humble two cents; but it’s been a while since I’ve made something of my own, and that’s something I’d like to spend a little more time doing. If you’ve been following my posts, I’m very grateful for your time and attention. I’ll try to keep it up as best I can.

Meanwhile, some things of interest:

1) Gregory Benford writes about the future of space exploration, arguing that the time has come for NASA to give way to commerce-driven space initiatives. Neil deGrasse Tyson (whom my family and I just saw giving a brilliant talk at the American Museum of Natural History) offers a different take on NASA and the vital importance of government funding for exploration. (Tyson videos have been popping up all over YouTube recently, eloquently presenting and sometimes re-editing his arguments: some choice ones here and especially here.)

2) A fascinating talk by author Neal Stephenson on our society’s increasing inability to get big stuff done, and why it’s important to revive that sense of ambition and possibility.

3) Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie has a must-read essay on “The Storytellers of Empire,” asking America why “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.” She makes a compelling argument for empathy, connection, and identity beyond ethnicity: “The moment you say, a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories. Worse, you’re saying, as an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She’s other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness. Write them out of your history.”

4) NPR host Bob Mondello points to a science fiction story by E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” that eerily predicts our (sterile?) virtual culture, our overreliance on technology, and what that says about who we are.

5) Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova asks: “what if we engineered [...] selective attention purposefully and aligned it with our emotional and mental well-being?” She calls our attention to Ruth Kaiser and the Spontaneous Smiley Project, which invites us to see — and photograph — the smiley-face configurations that are literally everywhere around us. Kaiser makes the case for optimism on her blog, and quotes some inspiring Dr. Seuss passages as well. You can also watch her TED talk here.

And now I’m off. Have a great day, wherever you are. Go make something beautiful. Make someone smile.

(Photo via Do Something)

Books are made of win, cont’d: Information needs hard copies

Jonathan Franzen makes the case for books over e-books:

My problem with e-book readers is that one minute I’m reading some trashy website, the next minute I’m reading Jane Austen — on the same screen. I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That things can be ‘whatever’, depending on the moment. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

And:

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of [my novel] Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing. [...]

“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing — that’s reassuring.

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

Andrew Sullivan disagrees:

Of course, an eBook is likely to have a longer virtual shelf-life than a physical book that will eventually decay or fall apart. Hanging out in some iCloud somewhere, the eBook will be eternal. And also more accessible to readers. There will be no more “out of print”. You won’t have to look for hours in a second hand bookstore to find that obscure tome you really wanted to read (not that that isn’t one of life’s great pleasures – but it’s not Borders, is it?) The very old can be brand new again.

I have to side with Franzen here. Just because information exists in digital form doesn’t mean it’s permanent — in fact, quite the opposite, as many of Sullivan’s own readers point out. One brings up Orwell’s 1984 and Winston Smith’s job revising history to suit the politics of the day; if people relied exclusively on easily-altered digital information that resides somewhere in the virtual Cloud, Winston’s work would have been that much easier. Another makes the crucial point that, with e-books, you don’t actually own what you buy:

Many eBook formats, and e-reader platforms, are designed to permit publishers and vendors to exercise post-transaction control over content. Buy a Kindle and purchase ebooks from Amazon, and guess what? At a later date, Amazon (or the publisher of the material) might withdraw the book — and poof, it disappears from your device. Many of these devices also permit publishers to automatically update previously-sold works. And quite a few of these devices are designed to prevent you, the reader, from ever having effective possession of the underlying file. You can read it on the device, or even on many devices via cloud storage, but you are prevented from getting your hands on a copy of the file that you may archive and secure from subsequent revision or retraction. (And this goes beyond book publishing; Apple, for instance, is well-known for both refusing to publish apps for the iPhone/iPad/iPod ecosystem that offend its editorial sensibilities or are contrary to its own business goals, and revoking previously-published apps, effectively deleting them from customers’ devices).

Ursula K. Le Guin makes a similar argument:

As an author sharing responsibility for the state of my art, I fear control of availability (and of course content) by the corporations. Amazon’s offering only Amazon-owned books for their Kindle reader was an example. Books are not commodities, and readers are not consumers, but the corporations, cultureless, with no ethical guidelines, nothing but their own profit growth in view, will treat them as such so long as they are allowed to. A public kept in ignorance isn’t likely to even notice.

This, a thousand times this. And this ties into my argument — here and here — about the dangers of conducting the activities of the public square on privately-owned platforms. True, the contents of a book may be determined by the author and the publisher, and the dissemination of that content may be controlled by bookstores. But once you buy a book, it’s yours, to lend and copy and share as you please; and the information it contains will never change. Not so with an e-book, where information can be revised and removed for whatever reason, even after purchase.

This is dangerous. It’s true that digital media has made information much more easily accessible; but in some ways, and contrary to appearances, it has also left the user in less control of that information than ever before. Twitter has just shown that it can self-censor as the cost of doing business in multiple countries; moreover, it is perfectly within its rights to do so, and it’s under no constitutional obligation whatsoever to protect free speech, if it chooses not to. And what’s true for Twitter is ultimately true for all the electronic platforms on which we exchange and store information: FaceBook, YouTube, the Cloud, GoogleDocs.

And WordPress. They’re currently very nice people, with fair terms of service; but theoretically, there’s nothing preventing them from revising those terms to block posts or shut down sites that displease the powers that be. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this blog, but I’m painfully aware that — if I didn’t have copies of all my posts saved on my hard drive — the words you’re reading now are ephemeral, and can easily be made to go away. By WordPress, or for that matter, by me — if I decide to edit or delete any posts, or shut down this blog entirely. You don’t own, and can’t keep, these words. There’s no guarantee that this post will stay exactly the same (or even exist at all) when you return to it tomorrow, or next month, or a decade from now. You’re reading these words at my whim, and at the whim of the company that lets me post them. Andrew Sullivan thinks this is permanent? Not a chance.

And I haven’t even really mentioned all the scenarios in which accidental loss of information can occur. If all your data resides online — or is otherwise in digital form — what happens when you spill water on your Kindle, or your Internet connection is shot, or the Cloud servers go down?

For ease of access, e-media is an undeniable boon (and one that’s obviously here to stay). But for permanence, for the preservation of history and of truth, and in order to ensure that control over data does not reside exclusively with corporations, information needs hard copies. That’s something we should never give up. And that’s why we should fight for books to survive.

Read the rest of Ursula K. Le Guin’s argument against e-books here. And more authors who feel the same way here.

(Image via VentureBeat)
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1/31/13 Update: Did I mention that there’s no guarantee this post will stay exactly the same? Well, guess what — it’s not. I revisited it a few minutes ago only to discover that a video I’d linked to, showing Andrew Sullivan’s side of the argument, had inexplicably become — of all things — a compilation of scenes from zombie movies. I didn’t own that video content, and for whatever reason, it changed; I therefore removed the link, thus changing (and diminishing) the content of this post as well. So much for electronic content enduring for all eternity.

Twitter chooses profits over free speech. In other news: water is wet, and 2+2=4.

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? In the victory against SOPA and PIPA, advocates for the free and open Internet successfully fended off censorship imposed by government; now we are reminded that there’s nothing preventing online social networks from censoring themselves as the cost of doing business. From the New York Times:

[T]his week, in a sort of coming-of-age moment, Twitter announced that upon request, it would block certain messages in countries where they were deemed illegal. The move immediately prompted outcry, argument and even calls for a boycott from some users.

Twitter in turn sought to explain that this was the best way to comply with the laws of different countries. And the whole episode, swiftly amplified worldwide through Twitter itself, offered a telling glimpse into what happens when a scrappy Internet start-up tries to become a multinational business.

“Thank you for the #censorship, #twitter, with love from the governments of #Syria, #Bahrain, #Iran, #Turkey, #China, #Saudi and friends,” wrote Björn Nillson, a user in Sweden. [...]

The announcement signals the choice that a service like Twitter has to make about its own existence: Should it be more of a free-speech tool that can be used in defiance of governments, as happened during the Arab Spring protests, or a commercial venture that necessarily must obey the laws of the lands where it seeks to attract customers and eventually make money?

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of “The Master Switch,” said the changes could undermine the usefulness of Twitter in authoritarian countries.

“I don’t fault them for wanting to run a normal business,” he said. “It does suggest someone or something else needs to take Twitter’s place as a political tool.”

Color me utterly unsurprised. As I wrote in an earlier post:

I’ve always found it ironic and a little disturbing that the democratic flowering of free speech that we see on Twitter and Facebook is taking place on a decidedly undemocratic, corporate platform. In a panel on the Internet and the Arab world, [Micah] Sifry and other panelists note this as well:

The role and responsibility of social networks was debated by the panelists, with Sifry saying, “I’m terrified that we’re relying on these corporate entities to enable this kind of activity. It’s very dangerous. There’s really no reason they have to be socially responsible at all. Their responsibility is to the bottom line. Twitter did not have to inform its users that the Justice Department was seeking all of their IP information in this WikiLeaks situation. They’re under no obligation to tell you. How do we get out of conducting vital public discourse, organizing, on a corporate foundation? [...]

We’re all dancing on a rug owned by others, with no guarantee that the owners won’t someday pull it out from under us.

It seems as if that day is sooner than we think, if indeed it hasn’t come already.

So my question still stands: how do we avoid depending on corporations — like Twitter, and, for that matter, WordPress — for our free speech? How do we keep the people’s voices free?

(Update: Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing has much, much more.)

(Image via PC Mag)