Box070: Eight Weeks Later

08.06.2228.06.22

DS071-e221:

It’s been a long old time, a two-month break from the blog. That’s the longest break I’ve had in a number of years. Truth is, I’m just extremely busy and never alone long enough to turn reading into writing or to think of things. I find myself in work-related conversations pausing or struggling because my brain is in the wrong gear and there’s too much to process.

I was away the last two weeks which gave some respite from the desk and the screen. Remarkably I really didn’t do any work. Just listened to some articles, rode my bike and hung out with kids really. About the best type of thing I could hope for. And now, the sun and warmth are returning which makes short training rides outside in London worthwhile. Having spent all winter training for racing, then getting Covid right at the beginning of the racing season I was quite demoralised but in April convinced myself to jump back on a pretty heavy training regime which seems to be paying off.

I think people on Instagram are sometimes disappointed that almost all my content there is cycling-related. Cycling is inherently visual so the medium leans toward it while as my work, (despite being design) is inherently text-based and so leans towards Twitter. I can’t fight these tendencies. Speaking of, they’re killing Tweetdeck for Mac next week and that’s going to seriously mess with my workflow.

I’ve said before about how I spend the week before a post just dumping links and notes into a form and then tidy it up before publishing? Well, imagine that for eight weeks. This place was an absolute mess so I just deleted most of it rather than try and remembe why I thought a particular link or sentence was insightful. I will leave you with this quote from Dan Olson of Line Goes Up fame from the Ezra Klein Show, presumably because I transcribed it by hand from the audio so I don’t want to have wasted that pain. In response to ‘What are Web 3 people actually trying to build?’:

Basically, if you go into any group and press them on that question, you’ll get a different answer and it may range from something that’s relatively cogent and focused about, well, ‘we’re trying to build decentralised systems of governance so that we could have a version of Twitter that is owned in fractional portions by every single user.’ And that’s a coherent goal regardless of whether or not you think it’s a feasible goal.
But then you go into a lot of others and it’s just a lot of wash about ‘well, we’re building something new.’ And it’s gonna be different and we’re gonna push corporations off the Internet. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s not a lot of coherence to it. There’s not a strong vision. There’s just a ‘vibe.’ There’s just an energy there about being involved in something that feels like the cutting edge regardless of whether or not anyone’s able to vocalise it. And a lot of crypto enthusiasts will point to that ineffability as the thing that get’s them excited. Oh we’ participating in something that’s so new that’s so radical that it’s difficult to even give voice to it.

Is novelty bias now the steering force of change? (You know what I just found out that the NYT offers transcripts of all the shows anyway. Oy.)

Small Stuff

Nick Foster on Design Thinking. I’m trying to make words like ‘intuition’ and ‘imagination’ ok in business settings so.
New Public ‘The Future is Small‘ featuring case studies of ‘smaller’ social apps that serve specific social groups including Strava which is probably my most used app.
James Bridle on plants that extract metal from the Earth. Put this next to the plants that can imitate other plants, even plastic ones, from last week.
The chip shortage is such a mundane but powerfully entangled artefact of the stumbling block of the future. How will we all live in the metaverse when car manufacturers are having to scavenge chips from washing machines?
I’ve discovered and have been enjoying Johannes Kleske’s blog, Seedlings, which gives some pretty good rigorous underpinning to futures studies. The latest one is about images of the future and the thinking of Fred Polak which is, you know, right up my alley. It’s nice to see people come back to blogging.
A Field Guide to The Living Internet from Udit Vira. Not presented in the most readable way but this idea of building out a regenerative future starting with the Internet as the fundamental infrastructure is smart.
Here’s a video of a swarm of drones navigating a forest.

Something I’ve learned over that break is about kitchens. I don’t mess with other people’s kitchens. I don’t like cooking in them and would appreciate if you didn’t ask me to. A kitchen is like a reflection of someone’s mind. You don’t want to get in there and start moving things around. Alright, love you and speak next week.

BOX045: Really, really this time.

04.08.21

DS045: No simulations or silliness. Keeping it straightforward.

The Metaverse is a broad, undefinable milieu in which you take your disease-ridden social network, add some home-brew virtual reality and more forms of data surveillance, call it an experience and trap people in it. It’s similar to ‘ecosystem’ but attempting to become more encompassing.

It’s starting to encroach into the narrative space of technology, a useful shibboleth for a range of things that no one really knows what they’re for. For example, I recently heard the idea being bandied about by some vacuous shill Shoreditch gallery owner trying to convince students to mint their work as NFTs and let his gallery take a cut or, as he put it, to ‘join the metaverse.’ The fact that none of those components even add up let alone make any moral sense demonstrates how useful a cover something like ‘metaverse’ is for naked profiteering. Now the ‘Metaverse’ is apparently coming according to those most interested in promoting it and has started to appear in keynotes and TV bits as the next apparently inevitable wave of ‘paradigmatic’ technology.

As the article there points out, nebulous prognosticating is a common tactic of boosterism and hype. I spend a lot of time looking at it in regards to so-called artificial intelligence but we also saw it in the Internet of Things for example, and most of us still don’t have smart fridges and smart locks; the case is too difficult to make. Despite that, the snake oil, Bitcoin bros are already moving in, buying and selling land that doesn’t exist, for example, but calling it ‘the metaverse.’

When you predicate your entire model on endless growth, but you’re hitting a ceiling like Facebook is, you sort of have two option: First, you could fundamentally reform, addressing and acknowledging the dependence people have on you to become a more wholesome piece of public infrastructure that enacts its claims of connecting people, information and debate by ejecting organisations that capitalise on your existing structure to profit, create hate and division for political ends or outright scam people and reform around a more open and accountable framework. Or second, you could say that a thing called the ‘metaverse’ is coming and put loads of articles out for your shareholders to read about how you’re going to make trillions of dollars.

The metaverse is season 5 of Lost. The writers are rudderless and throwing in hook after twist, time travel after reincarnation, just trying to hold on to the viewing figures while refusing to admit they actually have no idea of the actual plot.

I was thinking about this yesterday with Strava. I use Strava a lot for cycling stuff, and Strava keeps adding features to try and make it a social network – things like group challenges, meetups and so on. Strava is huge, it probably has most people who are somewhat serious about running, cycling and a load of other sports as regular users but all these people already have social networks. They’re already plugged in to whatever platforms they can confidently exercise self-loathing on so they don’t need another one. Strava has a lot of bugs and problems in the way the things I actually want – fitness data – are interacted with. Last year, they introduced a paid model and lots of people declined to sign up, largely because what you’d be paying for (lots of fitness data crunching) is done better by various free plugins. Rather than fix the broken bits and innovate on the things Strava users want, they tried to pivot to a social network.

So here’s my thought, I can’t tell if it’s just because I’m older and slightly less dumb or maybe it is a genuine shift of the status quo. I really don’t think people have much more patience for feature-loading; adding gimmicks and hype to services to stimulate growth and higher profit. We’ve just seen a massive international effort to turn the tables on a virus, where science and innovation actually saved lives, tangibly and really. Watching multi-billionaires gloat about the metaverse they’re building from their spaceships suddenly undermines their own self-importance. I’m sort of cautiously optimistic (increasingly also by the ad-war of personal security going on between Facebook and Apple) that these charlatans are going to have to take their problems and the problems they’ve created and profit from seriously. Really, really, this time. I just don’t think the consumer patience is there for more bullshit while whole nations burn and genocides are humoured.

Short Stuff

Some heteromation here from The Boring Company. Techcrunch got hold of the manual for people working on Musk’s Loop including readily prepared answers to questions about the system. Behind every bombastic charlatan is a well-oiled PR machine.
An alternative to the metaverse – miniverses in Moving Castles from Trust. Also particularly interesting for the idea of kitbashing CGI objects.

Ok, love you, speak next week.

Box 030: Brief Delusions

03.02.2103.02.21

DS026: Using some geometry nodes to adjust materials.

Get you a paragraph that can be targeted by the html for special styling and slip it in on the second edit when you realise the text is all over the place because you forgot first time. This is that paragraph.

It’s almost definitely a short one this week. I’ve been chin-stroking more on this question of the diegetics of Covid-19 and while was listening to this BBC podcast on delusions I came across the idea of parasocial relationships. This is the feeling that you have a social relationship with characters from TV, radio or other media. The notion has been extended in recent years to include celebrities and then social media personalities. In fact, social media lend themselves particularly to parasocial relationships because they encourage perceptions of intimacy that aren’t real or authentic to increase engagement. Parasocial relationships came up in the context of delusions for their relationship with paranoid delusions of being watched or followed, particularly the spate of these delusions that have been informed by reality television.

Now interestingly, the podcast was quick to point out that firstly, almost everyone engages in some form of delusion and it’s only rarely that they become harmful or debilitating: Delusions of grandeur can help us with confidence and self-esteem while paranoid delusions can make us cautious and prevent potential social harm. Parasocial relationships are particularly important to children where they contribute to identity formation and learning, for example.

Of course parasocial relationships have been seized upon by marketing and PR whizzes as a way of hawking stuff through podcasts, vlogs and particularly social media personalities and there’s ongoing study about the long-term effects of this barrage of attention-seeking para-friendships on individuals, particularly when in isolation as many are right now.

Anyway, there’s more to this I feel. Like speculative parasocial relationships where the foundation of that relationship is impossible. Think Roger Rabbit (or the dark, adult alternative, Cool World) or Hatsune Miku.

Short Stuff

Told you it’d be brief this week. I’m really behind with other things, I have some marking to do, a lecture series to write a website to build and then all the admin stuff that comes with this job.

I got a GoPro for Christmas and have been (on the rare occasions where I’m going out), experimenting with it. It’s not as easy to use as they make it seem. You can get passable footage quite quickly but to get something HD film-worthy is hard. I’ve been trying out a bunch of different mounts. This one from the weekend I used a grill mount (you bite on it) which seems to work better since the head is a natural gimbal. There’s also a problem with brightness flickering which I read can be solved by using faster HD cards so I’m going to try that when I next go out, probably hill climbing on Friday.
Benque on his almanacs.
Best explanation of Gamestop I saw.

Sorry, I have a bunch of open tabs for things to read and tell you about but I’m just swamped atm. There’s also a bunch of your names in reminders up there ↗ because I owe you emails or whatever. Love you and speak next week.