Infinite vision, 30# of red partridge, East German domains, bunnies in peril
These past two weeks, I’ve been slowly pulling together an article on humanity’s exponential appetite for creating and consuming images. That set me down a path of thinking about technological revolutions in general.
Trying something new, these links are on the theme of revolutions & technology and are largely not new[s]. I hope they’re useful brain fodder! As always, I’d love to hear what you think.
Self-promotion
As We Become Cameras — Wearable cameras will be ubiquitous. We’ll barely notice.
I broke my streak of publishing an essay a week because of this guy. It turns out digging into the history of time and the arriving era of truly ubiquitous, always-recording cameras takes a couple weeks to tackle.
(It’s also so anxiety-inducing to respond to Susan Sontag, one of the greatest cultural critics of the 20th century. I hope I did her some justice.)
Macro: Revolution
[Video] All Technology Revolutions Are The Same: Installation →Bubble→Crash→Deployment
Economist Carlota Perez has theorized that at least since the 18th century technological revolutions follow a predictable, bifurcated pattern: wild hype/speculation, followed by bust and long golden era of deployment. Investor Fred Wilson (whose entire investment thesis is built on Perez’s thinking) interviews her here and lays out the theory in its simplest form.
There is such unbridled optimism to this kind of thinking that needs tempering: in particular, the robber-barons of Phase 1 generally are the same to benefit in Phase 2, one way or another. Also, we’ve seen multiple of these boom-busts around a technology rollout in the past decade. How does society change if this cycle continues to be compressed, with a boom-bust happening in months instead of decades?
Nonetheless, a compelling way to look at technological [r]evolution.
The French Revolution as told through the menus of food eaten by the revolutionaries.
www.cabinetmagazine.org • Share
Micro: Domain names
We the networks | The Economist
ICANN, the organization which administers domain names (a key part of the web’s circulatory system) is becoming a true international body like the UN. If it works well, it would be a remarkable move towards cosmopolitan, extra-geographic governance. What else could we rule this way?
Political revolutions since the invention of the Internet (or DNS, to be specific) leave behind strange artifacts in the form of defunct top-level-domains.
Particular highlights:
.dd - East Germany, which ceased to exist before ever used
.tp - East Timor, registered in absentia on behalf of a jailed resistance leader
.su - Soviet Union, still living on as a bastion of spam and Russian botnets two decades later
basementgeographer.com • Share
Inspiration
"Rain, Steam, and Speed" by JMW Turner (1844)
I love this Turner painting from the beginning of the rail boom in England (NPR-breathless discussion). It is such a gorgeous representation of human smallness in the shadow of the technologies we create.
There are three subjects in this painting, all rendered in mad impasto: the train, the rain, and a tiny hare in the lower right corner, attempting to leap out of the way. Pro tip: We’re all the hare.
Diversion
Talka makes perverse musical use of the speech synthesis features of your iPhone. A wondrous little sound toy that was a good distraction from all this heady revolution business. (My good friend Mike Jacobs is behind this.)
Long read
[PDF] Distribution of the Sensible: Aesthetics and Politics - Jacques Rancière
For reasons beyond my comprehension, the dense Benjamin essay was the most popular link last week, so here’s some more continental philosophy for you!
Rancière’s basic idea in these relatively recent essays is that art (aesthetics) defines what is and isn’t possible by defining what is and isn’t visible, Aesthetics are our means of understanding the sensible world, and those apportionments define our public discourse. This PDF is the juicy highlights.
By Matt Hackett
I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.
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