The band’s manager, Jason, contacted me through his brother Michael (with whom I went to college) and asked me to direct a video they were planning that referenced a section of the book Infinite Jest. The Decemberists are my favorite band, and Infinite Jest is my favorite book. This was tantamount to telling me I had just won two simultaneous Powerball lottery jackpots, on my birthday, which was also Christmas. Thus, my response to him was that, although I was pretty sure this was an elaborate dream I was having, if it were in fact real, then yes, I would be interested.
The video’s kind of cute and all, but it gives you no sense whatsoever that the Eschaton scene in IJ is a tour de force — plus, the video just doesn’t capture the scale of the thing, the way that Eschaton really is a world for the ETA kids, and its unexpected collapse a strangely genuine catastrophe.
Trying to peer inside a crumpled ball by simulating the process in three dimensions is “mathematically nasty,” a problem that quickly pushes lab-grade computers to their limits, said Menon. And trying to reverse-engineer structure from patterns revealed upon unfolding just isn’t possible. What happens in a crumpled ball stays in a crumpled ball.“If you’re not talking about simulation, but mathematical understanding of these things, that’s one step harder,” said Menon. “We understand the underlying equations of the mechanics of a thin sheet very well. Those have been around for a century. But solving those equations, to produce a physical understanding, is difficult even in simple cases. If you’re talking about a structure that owes its properties to 1,000 or more of these structures, interacting in complicated ways, that’s asking more than we can do now.”
Lanier’s mother [before her death in an automobile accident] had recently bought the family a new house, in El Paso. But it burned down before Lanier and his father could move in. Lanier suspects, without any specific evidence, that the fire was set by vandals. Broke and unemployed, Lanier’s father moved the family to an empty parcel of desert in Mesilla, New Mexico.In Mesilla, Lanier’s father allowed him to design their new home. Lanier, who was eleven, chose a geodesic dome, and with his father’s assistance he drew up blueprints calculating the angles of the frame, plus plans for a squat, cantilevered spire that he envisaged as the entrance. (“Clearly a subconscious phallic expression of some kind,” he told me.) But the project proceeded slowly. “We’d get enough money to pour the foundation for one part of the house, and then, after a few weeks, we’d get enough to do another part,” he recalls.
During the first two years that the dome was under construction, Lanier and his father lived in an unheated canvas Army tent that was stiflingly hot in summer and frigid in winter. Lanier remembers shivering uncontrollably at times, “like I was having a seizure.” The family belongings, which included his mother’s grand piano and her antique furniture, were wrapped in plastic and heaped together on the ground outside the tent. “We sealed the piano in a bag, kind of,” Lanier said. “It must have sat out there for a year.”
What Jaron Lanier Thinks of Technology Now : The New Yorker.
Lanier’s bio reads like a series of outtakes from The Most Interesting Man in the World ads. I also thought this was noteworthy: “At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: ‘If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?’”
If the connection between publishers and writers splits completely, if they fail to support and defend each other, then both will separately be subjected to the markets’ demand for totally free content, and both shall have very short lives in the long tail. The writer will become an entrepreneur with a short shelf life, in a world without publishers or even shelves. But ultimately, any strategy conceived now is just playing for time as the slide towards a totally free digital culture accelerates. How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries: quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers.
Are books dead, and can authors survive? | Ewan Morrison | Books | guardian.co.uk
Morrison makes many, many claims in this essay, but I do not see evidence for any of them. It’s really just one dystopian assertion after another. Maybe things really will be this bad, but you need to give reasons for thinking so if you want to convince anyone.
And about that bizarre final idea that we should “demand” that writers get paid a living wage: demand it of whom? And who gets to count as a writer? Should I write to my congressman and say, “Because I am a writer, I demand that you pay me a living wage”? And what about painters, sculptors, composers? Shouldn’t they be demanding a living wage as well?
Really, it all just makes me throw up my hands in exasperation. Can we just try thinking of the digital age as one of opportunities as well as challenges? Or must we collapse in a heap of helplessness and “demand” that the political gods care for us?
It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that’ll take some lawyers and time.“The ultimate goal,” Friedman says, “is to open a frontier for experimenting with new ideas for government.” This translates into the founding of ideologically oriented micro-states on the high seas, a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.
It’s a vivid, wild-eyed dream—think Burning Man as reimagined by Ayn Rand’s John Galt and steered out to sea by Captain Nemo—but Friedman and Thiel, aware of the long and tragicomic history of failed libertarian utopias, believe that entrepreneurial zeal sets this scheme apart. One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says. When I ask if this wouldn’t amount to a shareholder dictatorship, he doesn’t flinch. “The way most dictatorships work now, they’re enforced on people who aren’t allowed to leave.” Appletopia, or any seasteading colony, would entail a more benevolent variety of dictatorship, similar to your cell-phone contract: You don’t like it, you leave. Citizenship as free agency, you might say.
‘America needs heroes,’ it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really 'need heroes’? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.
Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace. The problem isn’t just that it’s terrible but that it also retrospectively spoils the original films. George Lucas took the hinted-at mythical, ancient yet futuristic realm of his first films and filled in all the detail like a tedious nerd. He ruined his own creation. It was as if Leonardo da Vinci had painted a speech bubble on the Mona Lisa in which she explained her state of mind. Everything that was magical, mysterious and half alluded to, he now ploddingly dramatised, making it seem dull and trainspotterish. Those three prequels worked like aversion therapy for my addiction to the franchise.
why Gandalf and Elrond were wrong
I’m sure this has been said before, but … I don’t think much of the advice given by Gandalf and Elrond during the great Council at Rivendell. Glorfindel’s suggestion that the One Ring be cast into the sea is instantly rejected by Gandalf, and that rejection is echoed by others, after which Elrond says, “We must send the Ring to the Fire.” But I believe Glorfindel’s idea is by far the best one offered at the Council. Let’s look at the two objections to it, starting with the second, Galdor’s.
Galdor argues that “the flight to the Sea is now fraught with the gravest peril. My heart tells me that Sauron will expect us to take the western way, when he learns what has befallen.” But Galdor speaks as though there were just one “western way.” In fact there were many. It would indeed have been foolish to try to take the Great River all the way to the sea, but why not try a more northerly course? At this point Sauron’s military might was concentrated in the South, where he had not yet even been able to overcome the armies of Gondor. The North was beyond the reach of his power, especially since the Nazgûl had been unhorsed and rendered temporarily powerless. Again, Elrond speaks of “the western road” as though the Road itself is the only way, but we know it isn’t: earlier in the story Frodo and the other hobbits see Elves moving Westward through the woods. Moreover, Aragorn had just led the hobbits across a largely uninhabited region with nothing to trouble them except the Nazgûl; why shouldn’t he lead them back roughly the same way? They could be at the Grey Havens before Sauron could re-deploy the Riders. Certainly this would be far less risky — almost infinitely less risky — than marching into Mordor and heading straight for Mount Doom.
So Galdor’s argument fails. What about Gandalf’s? The great wizard says, “It is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one.” One might dispute whether taking a million-to-one shot at ending a great menace forever — remember that, as Gandalf says much later in the story, other evils will come, since “Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary” — is really superior to taking a much more likely chance to avoid it “for a passing age of the world.” But I will waive that point. Let’s agree that Gandalf is right and they must think of the longest term. Are they doing so wisely?
It is clear, I hope, that the chances of getting the Ring to the sea are far, far greater than getting the Ring into the Cracks of Doom. But once the Ring is dropped into the sea? Gandalf only says, “There are many things in the deep waters; and seas and lands may change.” But this is vague. How likely is it that any of those “many things” would find the Ring in the overwhelming vastness of the ocean? And in the highly unlikely event that something did find it, what are the chances that that would lead to its being returned to Sauron? And if indeed “seas and lands change,” is there any reason to think that they would change in ways that would lead to Sauron’s recovery of the Ring? They might well change in ways that would bury the Ring still deeper. And again, we have to consider these possibilities in light of the vastly more likely, indeed certain, perils that accompany any attempt to enter Mordor and get to Orodruin.
Yes, in the end things worked out, but only because, as Gandalf hints near the beginning, “there was more than one power at work” in these matters; not because Gandalf and Elrond were wise counsellors. Their counsel was poor indeed. Too bad Glorfindel didn’t win the day.
P.S. Some of my tweeps are getting upset by this. Don’t take it too seriously — think of it as an exercise in playing’s Melkor’s advocate. I really do understand why they made the decision they made, but I think the alternatives are passed over too quickly. Gandalf and Elrond say they do not offer a “counsel of despair,” but it certainly looks like they that’s what they offer; and I think they should spend some time explaining why they believe it is impossible to resist Sauron in any other way.