Alan Jacobs

A year of new avenues: a fantastic post by Robin Sloan, just fizzing with ideas. Here are the ones dancing in my head like a vision of sugarplums: 

1. “It’s plain that neither the big tech companies nor the startup financiers are going to produce the tools we need for the next decade. Almost by definition, any experiment that’s truly pathbreaking and provocative is too weird and tiny for them to suffer. They are trapped in their stupendous scale; lucky us.” 
2. “Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.” 
3. “Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging. If that sounds exhaustingly meta, well, yes — but it’s also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the best tool to talk about itself, some internal flywheel gets spinning, and interesting things start to happen.”  
4. “This isn’t a time for ‘products’, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page. Rather, I believe it’s a time to explain as you go.”  
5. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t create a Mastodon account, or that you can’t have fun, percolating conversations there. I’m just saying that it doesn’t represent a sufficiently interesting experiment, because it accepts too much as settled.” 

Currently listening: Van Morrison, Veedon Fleece (one of my favorite records for more than forty years now). 🎵

In Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, he acknowledges that he was wrong to say, as he was perhaps the first to do, that to the social media platforms you are not the customer but the product. Rather, he now argues, the company’s stock is the product; you are the unpaid labor that increases the value of that product.

When I read crypto-bro stories like this one I always think of Yeats: “The rhetorician would deceive his neighbor, / The sentimentalist himself.”

Leon Shamroy, writing in American Cinematographer in 1947:

Not too far off is the "electronic camera." A compact, lightweight box no larger than a Kodak Brownie, it will contain a highly sensitive pickup tube, 100 times faster than present-day film stocks. A single lens system will adjust to any focal length by the operator merely turning a knob, and will replace the cumbersome interchangeable lenses to today. Cranes and dollies weighing tons will be replaced by lightweight perambulators. The camera will be linked to the film recorder by coaxial cable or radio. The actual recording of the scene on film will take place at a remote station, under ideal conditions. Instead of waiting for a day —or days, in the case of shooting with color — electronic monitor screens connected into the system will make it possible to view the scene as it is being recorded. Control of contrast and color will be possible before development.

It is not too difficult to predict the effect of such advancements on the production of motion pictures. Economically, it will mean savings in time and money. Since the photographic results will be known immediately, it will be unnecessary to tie up actors and stages for long periods of time. The size and sensitivity of this new camera will make photography possible under ordinary lighting conditions. Shooting pictures on distant locations will be simplified. generators, lighting units, and other heavy equipment will be eliminated, thus doing away with costly transportation.

This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in translations of the Daodejing points to something that has been worrying me. I want to go father with my investigations into Daoism — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but I keep running into differences in the various translations that are this extreme or even more so. I’m starting to think that I’m either going to have to abandon my Daoist inquiries … or learn Chinese. The latter being a very daunting thought, especially at my age. (If I’m going to pursue any language with an alphabet other than my own, it probably should be Greek — which I know a bit of — or Hebrew — which I don’t really know at all.)