Transitions
Words I try to live by: never waste a transition
I do think that if Trump loses (big if) the GOP will set him up as a patsy just as soon as he’d do to anyone else. They’ll tell us that they remain focused on the same ideology, and it was Trump that was the problem.
I really hope they do. That they refuse to learn anything and bury themselves under a self-erected mountain of cruelty and lies.
Posted to MastodonThis week on my new Dialgoues project, I answered @geoff question back. Can't wait to see what's he got next form.
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/dialogues/what-then-was-the-moment-the-web-clicked-for-you/
This is how some news outlets were reporting the promise of a new technology known as "agents" that could almost predict your next move.
> Next month, you are traveling to Boston for the first time (in arranging the airplane tickets, your agent has already found the cheapest fare, reserved your aisle seat and ordered a vegetarian meal)..., your agent searches a pool of people whose taste is similar to yours, and then recommends three places
Sound familiar?
Source: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/062997firefly-side.html
Posted to MastodonI've been working on a new site, a collaboration with @geoff
It's called Dialogues. And it's not even really a site. It's more of a conversation. We're asking each other questions and posting the responses to a blog, and a newsletter.
Geoff took my first question, and had a great response. You can follow along for more.
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/dialogues/what-was-the-moment-the-web-clicked-for-you/
Posted to Mastodon
I think we need a word for people who repeat fringe chronically online talking points so much that they become indistinguishable from a bot.
Posted to MastodonNovember 7, 2006. Adobe gifts 135,000 lines of code to Mozilla in the form of Project Tamarin, a Javascript Virtual Machine compliant with the still-not-fully-implemented ECMAScript 4. Mozilla would try a few times to incorporate Tamarin into Firefox, but would eventually abandon that idea for performance reasons.
Still, it injected some enthusiasm into adopting more modern Javascript standards, pushing the web forward at a time when it really needed that.
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/footnotes/project-tamarin/
Posted to MastodonYou are not Steve Jobs
They have aspirations of being Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs, for all his bullshit, was obsessed with making products that actually worked and selling them to people who wanted them.
It’s telling, I think, that while a lot of modern business types I’ve spoken with, read interviews with, whatever, have obsessions with being Steve Jobs and the fantasy that being Steve Jobs provides, his biopic only made $4.4 million dollars, because nobody actually gives a shit about Steve Jobs, they just want to be as successful as he was.
Steve Jobs made Apple one of the biggest companies in the entire world by making sure that his devices were pleasing and easy to use, were must-have lifestyle products, and he catered, very heavily, to artists
On Birthdays
I’ll tell you what I think about birthdays.
I quoted from Interface Culture by Steven Johnson recently.
He also once said this in an interview (https://web.archive.org/web/20080724194127/http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2006/07/20/a-conversation-with-steven-johnson-part-1/)
"Someone — and come to think of it, it’s probably me — should go back and track all the core ingredients of today’s Web that were visible at Firefly circa 1996."
That's what I'm working on now. It’s taking me in all sorts of directions.
Posted to MastodonCool URLs Mean Something
Earlier this month, MTV News abruptly pulled their site off the web without warning, eliminating a virtual archive of pop culture news stories that date back to 1997.
But URLs actually do mean something. The hyperlink is important. We should try and preserve it.
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/cool-urls-mean-something/
Posted to MastodonIn Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig muses about the intersection of art and technology, and what is lost when the two diverge and we seek out only the cold refuge of science.
> We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all
I think today, the personal web is where I see art and technology merge. There is a lot of possibility in that.
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/footnotes/artists-and-technologists/
Posted to MastodonThe Power of Doing Nothing
A State Department friend of mine once gave a briefing to [Lyndon] Johnson. The subject was a Latin-American country where it looked as if one of our military juntas was about to be replaced by a liberal non-Communist regime. Johnson was distraught. ‘What, what,’ he cried, ‘can we do?’ To which one of his advisors—whose name must be suppressed, though his wisdom ought to be carved over the White House door—replied, ‘Mr. President, why not do nothing?’”
-Gore Vidal, interview, 1969