what i want to see...

0what i want to see....

i want to see more mom and pop shops.

i want to see more flea markets and more swap meets.

i want to see pollution-free, automated power plants.

i want to see automated, generic factories that can make a million exact copies or a million different variations in the same amount of time.

i want to see every piece of menial human labour that still has to get done relegated to the past by reliable, inexpensive or free technology.

i wanna see more clubs meeting up to talk about ideas and communicate.

i want to see pioneers living on the moon and then mars and then a thousand other worlds.

i want to see a vast, interconnected public transportation system.

i want to see people putting forth their energies with the intention to make something better for the world.

i want to see artists painting and sketching in the streets and the parks, and children under trees, reading.

i want to see strangers mingling with each other, both teaching and learning and always sharing the experience of life and how we all perceive it differently.

i want to see real, regular people in politics, instead of politicians.

i want to see multinational corporations evolving into benevolent institutions of education and social sustenance, or fade away into the past, no longer applicable.

i want to see underwater cities and cities in the clouds.

i want to see generational space vehicles, heading off to see what might be out there.

i want to see a technology to nullify the danger of nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, and i want to see education and communication and strong community ties and better thought and discusssion given to the social infrastructure to deal with all of these threats in the mean time.

i want to see stronger local governments.

i want to see a more transparent federal government.

i want to see the general populace break free of the influences of the so-called engines of apathy and distraction and take a look at themselves, each other and this world we're all living in.

i want to see the country around me from the top of a mountain and to see the horizon in every direction from the middle of the ocean.

i want to see the earth from orbit.

i want to see a public transit system that includes destinations around the solar system.

i want to see free education for anybody who desires it.

i want to see people who desire it.

i want to see the world as a good world, as it could be.

i want to see if aliens exist, and if they do, i wanna see what they're like.

i want to see a cure for cancer and aids and bird flu and everything in between.

i want to see god.

i want to see people who do the work they do simply because they want to, rather than because they have to for whatever reasons.

i want to see more cops and doctors who just want to help people and cooks who like to just like cook and to see people enjoy their food and toymakers who make toys and games simply because they like to see children (or anybody, really) enjoying the toys and games that they produced.

i want to see engineers and inventors who build the better mousetrap to catch more mice, not to market and get rich.

i want to see more hackers and tinkerers.

i want to see the open source model applied to more things than software.

i want to see the solution to the problems.

i want to see m-theory succeed as the theory of everything.

i want to see rechargeable batteries that can be recharged indefinitely.

i want to see waterproof and shockproof electronics.

i want to see neural interfaces.

i want to see independent media explode.

i want to see millions of blogs and independent newspapers and short stories and novels and video shows and movies and audio shows and video games and new sorts of media that haven't even been thought of yet all being shared and adding to this wonderful stew of human culture that we have at our disposal.

i want to see society pulling together to spread the resources around in the best ways for the most people, rather than the abnormal and unnatural concentrations of wealth and power that abound today.

i want to see star trek come to life as a model for social behaviour and structure.

i want to see everybody's crazy ideas, pick out the best ones and stick them all together.

i want to see the ubiquitous exemplification of 'the right thing'.

i want to see a new renaissance.

in all the wrong ways...

you might have heard that bittorrent dot com has announced a new modus operandi--they've partnered with major media corporations to transform into a 'new' legitimate channel for distributing media for money.

there are two problems which spring immediately to mind with this scenario. one--with the bittorrent protocol you need to have a good upstream going where you share the pieces of the object being downloaded that you already have with the other people downloading that object (so everybody shares with everybody, all at once--that's how download swarms work), which adds to your bandwidth usage. and two--the effing industry powerhouses are still the ones getting in there and setting the prices and restrictions (and other unnecessary middleman-type behavior).

nobody (well, almost nobody) has a problem with paying the artists they want to support, but who wants to support these tycoons who've had the industry cornered and divided for longer than any of us can prolly remember? i don't.

i think that at one point in time these middlemen (a comparison i'm fond of) were a necessity. you really couldn't get out and touch the whole world unless you had some help. please bear in mind that this in no way excuses some of the practices which evolved in these industries, but this is another matter, i s'pose.

the bittorrent protocol allows for user moderation in a sense. it's self-feeding (almost like a turbo). when a file becomes more popular (and more people are downloading it) then it becomes much easier for everybody to find other users to swap packets with ('cause everybody's downloading the same things) and start getting all the pieces they need ('cause everybody's downloading the same bleeding things).

media of small or infrequent interest is prolly better off with more traditional (http/https/ftp/etc) protocols, but in pretty much any situation where multiple people are going after the same file(s), bittorrent is the modern-day supreme protocol for the job. there's just nothing better (yet, anyhow). makes the most efficient use of bandwidth, runs hashes for verification, supports resumes, etc. and the more people going after it, the better the whole system will work for everybody.

but the question still begs--if this magic protocol is running the show, these aggregator sites for torrents are creating the jumping off point (with search capabilities), the artists are making the media, and it's our (the consumers') bandwidth that's making this a reality, then what do we still need the likes of mtv and paramount for?

there're about six billion creative and vibrant people out there with ideas of their own, many of which have something to say (a few of which are saying it) and the internet brings us all together. what are you going to do now?

--cid

0wn the media distribution channels

what do you do when . . . .

...you find yourself agreeing with a category who hold values that repulse you?

racism is terrible. it's a horrible concept which should never have been accepted, yet by many it is (whether they admit it (even to themselves) or not). judging people on stereotypes is just as flawed an idea, but ignoring stereotypes is not the answer either.

stereotypes bear a lot of similarity to demographics. one's a word used to describe a science trying to make assumptions about people based on their measurable or observable characteristics (or the various 'groups' to which they belong). the other's a word used to describe a person trying to make assumptions about people based on their measurable or observable characteristics (or the various 'groups' to which they belong).

for better or worse, demographic analysis/stereotyping does work at least in a limited and incomplete fashion. does it work all the time (or with everyone)? no. no way. does this make it right? depends on what you're using it for. should you make decisions based these practices? nope.

when you're making a decision, you want to make the best decision possible, right? that's what demographics are all about, too, right? efficiency. used in marketing, you want to get the biggest return on your investment--get the right message to the largest body of people who will be the most sensitive to your message.

similarly, in day to day life decisions you want to make the best decision you can--and that means taking into consideration all of the information you can acquire about the situation, weight that against the sum of your knowledge about how the universe functions, and then pick the most advantageous choice.

the trouble comes in from two vectors--people making uninformed choices (or choices based on the wrong set of statistics) - and - the behavioral influences of 'being in' a particular 'group' or demographic.

i'll address the the first one first. when you go back to my previous example, and start running certain statistical assumptions through that filter, you can see them ground to logical fallacies (or poorly made decisions based on incomplete or improperly weighted criteria). racism unfortunately jumps back to mind.

making a decision about somebody solely on the colour of their skin or the layout of their dna is a prime example of a stupid decision. there are too many other factors, too much variance within that type of a grouping of a given population to make any kind of good choices. simply put, that's just not nearly enough information to judge a person on.

the other kind of trouble i see is the alteration of behavior based on influence of a group. in other words, changing your behavior (whether restricting actions or causing expansion of actions) in order to 'fit in' to a certain group (or tragically because somebody else placed you in a group and now you feel that's what's expected of you).

and actually, these practices aren't necessarily bad either. if you choose to make certain alterations to your conduct in order to align yourself with a group or idea you believe in and agree with can be both healthy and admirable. but when the group or idea you're trying to emulate is not a good one, you can damage yourself and those around you.

i guess the trick is to know as much as you can, sort it out as logically and level-headed as you know how, and then pick the best choice. easy enough, right?

i know.

but all we can do is keep trying. when we change, let's change for the better, okay? this post is for those who are trying. trying to be better. trying to make the world a little better.

the group that i associate myself with is the group of the like mind--those who are trying.

--cid

0wn yourself

a convergence of ideas + capabilities

a convergence of several underlying memes, methods, and tools...

• rapid development tools
  
  
  
  • libraries
    
  • templates
    
  • intuitive ide's
    
  
  
• information retrieval tools
  
  
  
  • heuristics
    
  • fuzzy logic
    
  • pattern analysis
    
  • indexing
    
  
  
• proliferation of metadata (indeed, the metadata abounds, and grows daily...)
  
  
  
  • networking
    
  • social networks hooking people up
    
  • collaboration tools
    
  • peer to peer
    
  • distributed computing
    
  
  
• open source projects
  
  
  
  • volunteer work accomplishes everything
    
  • various reasons for volunteering
    
    
    
    • the challenge
      
    • desire to help the cause
      
    • desire to use the finished product/service
      
    • to enrich mankind
      
    • to learn
      
    
    
  • various levels of participation
    
    
    
    • users (when users send feedback, the development process is enriched
      
    • users mass use by a lot of people flushes out many circumstances for discovering bugs, etc.
      
    • developers contribute new code to the project
      
    • artists contribute media (video, audio, images, etc..)
      
    • debuggers check the existing code for errors
      
    • everybody helps spread the meme by word of mouth (telling
      
    
    
  
  

i've been thinking, right? sites like ebay, and craigslist, and all the match dot coms all work by hooking people up, right? everybody on there either is looking for something or has something to give, yeah, and these sites just play middle man/connect the dots (whichever you wanna call it).

what if that sort of approach was used on things that make up everyday life?

open source/cooperation/volunteer based cars, satellites, power, food, housing, electronics, etc... kind of a crazy thought, i know, but it seems like it would work (if you could get enough people involved to cover all the required inputs (resources, time, knowledge, skills...)).

--cid

[ 0 w n y o u r s e l f ]

star trek as a model for social behaviour

lessons from star trek

so, i'm not sure about this guy, yet, but this page brings up some very good points that i have long expressed myself, though probably not as eloquently as steve here.

it's an interesting read.

--cid

0wn yourself