Up to a point, John. These things matter as long as you don’t pretend your tastes are achievements. Any idiot with a bank account can buy Criterion Collection DVDs at the local Fnac or, even better, a book containing select quotes from the French New Wave… (via Filmquotes)

Cory Doctorow won't buy an iPad - and we shouldn't

I agree with Doctorow on just about everything he said, except for his view that iPad apps are just the ‘CD-ROM revolution’ redux. There were plenty of great ideas that failed because the technology wasn’t up to it and I believe that touch technology will brings a whole new dimension to the ‘book 2.0’ thing. I even designed an ‘interactive book’ last year at my Master’s with something like the iPad in mind.

That said, the iPad strikes me as a bad precedent. The whole walled garden, app store business model is ultimately more than a business model - it’s a dangerous path to a future in which even books are just something you rent. And when you consider most people’s web browsing consists of a handful of websites, possibly packaged as neat-looking ‘apps’, it’s easy to imagine that five years from now some ‘minor firmware update’ will do away with web browsing, closing the walled garden for good: for I start to feel the iPad is some sort of anti-Internet device.

I’ve read somewhere that the iPad was Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady Illustrated Primer. Well, if you remember the novel in which it appears, the Primer was a super-ebook-like device, designed as a gift for a child of the Neo-Victorian elite, that ends up in the hands of a little girl in a Shangai slum, which the device teaches to become a great leader. The Diamond Age is quite a poignant story of how ‘good’ information technology can lead poor people to do great things, if only those technologies cross the digital divide. So yes, in a way the iPad is like the Primer - it’s an artifact of the Digital Divide - aimed at enlarging it, in fact.

Which brings me to the other disagreement I have with Doctorow’s post: for most people, buying an iPad is not an option that we shouldn’t take. People just can’t. Even in Portugal, which is a fairly decent country by the world’s standard, the iPad’s a luxury. Despite the ease many journalists write about getting one, it does cost more than a pack of cigarettes. And this is why I think the iPad, despite selling millions of units, will ultimately fail Apple’s objectives: it stretches the digital divide too much - it’s no use having a computer so easy to use you granny could have one, if your granny has a hard time paying her medicine. People will get their information somehow, even if in less ‘magical’ ways.

I remember playing with my dad’s CDs when I was tiny, and then at school we’d put our projects on to CD-Rs to take home. But I never really owned any— by the time I was getting into music nobody bought them.

— An article about the CD revival of the 2020s. (via The Null Device)

Which I’m actually unsure if it’ll ever happen. It seems plausible at first, but unlike vinyl the compact disc is actually quite a sophisticated and unstable media. It’s unlikely many discs will survive into the 2020s, let alone players in good working order (this is why you’ll never see a Lomography-style revival of late 90s VGA digital cameras). I think CDs will instead go the way of the floppy disk or the VHS tape: charming pieces of retro plastic.

While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the hipster – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

— Adbusters calls the ‘hipster’ The Dead End of Western Civilization (via Drive-by Blogging).

I may not agree on this overly dramatic tone, as hipsterism must be seen as something aligned with the fact that in a way Art History stopped somewhere in the late 70s. So, in the same way postmodernism means there are no longer vanguardists fighting both the art market and the previous vanguards, youth subversion too became postmodern, ceasing to truly exist.

I don’t even think hipsters exist. There might just be too many obnoxious douchebags, overgrown tweens caught in a loop of consumerism, peer pressure and a fix for vacuous praise, for as long as their parents can support that. Most will hit head-on against a brick wall after college, when faced with poor salaries and a job economy much worse than the economy that gave their parents material progress and enough of a surplus to generate their hipster douchebag children in the first place. Others will be lucky and have enough money to continue being obnoxious douchebags for the rest of their lives.

Same as it ever was.

Yesterday Tumblr rolled out yet another improvement to their free ‘tumblelogging’ service - the ability to read ‘tag channels’ in your Dashboard, which you can filter by popularity in realtime. I immediately said ‘Wow!’ and found it very cool from a software development standpoint (an aesthetic appreciation my recently academic studies has been sharpening). But still, there was that old part of me that just said:

“Hey, whoa! Wait a minute!”

There’s much to be loved about Tumblr. I happily jumped onboard two-and-a-half years ago, right at the launch. I’ve seen this webservice grow, adding a ton of features in the meantime without losing focus. One of the reasons I like it so much probably doesn’t make much sense: Tumblr is made in New York, not in California, so somehow something has passed into its design and software engineering that I find more appealing to my European sensibility than similar services from the Far West. But there’s another, double-edged reason. When recommending Tumblr to people (which I do, a lot), I tell them “in a nutshell, it’s blogging for lazy people”. I’m lazy, so that’s a great reason. I don’t blog much, and would blog even less if there were no ‘bookmarklets’ or whatever you call them. So in way, the greatest reason for my enthusiasm about Tumblr is the bookmarklet.

If you are one of the two persons who visited If Then Else a few years ago and still do, you know that shortly after I signed up for my Tumblr account my blogging style changed dramatically. It may have taken a couple of years for me to get everything smoothy integrated, but essentially since 2007 If Then Else was ‘possessed’ by my ‘tumblelogging’, and what used to be a text-heavy blog became something quite different, a somewhat random collection of text, yes, but also photos, links, quotes and videos (I never had much care for chats and audio posts), not a web-journal anymore but some cross between a certain 1990s ideal of what an ‘e-zine’ should be and a chaotic Robot Wisdom-esque mess updated for the broadband age (mind you, when I started If Then Else in 2001 it was still costumary for a webdesigner to ensure a webpage’s ‘weight’ was below 50KB - or else people would get fed up with the loading time). In effect, If Then Else became a clone - diligently mirrored by a cronjob I put on its server - of my Found Objects tumblelog.

While If Then Else sports different visuals, a six years deeper archive, a photologue (itself a similar clone of my Fotologue account - I never liked Flickr, so I went Far East rather than West), a pretty pristine hand-coded comment system and some of the other knick-knacks old weblogs usually have, Found Objects ‘follows’ and is ‘followed’, and there are ‘notes’ (that is, ‘likes’ and ‘reblogs’) instead of comments. If Then Else won’t get out much, its best feature is perhaps the RSS feed, which allows people to read it without ever visiting the sorry-ass website a second time. But the party never stops in Tumblelogueland, where people like posts and posts get liked, where reblogs are conduits throughout which content gets pushed and memes gets traced. It’s Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0, my host versus their server.

This is the great trend of the late noughts Internet: centralization. Unless you are an A-lister, your own private, hand-or-Dreamweaver-coded website means squat. Sure you can put a portfolio online on your own host - and you should, as a courtesy for those who google you or so that you can have your vanity address written on the back of your business card -, but all the action’s at Behance, and that’s the place where you should put your stuff. In a sense, we’re back in the old BBS days, and the early Web was a crazy anarchic phenomenon that wasn’t fit to last. Why should I bother building my own spaces if nobody visits them, and people get their dose of whatever Ed is up to in the places everybody lists what they are up to?

I guess the answer lies at the beginning of this rant. While the means to filter huge amounts of information like the ‘tag channels’ are undeniably cool, and somehow meet the romantic promises of early information futurisms such as Vannevar Bush’s Memex, the flipside to the content-sharing cultures of places like Tumblr and Facebook is that nobody’s actually creating anymore. A ‘reblog’, while interesting as a meme-tracing construct, gives us an illusion of production through consumption, and in the end many weblogs and tumblelogs, in their quest for ‘new’ content every day hour become someone else’s parrot so they can improve their ‘tumblarity’ - a Tumblr feature I really dislike, as it introduces a competitiveness that encourages mindless reblogging as original posts are harder to do.

This is why I believe keeping your own, let’s say ‘Web 1.5’, site is still important: It’s your space, so you keep it neat and clean.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries.

— Erich Fromm (via psychotherapy)

I hadn’t linked Cat and Girl for a while, but Dorothy’s take on the reactions to Michael Jackson’s death is spot on. (via The Null Device)

Xkcd - Mission to Culture. I can definitely relate to feeling embarrassed while trying to show uncooperative people something new, but I also believe culture is something you consume and doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, so I have a hard time coping with some people’s smugness.

… and Penguin-style book covers for films. J. Kottke takes a look at media packaging mashups.

I always felt that the works of art we call movies consist of more than just the sound and the visuals in a stretch of film, but also of their entire promotional material - trailers, posters, etecetera - because this material too manipulates the viewer’s perspective and expectations, just the thing the art of editing is all about. It’s as if, even though you don’t judge a book by its cover, the cover does influence how you’ll read the book, just like an opening chapter.

Videogame packaging in the style of Criterion Collection DVDs. The ultra-hard R-Type would definitely deserve it.