What Dana Robinson is looking forward to at this year’s South By Southwest conference.
Dana Robinson On SXSW (Hi-res 25 MB)
Dana Robinson On SXSW (Lo-res 7 MB)
Category Archives: Friends
Craig Newmark On CNBC
Video and MP3s Of Craig Newmark On CNBC, Friday, February 7, 2003.
Craig talks about trends in job placement etc., as observed on Craig’s List.
Phone Message To Me From Timothy Leary In 1995
Things are really getting interesting now that I have my camera hooked up to the stereo (with an analog cassette player).
Fifteen years of cassette archives. Yowza.
Here’s Timothy Leary leaving a message on my voicemail in August 1995 to thank me for the work I did on his graphic novel, Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel.
(Note: this file is an MP3 from a cassette tape I managed to record the voicemail on to in 1995 (through a crude patch into a friend’s computer) — and then back out from his computer onto a cassette tape.
And all that — only so I could play it back into a video camera and recapture it into a computer seven years later. Funny, isn’t it?
Happy New Year: Welcome To The Uh-Oh’s
John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh’s.
As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh…
I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say “Uh-Oh?” Or, at the very least, something that translated into “Uh-Oh?”
Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.
Second plane. Uh-Oh.
America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.
As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don’t need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh’s visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.
So, the next time you’re looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it’s a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective – as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties – to evoke their essential flavor.
Craig Newmark at the Creative Commons Launch
Aaron Swartz At The Creative Commons Launch
Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch
Complete with new and exciting reasonable file sizes!
Below are links to a high resolution and low resolution QuickTime movies and audio MP3 file. Let me know if you need another format.
Brewster Kahle and son, Caslon, at the Creative Commons Launch
Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch – 25 MB
Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch – 14 MB
MP3 of Brewster Kahle at Creative Commons Launch – 5 MB
New Addition to the Commons: Matisse’s Glossary of Internet Terms
Here’s an old favorite of mine (originally published in 1994 and continuously updated ever since) that will make a great new addition to the commons!
Matisse Enzer has released his
Glossary of Internet Terms under a Creative Commons Share Alike License.
Alcor Excerpt From Tim Leary’s Book
The story I just blogged about the nano tech talks at the cryonics conference reminded me that Timothy Leary wrote about Alcor in the book I worked on with him (Surfing the Conscious Nets). (Contrary to popular belief, however, Tim did not freeze his remains.)
I went and dug up the reference to Alcor, just for fun. For those of you with a copy of Surfing the Conscious Nets around, it’s on page 16. For the rest of you, I’ve created a scan here:
I’m sure this is OK with both Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner, who is a friend of mine, and would consider it promotion for the book, and Tim Leary himself, because he told me in 1995 that it was his dream to have all of his works freely available online. A dying wish, if you will.
(Yeah, we’re talking everything. So I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a few scans.)
On the bright side of the ledger, John Lilly, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips have escaped with their “souls” intact. So far! Several of the lesser known Gabor sisters, rumor has it, had their pretty heads sliced and diced by Dr. Sidney Cohen’s gang. Elvis Presley? Who knows? Walt Disney? Janis Joplin? Jim Morrison? Just who exactly still lives frozen in blessed hibernation in the re-animation vaults of the Alcor-CryoCare Cryonics Foundation, in Riverside, California, as Jimi Hendrix does? — no thanks to Nick Rogue–all credit to Michael Hollingshead.
Then Andy Warhol started phoning me day and night. Cryonics is all Andy thinks about these days. So he says.
New Post-Singularity Fiction From Sci-Fi’s Dynamic Duo
Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow have written a short story (being published on four parts) that’s already considered a classic in my mind.
I’ve already read the whole thing, and I can’t imagine reading this story in pieces — so I’ll re-blog accordingly after all four pieces are up.
I don’t want to make any more comments about the subject matter so as not to risk giving any of the story away, but let’s just say that since reading this story, I think about meatspace a lot differently now.
I whole heartedly recommend taking ten minutes to treat yourself to a little glimpse of one possible future.
In many ways, we’re already there…Ju
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Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth’s RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.
A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There’s always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let’s-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There’s always a fucking geek who’ll do it because it’s a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.
Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.
But until that happy day, there’s the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.