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"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

Saturday, September 23, 2006

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google" - New Scientist - Bruce Sterling. [link via Ethan]

An almost-real, funny-scary take on the internet from the eyes of a "miserably-happy" teenager. Here's an excerpt:

"My Dad - he's still alive, apparently - he sent me an email from China and said I ought to "recruit" Debbie into my "social group dynamics of online identity production". My Dad always talks like that. I haven't seen Dad face-to-face in six years. Look: I am a 17-year-old male, okay? I don't want to send Debbie any hotlinks and digital video. I want to take Debbie out! Maybe we could take some clothes off! But there isn't any "out" for me and Debbie. There isn't any "off", either.

Okay, I admit it: Debbie is insane. The fact that Debbie really likes me, that just proves it. Debbie ACCEPTS this sick state of reality. She EMBRACES it. We are doomed.

Imagine that Debbie and me somehow go out together. We want to network with our peer group, teenager-wise. I need to figure out what's hip and with-it and rebellious, and Debbie needs to know what the other cyber-Goth chicks are wearing. Is that okay? No!

It's not that we can't do it: it's that all our social relations have been reified with a clunky intensity. They're digitized! And the networking hardware and software that pervasively surround us are built and owned by evil, old, rich corporate people! Social-networking systems aren't teenagers! These machines are METHODICALLY KILLING OUR SOULS! If you don't count wall-graffiti (good old spray paint), we have no means to spontaneously express ourselves. We can't "find ourselves" - the market's already found us and filled us with map pins."

Also read Men standing around broken machines by Paul Ford, a short but well-written essay where he goes back to a much-older future:

"I think about the men because there are two futures: the near and wild futureóthe future of Web 2.0, the war on terror, and midterm electionsóthrashing and blind like a baby mouse in the grass. And there is the other, much older future, which is basically an enormous, ever-widening archaeological dig. They're digging up old Roman bones, pilgrim gristle, and mysterious chunks of iron that may have been astrolabes. Shovels in hand, people fall over dead onto the piles of ancient coffeehouse newspapers and loose pioneer trash that they have themselves exhumed. Time passes; it could be a few days or a millennium. Someone digs them up and holds their skull in hand and wonders: what was the dig like then? There is nothing wrong with the newer future. Those who make it work for them will be powerful and rich. But that older future seems to have more room in it for those quiet, dry-eyed men. And I know I want, someday, to join their group as it stands frowning around a steaming car engine, each trying to figure out what went wrong."



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