“I believe that in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians—threat and obsession, taboo and fascination.”
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
via caitlinwinner
“It appears that Tumblr built in a day or two what no D.C.-based technology supplier could come up with in the last five years.”
The statement above is false. I’m one of the co-founders of Mobile Commons, though I no longer work there. The Mobile Commons technology that Tumblr used to build a very nice graphical interface has been available to any organization for going on five years. In fact, it’s been used by many organizations to lobby for the change that is important to them.
What Tumblr was able to do was remarkable because of the size and scale of it’s userbase and the ability of the Tumblr team to articulate to that userbase why SOPA is a horrible idea. The size and scale of that userbase is the result of years of work by David and the Tumblr team.
One of the issues with online advocacy and politics is to get things happening at web scale—and it’s often disappointing that the web really only rallies around causes that happen to concern the web. At the same time, it’s important. The Internet is a historical anomaly—allowed to grow and flourish because it grew too fast to ever be brought under the auspices of the FCC or anyone else (imagine if launching a site on Wi-Fi was like submitting to the Apple AppStore).
Sean Parker’s been talking quite a bit about how the web should allow us to divorce influence from money in politics. That’s a grand ambition and an important one because when it comes to SOPA, legislators are weighing the perception of votes vs. the pressure exerted on them by lobbyists. While it’s good to get apolitical people motivated en masse, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done for legislators to understand how that fits into voting profiles and their self-interest in being re-elected.
I hope that the success of Tumblr’s call-in campaign was a wake-up call to many web companies that have the technical and design wherewithal to start taking on some of these issues and working together to apply more precise and sustained pressure in Washington.
MediaShift Idea Lab . #DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS (via matthew)
(via matthew)
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”
“What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying to hard.”
Atul Gawande, Coaching a Surgeon - New Yorker
I usually love Atul Gawande, but I think he’s off-point about the real ethos of amateurism—which really just denotes a kind of love. Conflating amateurism with a specific anthropological tidbit is a disservice to people that pursue things for love. A lover can bring much more to a situation than someone that is a professional (which, to be rhetorically unkind, could be called a mercenary). I want more people in the world doing things out of love.
Kevin Slavin, How Algorithms Shape Our World
I wanted to reblog this talk from my friend, Kevin, but apparently he didn’t post it on his own tumblelog. Anyway: this is important. Watch this.
(Source: video.ted.com)
“I’m an actual artist (as in paid for fine arts, working on an MFA, etc.) and I am not an entrepreneur. I resent the startup community’s move to co-opt this designation. Partially this is due to jealousy—modest success in my field is not on par with modest success in theirs financially, so I want my remuneration in cultural prestige to remain undiluted! But more objectionable to me are these facile and specious arguments. By this definition, engineers are artists, chefs are artists, Jacques Cousteau was an artist, machinists are artists, teachers are artists, mathematicians are artists, and so the fuck on.
It’s certainly not my aim to denigrate the work of entrepreneurs (or teachers or machinists!) but rather to suggest that lumping every act of creation under the designation of “art” is unhelpful. It then takes the creative motive out of everything else. When I write code, I must be creative, but my algorithm for a distributed cellular automata is not art. When Jeff Koons builds an art factory capable of producing hundreds of Koons paintings, that was not art, but entrepreneurship, though it certainly took creativity and insight.
So fall back. We’re all doing interesting stuff, but we’re not each doing all the interesting stuff.”
“Because TV is so simultaneously personal (it exists inside your home) and so utterly universal (it exists inside everyone’s home), people care about it with an atypical brand of conversational ferocity—they take it more personally than other forms of art, and they immediately feel comfortable speaking from a position of expertise.”
Chuck Klosterman on Breaking Bad
Why is it so different from books?
Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) Interviews R. Kelly, Interview Magazine:
R. Kelly doesn’t need to throw on a tuxedo and dig into a McRib sandwich—like he did at the photo shoot that accompanies this story—to demonstrate that he is a complicated guy. In fact, the 44-year-old Kelly is the walking, talking embodiment of complicated: Complicated because, as a singer, songwriter, and producer, he has worked with everyone from Quincy Jones and Ronald Isley to Jay-Z and Michael Jackson, and represents so much of what is both good and important and difficult-bordering-on-ridiculous about R&B. Complicated because he is, if not the inventor, the preeminent purveyor of both soul music–as–art rock and the slow-moving sex jam.
“Camp, used as a descriptive word for certain kinds of behavior, has a meaning not far from this—one which probably arose from the fact that in New York during the depression of the early 1930s, young homosexuals (especially those aspiring to the theater) often lived in groups, saving rent by sharing a single large apartment. These groups were called camps. Later, by association, the kind of behavior often seen there—highly animated reactions involving an overemotional stacking of emphasis—came itself to be called camp.”
![Edward Norton interviews Bruce Springsteen about Darkness on the Edge of Town
If you’ve never understood why the Boss is an American icon, you should listen to this interview (or download the podcast). There’s too many gems:
“No. I was if I was ever a bohemian it was by circumstance, you know, it… I mean I, it was sort of, you know, I don’t, you know, I really, none of the guys, us guys locally, came out of an actual bohemian lifestyle. It wasn’t - that was not what was in as Asbury Park. Asbury Park was your working-class musicians who came from those kinds of homes, who fell into a bohemian lifestyle because it was all they could afford at a moment. And you were sort of on the outs but you didn’t have the self-awareness about it, you know. And I didn’t really read - I read Allen Ginsberg after I saw people comparing my first record to some of his poetry, you know. And so I was a late comer to the whole Beat thing and, you know, we were influenced by records, you know, records”
Or when Springsteen talks about craziness and age:
“[Now] there is a large body of work, so every piece of it you’re less self-conscious about. At that time I had, I only had three records out, you know, so you are going to be defined by - so that’s you were going to put out was 25 percent of all your work was about to come out, you know… There’s, I think there’s an age to be that way, to be very, very controlling and extremely intense and focused and a good deal insane, also. There’s - I think that if you look at the people who we care about are people who cared about something enough to get crazy with it, you know.
I think when you look at the actors we love, you know, its like Martin Scorsese said the artist’s job is you’re trying to get the audience to care about your obsessions.”](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lclpgrjYOS1qz4ax2o1_500.jpg)
Edward Norton interviews Bruce Springsteen about Darkness on the Edge of Town
If you’ve never understood why the Boss is an American icon, you should listen to this interview (or download the podcast). There’s too many gems:
“No. I was if I was ever a bohemian it was by circumstance, you know, it… I mean I, it was sort of, you know, I don’t, you know, I really, none of the guys, us guys locally, came out of an actual bohemian lifestyle. It wasn’t - that was not what was in as Asbury Park. Asbury Park was your working-class musicians who came from those kinds of homes, who fell into a bohemian lifestyle because it was all they could afford at a moment. And you were sort of on the outs but you didn’t have the self-awareness about it, you know. And I didn’t really read - I read Allen Ginsberg after I saw people comparing my first record to some of his poetry, you know. And so I was a late comer to the whole Beat thing and, you know, we were influenced by records, you know, records”
Or when Springsteen talks about craziness and age:
“[Now] there is a large body of work, so every piece of it you’re less self-conscious about. At that time I had, I only had three records out, you know, so you are going to be defined by - so that’s you were going to put out was 25 percent of all your work was about to come out, you know… There’s, I think there’s an age to be that way, to be very, very controlling and extremely intense and focused and a good deal insane, also. There’s - I think that if you look at the people who we care about are people who cared about something enough to get crazy with it, you know.
I think when you look at the actors we love, you know, its like Martin Scorsese said the artist’s job is you’re trying to get the audience to care about your obsessions.”
“The Internet is creating markets that enable us to own much less. The winner of the ebook sweepstakes will be the bookseller who becomes a bookrenter. I don’t want to own hundreds of books on a Kindle at $10 a pop. I want to Netflix them — pay for access to every book ever published. I’d rather be a renter in Borges’ library than the owner of my own.”
