Is the new future offline? We have grown attached to our electronic devices and online friends. Maybe we need to step back and think about going back?
Why?
Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#52This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments.
Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is not.
Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these activities digital is not changing society or improving lives. It is the same society and the same lives, with more time spent on these activities. Never has anyone gone to bed thinking "Gosh, I wish I had spent more time looking at funny pictures of strangers today." People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of].
Every founder will go on and on about "changing the world" if you let him. This is as if changing the world were something worth doing for its own sake. If you see a problem that is worth fixing and you fix it, then the change effected is important and even virtuous. But the key is that problem must be worth solving. Just because a petulant and spoiled American wants his iced mocha faster does not mean that speeding up sales of mocha is a worthy problem. Can you make money doing it? Probably.
I went to school to become an engineer (I'm 24) because I thought that computers and the internet were going to make invention and innovation possible even for people who did not work for industrial laboratories. Maybe the hugely reduced barriers to entry into the technology sector that resulted from cheap computers and good programming tools would lead young and eager people of brilliance to found ambitious companies to finally -- aren't we all sick of being exasperated by the mediocrity of culture and politics in the past 20 years? -- steer human life into better modes of existence and a new frontier of boldness. Sure, the internet cannot do this all on its own, but is such a powerful and promising tool, that maybe it would start things.
This has not happened. There are a few gems like SpaceX and Willow Garage that seek out challenge in this way, but they are doing it independent of the cheapness and openness that computers now allow. Worse, many of the companies that have been founded are dedicated to aggressively ruining the internet by making it a place for sucking up private information, showing ads, and selling the same old useless junk.
What it seems to me this article is about is that innovation in technology right now is about money, not about betterment. A billion dollars was just spent on Instagram. To do what? If you are so in the bubble of the "startup world" that you do not see the self-evident absurdity of a situation in which that is a possible and reasonable event, you are become blinded.
Stop thinking like a marketer and think like an inventor with balls. Stop trying to get rich unless you are getting rich by doing something that is worth doing.
I write this as someone who honestly loves technology, hacking, the hacker ethic, and HN, but I walk around Palo Alto every day being slowly crushed by disappointment. The problem is not that the good hackers are being spread across too many companies, it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers.
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#53I really don't think people understand how new ideas come about. It is simply a fact of life that the newest, most different, paradigm-breaking idea will almost always make people uncomfortable. People aren't going to like it, because likely most of them won't understand it. It is going to come out of an extremely unlikely location, perhaps even a cesspool like 4chan where you throw feces at the wall and see what sticks.
Relatedly, the idea that innovation and monetary success are in any way intertwined is laughable. I can make money off of anything. This is not a hard skill, this is not an admirable skill, and the thinking required to get people to spend money is the basest, most despicable form of thinking imaginable.
If we're going to Truly innovate, we need to break things. Break everything. Ironically, what I mean here is the exact opposite of the meaning typically assigned to the buzzword "disruptive". We need to make people uncomfortable so they can realize just how comfortable they can be. No one agrees with real change, no one actually wants to be disrupted, and Real Creativity is an inherently mischievous little devil who most people get angry with and want nothing to do with.
The vast majority of so-called entrepreneurs are lifeless copy machines with no original ideas who are too-concerned with the remnants of their highschool popularity contest to even get close to coming up with anything new.
We need to realize that the way most people think change is going to happen is not the way it does happen, or ever has happened. In the minds of most people, when you get down to it, change sucks, we hate it, and would rather sit around circlejerking about how innovative we are than go out into the streets and actually light the world on fire.
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#54From the previously-posted thread on this that got no other replies: an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that the browser is no more suitable to traversal of…
The semantic web has one huge problem imo: There was/is typically zero incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson, you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping someone has encoded the data for you. Another thing is that huge ontological databases actually exist, it's just that no one seems to be able to use them for anything useful. Knowledge bases and formal…
There was/is typically zero incentive to semantically encode data. As shown by things like IBMs Watson, you're better off extracting sentence semantics with NLP than by hoping someone has encoded the data for you.
But yet, adoption of SemWeb tech is growing. Google and Yahoo both rolling out their respective "rich snippets" type interfaces a couple of years ago helped a bit. Those acts raised awareness of the value of SemWeb tech and gave it a bit of a kick. I saw a post[1] earlier today that mentioned some research showing that 25% of the HTML pages out there have embedded structured data (microformats, RDFa).
[1]: http://ivan-herman.name/2012/04/18/structured-data-in-html-i...
Edit: better link to specific part of the discussion that mentions the "25% of pages contain RDFa" claim:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Apr/00...
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#55This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments. Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is not. Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these activities digital is not changing soc…
>People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of].
I know I have. Many more times than I care to admit.
>it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers.
Excellent. And since I always ask this question of people who lament the status quo:
What did you have in mind?
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#56This article is spot on in its thesis, though not always in its arguments. Everyone is convinced -- because the people who work in marketing are happy because they can sell ads -- that social media is an important thing. It is not. Social media is people doing what they were already doing, only more often and anywhere. Flirting with girls, talking with friends, etc. Making these activities digital is not changing soc…
>People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of]. I know I have. Many more times than I care to admit. >it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers. Excellent. And since I always ask this question of people who lament the status quo: What did you have in mind?
He doesn't HAVE to have something in mind. He is merely telling us about a problem that he sees with the current situation.
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
>People often go to bed regretting not doing what they could have done when instead they were on Facebook and Twitter and [insert the names of 90% of the startups you have heard of]. I know I have. Many more times than I care to admit. >it is that too many companies are not doing things worthy of hackers. Excellent. And since I always ask this question of people who lament the status quo: What did you have in mind?
He doesn't HAVE to have something in mind. He is merely telling us about a problem that he sees with the current situation.
While I may have sounded sarcastic, even dismissive. (If you read it in your head with the right tones.) I actually ask because I love hearing about what people think the future should be like. The hope is that if I ask enough people my own vision will change significantly.
So while I don't necessarily expect people to have something in mind, I always hope they do.
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
He doesn't HAVE to have something in mind. He is merely telling us about a problem that he sees with the current situation.
While I may have sounded sarcastic, even dismissive. (If you read it in your head with the right tones.) I actually ask because I love hearing about what people think the future should be like. The hope is that if I ask enough people my own vision will change significantly. So while I don't necessarily expect people to have something in mind, I always hope they do.
I think you ask a great question. I'll bite. Here is what I have in mind that will change my world.
Small data. My data. A 1999 google like interface into an index of me: my email, my documents, images and video that I've collected. Nice to haves would be a copy of the various conversations I have had on third party social media sites.
This index should be set up in a way that I can easily include a copy of it in my Trust that will pass my assets to my daughter (note - I am increasingly thinking that the raw data, much of what either lives in the cloud or gets backed up to CrashPlan, is an asset that should be part of the an Estate that gets passed to the next generation). She should be able to add to it when she is a old enough and (if I am so lucky) my grandchildren's grandchildren should be able to search for vague terms in the stories that their great grandmother (my daughter) told them when they were young. They will get links to relevant emails or documents that help them explore the past. They will be able to see the connections between images takes a the same time or location in a way that lets them explore their history. As I understand this tool better I will be able to narrate a one way version of my story to those of future generations.
As I said above, a tool like this would solve my problem. Do you think it would be useful to a computer literate, smart but non hacker/programmer type? Any ideas on how you think one should approach this problem?
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#59The preface to the article says this guy is a reknown journalist.
But I fail to see any insights worth noting in his writing.
Is he imagining that if we charges users to access digital resources that we'll stop mining data?
And why does he care if companies exploiting "free" are losing money? Is he invested in them?
I'll bet if I sent this guy a demo to boot up that allowed him to connect to peers directly and bypass all the data mining, all the spam, and allow for all the convergence he could ever want, he'd balk because it didn't have "big buttons".
One things is for sure, the internet holds no promise for any improvement in journalism. It just keeps getting worse.
Re: Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future
#60Why can't the next area of innovation be in education? I’m not talking solely about the transition from print to digital, but rather a complete reset on education with technology at its core rather than at the periphery? Rethink the status quo, with no sacred cows (teachers, buses, grades, testing, - even classrooms all up for grabs). Imagine tablet devices or similar technology that provide individualized, adaptive…
education is not a tech issue, its a social issue. When school boards decide to push creationism over evolution, its not a technology issue. We provide students the tools and all the information but have no way to inspire them to learn in competition with the idiocy of what the pop culture tells kids should be cool.