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Whole Earth Index

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Re: Whole Earth Index

#51

Post by myrmidon »

epolanski wrote: post #25
zackmorris wrote: post #10

This is great! I remember a turning point for me when I was feeling very low at the height of the War on Terror and jingoism appeared to have taken over the world. Just before the housing bubble popped and politics would swing the other way, but we didn't know that was going to happen yet. John Mayer was playing music at Macworld 2007 (wish I could find the video) and said "Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. just make life mo…

Not sure why wealth inequality is mixed anywhere near the rest of the topics. I couldn't care less about it, if some people live to make money, let them, as long as they do it legally. On the other hand hacker culture is very lacking and the fact that we don't really own our devices is part of the issue.p

Wealth inequality is a problem because it deprives median citizens of limited ressources; consider urban housing as an example. There are two factors at play:

- Average people have to compete on price with the wealthy (which becomes harder as inequality rises)

- Wealthy people are incentivized to use their wealth to acquire things and extract rent, which drives up total costs and makes inequality worse

A lot of the resulting problems stay negligible or hidden or as long as there is enough overall growth, but as soon as that growth slows down these kinds of problems become very apparent.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#52

Post by roryirvine »

Sadly, it doesn't mention the related (and equally-wonderful) Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16352/Whole%20Intern...

Before web search engines became a thing, "searching the net" meant either fiddling with WAIS/Veronica (which searched only titles, not content), sending mail to your local "weirdy beardy" Unix guru - or getting a bus into town, heading for the nearest bookshop, and spending half an hour flicking through their sole copy of WIUGC.

The latter course often turned out to be by far the most productive...

Re: Whole Earth Index

#53

Post by SirHumphrey »

bmitc wrote: post #50
paulcole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a bit sad to see where we have landed after all that. For a comically small amount of money I can listen to any song I want to, read any book I want to, watch any movie/TV show I want to. Then there’s the ad-supported videos and images and text. Then there’s the AIs that I use every day! I’m in awe at how amazing where we have landed at is. Sure some stuff isn’t perfect but what fun is it to be sad about what…

You're arguing convenience for things you could already do through a library over the huge amount of negatives that has come with the Internet: crime, espionage, hacking, emotional manipulation, spread of propaganda and disinformation, social media, legalized data stealing, destruction and abuse of copyright, centralization of information flow, etc.

Well, you could already do, sort of. Even the best stocked library in the world has it's limits and even the largest printed encyclopedia cannot reach anywhere near the breath of information on Wikipedia and no technical library has as many articles as PubMed.

We switched from techno optimism to techno pessimism - for some good reasons - nevertheless internet brought to the table revolutionary capabilities not only for evil but also for good.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#54

Post by ch4s3 »

fhennig wrote: post #47
ch4s3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say dirt cheap solar panels and CRISPR based vaccines are pretty cool. I’m also quite optimistic about the proliferation of plausible SMR designs. That new concrete that self heals and sequesters carbon is cool too.

I think it's a category error. The optimism isn't about tech, but rather about society changing in ways that make life better: > More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us. If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving he…

> It doesn't quite feel like it at least.

I think that's a function of social media and living in a society where things are objectively already really good for the vast majority of people compared to 50 years ago.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#55

Post by epolanski »

rainingmonkey wrote: post #36
epolanski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why wealth inequality is mixed anywhere near the rest of the topics. I couldn't care less about it, if some people live to make money, let them, as long as they do it legally. On the other hand hacker culture is very lacking and the fact that we don't really own our devices is part of the issue.p

Inequality necessarily reduces living standards for those at the bottom of the heap. When the person at the top has more than they can spend on necessities and luxuries, they put their money to work. That means buying assets and driving up their prices. Some assets are fairly divorced from the "real" economy, but enough filter through to extract wealth from the masses who have to work for a living as eg. spiralling r…

Regardless, what's the connection to hacker culture.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#56

Post by epolanski »

ch4s3 wrote: post #54
fhennig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a category error. The optimism isn't about tech, but rather about society changing in ways that make life better: > More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us. If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving he…

> It doesn't quite feel like it at least. I think that's a function of social media and living in a society where things are objectively already really good for the vast majority of people compared to 50 years ago.

It's only good if you over focus on material things.

As soon as you start looking at: mental health, drug addiction, loneliness rate, sexual activity, going out, etc, by all metrics we're way worse than our parents, let alone our grandparents.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#57

Post by fhennig »

ch4s3 wrote: post #54
fhennig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a category error. The optimism isn't about tech, but rather about society changing in ways that make life better: > More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us. If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving he…

> It doesn't quite feel like it at least. I think that's a function of social media and living in a society where things are objectively already really good for the vast majority of people compared to 50 years ago.

We're talking about the whole earth here, not just the societies that we live in.

And globally, things are not so rosy.

Specifically the point of electrification, might be that we electrify more, but globally the CO2 emissions are on the rise still, and have continuously risen in the past 50 years.

Re: Whole Earth Index

#58

Post by shark1 »

I would never hear of these magazines if wasn't hackernews. They eventually pop up here. I was taking a look on it and... it was so well written!

Re: Whole Earth Index

#59

Post by behole »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #18
behole wrote: post #2

This is pretty COOL! Right up my alley. I have been working on a similar project with PUNK ZINES. I have a lil loop going with Internet Archive - Scraped all of their zines and any new submissions I upload to them. Yours is much prettier than mine. NICE NICE job. Bookmark.

Is it live yet? I'd love to see it whenever it is.

[dead]

Re: Whole Earth Index

#60

Post by behole »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #18
behole wrote: post #2

This is pretty COOL! Right up my alley. I have been working on a similar project with PUNK ZINES. I have a lil loop going with Internet Archive - Scraped all of their zines and any new submissions I upload to them. Yours is much prettier than mine. NICE NICE job. Bookmark.

Is it live yet? I'd love to see it whenever it is.

Also, currently have a ton of MMR, Punk Planet and HeartAttack. These were far and away the "bigs". I am really hunting for more underground stuff. Back in the day (I am old) we had a physical zine library in our punk house and it was a treasure!! My goal is to connect later to institutions via IIIF (Pratt, Barnard, Brown, RISD) and other institutional databases. Hunting up Burn Collector and Cometbus currently.
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