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Ephemeralization

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Re: Ephemeralization

#41

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #18
joshmarinacci wrote: post #10

CDs and DVDs are a good example of this. I used to have a wall of my apartment dedicated to media, all completely immaterial now.

The metaverse, NFTs, crypto, and digital goods are pointed to as the next wave. Staunch proponents will tell you that we'll be living in VR metaverses, doing work remotely, earning crypto, buying virtual properties, etc. I'm personally bearish on crypto/NFTs, but kids like buying digital goods in games. And VRChat is blowing up and looking more and more like a threat to Facebook.

[deleted]

Re: Ephemeralization

#42

Post by Geekette »

sfink wrote: post #34
Geekette wrote: post #31

Etymologically speaking, I find the adapted meaning of this term irksome. Given that ephemera is a 16th century word[1] that refers to "transitory written and printed matter" and ephemerality "the quality of existing only briefly"[2], one would expect the standard definition for ephemeralization to be "the process of creating ephemera" or similar, as opposed to "ability of technological advancement to do "more and mo…

Now tell me how you feel about the common phrase "I'll be there momentarily." (I may logically accept that language follows usage, but I just can't not be bothered by that one. Also, people don't seem to like it when I reply "I hope you're right.")

Interestingly enough, I'm less bothered by that. It could've been worse, e.g. "I'll be there momentishly".

Re: Ephemeralization

#43

Post by breck »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #29
sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

Your Law of Optimization reminds me of the (often popularly ignored) denominator in the famous e = m c^2 equation. I believe the full version has a (1 - (v/c)^2) denominator on the right side; I think the Lorentz transformations motivate this. The upshot matches your observation in spirit: the closer you get to the optimum (the celeritas/speed of light) the more energy you require.

Ironic the man who wrote `make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.` is most tagged with `e = mc^2`.

Re: Ephemeralization

#44

Post by GauntletWizard »

robomc wrote: post #25
joshmarinacci wrote: post #10

CDs and DVDs are a good example of this. I used to have a wall of my apartment dedicated to media, all completely immaterial now.

that's also a good example of how it's often mostly or partly faked through displacement as well though. your CD and DVD collection has been replaced by round the clock maintenance of the storage and transmission of that data, from the record label or movie studio through various data centers, via a number of middle-men companies all requiring their own ever-changing and complex infrastructures, through a system of c…

There was a lot of plastic stamped out, and there was a round-the-clock distribution system for shipping those pieces of plastic to middle men distributors and stores before they got to you. There's a huge maintenance cost to these cloud services, but there's plenty of evidence that the environmental cost of that maintenance is much lower than the cost of those DVDs.

Is it perfect? No, I'd much rather that a county-or-state library system run the media library and have set of servers and data that were shared and archived and synced with the library of congress. It is by no means more expensive, in terms of cash, middlemen or natural resources, for digital delivery the way that's currently going on over buying DVDs.

Re: Ephemeralization

#45

Post by 7373737373 »

gamegoblin wrote: post #13

This article is about technological progress enabling doing more with less. I’ve been having a tangentially related thought about general project planning as it pertains to technological progress. The thesis is: Unless you can create an optimistic project plan that results in the project’s completion within 5 years, the money would be better spent on doing basic research. The thesis is informed by the ITER fusion rea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

Re: Ephemeralization

#47

Post by mensetmanusman »

Most of the technology I work on wouldn’t be worth doing if the global population hadn’t grown 10x in the last century or so. You need a large mass of people willing to pitch in a penny for an improvement to their lives with expensive technology than a smaller number of enthusiasts.

This brings economies of scale and suddenly 1000 things that wouldn’t be worth doing make a new thing that wasn’t predicted. The neo-malthusians didn’t predict this happening with innovation and markets (reminds me that the US patent office almost closed 100 years ago saying ‘everything has already been invented’).

Re: Ephemeralization

#48

Post by [deleted] »

sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

[deleted]

Re: Ephemeralization

#49

Post by mensetmanusman »

rektide wrote: post #16

such a nice fancy sounding word for something that is so great & powerful but which also is a vast anti-Enlightenment force. we used to see the world about us, could monkey with things about us. butnhugh tech goods are deeply resistant to observation & understanding. what used to be apparent & ooen for interaction has become like magic to us, and we, humans, thr toolmakers, understand & see less of our ephemeralizing…

Maybe.

Thought experiment: replace ‘ephemeral’ silicon based technology with what we know of biology, which at the small scale is far more advanced than anything humans have created.

The fact that bio is so information theory intelligible only increases its ability to ‘blend into the background’ and ‘become ephemeral’.

(E.g. your body is constantly creating and destroying iron nanocrystals in protein cages we can’t synthesize to regulate the amount of iron ions involved in constructing a proton potential to move muscles.)

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