Month: December 2012

I was watching E.T on TV and couldn’t help but think how great of a movie it is. But I remembered that I saw it at kind of the perfect age, seven. I say perfect age because a little younger than the movie’s hero which is perfect because when you’re seven, you really want to be ten and when you’re ten you really want to be fourteen, at least that’s how I felt. So you really get into a “fascination mode” watching someone a bit older doing amazing things with an E.T.

Same thing with watching Akira at 11 (full story here), when the hero is sixteen. Same thing watching The Matrix at 20, when the hero is in his mid twenties.

I feel lucky to have seen these three monuments at the theater at a perfect age but also, if they marked me so hard was because I didn’t know anything about what I was going to see. Like, nothing except the main poster before getting tickets.

Also, sound. From the first ten minutes of E.T. exclusively based on sound effects and no faces, to Akira’s unique music and soundscapes to the tightest audio I had experienced with The Matrix, they all left a big mark on my forehead and my earholes.

Also, social commentary. E.T. is clear about what its director thinks of divorce. Re-watching it, I see how personal it was to Spielberg and I find that it’s awesome to point things out with determination, but in a honest way in a science fiction movie. Akira’s cyberpunk tone seemed a little too dramatic to me in 1991, but in 2012 it feels oh so powerful: corrupted gigantic decadent and shallow society controlled by the army in 2019? It looks like we’re doing it, we already have the drones and the decadence with the 1%. Again for a science fiction, action movie what a great vision twenty years ago. The Matrix social commentary is too obvious and too painful: yes, people are mostly like the dude who wants the fake steak as we can see how people prefer the comfort of freedom-killing silos on the web instead of being in the real, server-side-I-install-my-own-shit and I’m free web.

So to me that’s where the art VS profit discussion falls short because these three movies have both. Strong vision, innovation but also enough compromises to make it to a larger crowd, would it be by cutting off the complexity (Akira) or spending time explaining what’s going on (The Matrix). Because these movies are widely considered landmarks and really punched me in the face, I think we should analyze more these successes instead of going for Indie VS AAA VS Art VS Profit pointless game discussions, creatively speaking.

I wanted to write about Anil’s blog post. It talks about how the web was open and favoring fluid transmissions when today, the web is getting silo’d, heavily so.

And we all know where the inspiration comes from: Apple.

Companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook and most of the startup culture love this very special capitalism that just doesn’t compromise on anything.

I saw an article on how capitalism is breaking the web but that’s not true, you can have any kind of way of doing business. You can even make money with a totally free and open source system, or simply have a fee/year like Flickr and Pinboard.

The problem is greed. People can’t stop drooling at Apple’s margin and aura. So they start by becoming super cocky (Twitter and its developers’ relationship), edgy about design (redesigns of UI/UX all over the place) mute to users (Google not answering anything on its forums) and hostile to competitors (Google blocked Windows Phones to upload to YouTube, how lame is that).

And developers followed, lost in trying to follow over-changing APIs -when they exist- or trying to be the first to emerge as “the” one product/service that does it the best, first on the platform that boosted the vertical integration scheme as “the” thing to do: Apple’s.

How to change that?

Well, developers need to use what we learned from these very popular services to build excellent experience and apps, only without the dictatorship and silo part. For example, I really wish someone was building some clients for Dave Winer’s river of news thingy, it’s too complicated to set up for now to interest anyone, even me. But you developers, be the bridges that bring great ideas to users. Let the data flow. Always. It’s not only one of the internet basic, it’s been what made computers awesome even when sharing floppy disks. An amazing freedom, and absence of scarcity.

Developers need to make awesome native apps around open data. The browser is going down, let me have great native apps on every single platform, be platform agnostic. Stop trying to make me sign up and be part of a “community” if I just want to read news, simply make great apps. Stay simple, let me handle the social. Embrace what new platforms give you and build tools to empower users.

As for people, I should probably spend more time teaching around me how to use computers (90% don’t know the ctrl+f to search a page, a majority never heard of the “” you can use in a search engine). But at the same time, people are the worst. They never really want to get a better way to do things or exploit what their computers offer. Computer literacy is low and it’s the reason people flock to tablets and closed ecosystems, not understanding what they’re losing or about to lose.

It’s not worse. It’s not better. It’s wrong.

I always feel uncomfortable when people think that dead kids is the “worst of evil”. There’s no gradient in death, it’s sad in every case.

We think that a 50 year old man killed randomly by a shooter is less of a big deal because he’s in the middle of his life but what if he was about to enjoy the best 20 years of his life after working hard for it? On the opposite what if the kid killed was going to ruin some people’s lives by drunk driving, hitting a family van? We’ll never know. It ended abruptly and all we have are our eyes to cry.

My cold ass orphan past probably makes me think this way but I never really considered kids as kids but as small adults. I don’t forget that they understand things, even if they can’t express them through language. I don’t forget that in some countries right now, some are soldiers and trained to kill people, or that in some culture kids have sex very early on or watch it. It weirds me out too but you can understand how this is possible if you don’t treat kids as little pure and cute things that they aren’t, sorry to hurt you Western normative culture. They are small adults with shitty experience and that’s why we need to nurture them, not because they’re virtually perfect, adorable little miniature of oneself. After four or five years on this planet, they are not.

I especially don’t like how people realize that children dying from bullets is a terrible thing when as Jezebel notes, “black children accounted for forty-five percent of all child gun deaths in the United States, despite being only fifteen percent of the child population.” Please read the report and think of things like “Between 1979 and 2009, gun deaths among white children decreased by 44 percent and increased by 30 percent among black children over the same period.”

Nobody gave/gives a shit. No one cares, it’s like black people are not part of society. But a tragedy happens and the nation’s emotional attachment to it is strong enough that it might change things. I hope.

Too bad all these dead black kids never had any impact on gun laws. I feel sorry because if they had, a lot of children include those white kids from Newton could be alive today.

So much for preventing the “worst of evil”.

So now it’s about mental illness.

We know where that mental illness grows. Not the medical one, the societal one. It grows in people in an unstable society. A society that makes no sense in so many ways and fuck us up. When I read Gawker’s unemployment stories I see what can fuel the explosion of an individual. 2010 has seen the highest suicide rate in the US in 15 years.

What most boomers driving our Western society don’t get is that things really changed, that today you can make the best choices and it just doesn’t matter, you’re still going to possibly end up in shitty places through the weight of things you cannot control at all. The sense that as an individual things are more random than ever before, is terrible.

That’s like, the strongest despair you can get.

You don’t even need to be so mentally ill to snap out of control. It just happens. The Colorado shooter was an apparently brilliant dude, studying neuroscience. How could we see what was about to happen? We could not and no one could. On the other hand the Virginia Tech killer was receiving treatment, therapy and special education for years and that didn’t stop him. He wanted to replicate Columbine and did.

Look at the Empire State Building shooting, the 58 year old perpetrator went there to kill his boss after he had been laid off. No psychiatric problems ever, he just had enough after being evicted from his apartment. Hitting the streets at almost 60 is probably crazy hard to swallow.

We shouldn’t dismiss people’s pain and call for the convenient “he was just a crazy and sick person”, especially in a psychotic society teaching us to be good AND merciless. Which of course doesn’t yield good results especially with white guys because when shit hits their fans, they are the ones falling from the highest point. Everybody else is used to not have all the rights and therefore are more capable to deal with the shittiest shit. This guy went nuts because of the IRS and the government, crashing his plane in a building. Meanwhile, black people deal with the worst statistics possible -employment, incarceration, children death rate- and don’t try that much to make everyone pay for it. Black people even have the lowest suicide rate. Like Paul Mooney says, “white folks, thanks for making us tough.”

Anyway if it’s about mental illness, it’s about society’s not individuals’. This is the one we need to fix.

Reading stuff on FM synthesis and computers I realized something: make this new technology available for as many people as possible was the 80s and 90s motto and we lost that.

The goal following a trend set by the end of WWII was to be affordable. Technology was hype, but not in a hipster way it was just obvious that we should all use it and from the IBM PC to the Yamaha DX7 to the Roland 909, they all aimed at making things available for those who didn’t have the money, the space, the knowledge sometimes to get “the best of the best”.

Through affordability and people’s creativity, these machines conquered the world and became ubiquitous, changing our culture forever. I love that.

Today, technology is snob. Machines are sold at a higher price because brands all want some of that crazy Apple margin so they all sell computers around $1000 instead of $700. People expect $1000 as a starting price now, they want “the best”, despite not knowing anything about much better deals (all these expensive laptops with shitty HD4000, seriously). We don’t even pay for our expensive phones anymore or if we do, we pay half a thousand dollars to look at pictures while taking a shit. Think about that. A 500 bucks tablet for your three year old kid? Come on now.

It’s definitely a change compared to emergent technology from ten or twenty years ago. Technology literacy didn’t spread and manufacturers are using this at their advantage.

The computer industry is now focused on selling pseudo-primo stuff -Intel ultrabook bullshit- to people who don’t understand anything about computers but who are ready to shove whatever price in to impress their friends. It’s not anymore about doing things, it’s about showing off.

All of sudden affordable equals cheap, but I don’t think it does. Netbooks are now going down but the last ones running on AMD allow you to play Crysis. On $450 machines. Doing more with less, people call that Great Value or Yield and usually love it.

So OEMs either sell low-margin cheap products like netbooks and Android tablets to tractor beam customers and then sell high-margin expensive products like ultrabooks. There’s a sweet middle ground to go for but more importantly, it’s no more a free market with choices if one company (Intel) dictates how things work through an oligarchy of vassals.

If I had been told as a kid that I would be in Los Angeles making music in 2012 I would have been like, shut your face hole! And then proceed to high five myself in the mirror with a little dance.

But that’s not all there is. I’m under the biggest stress ever, the kind that takes a bit too many brain cycles. I compensate by nerding out like crazy but that doesn’t feel like enough.

Living between L.A. and Paris for almost four years, 2013 needs to be the year I settle. I’m lucky I have been able to travel but it’s exhausting and making audio really requires a big dose of stability.

Problem is I still am not certain where I will settle, it depends on things I can’t really control. Frustrating. So close.

C’est la vie, bite the bullet hang tight etc