Category: Me Myself&I

Ian was writing four years ago about the cigarette of this century.

The point is not whether technologies like smartphones actually make us more or less connected to one another–that’s a cheap, pat question whose answer is best left to trade books and TED talks. The point is that technologies like the Blackberry change our social fabric in ways that we often cannot see, and therefore cannot fully reason about. McLuhan argued that technologies can never be fully grasped in the present, but only after we establish some distance from them.

I am doing that as much as I can. It annoys me because it’s easy to not have your phone around you to look at and yet, I struggle. Which is weak. There’s always something to look at right? No. That’s what completely scares me: we often look at our phones for no reason, pulling to refresh some content we already saw etc. We’re completely in the slot machine psychology here.

Recently I forced myself to have dinner without looking at my phone, without having it with me in the kitchen. It’s weird but it’s fantastic I actually enjoy my food far more. I feel much more satisfied.

Someone might say that reading books does the same disservice to your neck except that we don’t read books and never did for hours everyday like we do with phones. The convenience is right here, one minute that becomes five minutes at a time.

Like smoking, I’m not against it but let’s have some self control/respect.

Last week we get killed in the streets

On debates we’re a bullet point, a statistic

Yesterday we still get killed for no reason

While some people are all over a Mars mission

It’s hard sometimes.

I’m thinking a lot about IRC these days. That would be cool if I could have my network spread out over a few channels. Communicating without being sniffed and tracked down sounds like a dream in 2016.

Reading its history is interesting. Of course it was messy. I think hosting companies should offer IRC server features or should have been doing that. Imagine you buy your domain name, your presence on the internet and you can not only put your stuff in there share photos and blog posts but also chat freely. Have your friends over. Kick/ban idiots. Slap your dad around a bit with a large trout.

I’m trying to think of an internet without paranoia or ads or cookies because fuck, that’s missing these days.

So Google just presented Wavenet, an AI that recreates human speech more accurately than anything before. As a sound designer I am used to speech synthesis and have been playing with it for the past sixteen years. the last big innovation was around 2000. This is something else.

This is so close to a real voice I feel in deny. Convincingly faking a human voice to the ear the most unforgivable, most sensitive organ we have –and which is totally shaped around human voice- is a tremendous achievement. Like, I can’t believe it it’s pretty much a done deal.

Look at yourself and see how you react to the voice or sounds of your loved ones. Yeah, a computer will be able to make you cry really soon. Forget virtual worlds and visual cues, audio triggers emotions like nothing else.

Same week, Microsoft just announced that they have reached a milestone in speech recognition.

Both sides of the equation are being solved as we speak.

Obviously first thing I think about: jobs. It’s ridiculous how many jobs are based on boring ass discussions, bam, gone. The fact that now robots will be able to understand us easily AND answer with natural voices is FREAKING ME OUT. Jobs where you needed a human to interface between people and machines, ba-bam, gone. Voice is why you trust your doctor. You’ll trust a robot with a sulky voice even more.

As Brad Wardell is writing:

The new uber class (calling them rich isn’t even the right term at that stage) will be way ahead of the mob. They’ll have machines to protect their holdings, homes and families from the rabble. So those who think “they’ll have to do something for everyone else or they’ll be a revolution” think again. Don’t assume a universal basic income is a definite.

Of course no techlord be MS or Google or Uber or Facebook or Amazon are warning us, they’re too busy replacing us already.

If you have kids or plan to have some, you’d better get the discussion about UBI going right the fuck now.

I can’t shake the feeling that we’re arriving where we wanted to be but that it’s also an abrupt end to things as we know them…

The Simpsons is so ambitious, intimate, classical, experimental, hip, corny, and altogether free in its conviction that the imagination should go where it wants, that to even begin to explain all the things The Simpsons is, and all the things it does, you would need an immense Venn diagram drawn on a football field, each circle representing different modes of comedy.

On the best TV show ever.

It went to more places—tonally and topically as well as geographically— tackled more issues, and told more jokes about more subjects than any comedy has before or since, and at its peak (roughly seasons 3–12) did it better than anyone else.

Those seasons happened right when I was a teenager in France, where the show aired too. It is just great memories of talking about that joke, that line, in the last episode during a break at school. What I remember being struck by was the amount of self-consciousness, how the writers would go on US culture and society. Could be hard or just poking fun at it but it was constant and surgical. France’s irreverence has always been pretty corny and basic, or its satire is super brutal going for hard themes and strong images. There, humor and criticism were happening through so many angles and layers, it was inventive and great. Balanced. I couldn’t get enough of that. Same with Futurama.

I just read that Matt Groening grew up on the west coast with his parents being both half-Europeans. Considering how strongly universal the Simpsons felt –despite being truly Americans- I am not surprised.

I thought that liberal, agnostic take on the US and the world would spread because it is so effective creatively. So many places to go.

It did not happen but we still have 596 episodes –and counting- of that sitcom.

The Simpsons, man. One of the only thing the US can be proud of univocally.

Dave Winer, one of the blogging godfather wrote this week:

My reason for writing is not just engagement, but also to get mind-to-mind connections.

Medium people who write 200% for engagement, you need to chill.

Writing is not even just to get mind-to-mind connections to me, it’s a fantastic way to play “parse my thoughts and make them readable” which is a useful thing in life. Those ideas that go back and forth, it’s really great to lay them down and move on and I’m always surprised that people find that kind of weird, while they have no issue talking to a stranger about how they feel for years to get a hold on themselves.

It’s Labor Day and I’m going to make more coffee.

I often thought of that website as being necessary. You know, shaking things up at least with words on a screen. In the real world we can’t do much anymore so that was always refreshing to see them write super loud what tons of people were trying to avoid to discuss or were muttering under breath.

I had two links from Gawker for a sugar/physical activity blog post here are the titles:

– Study: You Are Not Working Out

– Artificial Sweeteners May Actually Raise Your Blood Sugar, Ha

Those are frank articles on the fact that folks drink too much sugary shit and don’t move enough –a plain, good old truth-, when every single publication around is on its toes, massaging its audience.

At first I thought Gawker was necessary but then, because they were so thorough too, it became a favorite. I really appreciated reading wit on absolutely everything and it was one of the very last website where comments were true gold (despite a terrible comment system: if articles are good, people will go through hell and back to add their sarcasm). Now all I have is The Atlantic.

So Gawker is gone. As we all know the American justice system has “some” flaws. I still contemplate how three adults into open marriage and voyeur stuff can sue a company that wrote an article –which was pretty cool btw- and published a few seconds of said video to death. That’s fucking crazy.

But yeah writing freely online as powerful and freeing as it is, is “dangerous”. I have too made adjustments from time to time in fear of some backlash. This is why Gawker falling is not good news for anyone not a billionaire, not a sheep, which is probably some of you.

I went through Stranger Things.

It was bad.

It got me thinking though. I think you need to have a “fucked up” upbringing to have things to say creatively more and more. You need a fresh, different perspective and you can’t really have that if you had a perfectly boring and great childhood.

Apparently the Duffer brothers didn’t do anything else in their lives besides watching movies, learning how to make movies and making some. That’s not a good thing. You would think it is but it’s not. Stranger Things feels like it’s been created by an algorithm. Procedurally generated generic horror story.

Akira, which has the best story revolving around kids with psychic powers escaping a secret government lab of all time, has this development because the author lived something, being born right after the war and wondering about nuclear bombs effects on people. Which is why the kids in Akira look like they’re old, making them immediately fascinating. Katsuhiro Otomo had lived some shit and was putting it in its art.

Take someone like Jenji Kohan, TV writer born in a family working in television. You’d think she would be bland but she isn’t because she was a woman competing with her brother and dudes in the late 90s and that ultimately had an impact on her output. She went for unheard themes and stories like single mothers selling weed and women in prison. She added something. She brought something.

You need purposes and reasons to make long and lasting things and Stranger Things falls really short for me because it’s been made with a weird fetish/me-too/nostalgia-induced creativity and nothing else.

We have a thing in sound called signal-to-noise ratio.

Signal-to-noise ratio (abbreviated SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in decibels. A ratio higher than 1:1 (greater than 0 dB) indicates more signal than noise.

So let me introduce the progress-to-perception ratio (abbreviated PPR or P/P)

Perception-to-progress ratio is a measure that compares your perception of the world which is what you actually live everyday to our progress, which is defined by actual facts and numbers.

So for a white person maybe the ratio is about 5:1, indicating that white people see a decent amount of good things going on while the actual progress is 1. Maybe 1:1 for poor white folks.

For black and brown people though it’s going to be 0.8:1 if not 0.2:1. Just an example from a recent article in Baltimore:

of the nearly 1,000 people killed by police officers in 2015, 40 percent were unarmed black men. Now consider, black men make up just 6 percent of the national population.

Let that sink in. Ponder. Imagine the impact on people like me, realizing that we’re definitely the target. It’s not just a “we talk a lot about it in the news”. It’s real. We knew this before, now we have HD footage.

So even if progress happens, it happens at a slower rate for people of color: if all violence goes down but black and latinos are still targeted far, far more than we should –at a rate that never went down- then violence doesn’t really go down for us. And because violence *does* go down globally, it makes us wonder quite a lot what is going on because that’s not what we witness or how we feel.

That changes a lot of things in the way we go on with our lives and it’s hard to describe it, that was my attempt. I wish there was a “apply to all” button for progress so that we flatten those enormous disparities.