h. Play

“Dear US, you have an extraordinary bullying culture that you praise as much as you despise.”

“Dear France, you have an extraordinary avoiding culture that you praise as much as you despise.”

I tweeted that and I kind of feel like it’s damn true. People bully each other a lot here, the cause being good or bad doesn’t matter, people truly enjoy going at it, going after it. Like American football. In France it’s more like the opposite where people avoid confrontation a lot more because it’s kind of stupid, the outcome is never good. Like European football. The problem though is that at some point, it explodes and it explodes big time. And we’re all very conscious about it. US folks denounce bullying all the time and French people often criticize the lack of action, pointing at the terrible inertia. Yet, we continue.

Just observing our cultural patterns and paradoxes.

I will probably never see another left-handed black man at such a prestigious position, unless I become president too (I’d be perfect for France tho). I randomly gathered those pictures but man, they perfectly illustrate my memory of his 2009-2017 tenure. Outstanding wife, humor, work, kids laughing, vacation, that left-hand writing –such a classic, stiff hand position-, Barack in the paint fighting for the basketball I mean… It’s going to be another painful moment this year.

Very disappointed in what he probably couldn’t change anyway which is a weird, confusing feeling but what isn’t confusing in 2016 amirite.

I’m a little afraid for the family’s safety after November to be honest.

Great article on e-waste. One thing though:

“Who is to blame? Consumers certainly have a role to play in the increase of e-waste—they’re buying the goods, after all. But manufacturers have given people fewer and fewer viable ways to keep older electronics functioning effectively.”

Un-true. Weak. We update devices when they’re perfectly fine, we don’t have to. A few days ago I charged my 2011 dusty phone, it works like a charm. I just checked the battery, the phone is still on with 60% of juice. We lie to ourselves as much as manufacturers plan obsolescence, let’s be honest.

You still can text and tweet with a Blackberry and you will get the same results. Technologically speaking the world runs on old ass protocols and low-level things that haven’t changed in decades. We do not need to update. We do not need to upgrade. 5 year old laptops are still powerful enough to do just fine with 99% of what people use computers for. Millions of computers less powerful than your little sister’s phone are running our world without sweating.

Yes, it will be a tiny bit better with the freshest silicon available but in the big scheme of things, it’s not important. Outside the existential question about what happiness is (is it a new device every 12 months?), how much we waste is a bigger issue and again if you have some kids you’d better curve your upgrade habits down a bit because at this rate well, I kind of feel like we are destroying everything right now at a wonderfully fast pace so… We’ll see.

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.