h. Play

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.

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.