Super Volatile

Skyrim was released this winter, and players have already invested millions of hours in it’s single-player Nordic countryside. World of Warcraft boasts millions of years logged on it’s massively-multiplayer world of Azeroth. The human experience would claim billions of lifetimes spent in its omni-player reality, if it were to make a comparative claim on its marketing material.

How soon until we spend not hours but entire lifetimes elsewhere?

In case you didn't notice, it's already happening. From a comment on Hacker News:

If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.

To take this to an extreme, imagine that you're completely blind. Yeah, that's a tough life, but you can still pretty much take care of yourself and do the things that people do. Do you know what it's called when you lose all sense of touch? It's called paralysis, and they push you around in a wheelchair while you calculate black hole radiation.

Visions of the future, like the one published recently by Microsoft, are not only creepy, but also limited and narrow in presenting what's possible. The article analyses tactile interactions possible with our hands, neglected in Microsoft's video.

I've noticed the arrival recently of a new genre of futuristic YouTube videos. They're created by tech companies for marketing or brand-burnishing purposes. With the flawless production values that only a cash-engorged balance sheet can buy you, they portray a not-too-distant future populated by exceedingly well-groomed people who spend their hyperproductive days going from one screen to the next. (As seems always to be the case with utopias, the atmosphere is very post-sexual.) The productions are intended to present us with visions of technological Edens, but they end up doing the exact opposite: portraying a future world that feels cold, mechanical, and repellent.

Why perfection is so scary.

I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong and I'm going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?

A personal story about Steve from Vic Gundotra, of Android fame. Reading things like this I realized that it's only a matter of time that the Church of Steve will be formed. Seriously.

RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead.

Good.

Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.

These people rarely do anything of much value, though.

Finally a reasonable response to all the voices shouting that “the web is dead”, recently heard at (Microsoft-sponsored) SXSW's panel.

When the Internet was first opened to the general public in 1992, I was unimpressed. What I saw was exactly as interesting as the brochure rack in the grocery store. Hadn't people read my sci-fi novel "Ender's Game" (1985), where a couple of anonymous kids used something like the Internet to pass for experts and influence public opinion; or "The Worthing Saga" (1978), where millions of people watched superstars play computer games?

Well, probably not. But I was impatient for others to catch on to how much potential there was for public networks to change politics and entertainment.

O. S. Card reflects on the changes that the internet brought into our lives over the past 20 years. I can't resist from noting that he's overly optimistic about the quality of his predictions. This XKCD comic expresses it best: Locke and Demostenes.

The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself again, aren't I) combined. And it’s not for reasons of price, or limited cell carrier options, or lack of corporate IT support, which are the mainstream media’s main caveats when they review it.

A blogger predicts inevitable failure of the iPhone, just before it came out in 2007. The internet never forgives.

[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

I’ve been thinking about this since Saturday. Here’s my theory: the problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy. I think he’s a really weird dude. Recall, for example, this comment of Schmidt’s from 2009, regarding Google and privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Schmidt's views quoted in the article are creepy indeed. The problem is that they may turn into truth one day.

But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.

College dropout shares his opinion of university level education. I wonder if it will be as accurate as his infamous former prediction that “640k of memory ought to be enough of everybody”.

Seriously, though, there's a lot of excellent learning material on the web already. A lot of it is of higher quality than one can get from a university. It's also often more adequate to market expectations. But whether students will be able to filter out the fluff and study systematically on their own, are totally different questions.

The social networking site only picked up 320,800 new users in the U.S. in June, according to Inside Facebook. That might sound like a lot -- until you compare it with the number of new U.S. users the site grabbed in May: 7.8 million.

What tech journalists are good at is premature rumors about companies' deaths.