Fluxx™ and Modern Life · 7:31am May 16th, 2016
It's been fashionable for a long time to say that modern life changes rapidly. This is a very silly statement. It's now 2016, and the city outside my door looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1960. The lives of its inhabitants have changed some since 1960, but if I made a list of the major changes affecting large numbers of people--interstate highways, affordable air travel, minority rights, women's rights, environmental cleanup, factory robotics, air conditioning, the Internet--I think most of them would have developed in 1960-1980. And the number of major, life-changing social and technological changes in the 46 years from 1970 to the present would pale in comparison to the number of major changes in the 46 years from 1914 to 1960. Or 1868 to 1914. Or 1822 to 1868. Or 1300 to 1346. Rock music changed more from 1958 (Pat Boone, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers) to 1964 (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles, the Doors, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones) than in the 52 years since. I think those of us in the West live in a time of almost singularly slow social and technological change, slower than any time since, possibly, the 12th century. Consult some history books if you don't believe me.
That's not to say they won't start changing rapidly soon. But they haven't been lately.
So why do people feel like it's so fast?
A big part of the reason is just that people have always felt that way. But there is something else that really has changed.
Fluxx is an interesting card game made by Looney Labs (the geniuses behind Zendo and some other great games) which is actually a meta-game. The game is to change the rules of the game so that you win the game.
It occurred to me this evening that this is a good metaphor for modernity.
I was talking with someone who's having difficulty making friends. This is a problem endemic to 21st century Western society. I don't see this as a big problem among my friends from India or China.
Partly this is just a technological problem we've chosen for ourselves, by taking advantage of our mobility to move around the country, of our ability to switch jobs frequently, of our mobility to spend all our free time in activities many miles from our homes, and to shop in any one of perhaps hundreds or thousands of large stores within driving distance, so that most of us rarely see the same person twice without making a special effort.
But it's also part of America's heritage. By the time America rolled into the 20th century, we had a whole collection of different social structures and corresponding sets of rules to live by. There was the social structure of the village, of the big-town ethnic ghetto, of the social elite. There were the social structures of grade school, prep school, and college, of factory, women's committee, and church diocese. There were the cultures of the South, of New England, of the Midwest, of the West, and of the Southwest; of Italy, Germany, Sweden, England, and Spain; of Native America, Spanish Mexico, Africa, and the new African-Caribbean cultures that were as old when America began as America is now. And there were some people in all these places and cultures who said we had a uniquely American way of doing things, and some who spoke of humanism and the Enlightenment, and some who insisted the only possible values were those of the Middle Ages, which we must return to as soon as possible. Probably some old cranks in Harvard were muttering about Homer.
The problem is that our instinct is to figure out the one important social structure and climb it, and that doesn't work anymore.
To put this in more concrete terms: Say you're in high school. You see that there's a dominance hierarchy with a few kids at the top of it, and a whole lot on the bottom. You figure out how to slowly work your way up the hierarchy. The uniquely modern question is: Is it worth it? Or will that all be wasted time when you're dumped out of high school into some other social pool?
With our mobility and our mix of classes and ethnicities and value systems, we are all somewhere in many different social hierarchies at once, all of which have arguments over what the hierarchy really is and what the rules should be, and all of which are shifting as we and other people move about. Not due to any underlying changes in society or technology; just due to the relatively constant social structure being a thing that spins us all about at high velocity among lots of smaller social networks.
Sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, a bunch of clever people figured out that, with all these different ideas about what the rules were in the air, the way to win was no longer to figure out the rules and play by them well, but to make the rules so that you would win. Once enough smart people had realized this for any particular game, a new game developed, a meta-game of fighting over what the rules of the game were going to be, and the game itself faded into insignificance.
This was done consciously in the arts, and had reached completion by 1930, by which time all art was judged according to how well it fit whatever theory was (un)popular at the moment rather than whether anybody liked it. (In light of the astonishing amount of energy that the highest-ranking Nazis, including Hitler, devoted to supervising artists, art installations, and art exhibits, I think there is a case to be made that World War II was in part the Art War. The hatred of Jews was traditional, but also part of a cultural reaction against modern art and modern capitalism. See a summary of Artists Under Hitler, a recent book on the Nazi supervision of art, for some interesting details.)
This is still how literary theory is today. Before the 20th century, we used to have authentic artistic movements, when people started thinking differently, perhaps in response to events like the Enlightenment or the American Revolution. Sometime in the second half of the 19th century, we could argue that causality began running the other way: people spent more time sitting and coming up with theories about art, which led to new kinds of art that eventually trickled down to change society (and to the people who sat down and came up with those theories getting chairs in universities or selling lots of art). If you read a textbook on literary theory, it describes movements in literature up until 1900, and movements in literary theory after that. If a "movement" appears now, like metafiction or language poetry, it seems to be written and selected to fit a pre-existing theory.
You can also see this in the financial industry. Enron didn't really break many rules. Most of its profits were the result of legal shell games; most of the charges against it were on points of law too complex or ambiguous for anyone to say whether the laws were broken or not. Really it was just a little too cutting-edge in admitting that it was playing the meta-game of rules-lawyering rather than the game of making stuff. And who even understands what's going on today in the derivatives markets, where the total value of existing obligations is reputedly multiple times the monetary value of the Earth?
And perhaps this is how our ordinary lives are today. Certainly people have always argued about values--should we free the serfs? Nothing has changed qualitatively. But today, I might have lunch with my fundamentalist Baptist parents or my Catholic sister, go to class in my third-wave feminist English department, stop for a coffee on my way home at the coffee shop in my staunchly Republican town, then come online to... this place. I think what is changing rapidly in the 21st century is not technology, and probably not even the different cultures that make up society, but their availability to each individual, the rapidity with which we switch between them--and the number of people who take advantage of the confusion to spread the values that are best for them personally. More and more people are playing the meta-games rather than the games.
This should be a site wide blog post!
Or is that what you want us to think because it makes you look cool?
Not much else to say except that I completely agree, and I didn't realize it, but I've been thinking at least tangentially about this too.
Engineering, which is what I spent the last four years studying, is not in a good spot at the moment. I've been talking to people a generation and a half above me, and the first thing they tell me is an affirmation of the previously mentioned. The second is that "you're young, there's so much in store for you", followed by musings about other random fields like chiropractics, food tech, business management... the erosion of the exclusivity of the university degree has, I think, eroded the exclusivity of the direction of the degree. Getting a degree used to lock you into that field. Now it doesn't. It's like you said - really fluid, really mobile.
Is it just the age-old problem of nostalgia? Regret? Was it because most of the people I talked to had heavily subsidized degrees? Probably not, since they have children too which come with their fees in tow and it's not likely that they've just forgotten about it. I don't know if I should embrace the logical conclusion of Instagram philosophy, saying "Screw it, I'll listen to these guys and chase my dreams while I'm young and do chemistry/writing", or if I should stay with my heritage, my culture's view of "bitter first, sweet later". Which structure to climb indeed.
That's the new game, isn't it? If the meta-game is the new game, can it still be called the meta-game? Social justice, culture appropriation/preservation, all that 21st century shebang.
It's okay, Bad Horse, we've just gone through the 50's in the 2000's, a time that will be idolized in spite of stupid wars (Korea/Afghanistan) where culture more or less stagnated for the decade, before going back into the 60's again.
Everything's starting to spark up again, 3D printing is being utilized and becoming remarkably affordable, you can have a laser etcher in your own home, crowdfunding is astonishing in implication, the VIVE is about to do some amazing stuff too, it's the closest we've come to a working Holodeck...
And we got yippies back in the form of SJWs.
Let's just hope the music gets as good this time around, too.
I don't entirely agree.
Recipe for feeling old: have a conversation with a child today who has never known a world in which access to information is not immediate. I think the world as we experience it has changed substantially more quickly in my lifetime. The reason we don't realize it is we become so accustomed to the new normal that it's easy to forget what it was like back in the days where the only recourse to wanting to know an odd fact was a library (which was extremely slow and unreliable) or word of mouth.
That said, I agree in part. I think some of the effect is psychological but internal, for everypony: as we age, things seem to go faster because we accumulate memories and experience.
I can't really speak to it, myself. My life has been speeding by like the protagonist of Siouxsie's "Gun" due to the use of pain medication, which is a damn shame.
Nah. I feel like people's difficulty forming relationships is just a product of two (main) things:
1) Car culture. It just plain sucks when you've got a large distance to cross for any social thing outside your own house, but that's basically the norm for Murrica (and 'Straya). This is not a problem other countries have.
2) Paranoia. I'm constantly surprised by how many ways there are for people around me to consider someone (usually not me, a third party) a "creeper", a "douchebag", or to otherwise socially pigeonhole them. When people do this, it "saves" them the effort of actually interacting on a social level.
If you live far away from other people and are dismissive and creeped-out by them whenever you meet some, yeah, you're gonna have very few friends.
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3947512
Yeah, except this time, the protests were at the start (2011 vs 1968).
3947514
Sorry to hear about your pain meds
What?
No.
do people still play fluxx?? I havent play in years though.
Your last bit reminded me of code-switching.
I think the creation, and dissemination of information is what has rapidly developed these last few decades. Two quick observations: Young people today get really freaked out when they don't have Internet access, and I think the brony movement would be much smaller and underground without social networking and meetup.com and the like. We can find niches of humanity to attach to better than ever, even and especially if they live on the other side of the globe
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3947514
Somebody who came out of a coma today, after 50 years, could go downtown to the same Greyhound station he used 50 years ago, go to his hometown, eat at the same McDonalds he ate at 50 years ago, go home (if he has one to go to) and watch the news on the same TV and on the same channel he watched it on 50 years ago.
Somebody who came out of a coma in 1950 after 50 years would be utterly lost and bewildered. He would never have seen a car, a bus, an airplane, electric lights, or a television, used a telephone, had indoor plumbing, heard a radio or any recorded voice, or seen a moving picture. He would never have known a doctor who could reliably deliver a baby without killing the mother or the baby, do surgery other than amputations, or dispense medicines other than poisons. He'd never have paid income tax or heard about welfare, social security, women voting, or federal labor regulations, and he'd have missed out on 2 world wars.
And you think the past 30 years have seen an increase in the speed of communication? Our guy from 1900 lived on a farm in the country, where his nearest neighbor was half a mile away and you had to walk there to find out what was happening. There was no newspaper delivery, no TV, no telephones except among the rich, no radio. You had to see people in person or write them a letter to talk to them. The radio and telephone were bigger changes than the Internet, as I think is shown by how quickly poorer people were (and still are, in other nations and among America's homeless) willing to spend a lot of their money to adopt them. 50 years before that, there were no telegraph wires, and so no communication anywhere except by physically moving from place to place. It took weeks for news to travel across the Atlantic. Major battles happened after the wars they were part of had already ended.
3947725 "The Sixties" were really 1964 (introduction of modern rock 'n roll) to 1975 (the fall of Saigon). Woodstock and the Tet Offensive were in 1968 IIRC.
...This really explains the neoreactionaries. "Hey, can we just pick a set of rules and make everyone follow them, goddammit? If you don't like it, go to a different place with different rules."
3948002 true. I would argue that what information is accessible and presented to you is almost entirely up to you these days; top-down entertainment and information dissemination services like TV, newspapers, magazines, and to a lesser extent fm radio are losing money, relevancy, and viewers. The Internet allows you to find any information you want yourself, and makes it a lot less effort to do so than going to the library.
3948002
Those are selective examples.
How often do you take a Greyhound bus or eat at McDonalds?
Now how often do you access the internet?
Yes, the invention of cars led to cities looking very different. But in a similar manner, someone from the past bumped up could still walk places or cook food over an open fire. We're talking about what changes our day-to-day lives, and the internet is leaps and bounds beyond any of the other examples you've used. We access and make use of it almost constantly.
Here's something:
I've never seen before that may be possibly related to the topic at hand.
I've worked in the same little branch of the city's public library for 26 years now, and just in the past two weeks, I've helped three gentlemen at least a decade older than me--guys in their 60s, that means--who were filling out online applications for jobs at some of our local grocery and retail outlets: Costco and Pavilions Market and places like that. I had to explain to them what a "user name" was on the form and show them where the sites gave tips for how to create a proper password.
It's made me wonder. Did these guys get fired from jobs they'd held for years only to discover that they didn't have a pension or the savings they needed for retirement? Have they lived their whole lives in a world that they assumed worked one way and are now discovering that it doesn't work that way at all? They make me think of your hypothetical coma victim. How does he pay for his bus ticket, or for the electricity to run his TV?
Mike
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I think part of what you're tapping into here is relatability. In our 1900's coma guy waking in 1950 example, sure they'll be freaked out, but they can be quickly acclimated to many individual things. A car is just a horseless carriage. Electric lights are just flameless lamps. Indoor plumbing means it's now sanitary to poop inside
a specific area ofyour house. As long as the person is okay with a layman understanding and is willing to hand-waive how it all works as just "science", then it's just a high-tech version of what they've seen before. Contrast this to explaining a television to a 1900's person... "Um, okay. It lets you watch... stage plays, I guess. Or other stuff. But it's just a tiny little picture of them. No, they're not actually in the box. No, they can't hear you. Is this happening right now? Uh, sometimes I guess."Put another way, think about your smartphone. It's a phone and a portable computer, so while futuristic, you can easily explain it to a 1980's person (also, thanks Star Trek!). To a 1950's person, it's like that landline you have, except it works without a wire (and then you'd also have to explain the computer half of the device). To a 1900's person? Where do you even start? A smartphone is just this wizard box that I can use to communicate with London, listen to symphonies, watch lewd and carnal acts, play 2048, order theater tickets, and listen to those two gentleman one of whom is particularly Grump while the other is not quite so Grump.
This carries into two main observations. First, that 1900-1950 had many more changes to ubiquitous infrastructures... cars and skyscrapers and the New Deal... all the little things that led up to that 1950's idyllic suburban lifestyle. Many of these were designed to wow and amaze—the future is now!—and so relatability is not really the focus. By comparison, from 1950-2000, there's much more of a focus on science and technology. On-demand porn in my pocket and not catching polio are both fantastic advancements, but your 1950's coma guy isn't going to observe these things on his own by just walking down the street. In America at least, and probably most of the first world, city infrastructure has stagnated.
Second, because science and technology can be difficult to understand, or downright scary at times, relatability was a focus. Electronic mail. Smart phones and smart cars. 3d printers. Streaming video. These are all revolutionary developments, but they're all "we took X and made it Y", or "it's like X but better". Related is skeuomorphic design, the trend of designing new tech to resemble old tech for familiarity's sake. Because this has been emphasized, I'd argue that it is intentionally easier for a 1950's coma patient (or our grandparents) to acclimate themselves to this new tech.
EDIT: Another example. When I sit down in my car, my smart phone connects to my car's system via Bluetooth, synchronizes contact information (for hands-free phone calls), and loads the music app to stream music through my phone. A 1980's person will be like "Hot damn! That radio can do tons of stuff now!" A 1950's person will be like "...it's just a radio? It plays music. [listens to your explanation] Oh that's cool I guess. It's still a radio." A 1900's person will be like "WTF HORSELESS CARRIAGE WITCHCRAFT"
I disagree on this, actually.
Modern life does change rapidly relative to historical norms prior to the, say, 1700s. We've had at least one major disruptive technological innovation per generation since the late 1800s - railroads, telegraphs, industrialization, automobiles, telephones, radio, cheap air travel, Interstate Highways, television, personal computers, the internet, cell phones, and smart phones all have had large effects on how people live their lives or, at a very minimum, how the world around them functions to the point where it noticably changes their life.
While life always changed, we saw a great increase in the rate of technological change in more recent years, and a lot of it has directly impacted how people live their day-to-day lives. Computers, the Internet, cell phones, and smart phones were all disruptive technologies - people spend their days very differently now than they used to. Most young people spend far more time on the computer than they did on the TV, and the computer-Internet combination has caused an explosion in the creation of content. Meanwhile, cell phones kept us connected to each other 24/7; you are never out of touch with a cell phone. Smart phones brought a bad computer and the information on the Internet to everyone, everywhere, 24/7.
Honestly, the Internet was really what ended history; it used to be that something happened, and then was in the past and was much less accessible. Now, I regularly come across posts from the early 2000s while searching for stuff. The time horizon on "now" presently stretches back more than a decade.
The thing is, I'm not sure what disruptive technology is going to happen now; the smart phone is basically part of a millenia-old trend of going from "I have to find this dude to talk to them about X" to "I can instantly say anything to anyone, anywhere on the planet, from anywhere, and send them multimedia images of my environment." Letters were the precursor to this, and now we're at the point where the world is just a different place as a result of communication. Cars go about the same speed they did fifty years ago; so do planes. They're more fuel efficient, and are better in other ways, and driving a car around is now much more convenient (audomated directions via GPS combined with maps from the Internet and possible live communications with people at your destimnation to let them know your progress!) but that hasn't really been a big deal. Some people claim self-driving cars will be a disruptive technology, but frankly, I don't think so; people already sort of automate driving to a great extent anyway, and no one really wants to spend a lot of time in the car, even if they don't have to drive while doing it. Yeah, they could watch something on their cell phone... but unless they have a super-long commute, that's not going to be very impactful (though I suppose if automated cars make it possible for cities to allow 15 minute commutes instead of hour-long commutes, it will be somewhat disruptive).
Predicting the future is hard.
Sure, the gay rights movement wasn't as impactful as the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, or women's sufferage, but on the other hand, I do think that the Internet, by changing how we communicate, has fundamentally changed the way our social groups function. I mean, from one point of view, we haven't had as many major disruptive changes in the last 46 years in terms of major X Rights movements or what-have-you, but on the other hand, how we structure our personal social lives has changed enormously. Many people have many friends they've never even met in real life now; my personal social network is international. That was severely abnormal historically, but nowadays, it is true of a huge fraction of people.
Also, I think you're underestimating the impact of the decline of religiousity on society; attendance of religious services has plummeted, and religiousity itself has been declining by about 1% per year in the US for the last couple decades. This has had a lot of secondary effects as well, though it is arguable that cause and effect is reversed there (i.e. the decline in religosity is because of those secondary effects driving people away from religion).
There have been many new spinoff types of music, and I think a lot of the heavily-produced, more techno modern stuff is pretty different from what you saw in 1964.
This is really another example of time bleeding in modern-day society. Like how the Internet has made it so that the past bleeds into the present, derivatives (and things like Kickstarter and Early Access video games) make it so that the economy of the future bleeds into the preset.
In reality, it is nothing more than people saying "We will pay for this stuff in the future." Viewing it as being many times larger than the rest of the economy is misleading, because it isn't; it is basically a projection of the future. The real value of the derivatives market is whatever bleeds into the present on any given day.
The actual amount of money involved is vastly smaller than the nominal value because in reality, that nominal value is really a nominal value at a specific point in time.
It is basically like comparing the amount of money spent in the US on any given day to the total value in assets of the US; you're not really comparing the same thing, so pretending like X is much bigger than Y doesn't really tell you much of value, because you would expect years and years of economic movements to be more valuable than the amount of money being pushed around on any given day.
They're saying that because McDonalds paid for a contract to have the right to buy 10,000,000 pounds of beef delivered on October 1st for $2/pound, that they bought $20,000,000 of beef today. They didn't; they're just planning for the future. Counting that $20 million as being around for the next five months is basically counting it multiple times; in the end, it is going to be $20,000,000 in October in exchange for 10,000,000 pounds of beef. The people who trade around said contract are only paying tiny fractions of that contract in the trade, because they're basically betting on the market for beef going up or down by small amounts; you're really looking at pretty fractional changes in value, for which people simply aren't going to pay vast sums of money.
That's not to say that the market isn't big, but the actual size of the market is less than 1% of the nominal size of the market. In 2008, for instance, the $596 trillion market was really only $3.3 trillion once you took into account all the contracts that were offsetting each other. $3.3 trillion is a lot, but it is a lot less than $596 trillion.
Moreover, the value of the market is grossly, grossly inflated by interest rate swaps, where the notional value is never exchanged - it is just two people agreeing to swap the interest being accrued on assets they possess, which is a way of hedging bets and averaging out returns. It makes perfect sense, but it makes it look like people are trading hilariously large amounts of assets for comically small sums until you realize that, no, those assets aren't going anywhere, and are indeed only sort of peripherally involved. A much more honest way of looking at them is looking at the value of the interest involved. Moreover, because they are swaps, they aren't even really representative of the same sort of thing as ordinary futures contracts - you're just basically averaging out your returns with someone else's.
Is there a difference between "technology" and "technology available to people" and "culture" and "culture you are actually a part of"?
3948343
This line gave me chills.
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It's ironic that you say that, because before the Internet, the perceived time horizon on "now" went back more than 10 years. People had discussions that spanned many years, because they were carried on in journals and books. Replying to something published 10 years ago was normal. Now, people lock threads on discussion forums after one month, as if something that was relevant one month ago is no longer important.
3947512
Neither of these things are particularly important, honestly. I'm not saying that they're not cool, but frankly, 3D printing is just another manufacturing method, and it isn't particularly useful for most things due to material limitations. For most people, 3D printing is nothing more than a gimmick.
What sort of stuff can you print using the home 3D printers? It is fundamentally objects d'art and entertainment stuff like warhammer minis. If you want to fix your car, you need stuff made out of metal, not plastic. Sure, you can build a crappy gun - whoopie. Who cares?
Laser etchers are even more pointless. They're really neat, but as far as 99.9% of the popualtion is concerned, it is a way to make cool art.
People talk about these things like they're replicators from Star Trek. They're not. They're cool, but as far as practical uses go, they're mostly useful for prototyping.
Yes, externalizing the risk of failed projects to the public at large rather than just rich investors is definitely cool.
The VIVE (and indeed, all of VR) are gimmicks like the Wiimote. They're not really important. Indeed, they won't really meaningfully change anything.
They're pretty much pointless.
VR won't change how people live their lives; I can already live in a virtual environment via a computer.
AR might be more meaningful, but people largely rejected the Google Glass.
Music has been improving over time. Remember, almost all 60s music was bad, we just don't remember it.
If you're trying to think about truly disruptive things, things which change the world, you need to actually change the world. VR does nothing because right now, you are sitting in a room with a computer. IN THE FUTURE, you are... standing in a room with a computer. Nothing meaningful has changed.
If you had actual Star Trek replicators, that would be disruptive. But 3D printers aren't those. "But they will be!" ignores a lot of very large, practical materials problems which create major restrictions on affordable 3D printers you'd actually want in your home/garage.
Laser etching is just not something that matters to anyone outside of an industrial environment. It is an aesthetic thing. It won't change the world, it will just make it a bit more stylish.
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Everyone needs a cell phone. Smart phones are useful but less mandatory. That said, honestly, if you don't have access to a computer, you're pretty much hosed as far as most good jobs go.
3948002
This is an interesting point, so you could argue that things changed more during that time period...
But on the other hand, there's a good chance both buildings have moved. How do people find stuff nowadays?
Moreover, I'm not sure if it is really a meaningful comparison. You could argue stuff changed more between 1900 and 1950, and maybe that's true in some ways, but on the other hand, many jobs which existed back in 1950 functionally don't exist today - what people do in them is wildly different. Work is an important part of your life. Of course, the same was probably true 1900-1950.
However, 1600-1650, how much changed? 1650-1700? 1700-1750? I would say that the changes we've seen in the last 50 years dwarf those of the changes experienced by most people during those time periods in terms of daily life and work.
So yeah, I mean, I could see the argument that the first half of the 20th century saw much larger changes than any other period in human history - that's probably actually true. But that doesn't mean that recent times are slow.
Also, a lot of our modern changes are much more personally demanding; it isn't very hard to teach someone how to ride a train or the bus. It is harder to teach them how to drive. It is harder still to teach them how to use a computer well.
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How many physical objects do you need on a daily basis?
My general answer is "zero that I don't already own".
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Yes. An affordable manufacturing method capable of printing small or fine parts that most anybody, even me, has the skills to create. Where designs can be shared through the internet. Where all the programs needed to design your own complex machinery is taught at the highschool level.
Can we not find inspiration in that? Is that not, in and of itself, enough that we have to deem it inferior to a fictional technology and thus a gimmick?
You can make cool art. In your house. With lasers. On the consumer market.
i.imgur.com/dcKXoy3.jpg
talk.dallasmakerspace.org/uploads/default/907/5340017696a09277.jpg
This is technology that is significant not because of what it can do, but for who it can do it for.
Yes, because it's democratized the investment process, and taken the investment process out of the sole hands of a few wealthy 'elite'.
That's fuckin' awesome, like holy shit. Compare the Indie game scene now to what it was 10 years ago. Golden age of Flash games. It's the difference between Triachnid being a browser game and Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac being cult hits and money buckets.
I stand by this statement whether that was sarcastic or not because I genuinely can't tell.
Pointless?
Who cares?
Now, you get a CAD program with VIVE and a 3D printer, and we could do some really cool stuff with scale model building.
We're running awfully quick into walls with what we can do with technology that has immediate cultural ramifications. That's not to say nothing, but the fact is that you can already have something as complex as the microwave in most every home and all it does is heat food.
For comparison, one of the greatest technological innovations of the last century was packaged dry noodles. In terms of what it meant for long term disaster relief foods and long term storage, it's a goddamn revolutionary marvel. It does far more in a far more significant way, but I find the existence and low cost of a microwave a better technological indicator.
So how about developing piezoelectric buildings, Japanese innovations in efficient indoor mass-farming, GMOs increasing prevalence and public acceptance, the Lazarus project to reverse brain death has been funded and is going into clinical trials on humans, an artificial intelligence has been brought on by law firms, robotic exoskeletons for the infirm and the disabled are totally becoming a thing, robotic drones can deliver your internet ordered specialty Amazon product, military planes are being outfitted with lasers to replace certain cannons, battleships are having their cannons replaced with fucking railguns, MIT continues to improve on and make more and more organic looking robotic organisms. you can fit 128gb or data on a card smaller than your pinkie fingernail, everything about mobile apps, advances in bioplastics, wireless electricity transfer continues to march forward slowly and inexorably , and this list is getting too long now so I'll stop. Because otherwise I'd start getting into neural networks and that's Bad Horse's wheelhouse.
Point is, I valued technology that significantly puts the creation of art and manufacturing into the hands of the individual. There was any number of other things I could have said, instead, but do not think for a second I chose to highlight what I did out of a false sense of hype or naivety.
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Google Glass wasn't AR. It was (well is) a headset that displayed images on it's surface without context cues.
VR is about as big a change as having CRT monitors instead of printed readouts which is to say that it's of more relevance to the casual consumer rather than geeks who already spend their lives staring at a screen.
3948795
Counterpoint: How many people do you suppose scroll down their browser windows by holding down the little arrow in the tiny box at the bottom of the scroll bar?
3948695 3948682 3948710 I've looked into 3D printing, but it's inferior in most ways to making a model out of clay, making a mold on that model out of silicone, and casting the part in that mold. Which people have been doing at home for decades.
Thermoplastic beads are also easier to work with, & probably cheaper. 3D printing is still super expensive and low resolution.
Sharing & downloading models is cool, except that so far I've never wanted to do that. Nobody has ever had a model of anything I've wanted to cast. The only other application for 3D printing that I've thought of is when you want to have a part that is customizable to individual customers by a computer. Like, they can customize all the dimensions on an item on your web page, and order it. To date, no one has done this.
etc.
The thing is most of this stuff has been under development since before I was born. In the 18th century, one guy would have an idea, go out and build something, and sell it. Whatever developments you point to, we do everything slower and in much more capital-intensive, highly-regulated ways than before. Look at how the smallpox vaccine or penicillin were developed. Each done by one guy in, like, a year, in his spare time. Those things would have taken a giant company billions of dollars and 20-30 years today.
3948867
To be fair penicillin could have been developed thousands of years ago.
Bedouins were using it to treat saddle sores which is how a Duchesne discovered it, got drafted into the military, died and then Fleming discovered it again a couple of decades later.
3948867
The main value of 3D printing is rapid prototyping, and the ability to make something on a computer and then get the physical part and be able to email that file to wherever, as well as being able to then edit said part a bit in the computer and make another one more quickly than you can make a clay model, among other things. HP had a 3D printer which they used for rapid prototyping and making stupid stuff that was totally pointless to show off how cool it was.
3948710
We're talking about things that change the world, not inspiration.
How many small plastic parts do most people need?
If you don't need it, or whatever it is is something which can already be fairly readily provided (especially in an equivalent form), it probably won't change the world.
I need information all the time.
I need to get from one place to another.
I need to advertise my products.
I don't need a little plastic bit.
Is that going to change the world?
No.
I didn't use the word pointless, I used "gimmick". Which VR is, in much the same way that the wiimote controller is a gimmick.
That's not to say it is worthless, but it is limited in value and nowhere near as useful as you think it is. The reality is that you can't just walk around with VR goggles on - the space you can use it in is sharply limited, which greatly limits its usefulness. Moreover, realism of that particular sort has never been particularly valuable to begin with. The neatest thing about it is something like a racing or space game, but existing UIs can already accomplish the same tasks - generally better. Same goes for first person shooting and similar things.
Yes, there are some physical action games that VR headsets are useful for. They're still not very useful, though, and certainly not revolutionary.
Not something that changes our day to day life.
Not something that changes our day to day life.
We already have these and they're frankly already everywhere in the US. And, again, they don't really change our day to day life.
This is vaguely interesting, but what I've read of the technology makes me think that a lot of people have comically unrealistic expectations for the technology. The reality is that brain repair tech is less valuable than it seems at first glance because the brain IS the person; unless you can make them who they were before, it is pointless. Also, well, they're doing clinical trials. Just because someone does trials doesn't mean it works. In fact, about 90% of products at this stage of development will fail.
Yes. It is called Google. AI is not magic. This has already happened and yes, it did change the world - past tense.
This will be cool for those people, but it won't fundamentally change the world.
They can, sure. Is it worthwhile? Not particularly. Self-driving cars will be more interesting in this regard, but in the end, will it fundamentally change the world? No. We already have FedEx. We'll just unemploy some FedEx drivers.
No, they're not. The purpose of those lasers is to serve as a point-blank missile defense system, not to act like standard machine guns, because lasers actually make terrible replacements for machine guns.
This is incredibly irrelevant, as "better cannons" isn't a change in kind and most Americans have zero vision on such things. Also, no one actually uses battleships anymore because they're pointlessly expensive for what they do.
Won't change the world.
No one doubts we're developing a lot of new technology. There's lots of cool stuff in the pipeline.
But is it really changing most people's day-to-day lives in major ways?
3948972 Yes, but in practice I've found it's really hard to design or edit 3D objects on a computer. It will be more practical when we can scan in 3D models made with clay. 123D Catch is very very cool, but still impractical.
Clay is a better input device, and maybe always will be. People who were interested in utility rather than digital coolness would have gotten excited about polymer resin casting. That we can make stuff and copy stuff out of plastic at home is incredibly cool and useful, yet the Maker people don't care about it.
3948922 My point is that if penicillin were being developed today, it would cost at least a billion dollars and take a bare minimum of 15 years.
3948380
I disagree that everyone needs a cellphone. In fact, my husband doesn't have one (he leaves them in his pants pockets and puts them through the washing machine) and neither do several people I know. We don't even get cellphone reception where I live. I have one, but because my husband isn't used to having one he never remembers to turn it on when I let him borrow it.
Now, most people have cellphones, even if they don't strictly need them, because they're superior to landlines for most people who don't live out in the boonies, and at a comparable cost. But you can get by just fine in modern society without one.
I agree with you on a computer. Or at least access to one (some people in my area still rely on the public library.)
Living in a lower income area and having a bunch of lower income friends give you a different perspective on what "everyone" has and needs.
3949692
Everyone needs a phone, really; a cell phone is nice, and a lot of people get them instead of land lines because they're convenient. There are people in Africa who have cell phones and don't even have the ability to have landlines.
But yeah, I can imagine people out in the sticks not getting reception (though it is weird that there are places in Africa with no land lines which have cell towers).
Having a cell phone is kind of expected now for a lot of jobs, though, which sort of creates a lot of pressure to have one.
Heck, I feel pressure to get a smart phone, even though I don't need one.
3948343
You can also sleep while your car is driving you wherever. With that, you can live pretty much anywhere within a four-hour radius of your workplace if you're willing to adopt a biphasic sleep cycle. Cities become larger and more sprawled, workers get more freedom to choose where they work, friends and family can stay together in more situations, etc.
Also, and more likely to be near-future, car ownership. Automation can do for cars what VMs have done for computers.
3949978
That isn't going to happen. Sleeping in cars is like sleeping in planes: you can do it, but it is godawful and not a good or healthy way to sleep.
There's also a lot of other problems with the idea, including but not limited to "people don't just live in cities to work there".
Emulate Mario?
images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/6560214_700b.jpg
Because, frankly, VMs haven't really done much to affect computer ownership.
3948343
Drones, maybe. They could make a lot of trips (e.g. to stores) unnecessary, and they can make it easier to share physical things. Theft is a concern though.
3950051
Yes they have, but only for people that would otherwise have to spend a lot for parts that would only partially be used. No one is going to timeshare a $600 15 year old car for a two hour daily commute, but they might think otherwise for a $60,000 one they only drive a few miles to and from work each day. I would absolutely drive a Tesla to work each day if I only had to pay for the time I used it plus a small premium. Assuming a lifespan of just 150,000 miles and assuming I drive my Prius for 10 years at my current rate (averaging under 10 miles a day over 2 years now), I would end up saving up to (tight bound) $1,000 per year while driving a pretty snazzy car. And if I wanted to upgrade every now and then, it wouldn't have to cost a fortune.
3950051
I think sleep is sufficiently poorly understood that I don't believe that.
I used to sleep terribly on planes because of the awkward, stiff position and the unfamiliar setting. I assume other people are similar. Neither of those have to apply in a car you sleep in regularly, especially not one specifically designed to be slept in.
In any case, it's just an idle thought. I seem to have a very high tolerance for unusual sleeping habits. I would absolutely try it given the technology.
3950121
Sleep is poorly understood, but I can say from experience that sleeping in moving vehicles sucks.
I think the biggest problem has to do with acceleration and deceleration. Humans evolved to sleep in a static environment, as did all creatures. A sudden acceleration indicated that you needed to wake up because something had grabbed you/you were falling off the branch/ledge you were sleeping on/ect.
This is an important survival trait, and I know that when I roll out of bed, I wake up before I hit the ground.
My guess for the reason why sleeping in the car sucks is because when the car accelerates or decelerates, the water in your inner ear sends signals to start waking up. But then you don't end up going all the way to wakefulness, so you go back to sleep without ever fully waking. That said, I suspect it leads to very fitful sleep. If you're driving in a steadily enough fashion (interstate highway, on an airplane) you can sleep after a fashion, but it just isn't high-quality sleep.
Even sleeping in a static car kind of sucks, though that is probably fixable at least to some extent.
3949978 Regulations are already written to make cities more sprawled. It turns out that mostly doesn't work, self-driving cars aside, and what people want is cities more closely packed.
3949907
No, you don't. You really don't. Everyone just insists that you do.
3950051
It's absolutely been a huge player in the enterprise level; AWS says hello. Of course, that's not really relevant to the original topic of "will it fundamentally change the world?" Cloud computing has not fundamentally revolutionized businesses, let alone individuals. But my point was just that it's a billion-dollar industry, not just for running Windows on your Mac/Linux box.
3950887
The reality is that everyone knows that, yes, in fact, what technology you use in your personal life is indeed a matter of personal choice. You can, in fact, choose not to possess any piece of technology from the 20th century.
However, at some point, you're basically excluding yourself from modern society to do it. The Amish have to make concessions to their lifestyle in order to run businesses and otherwise participate in the economy; cell phones and smart phones are beginning to cause damage to their way of life, because they're so portable and so easy to bring everywhere that it is much harder for people to stop. Moreover, because they're actually used for their businesses, it gives, shall we say, an excuse for that to creep into their lifestyle.
Take talent agents. Can you work as a talent agent without a cell phone? No. You're basically always on call. That's part of your job now. It didn't used to be that way, but now, if you say "Well, I don't really want to take calls outside of 8 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday", you can do that, but a lot of people won't want you as their agent because they'll feel you're not responsive to their needs in an emergency.
The main reason a lot of people don't like folks like that blog writer is that, well, people like the blog writer are sanctimonious, holier-than-thou assholes. I've told people I don't watch TV and no one has ever complained at me about it. The reason people have reacted negatively to that blog writer is his superior, condescending attitude. It is common amongst people like that.
It isn't that he has a lack of interest in television; it is that he has an interest in a lack of interest in television. It is the difference between "I don't eat meat because I don't really like its taste/texture" and "I don't eat meat because I CARE ABOUT TEH ANIMULZ."
You can see the delusional rage festering beneath the surface. He's no different from the very people he is criticizing in the section about the future Ectopia; indeed, he's exactly the same, he just chose a different target for his personal delusions.
The reason why I have felt pressure to own a cell phone is because there are many things in my life which have basically expected my ownership of one, including one of my jobs. Smart phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and more and more stuff is dependent on people owning them. At some point, they'll practically be required, because people are going to stick those smart phone message things all over the place and expect people to use them or to scan items using them or whatever. It will become increasingly inconvenient not to own one.
We're not there yet, but we're getting there.
Interesting point. Perhaps when people and ideas are ultra connected it means that fledgling movements and ideas are put into conflict and subsumed into each other almost instantly. They are never let to develop by themselves, are only in their own environment, or only in relation to what they promote or discourage. Is this an product of the pace of literature production, or a natural course of the medium maturing and there being less novel and unprecedented innovations. To what extent do authors feel hamstrung in their innovations, or avoid techniques to distance themselves by proxy from others?
Certainly all this has happened in the past, and if I generalized then I would be just as guilty of doing the timewarp as artists themselves, but my gut feeling is that we're seeing the same process play out like it always has, just at a faster pace.
ironically, Fluxx is a game that is much less "rapid" than I would've expected. there's always THAT ONE GUY who takes forever studying his cards, planning out the Perfect Combo for getting a glorious first turn win so nobody else gets to play..... or, failing that, to at least play lots and lots of cards because it feels pleasurable, even if it accomplished nothing. the pacing grinds to a halt. what a badly designed party game
maybe That One Guy is part of modern life too.
anyway, very interesting metaphor. the comments nitpicking over the opening paragraph distracted me from the main point, which I had to think about for a little while. society ends up seeming too complex and rapidly changing if you're always trying to play by everyone else's rules/goals -- the ones they set down on the table to help themselves. you'll always be playing ketchup, and it seems like you can only win by a stroke of dumb luck! the meta-game becomes a lot more psychologically comfortable when you understand you should try to set up your own win through your own rules. you'll still have to tolerate everyone else's rulesets during their turns, but you don't have to let them control you.
I don't know if that resembles your own conclusion, it's just my own philosophy I take away from all this.
Probably no point to reviving an apparently dead blog post but hey I've never let reason, the fact that I barely understand anything about society and it's evolution or any of my many personality flaws stop me before.
Sure you can go outside and see the same buildings as before and think "Have we really been doing anything recently? They used to invent cool stuff but now it's just boring stuff only nerds care about" but that's stupid and wrong.
I could go on twitter and upload a picture of my ass and put a popular hashtag in it (I don't use twitter that much, but it's like that right?) and hundreds of thousands of people could see my ass and be disgusted. That's not difficult, it's actually so simple and easy that it's almost scary how much someone can influence you with such little effort. There wasn't a way to do that before the internet, nothing has ever connected so many people across the world together like that before.
I live in the UK, I've actually learnt too much American politics, history and culture because now I'm probably more American than British. I wasn't even trying to learn that stuff, it just happened over time while I was browsing stuff. This is perhaps the first time in history where we as a people have too much information available.
3D printers suck? That's because they're new, and before anyone jumps down my throat by saying that they've been working on 3D printers since the first human hit a rock with another rock and discovered the spark of fire, I mean that 3D printers are new to the people. Remember computers? They sucked at first, but they existed and we worked at them and grinded away until they hit lvl 30 and unlocked the talent 'World Changer: Everyone Has One Now' and now who's laughing? Everyone all over the world at me! That's who! 3D printers aren't replicators yet, but give it time.
Just because you can't see progress, doesn't mean it's not being made. It means you're looking at the wrong place. You don't stare at the sun to find out where Jupiter's going.