Modern Day Gadgets
This book is dedicated to my friends and colleagues in the digital revolution. Thank you for considering my challenges constructively, as they are intended. Thanks to Lilly for giving me yearning, and Ellery for giving me eccentricity, to Lena for the mrping, and to Lilibell, for teaching me to read anew.
CONTENTS
PREFACE PART ONE What is a Person? Chapter 1 Missing Persons Chapter 2 An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication Chapter 3 The Noosphere Is Just Another Name for Everyone‟s Inner Troll PART TWO What Will Money Be? Chapter 4 Digital Peasant Chic Chapter 5 The City Is Built to Music Chapter 6 The Lords of the Clouds Renounce Free Will in Order to Become Infinitely Lucky Chapter 7 The Prospects for Humanistic Cloud Economics Chapter 8 Three Possible Future Directions PART THREE The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness Chapter 9 Retropolis Chapter 10 Digital Creativity Eludes Flat Places Chapter 11 All Hail the Membrane PART FOUR Making The Best of Bits Chapter 12 I Am a Contrarian Loop Chapter 13 One Story of How Semantics Might Have Evolved PART FIVE Future Humors Chapter 14 Home at Last (My Love Affair with Bachelardian Neoteny) Acknowledgments
Preface IT‟S EARLY in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find
CONTENTS
PREFACE PART ONE What is a Person? Chapter 1 Missing Persons Chapter 2 An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication Chapter 3 The Noosphere Is Just Another Name for Everyone‟s Inner Troll PART TWO What Will Money Be? Chapter 4 Digital Peasant Chic Chapter 5 The City Is Built to Music Chapter 6 The Lords of the Clouds Renounce Free Will in Order to Become Infinitely Lucky Chapter 7 The Prospects for Humanistic Cloud Economics Chapter 8 Three Possible Future Directions PART THREE The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness Chapter 9 Retropolis Chapter 10 Digital Creativity Eludes Flat Places Chapter 11 All Hail the Membrane PART FOUR Making The Best of Bits Chapter 12 I Am a Contrarian Loop Chapter 13 One Story of How Semantics Might Have Evolved PART FIVE Future Humors Chapter 14 Home at Last (My Love Affair with Bachelardian Neoteny) Acknowledgments
Preface IT‟S EARLY in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find