“In the late 1970s, computer makers were popping up much the way car companies did in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. Osborne, Commodore, and RadioShack were all selling what were becoming known as ‘personal computers.’ Like the Apple I, they were made for hobbyists. They were hard to use and didn’t really do much. The Altair, the earliest, pretty much just lit up little lights once you laboriously connected a bunch of switches on the logic board.
Jobs wanted the next computer to be something different—an appliance, something anyone could use. That was the Apple II, which came out a year after the Apple I. He hammered at his message as the company grew: Computers should be tools. Trip Hawkins, one of Apple’s first 50 employees, remembers Jobs obsessing over an article he’d read in a science magazine about the locomotive efficiency of animal species. ‘The most efficient species was the condor, which could fly for miles on only a few calories,’ Hawkins says. ‘Humans were way down the list. But then if you put a man on a bicycle, he was instantly twice as efficient as the condor.’ The computer, Jobs said, was a ‘bicycle for the mind.'”
“‘Progress is exponential–not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk–the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.’
But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.'” (Thanks Longform.)
•••••••
Kurzweil sits for an interview with that dashing cyborg Charlie Rose, 2007:
From “The Comfort Zone,” Jonathan Franzen’s great 2004 New Yorker essay about his childhood relationship with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip:
“I was unaware of it, but an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not attend college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on, not just clashing with their parents but rejecting and annihilating everything about them. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so mystified and so ashamed that each family, especially mine, quarantined itself and suffered in isolation.
When I went upstairs, my bedroom felt like an overwarm sickroom. The clearest remaining vestige of Tom was the Don’t Look Back poster that he’d taped to a flank of his dresser where Bob Dylan’s psychedelic hair style wouldn’t always be catching my mother’s censorious eye. Tom’s bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by an epidemic.
In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen A Charlie Brown Christmas the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying Peanuts reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, Peanuts collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a Peanuts wastebasket or Peanuts bedsheets or a Peanuts gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.”
In honor of what would have been animator’s Art Clokey’s 90th birthday, here’s an episode where Gumby goes to the moon. He probably saw Whitey while he was there.
The single best description of a personality type that I have ever read is still “Caring for Your Introvert,” Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 Atlantic article. The opening:
“Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
If so, do you tell this person he is ‘too serious,’ or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly.”
“[Chris] Ellsworth provides a quick demo. On the massive tablet is a map of a hypothetical warzone. Blue icons represent the positioning of Team America assets — ground troops and overhead aircraft. Red icons show the enemy. When a new red diamond pops up, Ellsworth taps his finger on it, and then drags a bluish character over it.
It looks a little bit like a ghost from Ms. Pac-Man. But Ellsworth has just directed a drone — in this (fictional) case, one of AAI’s tiny Aerosonde-1 spy robots — to the enemy position. Whoever’s sitting miles away in an air conditioned Ground Control Station, wielding the joystick that controls the drone, has now received her new orders on an equivalent device — perhaps the smartphone that the Army might one day put in her pocket.
Either way, an IM confirming that the order is understood pops up on an adjacent flatscreen TV repurposed as a computer monitor. The drone above our fictional warzone should be on its way to its new position imminently.”
••••••••••
A piece about the increasing digitization of warfare, featuring AAI:
Very experimental, neurology-centric Jim Henson bit from the Tonight Show in 1974. Johnny, who may have had a few belts before the show, introduces his guest as “Jim Jenson.” Jack Benny is seated next to Henson in the latter part of the video.
Slavoj Žižek, that provocateur and performance artist, gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street. Thankfully, his rhetoric was short on his usual bullshit (smirking apologias for Stalin, for example) and long on common sense. The speech’s opening from thefull transcriptprovided by Sarah Shin at Verso:
“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not ‘Main Street, not Wall Street,’ but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?”
••••••••••
Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:
Žižek holding forth in a garbage dump, in Astra Taylor’s Examined Life:
I’ve never fully comprehended people who reject the idea of genetically modified food. I’m not speaking of concerns about corporations producing the food safely or the FDA’s reluctance to have such food labeled–those concerns I understand. I’m talking more about people who out of hand reject the notion that we should be using biotechnology when it comes to our diet. The weather patterns we currently enjoy, which allow for our agrarian culture, have existed for only about 10,000 years. Even if we were treating our environment well, which we’re most definitely not, those weather patterns will eventually shift, and we’ll need new ways to prevent famine. There seems to be a dogged belief that anything natural is good and anything engineered by humans is somehow tainted. But there are plenty of lethal plants which exist in nature. At Singularity Hub,Aaron Saenz brings common senseto the argument over the labeling genetically modified foods:
“We should label GMOs. I don’t see why the FDA and GMO developers are fighting this. I believe in GMO technology. I think it’s one of the most likely paths to cheaply and securely feeding the world. While current incarnations of the technology are still far from perfect, a mature GMO industry may be able to design humanity with the organisms it needs to survive in the 21st Century.
But I still think GMOs should be labeled.
Why the hell not? Let consumers see the benefits of GM crops. Sure, some will definitely switch to competitors products because they are adverse to consuming new forms of food. That’s fine. If GM foods really are cheaper then many more consumers will choose them to save money. If GM foods aren’t cheap enough to compete with non-GMO foods, then their developers should go back to the drawing board and make GMOs that can compete. By keeping consumers in the dark we’re artificially stalling GMO science.”
This 1978 NBC News promo is a real time warp. It’s anchored by the late Jessica Savitch, who was, fleetingly, the golden girl of broadcast journalism, and died young and mysteriously five years after this clip. Following the news brief are an American Express commercial featuring the great tennis player Virginia Wade and a promo for Headliners with David Frost, that show’s star being one of the biggest names in America after going mano-a-mano with disgraced former President Richard Nixon.
Polaroid has faltered badly in the digital age, but that company’s genius inventor Edwin H. Land was to his time what Steve Jobs was to ours, and, yet, his name is probably unfamiliar to most people just two decades after his death. Christopher Bonanos has an excellent piece in the New York Times about the Land-Jobs link. An excerpt:
“Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land’s World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.
Three decades later, Jobs would do exactly the same thing, except in a black turtleneck and jeans. His admiration for Land was open and unabashed. In 1985, he told an interviewer, ‘The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.'”
••••••••••
Land demonstrates the Polaroid instant camera, 1948:
Martin Scorsese’s documentary about George Harrison aired on HBO this past week. Here’s a look back at what’s likely Harrison’s most famous post-Beatles interview, with Dick Cavett in 1971. He was not on good terms with John and Yoko at the time.
Swashbuckling Raiders ownerAl Davis just passed away. A person with tremendous capacity for both good and bad, Davis was one of the people most responsible for the NFL-AFL merger which created the modern NFL, even though he didn’t want his upstart AFL to merge with the more established league–he wanted to kick its ass. From a1981 People articleabout the take-no-prisoners football executive, who made the Raiders an outfit for social misfits, on the eve of his team winning Superbowl XV:
“No one kicks the hell out of Davis for long—his competitive instinct is too finely honed. According to an instructive popular myth, former San Diego Coach Harland Svare is said to have approached a light fixture in the visitors’ locker room at Oakland once, yelling, ‘Damn you, Al Davis, I know you’re up there.’ Asked later if he had indeed bugged the Chargers, Davis would say only, ‘The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.’
Davis’ father, Lou, was a successful children’s clothing manufacturer who moved the family to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn when Al was 5. Strictly second-string as an athlete, Davis had the time and inclination to contemplate strategy. After graduating from Syracuse (in English) in 1950, he became assistant football coach at Adelphi University, then took a series of college jobs before becoming an assistant with the Chargers in 1960.
When Davis joined the Raiders, they had won only one game the season before. The following year he led them to a 10-4 mark. Though he owns only 25 percent of the team’s stock and there are 14 other partners, nothing happens in the franchise without Al Davis’ approval. It was his decision to choose little-known punter Ray Guy in the first round of the 1973 college draft, and to pick a widely belittled defensive back named Lester Hayes in 1977. Both rewarded him by becoming All-Pro performers. Equally decisive in matters of style, Davis also selected the team’s distinctive colors, silver and black. ‘I used to be color-blind,’ he explains.”
••••••••••
Part of the dark side of those macho, lawless 1980s Raiders teams is that drug use was rampant and Lyle Alzado, John Matuszak and numerous others died young. Alzado believed that steroid abuse was behind the brain cancer that killed him at age 43 in 1992. Alzado gets his pump on in 1984 with the aid of a couple of gallons of milk:
This classic 1971 photograph of the crescent Earth was taken by astronaut Alan Shepard, while he was aboard Apollo 14, exactly a decade after he became the first American in space. From Shepard’s 1998 New York Times obituary: “On the morning of May 5, 1961, Mr. Shepard became an immediate American hero. A lean, crew-cut former Navy test pilot, then 37, he began the day lying on his back in a cramped Mercury capsule atop a seven-story Redstone rocket filled with explosive fuel. After four tense hours of weather and mechanical delays, he was shot into the sky on a 15-minute flight that grazed the fringes of space, at an altitude of 115 miles, and ended in a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Though not much by today’s standards, the brief suborbital flight had stopped a whole country in its tracks, waiting anxiously at radios and television sets. When the message of success came through — with a phrase that would enter the idiom, ‘Everything is A-O.K.!’– everyone seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief.
Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union may have been first into space, 23 days before, and have flown a full orbit, but with Mr. Shepard’s flight the United States finally had reason to cheer. In fact, Mr. Shepard’s success is credited with giving President John F. Kennedy the confidence to commit the nation to the goal of landing men on the Moon within the decade.”
The sci-fi thriller Limitless asks questions about the type of neutrino-speed performance enhancement for humans that seems possible in the not-too-distant future, but it doesn’t ask the best and most important ones. Neil Burger’s movie is concerned with the complications that arise when a wonder drug that bestows superhuman abilities turns out to be less than wonderful, attended by side effects, glitches and downsides. The better questions to ask are: What will we do when such pills and (microchips) have no side effects at all? In which direction will we head when all signs are pointing up, and we can get there through no effort of our own? Will we see a pain-free ability to realize our human potential as something less than human?
Eddie (Bradley Cooper) is a depressed novelist with writer’s block and a broken heart. Kicked to the curb by his disappointed girlfriend (Abbie Cornish), he drinks and frets and dodges anyone he owes money to. But then the previously married author has a chance encounter with his erstwhile brother-in-law (Johnny Whitworth), a former coke dealer who claims to now be pushing FDA-approved wonder drugs for Big Pharma. He hands Eddie a bright, clear pill not yet available to the public, and it quickly changes the writer’s life. Eddie not only finishes his stalled novel in four days, but learns languages in a matter of minutes and becomes a wealthy titan on Wall Street. The world is suddenly wide open.
But there are extreme side effects for those who try to taper off, as Eddie learns when his stash begins to grow low. But what if the supply was as limitless as the capacity it allowed? When we have the ability to improve neurons, nerves and muscles at a whim, will the choice be obvious? Will some decide to stay behind? Will the change be so gradual that we won’t really notice the transformation? Those are the questions we should be asking.•
And then maybe, after all that time, there was clarity. For 30 years, they’ve come, often wearing flags and crosses, with promises that only divided, and they were after just one thing: money. Then, maybe, just maybe, it became apparent to the 99% that they were the ones who were paying, that they were the ones not using their power, that they were one.
