Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly

11:20 pm

every time i come back here i'm surprised there's no like button

how. to. express. like. of. something.

so.

confused.

sorry

03:35 pm - net neutrality

Let's be clear what we're talking about: Video. No one is going to try to profit by charging different rates for different streams of text. Text was out the barn door before we ever started having this conversation. Then images escaped, and still everyone was stunned still. When audio started to escape, the Napster era, finally the defenders of the status quo leaped into action-- and failed. They had no idea what they were fighting, and they never landed a single solid blow.

So now they're taking a crack at video. They're doing a much better job. The ISPs intentionally slow-walked the bandwidth so we'd spend as long as possible in the region where video is sluggish; now we're forced to walk slowly through this pass where they can spring their ambush. But that's all we're fighting over: Just video, and just the next few years. In a few years the technology forces the situation by making video so tiny it can slip through any net. There's a lot of money that could be made in those few years, but it's not as much money as they're imagining.

They're imagining taking control of us forever. That is not going to happen. None of us have the power to back information technology into Pandora's box, not even for a good reason, not even if we need to to save humanity, never mind so someone can make a few bucks selling videos. Soon the cost of storing or transferring a video will approach zero, and this fight will be history. If we invent something that takes more bandwidth than a video, there will be a window of a few years where it might be possible to control that, whatever it is. But it will never last forever. The theoretical limits on bandwidth are very far away, more than enough to transfer entire humans never mind any human media.

This is a ridiculous game with little actual relevance to the future of humanity.

11:38 pm

I really love the internet. It's funny how we've pretended that we get the internet. We assume that because we've used it for a long time now we must be masters of it, so we pretend at a blase worldweariness about it. Oh, yes, the internet, I've used that. But really we have no idea. It's such an incredible thing, it would take far longer than we'll have to be able to understand what it is or could be. I think there are many more entirely different ways we could use this internet thing than the one we've settled on. For a while we were astounded by the possibilities of it, and then we wanted to think we had grasped it and settled into it, but really all the possibilities are still there. It's still just as much a wilderness. Probably more than ever. We just built some blinders. We just can't keep our minds open enough to take it seriously. The internet. What can you do with that?

08:32 am - hello again livejournal

Hi! I haven't been here in a while. Is anyone still following me here? How are you?

07:18 am - ever-flowing feedback fountains

05:30 pm - an open letter to Craig Newmark

Craig,

I've seen numerous interviews with you over the years, and I've always been impressed with your wit, modesty and individuality. I am of the mind that something of the general shape of Craigslist was inevitable, but OTOH it was a wonderful surprise to see it done with such grace and class. I wish therefore it were a different circumstance that brought myself to your attention than this tweet of mine:

mungojelly: @jayrosen_nyu Craigslist is completely untrustworthy. You'd think there'd be a new niche in providing some sort of local trust relationship.

craignewmark: @mungojelly Can you clarify your remark re #craigslist ? Thanks! craig at craigslist.org

10:00 am - Carl Malamud for Public Printer!

I strongly endorse Carl Malamud for the position of Public Printer of the United States, and I encourage you to do the same! See: YesWeScan.org

I shooped this shoop myself in support of the campaign! :) It's CC Attribution 2.0, inverted version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Malamud_at_Berkeley-2007-10-17-version.03.jpg which apparently was cropped from http://www.flickr.com/photos/71753172@N00/1610430707/

05:26 am - an economic experiment

Hey so I've been meaning to do this experiment for a while! Here goes.

I am hereby offering up approximately one hour of volunteer labor. I will work for about an hour at whatever is the first reasonable task suggested by a comment in response to this post. (Reasonable will be defined, of course, however I feel like-- but I promise to be lenient.)

Ball's in your court, internets! What should I do? What needs doing? Or what would be amusing to have me do?! It's up to you!?!

<3

03:42 pm

we shouldn't of course have to choose who to "friend", it's about time for all that silliness to end

there should be a complete record of who we've ever had any kind of interaction with: oh, that person, right, i read an article by them 3 years ago

those people we find more interesting & continually return to should be made naturally more accessible, but it doesn't have to be broken into simple categories

it's going to feel so natural to let our agents make the connections for us

even once we begin to consciously question what's happening

10:34 am - money is melting

The actual date when the technology was available for the bulk of U.S. attention to switch from old media to open blogging was at least twenty years ago. We've been slogging through inertia for decades.

Similarly, I believe that the date at which it was first possible for the U.S. to switch from a currency based economy to a more rational system of organizing collective activity has already passed. Now we just have to slog through a few decades of people saying "but that doesn't count somehow" before we can actually implement the change.

Money is absurd on its face, and deeply irrationalizing when employed. Real value is multifaceted, not quantifiable. On some level you know this basic fact, and yet as a hypnotized participant you may have the unsupportable feeling that to this dramatic wrongness there must be some compensating right. There is, but only historically; looking at value through this simplifying lens allowed it to be processed by an information system so antiquidated that its bits must literally be purchased and manipulated individually.

Like the blogging revolution, what I am talking about is not so much a transfer as a broadening of power. No one system alone will replace the roles money now plays in our life. Indeed, because of the conservative inertia, I expect it to look more like a gradual attrition than a sudden transformation. Parts of the transformation-- blogging, free open source, media piracy, flashmobs-- are well underway, and being understood only in isolation (certainly not as a threat to commodified value itself).

Over the next few decades, though, we will be forced to become aware of how all these new allowances are spreading and stitching together. The line that separates "real" things in the "real" money economy from the encroaching "unreal" things will fall into as helpless a retreat as the mainstream media are now in. Already we must rationalize to ourselves that so many things which didn't used to seem so "unreal", like entertainment, news, and communication, have solidly crossed the line.

And underneath this transformation, acknowledged or not, will continue the voluntary but complete abdication of the day-to-day operation of society to artificial intelligences. But that's a whole other story.