Wait, Really?

That crazy guy who was going to launch inflatable space stations into orbit has two modules the size of a dorm room each already up? And Boeing is co-planning their manned space flight to have his much-larger future modules as a destination?

Holy cow, dude.

The Explosion of the Possible

There are now so many things which have become possible so recently that only a very tiny fraction of them actually get done. It's true for all of us, which is one reason we all feel so paralyzed so often by the constant flood of new and amazing things that everyone else around the world is already doing.

However, the infinity of that which is undone easily trumps the infinity of that which is done.

Post-Privacy Humanity? Not on their terms.

So my thoughts on privacy have gone back and forth a lot recently and I've decided one thing for sure:

"Post Privacy" can not be allowed to happen by means of grinning "social media experts" pinning our lives up on their board next to their ads.

Post Privacy is fine in concept, but in practice it needs to be paired with a massive advocacy push to make sure of one thing: that the experts, politicians, lawyers, corporate shills, and robber barons get as little or LESS privacy than any of us. And the problem with the way things are happening now is that it works the opposite way. The above types buy proprietary walled-garden networking solutions that let them have all of their conversations away from prying eyes while the rest of us buy our social networking with the data itself. And with our own personal experiences and our data so pivotal and precious, and with server space and time so cheap, it's a raw deal.

I don't think we can really afford to give our data so willingly in the long run. We need both to be spreading our information peer-to-peer rather than through a hub owned by marketing jackasses, and to be undermining the privacy of those who have any significant amount of power.

Because that should be the tradeoff. Privacy or Power. Nobody should have both. Or neither.

I'm a pathological name-giver. So it shouldn't surprise you I have a whole host of names for various internet metapundit types:

Royalists: these are people who feel like the internet is too free. Specifically, they feel that, because everyone can say everything, nobody is really able to say anything. I don't buy this for a split second: top-down content selection isn't how you get greatness. It's how you get television.

NeuroLuddites: your brain is probably buzzing with new information right now. These people hate that. Fearful that their poor cerebral cortices will burn out if they keep running them this hard, they warn us that The Internet Is Making You Dumb, usually citing studies relating to specific types of thinking which have less value when you have access to fast search.

MediaMarxists: there's a really stunning number of rich jerkwads trying to make the internet more like television and less like anything anyone smarter than a raddish would actually want. Their direct opposition are MediaMarxists, who go entirely overboard from this admirable starting point and start claiming that if we don't confront and directly destroy these influences, we're all doomed. Useful allies when you're trying to keep internet neutrality alive, but I wouldn't trust them to actually run anything.

Internet Anarchists: There's always someone pounding the table and saying that all content everywhere should be free, and that nothing should ever be secret for anyone ever. I'm actually in this camp, as long as we start at the top and work our way down, which all too often isn't the case.

Humbugs: For every person extolling the virtue of any facet of the internet, there's someone saying it's a distraction from the Real World, which of course is going to hell in a handbasket because you stupid kids are all on the internet blogging instead of getting arrested like We Did Back In My Day.

And of course, many more. I might have a problem...

Shopping List of Doom

Just running off a list of things I'd need to cause a ruckus in a pinch. Not a complete list of the goodies I'd have in a fully set up lab, but the core elements I'd need to, given access to the surrounding Technium, start cannibalizing things and making abominations.

In part because it'd be nice to know what to order if I ever find myself somewhere without tools, and in part because it'd be great to have, say, a small suitcase with these items in it.


* Microcontrollers, preferably a nice brick foam stuck full of 'em.
* USB stick with all the OpenSource goodies, including Code::Blocks, Arduino, WinAVR, Processing, etc.
* Arduino or other AVR programmer
* The Warranty Voider (this is a small leatherman multitool with wire strippers)
* Spool of solid-core shielded wire
* spool of magnet wire
* Resistors, 10, 100, 1k, 5k, 10k, at least ten of each
* Capacitors, 100nF, 1uF, 100uF
* Hobby saw
* Soldering iron and solder
* breadboard, and some cards of perfboard.

Any other suggestions?

Program or be Programmed

Woa, I need to get this book:

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.

And this doesn't just mean learning a programming language (you should), it means learning how the network works, and how to tweak it. It means learning how to perceive both the impact of actors and the impact of programmatic actors, and to hear, at least to some extent, the whispers of the programs that move through the network, extended hands of actors who may, no, have certainly, forgot what they're doing.

Magic Boxes (with handles)

I think a big reason Electrical and Computer engineers expect that we will understand or at least replicate the human brain in the electrical domain is that we've seen impossible-to-understand systems tamed and replicated before: transistors.

Transistors are bundles of impossibility, where quantum mechanics are needed to even understand the basic operating principles, and to really design them, one must confront problems of such awe-inspiring complexity that it's hardly a surprise we are often the ones who go a bit mad.

And yet every day, trillions of these impossible boxes are instantiated, reproduced, copied, pasted, and spun like it was nothing. Unconsciously. The impossible box becomes a normalcy. And if we can do that, they imagine, why not the same with a similar system made out of gels and fibers?

LJ Crosspost from The Radial Expansion Blog

Testing....