Liquid Living

The Last Post of the Project (Probably)

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 09:42:49 +0100

Fundamental comments can sound trite. I’m going to risk it.

1) Human beings are amazing things. In conversation with William Gibson he points out that we all thought virtual reality was going to be done via goggles and suits. You’d jack into the matrix via a hole in your head ... but we don’t need all that. Learn the language, read the symbols, and you can go through the window using what you’re reading this on. It just takes practice.

2) Electronic lives and our physical lives are both subsets of ‘reality.’

3) Our toys give us a million-and-one ways to pretend we’re communicating, to pretend even we’re trumpeting our wish to be understood, while obfuscating the truth about ourselves and allowing us easy get-outs from genuinely doing any of this, because it is frightening.

4) Our toys give us a million-and-one ways of improving the quality of our communications with the people we love and are yet to love. One just has to be brave, and it is difficult.

5) Some say non-geographic communities living on the network encourage ‘democracy’ while others see inane chatter about tits and burritos. I see a spectrum. At the extreme end, there’s a direct parallel between “in world” conversations and the conversation of acid users in 1968. Beyond politics but shaping the world, defining how we imagine ourselves in the physical world through hallucinating a new one -- with the potential either to become parody or to inform action in meat-space.

6) Like the project and the eventual radio programme, it is NOT just about Second Life and 3D environments. The compulsive twitter of email and status updates provide something a bit like crack, a bit like speed, a bit like coke, with a bit of some other addictive drug that makes you psychic.

7) There’s nothing new about any of this. It doesn’t say anything new about humanity or about ways to solve our problems.

8) You can be perfectly happy in the bubble. You can be perfectly miserable there.

I am incredibly glad I did this.

I would never do it again.

Day 7+1: Game Over

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:18 +0100

Day 7: Paul Bennun is ...

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:12:09 +0100

... unable to take this a moment longer.

That is all.

Thanks a Million, Neil

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:50:39 +0100

Via email, a song called Loneliness House by one Greg Brown. From my twin brother.

Don’t know him.

Perfectly happy in the bubble now, blaring ten-tonne samba and Charlotte Hatherley.

Three verses of Greg:

Loneliness House
I went into the loneliness house,
went on in and I locked the door,
Seen a lot of trouble when I was out and about,
I might not come out no more.

Sometimes my baby gets so sad,
She stopped by the other day,
I wouldn't answer and she got mad,
She said, "When you gonna come back out and play?"

It gets pretty quiet in the loneliness house,
There is trouble in the city, everybody screaming,
Once in a while I look out,
and it seems like you're just better off dreaming.

The Final Chapter (Nearly)

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:40:22 +0100

Andrew Keen. I’m allowed an opinion because I’ve spoken to him at book-plugging length about the book he’s plugging: The Cult of the Amateur. Not over Skype (of course?) but over the telephone.

TCotA is about how Web 2.0 is leading to the destruction of good old one-to-many media created by people that had to pay dues for their press cards; how piracy is killing the music industry, and soon, Hollywood. It’s about how the New York Times is being replaced by the echo-chamber of uninformed or mendacious blog-babble. About how The Kids of Today are staggeringly media-illiterate, filled with misconceived ideas culled from inaccurate entries on Wikipedia.

When I read the book I thought I was going to be dealing with a cast-iron ocean-going bell of titanic proportions. After all, it’s staggering to see someone bemoan the fact that ‘common knowledge’ is replacing informed / scientific fact and then write that internet piracy is murdering the music industry. You see, that’s “common knowledge” and it’s wrong. As is his quaint belief that the late-capitalist way of ‘doing’ copyright and intellectual property is the natural order of things, not a very recent blip. A man that believes Hollywood should be saved but (presumably) home-made machinima is worthless (not that he mentions machinima).

But he was actually a interesting man with whom I enjoyed speaking very much, and his book is great polemic. You’d be nuts, he smiles, if you believed every word of it. Beyond the bits that get your heart racing there’s a lot to think about. Deeply. Such as considering that the alt-reality crowd has an unsavoury evangelical zeal about it (which a whiff of religious right), that ‘democratised media’ is resulting in a tiny oligarchy of individuals who, like US libertarians, satisfy both free-market and counter-culture fundamentalists -- both of whom get on my tits too. Google, in Andrew’s world, is rather like corporations that would seek to patent basmati rice or parts of the genome: taking fundamental parts of what we’ve made or what we are, what we know as a species, then sticking a flag in it before charging us to access to it. By inference this is also true of the interactions and communities that feed our favourite Web 2.0 services, from Last.fm upwards -- hence the relevance to Liquid Living. Seeing everything through an American filter gets wearing on The Rest of Us, it has to be said. “Libertarian”? Does that mean anything outside the US blogosphere echo chamber? It’s not part of the discourse where I hang out.

I think he’s profoundly misguided on half of his core argument, and seems wilfully blinkered to most of what’s wonderful about collaborative amateur creation. Tech and media without the amateur would be like the US without Mexicans: statistically, his web server is probably free or open source. But so what. I’m just Some Guy On The Internet® onanistically blowing my ego at half two on a Sunday morning. Just part of the echo chamber.

I should also state, despite my obvious sentiments, I’m looking forward to meeting Andrew Keen. He’s all in favour of the ‘non-geographic communities of interest’ thing and many things I’d count as litmus for sanity; his book is far more complex then it seems at first glance. And he’s a nice guy.

I’m allowed polemic too, right, Andrew?