ALEX CAMPBELL'S TUMBLELOG

The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since. Clay Shirky’s interview in The Guardian, ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’

unhappyhipsters:

The angular house had disrupted the space-time continuum; he could feel his features starting to blur.

(Photo: Nicolas Saieh; ArchDaily)

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Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. From this wonderful New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten (via the brilliant @STWnext)

newyorker:

In this week’s issue: George Packer on the McChrystal debacle; Ken Auletta on Afghanistan’s first media mogul; Tad Friend on Steve Carell; Charlayne Hunter-Gault on Jacob Zuma; Rebecca Mead on playgrounds; James Surowiecki on financial illiteracy; Sasha Frere-Jones on Robyn; James Wood on David Mitchell; Peter Schjeldahl on Charles Burchfield; David Denby on “Knight and Day” and “Winter’s Bone”; fiction by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum; and more: http://www.newyorker.com/

Oh hai there New Yorker, welcome to Tumblr!

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Another brilliant TED talk by Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via colporteur)

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Sites like Facebook, Twitter and others have allowed for the creation of what we call a Digital Super Me. A highly-sharable and incredibly robust digital version of our selves that only drinks the best wine, vacations in the finest locales and has the best and brightest children. We have created these alter egos and now we not only refuse to live without them but we have a new expectation for the contribution that other products and services should make to our lives. So for essentially an investment of zero it delivers the most powerful way to say who you are and share it with the entire world, if you like. ‘Why are our cars so dumb?’ by Alex Bogusky

Psychology is also at work when you look at the women of Paris. The principle at work here is the assumption of style and the amplification of grace. Because you are in Paris, you assume that women are fashion-aware, which colors all your judgements about dress, hairstyle, and other factors of appearance. Because you suppose the most stylish of intentions behind whatever the actual outcome, you will find seductive and ennobling qualities behind almost everything and anyone. What would be a dowdy old hag or a trampy termagant in the wrong part of Baltimore is suddenly the epitome of French cuteness. It’s a sophisticated variant on the “Emperor without cloths” syndrome. Ionarts via Marginal Revolution (via somethingchanged)

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We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.

From this brilliant WSJ piece by Clay Shirky.

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting. Alain de Botton in “On Distraction,” for CITY Journal (via britticisms)

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unhappyhipsters:

He couldn’t bear another minute in the company of all that scheming tubular steel.

(Photo: Hertha Hurnaus; Dwell)

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If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon University (via withabang)

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