Quantifying Information Content Does Not Bring Meaning Fr...

It is perfectly true that redundancy aids recognition of a signal as a language or a code, and this recognition is crucial to SETI. However, Shannon’s method provides only a quantitative measure of the complexity of a language or signaling system—not a translation. And while it is axiomatic in cryptology that redundancy helps in deciphering a text, the task of decipherment/cryptanalysis is to move from an encoded text to the original text—not from text to meaning. To get from text to me...

 Increasing the Number of Researchers to Perpetuate Techno...

Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this progress is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponentially increase the number of researchers and engineers. For instance, in the United States, research effort is over twenty times higher today than in the 1930s.27 The number of scientists in the world is doubling every couple of decades, such that at least three-quarters of ...

 The Rate of Change in United States

Imagine you are a typical inhabitant of the United States in 1870.11 You live on a rural farm; you produce most of your food and clothing yourself. Your only sources of light are candles, whale oil, and gas lamps if you’re lucky. If you’re a man, you face gruelling physical labour, sometimes from the age of twelve onwards. If you’re a woman, you face unrelenting toil as a housewife: one calculation found that in 1886 “a typical North Carolina housewife had to carry water 8 to 10 times...

 Dead Internet Theory is True

Of the platforms where we know flesh and blood humans do spend enough time, 92% of all content is created by 10% of all users, and engagement with different posts can vary from 0.03% to 0.1% of all viewers. In other words, of the 52.6% of internet traffic which is human-driven, about 9 in 10 users stuck to messaging friends and family and just passively consume contents mostly meant to sell them stuff, or see if they would be interested in propaganda campaigns ran by governments, both theirs ...

 Modern Absence of Monoculture

It is difficult to, either quantitatively (through sales, net worth, or awards) or qualitatively (through an objective hierarchisation of cultural products) provide an indisputable metric for ‘fame.’ First, there are contextually contingent variables like streaming or internet relevance preventing me from drawing transhistorical comparisons with say, The Beatles or Michael Jackson. And then there is the reality that in our postmodern, globalised world, culture has expanded, mutat...

 Avoiding Communication Vexes Online Surveillance

‘The idiot does not “communicate”’,2 writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics. He may speak, sure, but not to convey a certain message. That makes the idiot instantly subversive in our time, where communication counts among the highest goods. Not so much because we value the exchange of information or because we can learn from each other. But rather, because the ever-accelerating, 24/7 communication cycle is what keeps surveillance capitalism going. It feeds the database an...

 The Garden and the Stream as Metaphors for WWW

The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens. The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relat...

 Principles of Technorealism

1. Technologies are not neutral. A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...

 Play Has Become More Personal and More Intense Through Te...

A similar trend is the rise of personal vacations and separate activities on family vacations. Children’s street games (such as marbles, Hopscotch, and hide-and-go-seek) have been replaced with video games. Face-to-face encounters have been transformed by e-mails, electronic chat groups, and web sur'ng. Revolutionary as all this may be, it represents the clear culmination of a century of developments in media technology. Twentieth-century technology privatized and homogenized play, but it ...

 Computing is Pop Culture without History

Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their work. Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music ba...