Year: 2003

In which four dorks go and commune with the mothership in the immediate post-Emerging Tech period:

The best commentary I can find on the Apple keynote about the iPods and the Apple music service is here. I’m going to talk more about this later, but in the meantime go and find out all the cool / scary news…

A final night in San Francisco – we fly back tomorrow afternoon – spent with Matt Webb and Ben Hammersley. We meet up at Union Square outside Victoria Secrets and wander through a long tunnel to an off-beaten-track part of Chinatown where we have large and amazing portions of various nice foodstuffs. Matt uses the phone to try and contact a mutual friend who’s in town. The owner asks us if we are from out of town. And when we’re not paying attention she gets some anti-bacterial wipes out of a drawer and carefully cleans the phone receiver from top to toe. As we leave the restaurant we tease Webb accordingly. “You’ve got the SARS, you have.”

So I was at a party and Lance Arthur was there, and I was really looking forward to seeing him and then he was wearing clothes that made him look … different somehow and I didn’t recognise him. That’s so terrible. I felt totally stupid. Anyway – to cut a long story short – we were staying at Leslie Harpold‘s flat last night and she was looking after Lance’s cat because Lance was going away, and his cat savagely attacked all of us during the night and so – in a weird way – I guess I’ve paid for my crimes!

I think when you’re born you maybe get a discreet amount of mental storage and then maybe when you’ve used up that amount of storage then maybe it all seeps out of your ears or something. This is a really good way to prove that we’re not all living in a huge simulation – no computer system could hold all the information and resonance that’s being jammed into my brain at the moment. I need someone fat to sit on my head so that I can keep the lid down.

• Hydra notes on Social Software and Social Capital
  James Cronin’s and Matt Jones’ talk was slightly compromised by an initial clunkiness with the projector. I think they think it threw the whole thing off balance, but it was really involving and interesting…

• Hydra notes on What Groups Will Be
  A fascinating afternoon’s lecture by David Weinberger touched on some apparently slight but actually pretty profound questions about how social interactions work and/or don’t work online and what we can do about it (if anything). Good notes here as well on uses of Hydra…

The difference in atmosphere in the keynotes between the guy from Google and the guy from Microsoft is tangible. When the guy from Microsoft talks, there’s scepticism – hostility even. There’s a sense of outrage when he doesn’t know what a GPL is, frustration when mentions that he things ‘things built by committee’ are messy. The only clap he gets is for mentioning that he hates the PowerPoint paperclip… The guy from Google gets a clap within the first ten minutes for mentioning that he likes the way that his site does search-query spell-correcting. It’s immensely satisfying, but it makes you wonder what impact gut emotional reactions have had on the history even of the most ostensibly rational industries, technology and computing – …

Driving around Santa Clara is like being inside an episode of Stargate – it’s like there’s a flat desolate alien landscape all around us that’s being used as a massive landing strip for these huge monstrous mother-ship style buildings. Each building has a brand that’s sharp and occasionally scarily authoritarian in appearance – like the flags for an alien regime. I keep thinking that there are lizard creatures inside that have come to dominate the earth. Around the monstrous motherships (our hotel is one), all these smaller buildings are littered around – like cleaner fish around a whale, or like the tents and mud-structures that surround the huge architectural beasts of pyramid-like tombs. They’re subservient buildings, housing creatures with no other purpose than to serve the whatever-the-fuck-it-is that is living its domineering life in the bowels of Network Solutions or Globix or…

When I see them in our rare trips outside the building, I never feel certain that there won’t be a terrible rumbling and shaking with smoke and dust everywhere and they won’t just lift off to find a new world to colonise and destroy. It’s kind of arcane and beautiful in a ‘beauty of the bush-fire” kind of way. I love it here.

It’s like the Unkle track says, “We had access to too many, uh, too much money. Too much equipment, and little by little we went insane”. Here are two more text-transcripts done collaboratively over Hydra from this afternoon’s sessions:

• Meg Hourihan’s “Margins of the Writable Web”
• Stewart Butterfield’s “Play and Social Software”