The End of Cyberspace

Quote of the day; or, I'm not worthy!

From a William Gibson blog post that links back here:

The thing that's going to be quaint about "cyberspace" (that already is, really) is the inherent assumption that it's a realm unto itself; that it's in any way elsewhere or other.

Glancing sideways is becoming more generally recognized as about the best way of doing what we used to call futurism.

At the risk of making this too tightly interconnected a thread, I'll note that Gibson's well-known quote that "the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed" (also sometimes rendered as "not evenly distributed" or "not uniformly distributed") is engraved n the memory of every futurist. Especially since we started using ethnographic techniques in our work, studying early adopters for clues as to how the rest of us would use currently-new technologies.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, future

links for 2006-12-18

• Welcome to the future | Compare and buy | The Observer
  "Food must move on. If we don't experiment and innovate we risk missing out on an even more exciting time both in the kitchen and round the table."
  (tags: food future)

links for 2006-12-16

• Wondermark by David Malki ! - An Illustrated Jocularity.
  (tags: humor)

Another example of the tangibility of cyberspace

Nick Carr calculates that a Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as a Brazilian:

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals... 60,000 kilowatt-hours....

Which, annualized, gives us [an average avatar consumption of] 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year..... [T]he average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

From Mark Baard via Tim Bray.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, energy, games

links for 2006-12-11

• I already have an Ultra-Mobile PC: It's called a Newton - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
  I have an Apple Newton 2100. It still works. Maybe I should try to update it, and see if it'll work and play with my regular computers?
  (tags: Apple software)

Quote of the day

From Steve Talbott's very stimulating essay "Where We Have Come To:"

During 1994-1995 I wrote a book suggesting that the emerging culture of the Internet was infected by a massive and potentially disastrous confusion between our full human capacities and the technical capabilities of the new digital machinery. It's not that the technical capabilities had nothing to do with us. Quite the opposite. The point was that they lived first of all within us: we had to conceive the computer and be capable of thinking like a computer before we could build one. And that's exactly where the danger lay. This thinking and the machine it spawned were extremely one-sided expressions of ourselves. If we continued investing our energies in such one-sidedness, allowing the rapid spread of digital machinery continually to reinforce our own imbalance, then (so I argued) we would eventually descend to the level of our machines without even realizing it. And we would mistake our own descent for a glorious ascent of the machine to a human and then a superhuman level.

The ultimate threat, I claimed in The Future Does Not Compute, was not the operation of the machine "out there" in the physical world, but rather the ongoing amplification and imperial aggrandizement of the machine within us. This is what makes the externalized technology so extremely dangerous.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace, internet