I'm Giving Up Reading for a Year

But yes, I agree, I am leaning towards what PG is saying there for sure as I think it speaks to a lot of the mockery of the original article as many see the issues for what they really are.

Now, of course they don't literally read your mind. Instead, there's some easy to write configuration in a nice language (e.g. Haskell) that communicates your thoughts to the manager ahead of time.

I'd (half-jokingly) respond: ‘It's 2012, why are you still using a computer?’

If we're talking future, what you've described is one alternative. Another is not using computers for everything.

Imagine that a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, an efficient and relatively compact electric motor was invented. A revolutionary achievement for those who were aware. Soon engineers professionally working with electric motors appeared. But it was difficult for a regular person to operate one, and—let's be honest—regular people didn't really care about electric motors. However, people cared about other things: when someone combined an electric motor and a coffee grinder, it was a hit. Many a successful product making use of an electric motor was subsequently brought to the market. </narrative>

We put computers in things for a long time already. Is there a reason at all for ‘real’ computers (with OS, window managers, and all this stuff) to exist, except maybe for scientific tasks and programming?

Yes, today ‘real’ computers are already used by many. Mainly for communication, as well as for specific tasks like text editing, photo editing, video production, DTP. However, it's usually not very efficient. A person needs to deal with a complex generic system, which is intended for thousands of use cases—and as a result not really suited for a single one. It's understandable that most people don't particularly like using a computer, seeing it like a necessary inconvenience.

Perhaps we can figure a way to turn a computer into that magic multi-purpose thing you've described, that can ‘read’ our minds and do everything equally good. It would be fantastic. However, I think it's probably more likely to share electric motor's fate.

First things first: there is no such thing – none, zip, zero – as raw information. Everything communicable is subjective. That subjectivity might expose objective fact, but even then, there's a subjectivity in which facts are brought up, how they're discussed, and ultimately what facts the communicator knows. You can't separate medium from message. That applies to everything. Rhetoric and information are inseparable.

Your "read everything in your favorite theme/font" assumes that the purpose of publishing is readability, when publishing is just as much about contextualization and "experience-crafting" (too tired to think of the right word). The publishing process lets people decide whether something looks like it'll be worth their time, and it does that in part by creating a certain experience around media consumption that frames the media in question. This process doesn't start when somebody themes a blog or calls an agent. It starts the moment you begin to try to express yourself. There is no such thing as communicating without an audience; every form of communication is a form of publishing.

It's through this process, moreover, that culture forms. From our specific choices we notice and abstract what we believe to be our values. These values then define both how we choose to function within society, and as these values spread they become our society. This is as valid online as it is anywhere else. Gaming theorists refer to a "magic circle" which divides a virtual world's reality from any other; a book I'm reading, Communities of Play, follows online gamers who are forced to migrate to a series of other games, and studies how the values they developed in one game influences their behavior in other games (and watches them try to recreate the original game in scriptable environments like Second Life).

You talk about "authoring" and "commenting" and "sharing" and "upvoting" and, hell, even "editing" like these are all concepts everybody agrees with. But look at the difference in culture even between near-clones like Hacker News and Reddit. Then look at the difference between these sites and sites that are only slightly different – Newsvine, MetaFilter. By the time you get to something two steps changed – 9gag, say, or traditional web forums – you're looking at an entirely different way of processing information, even though you're still looking at essentially the same systemic process. And that's before you look at sites with entirely different purposes. None of those sites have remotely the same purpose as Flickr, and Flickr has little in common with Instagram, and Instagram has nothing in common with, say, TheSixtyOne.

Look, if you're a biochem major you ought to understand that minute variations on a micro level leads to profound changes on the macro. Saying that information can be broken down into text/images/video is like saying that life can be broken down into carbon/hydrogen/oxygen. The magic is that a few basic building blocks can lead to ten thousand variations on the same silly theme, as you say. That's not a bug. That's a feature. I'll take that a step further and say that the magic of computers is how they allow ANYBODY to program systemic processes, so we're seeing systems and cultures evolve that literally never could have existed before. Cultures that rely on passing information that never could have been passed before. That break all preconceived notions of how cultures can exist.

From this baseline computing platform came web sites, a primitive but effective way of creating localized systems. From these web sites came cultures – cultures within sites but also between them, like Communities of Play addresses. The web site is still among the most basic ways for people to publish. I'm publishing my thesis this year as a web site, because I can do things with hypertext and javascript and css that I could never do with paper. The book version of my thesis will be the deprecated version in a number of ways. Does that mean the web site is the only way to publish within these systems? Of course not! Newer and cooler things will evolve with time, and people will rely on the World Wide Web less and less and less. But the WWW is a great equalizer. It's given rise to voices that never could speak before.

Protip: if you're feeling frustrated with the "ten thousand variations", stop reading tech news. Stop reading your Facebook friends. Take control of what you read. Don't rely on fucking Prismatic – it means well, but ultimately it's a hedonistic system, designed to show you what you want and hide from you everything else. Hell, don't rely on ANY recommendation systems. No Hacker News. No Reddit. Look for individuals. Search for people whose voices make you think. Create your own magic circle, your own tiny culture. Don't bother coming up with a platform or a startup to contain that culture. Just make the culture, and then build tools that help that culture sustain and extend itself. Maybe it'll never become huge, but it'll be big enough for you and all the people who think like you, and those are all the people you need. That's the purpose of a culture, after all.

I don't check Hacker News very often now (for reasons just stated), but if you'd like to talk about this more shoot me an email (i.am@me.com). I love having this conversation. Or just talk around this subthread without me, whichever. Fascinating, isn't it, how each thread in a conversation like this becomes a whole culture of its own...

"Strange how much human progress and accomplishment comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim

    Starvation (better agriculture, distribution, storage)
    Pathogens and illness (medicine)
    Environmental hazards (heating, shelter)
    Lack of human contact (transportation + communication)
    Censorship (distributed networks)
    Entertainment (media creation, reproduction, storage)

I'll take a world full of pop-up adds, viral marketing videos and spam email over a world in which my parents both died of Malaria in their 30's and I can barely get enough clean water to live on in my dirt-brick house.

1- Since dropping from College, I decided to change friends. Facebook allowed me to get back in touch with older high school friends and also find new friends in the same area as me.

2- The Internet allowed me to work remotely to foreign companies. Skype, Github, basecamp... manages my projects and workflow. These technologies made it possible that I make a very good online income while staying at home.

3- I bought a Nikon D5100 the last week. I'm taking photos of everyday life and events, re-touching them and saving them (not in Facebook, just plain JPEG in computer) for the future as memories.

4- My SmartPhone, Tablet, and TV do a lot for me everyday. (productivity, communication, learning, and entertainment)

The issue is not with technology, but with using it. Some BigCorp makes addictive technologies to boost their earnings (online/social videos games). I play video games, but I'm a light player. Few hours a week.

My view is that technology is power and power itself is neither good nor bad, it’s neutral. Power just increases the stakes, how the cards get dealt is the important point. As a society we spend a lot of time thinking about who has what power because we know what happens when you get it wrong. But, strangely, we don’t afford technology the same consideration. What happens instead is that whichever technology is just the right mix of popular and profitable proliferates while all others die. The implication of this belief is twofold:

* there are a whole load of great technologies with no means of generating profit that we will never benefit from

* there are a whole load of awful technologies that are profitable that have a negative effect on society that stick around.

Zen is a tradition that is firmly based on the practice of meditation (zazen) as a way to gain insight into fundamental aspects of awareness and let go of clinging to concepts and self. This sounds very abstract, which is why Zen teachers sometimes prefer to express themselves very concretely, like in this story:

A monk told Joshu: `I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.'

Joshu asked: `Have you eaten your rice porridge?'

The monk replied: `I have eaten.'

Joshu said: `Then you had better wash your bowl.'

It's hard to talk about all of Zen at once --- though I guess any one word is sufficient, even silence says everything, or just snapping one's fingers --- so I think it's better to just look at basic zazen instructions and start practicing, because nothing makes sense until you taste that.

If you look at the formal aspects of Zen practice --- the rigorous monastery schedules, etc --- it can seem like a very stiff and rigid religion. And in one sense it is. But from the inside, this strictness is just a helpful way of intensifying.

Feel free to ask if there's anything you're curious about, I might be able to answer, though I'm really a beginner.

Categorization for its own sake is definitively useless. If you want to compare Heraclitus to Joshu, go for it. Alternately, if you want to compare Pirsig with Aquinas or Kant, fine. If you want to figure out how to live, there's not much point to asking, "Is it a religion?" or "Is it a philosophy?": the salient point is rather whether or not there's anything worth enacting in your life.