We’re skipping this weekend — too many confusions. I’m off at the Hypertext Conference, which is not entirely about food. But there is food, and The Ramblas.
Actually a very interesting conference. @eastgate’s paper (or, papers) were interesting. Under the froth of the Web and Social Networks and all the other shiny things, the deeper and more reflective thinking around Hypertext is still alive—thankfully. Nice to see some input creeping in from the literary side of things too. We all too easily froget it’s not just about tech.
The Hypertext Conference also includes Social Networks and the most interesting/disturbing as apsect was the “it’s not my fault” view of those describing alogos do detect ‘bad’ behaviour. One person’s saviour is another’s oppressor. Simply believing we are good doesn’t mean we are. We need better, more behaviourally mature analysis than “people not in our gang are good, therefore anyone not in our gang must be bad”. So dies democracy. We need more articulate technical folk.
IMO, the privilege of modern democracy is the right to not belong to a gang, aka (political) party, where our view is pre-sold to the party’s end.
This becomes truer every day. I recently reread Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future. He seems to me an extremely rare example of someone who has been both extremely deep in the technical/development/coding community and who has also been able to step outside it and critique it – notably, not just attack it – from a social/humanistic perspective. A mindless buy-in to the universal applicability of tech to problems poses extreme dangers, to say the least. If 3000 years of philosophy haven’t developed a satisfactory rule based system to distinguish good from bad behavior, developers ought to have some sense of perspective and humility in proposing/trying to write code to do so…