Archive for April 2013

I myself don’t go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. […] How many bookstores close, as a direct ratio of hours spent with electronic devices?

I’m sure there’s some direct relationship there. And it’s not a dark conspiracy. I happen to be quite the Google Glass fan.

In fact, I’m even becoming something of a Sergey Brin fan. I never paid much attention to Sergey before, but after Google Glass, Sergey really interests me. He’s filling the aching hole, the grievous hole in our society left by the departure of Steve Jobs. With Jobs off the stage, Sergey’s becoming very Jobsian. He wears these cool suits now. He’s got much better taste in design than he did. He’s got these Google X Moonshot things going on, they’re insanely great, and so forth.

I hope Sergey’s not taking a lot of acid and living off vegetarian applesauce. But other than that, well, now we have this American tech visionary millionaire who’s a Russian emigre. It’s fantastic! There’s something very post-Cold-War, very genuinely twenty-first century about that. It’s super. Sergey’s like my favorite out of control, one-percenter, mogul guy, right now.

[…]

Since the financial panic of 2008, things have gotten worse across the board. The Austerity is a complete policy failure. It’s even worse then the Panic. We’re not surrounded by betterness in 2013. By practically every measure, nature is worse, culture is worse, governance is worse. The infrastructure is in visible decline. Business is worse. People are living in cardboard in Silicon Valley.

We don’t have even much to boast about in our fashion. Although you have lost weight. And I praise you for that, because I know it must have been hard.

We’re living in hard times, we’re not living in jolly boom dotcom times. And that’s why guys like Evgeny Morozov, who comes from the miserable country of Belarus, gets all jittery, and even fiercely aggressive, when he hears you talking about “technological solutionism.”

“There’s an app to make that all better.” Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness? – Bruce Sterling’s keynote at SXSW 2013

(the ending of 2006’s Children of Men)

So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs.

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to.

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on. – Paul Krugman The Excel Depression

I wonder sometimes if Morozov’s disinformation campaign is a deliberate sabotage, an attempt to discredit those who are actually working to achieve the participatory ideal that he claims to be protecting. […] I don’t mind Morozov’s petty mischaracterizations of my motives; it’s what he does to garnish attention and I make a convenient target.

-Tim O’Reilly responding to Annalee Newitz’s overview of Evgney Morozov’s attack piece

Faust audiobooks conjure Mephistopheles doodles