If their legal arm gets out of control? This is an industry that demands payment from summer camps if the kids sing Happy Birthday or God Bless America, an industry that issues takedown notices for a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing to Prince. Traditional American media firms are implacably opposed to any increase in citizens’ ability to create, copy, save, alter, or share media on our own. They fought against cassette audio tapes, and photocopiers. They swore the VCR would destroy Hollywood. They tried to kill Tivo. They tried to kill MiniDisc. They tried to kill player pianos. They do this whenever a technology increases user freedom over media. Every time. Every single time.
Given everything a phone can do, suggesting that the screen is the most important thing about it seems like a misunderstanding of what’s powerful in there. For me, the single most powerful aspect of the mobile phone is that it’s connected to other people and other things. I’m not saying the screen isn’t important. But what makes the screen of the phone powerful is that you can look at anything, anytime — not just what’s in front of you. What’s in front of you is already in front of you. Being able to gather information about what’s in front of you is what we do all the time anyway. We’re either using data on our phone to connect with somebody we know, or to connect about something that we’re thinking about, or to connect about something that presents itself to us in that moment. And none of those things are made better by overlaying an informatic layer onto video.
Do you work as a computer programmer, writer, editor, animator, or graphic designer? Would you like a free desk to do work at your public library? What’s the catch? The catch is that you need to contribute 10 or 20 percent of your time to serving the public in some way. You can either set aside time to answering the public’s questions or teach classes or work on public-oriented digital projects of various kinds. You might also mentor a youth or an adult. You might want to cowork at the public library just three days per week, in which case you need to contribute just 10 percent of your coworking time. If you cowork at the public library five days a week, you would need to contribute 20 percent of your time.
We need to think smaller, not bigger, and with more attention to craft of execution. The craft of synthesis through sensemaking is not in visual details, as most designers have been trained, and it’s not in the application of our talents for the corporate machine, as most designers have accepted. It’s in intellectual details, specificity, and rigor; it’s in directives towards the focused and local, and it manifests as hard, hard work.
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
(via sabbatical)
Source: alovet
Christensen also describes the impact of foreign outsourcing on many other companies, including the steel companies, the automakers, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals, and now even software development. These firms are steadily becoming primarily marketing agencies and brands: they are lopping off the expertise that is needed to make anything anymore. In the process, major segments of the US economy have been lost, in some cases, forever.
However, the status quo is getting so top-heavy and dysfunctional now, so obviously unjust and so riddled with mass unemployment that it’s possible to imagine some stricken region cracking up, abandoning IP, patents, safety regulations and economies of scale, and going into a full-scale Maker frenzy. Almost a wartime, victory-garden, scrap-metal economy. Could even be in the USA. Probably needs to be reframed from hobby activity to resilient civil-defense. Less of a stretch than that looks.
All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi—hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE. What the hell more do you want from us?
Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.
So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program?
Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.
Here’s a glimpse of the future: Ubiquitous cheap sensors. Perpetual freelance surveillance. Relentless sunlight, directed by shoals of shadowy interest groups…
Perhaps future police actions will be announced by an EMP blast, to clear the twittering airspace. Rogue journalists load film cameras as occupiers brace for the assault. The policeman’s mic declares the assembly unlawful. The burst is ineffective. The net interprets a gap in coverage as censorship and rushes to fill it. New drones buzz into position and an enterprising trike journalist, sensing a chance for a payday careens through the police line in the hopes of catching something good.
It’s the internet’s fault that you don’t have a flying car.
We don’t always think of the web as bridging physical space problems, but it does – so smoothly that we don’t notice. I have my work colleagues in my pocket and a window to my work space in my bag. Now, why do I need a flying car?
(Yes, there are also technological and logistical reasons why flying cars are difficult. The internet isn’t a perfect solution to the problem. But it’s not bad, for an unevenly distributed future. And if it didn’t solve the problem pretty well, I reckon we’d find a way to make flying cars work. We’re clever little monkeys, and we’re good at solving problems.)
What else is in my pocket? I have the biggest encyclopaedia there has ever been, and a satellite view of the entire globe, and a personally curated collection of interesting writing by clever people that expands every day beyond my ability to read and absorb it. I have a direct, fast, simple line out to millions of people, and tools I can use to collaborate with them on any number of exciting projects or toys or games. Oh, and the news, too. All of it.
The scene is set for the open hardware ecosystem to blossom over the next couple of decades, with some hard work and a bit of luck. The inevitable slowdown of Moore’s Law may spell trouble for today’s technology giants, but it also creates an opportunity for the fledgling open hardware movement to grow roots and be the start of something potentially very big. In order to seize this opportunity, today’s open hardware pioneers will need to set the stage by creating a culture of permissive standards and customs that can scale into the future.
That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.
Culture expands by subsuming its edges;the edges grow outward by defacing and recombining things abandoned in the centre.
