Tuesday, March 13th @ 5:00 pm
Bruce Sterling Visionary In Residence, wired.com
From the introduction, it seems this rant is a staple of SXSW. It was kind of long and rambly (but I guess that’s what a rant is). Most of my notes are pretty raw, but this one in particular is going to be that way, because of the nature of this talk – very stream of consciousness. -SF
Everyone w/ristbands have RFID chips in them – but they’re not connecting them to your profile.
Video on the net big this year – stupid medium! TV, the vast wasteland.
Viacomm sued Google for a $billion
broadband eats everything – net neutrality won’t become an issue. the teens use it too much and have no respect for media.
movanich – soft media site
Realized from google that information wants to be free – tons of arcane material for FREE – google + wikipedia = game over for the 80’s
1st world = global market – capitolism
2nd world = all forms of govt. – national, city, state, local all
3rd world = common space peer production, no communism, not state, not market, just common peer production – starting to have effects on society
4th world = disorder, where they don’t have any of this, abandon the map (more obvious in 10 yrs).
social networks are not fragile – very resiliant
in this 3rd world businesses stop being business – fear of craig’s list – craig is not interested in having a business – he’s gutted revenue streams of traditional newspapers.
scaring newspapers, not a business any more – being turned into social-based peer production
Downsides:
many more rip-off artists
fandom is big – fan art is terrible “not good, never will be good”
wikipedia is good, but you’ll never see a painting by commitee.
mashups – big vogue, they think it is super-duper, but it’s just novelty music “like the monster mash” won’t go anywhere,
we need some aesthetic honesty, just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good
digital tools are melting media down – building stuff all out of effects, all frames are touched now. anyone who can afford a machine is in a position to do this construction.
media isn’t converging, just becmoing different flavors out of the same mixing machine.
“when you have a laser, everything looks laserable”
electronic art stinks (deviantart.com) – interesting stuff, nothing great – probably due to ease of production
“folk culture” made for hicks – electronic folk culture
2017 nobody will use the word blog – good for some things and not really that potent of a medium – can’t find a blog that will make you cry, or display fine art
this is our means of expression? such an unstable medium because it changes so quickly, the ground is being eaten out from under it before it gets a chance.
spam – 95% of the net is machine generated robbery and giberish
what happens if you’d turned on the tv and then it tried to rob you?
Reed Hundt (former FCC) – disenchanted, in private practice – involved in auction spectrum.
come up with a way to sell spectrum to police emergency and othe users – take from tv (nobody usses any more)
take those wavelinks and put the net on it and saturate tv areas with broadband net. it would be everywhere! no technical reason that it can’t be done.
group of police, fire, emergency is enough to get it going and get the money from congress
could potentially move USA from #22 to the top
Yoki Benkler – what it takes to build the 3rd world:
1. divy up the work (suck em into it) – granular, modular, integratable
granular- will contribute something of merit (even the little bit has to matter and very few of the big ones)
modular- divide into projects and let people know status
integratable- has to turn into one thing that achieves something in the broader aspects of society – has to be useful!
2. self-selecting – ppl chosing to join you
3. in or out mechnism
4. communication – platform where everyone can talk, but not kill each other
5. humanization
6. trust construction – have to learn how to trust each other
7. norm creation – what’s alowed? what is normal?
8. transparency – can’t hide behind the curtain
9. monitoring – a police force is needed – make sure ppl play by the rules – savage out there
10. peer review – know who’s good at it
11. discipline – hard to do good work – especially when not working for any money
12. fairness – make sure this isn’t just a way to exploit users
13. insitutional sustainabilig – no way to know how long this will last – not been around long enough
computers are platforms for self expressions not well behaved appliances
Benkler started a wiki, but nobody is there.
I didn’t take any notes during the Will Wright presentation today. He was just speaking way too fast to get anything down. Plus, I really wanted to pay attention to what he was saying. They moved us out of the convention center over to the Hilton ballroom for this presentation due to the large crowds expected. The keynote was basically split into two pieces, “modern games vs. traditional games vs. other media” and a demo of Spore, Will’s newest game. The games vs. media track was pretty interesting. He basically discussed the evolution of gaming starting with storytelling and movies and the paths that a user takes though them (linear vs. non-linear or quasi-linear). It was an interesting look at how games have evolved and become much more complex. This worked into the demo of Spore, which is stretching the boundaries of traditional gaming. I don’t think I’d do it justice if 
I explained what Spore is, but there is a great video online of one of the original walk-throughs of the game. This game looks incredible! Seeing it demoed live just reassured that. I’m willing to be that my productivity drops 110% when that game comes out because all I will want to do it play it.