Posts Tagged → internet

The Metaverse Won’t Involve Mark Zuckerberg

“Zuckerberg will still be working on his smart home screens, Habbo Hotel rip-off Zoom calls, and budget Apple Watches, while young people are busy actually building a new internet, haphazardly, out of protocols that are free, easy-to-use, and the most convenient — Bluetooth, WiFi, video calls, free messaging clients, open source maps, QR codes, and the blockchain. And we will interact with this new metaverse on devices that we already own for a while. Then, slowly, new features will be added to help us interface with it better. Wireless bluetooth earbuds, smart watches, and phones will become more seamlessly integrated. They’ll have longer batteries, faster charging, brighter screens, better cameras, more wellness tools, and maybe eventually small projectors. We will create new user behaviors that companies will have to adapt to and then facilitate.

And there is no version of that where Facebook, or Meta, will be a key player. It is simply too big for them to dominate and, more importantly, it is already happening on Twitch, on Discord, and on TikTok. Zuckerberg is right. The metaverse is here, but it is has already left Facebook behind”.

The Birth of the Internet Archive

“25 years ago, the entire World Wide Web was only 2.5 terabytes in size. Most connections were dial-up, important records were stored on tape, and a young engineer named Brewster Kahle was working on a revolutionary project—a way to archive the growing Internet.

Filmed by Marc Weber for the Web History Project, this video showcases the Internet Archive’s very first web crawl in 1996. In 2001, the project was made accessible to the public through the Wayback Machine. Today, the Internet Archive is home to more than 588 billion web pages, as well as 28 million books and texts, 14 million audio items, and 580,000 software titles, making us one of the world’s largest digital libraries.”

[via]

It looks like typing

“There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”

Quinn Norton

[via dayofthedreamweavers]

Memes against censorship

tiananmenduck
“China’s censors are blocking words like “today” and “June 4″ from social media as part of the country’s yearly chore to block any reference to the anniversary to the Tiananmen Square massacre 24 years ago. And though the Chinese are running a sophisticated and tight censorship ship, they’re having a bit harder time blocking memes.”

Read full article here.

Going offline. And coming back

paul_1020_2

This is one of the most inspiring readings I ever did. Seriously.
Paul Miller went completely offline for a year and he finally discovered that blaming the web for our vices and our poor decisions about life just isn’t the right way to go.

I’m pasting a couple of quotes, but you should read the whole thing, because it’s richer and more complex than that.

“By late 2012, I’d learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat.”

“I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.”

Internet And The Infinite Sadness

sad

“It only takes a quick scroll through Tumblr to come face-to-face with the bleak realities of millennial existence and to discover that in darkened rooms, lit only by the blue glow from the screen of a MacBook Air; over the sound of Hannah Horvath’s muffled complaints coming from the TV in the next room; where empty burrito wrappers and wine bottles line up on the windowsill like trepidatious soldiers, peering out into the snow blanketed world outside; where iPhones lay inert and vibrationless on IKEA bedside tables, there is a battle raging. There are 20-somethings everywhere crying through their fingers and onto keyboards, creating the kind of futuristic tears Blade Runner only dreamed of as they tap, tap, tap, bloodletting late into the night.”

[read more here]