transmit nowhere

William Gibson shares some wisdom on writing, answering some forum questions:

Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?

A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.

Q: Least?

A: They’re all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I’ve learned, indicates that I’ll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn’t seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.

from http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2010_03_01_archive.asp#6800925744412544840

I have rarely met anyone who has enjoyed or appreciated bureaucracy. Maybe the people who are entrenched in it or contribute to it. There are problems of efficiency (a whole other post) that are nearly universally recognized but we cannot seem to improve. Looking at the rich history of our people (everyone) it seems like many systems today are perpetuated out of a misplaced sense of respect for the past. An unbroken stagnation that has come to life. A sentience of paperworks, forms, processes, rules, regulations.

Are there science-fiction stories that postulate a world in which a single global government takes on a Vogon-like bureaucratic mess, developing and growing a system for management riddled with forms, cross-checking, and delayed process? Perhaps this system would come to life and become our benevolent overlord, drowning us all in a kind of ISO 9000 process.

Like many things in life, taking a step back, asking questions I’m forced to wonder the purpose of the system. It took a friend a quick check on Wikipedia on automotive registration for us to determine the reasons to necessitate the annual registration. The answer, of course, was unsatisfying. Justified, maybe. But only barely.

It makes me wonder if the proponents of “small government” are thinking too small. And makes me ask more questions about the world I live in that instill seeds of depression.

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

via Post-Medium Publishing.

As more of our conversations parse through personally, carried devices and the services they connect to our ability to transform, filter and analyse what is being spoken evolves. Simple examples exist today – mobile phones designed for the elderly in Japan include features that can slow down conversations by up to ~30% to make them easier to follow – the conversation length stays the same compensated by shorter pauses. The iPod shuffle supports podcasts on speed.

via Silence is Subjective – Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect.

synchronicity |ˌsi ng krəˈnisitē|

noun

1 the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection : such synchronicity is quite staggering.
2 another term for synchrony (sense 1).
ORIGIN 1950s: coined (in sense 1) by C. G. Jung.

Things are duplicated everywhere. Tweets in Tweetie, across computers and the iPhone. Google Reader and Buzz. Missed calls from Google Voice. Status indicators, badges, alerts, alarms. Duplications everywhere. It’s not enough that there’s too much – we duplicate things even when it’s not needed.

It’s more than that, and worse. Trawl github and you’ll find that people have implemented and re-implemented the same stuff over and over and over again. How can we do anything new, anything meaningful if we keep doing the same things over and over again?