Flutterby™! : Where is the new edge? 2012-12-10 21:29:22.199531+00

Where is the new edge?

2012-12-10 21:29:22.199531+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Paul Palubiki: Expired. On what Wired Magazine has become:

Going through the first issue made me somewhat sad, but not really from any sense of nostalgia. It was a painful reminder of how much the magazine has changed from a weird, dangerous, avant-garde magazine from the future to basically PC Magazine with a goatee and cargo shorts.

Yes. Hell, Boing Boing is now pimping bimboxes. Even "gamification", ie: stealing ideas developed decades ago in contexts like Toastmasters to get you to pay someone else to care for your Tamagotchi, appears to be over. Maybe there's something to the "Maker" movement, but that's largely what our grandparents' generation called "Hobbyists".

I'm seeing a slight resurgence in the home-made sex-positivity areas, but in general it feels like this culture, tech and otherwise, is stuck in this tremendous malaise. Where's the transgression? Where's the "fuck the status quo, let's make some noise and change things"? Have all the punks been assimilated?

Or have we all become so accustomed to the shiny now that we're living in the future that there's no future left to envision?

I need to hook up with more of the maker crowd around me. I know the SRL folks are in-town, and I'm pitching the idea of the Ephemerisle crowd bringing their art out to the Petaluma Rivertown Revival (where we already have some cool stuff, like the Whiskey-drome)...

The other reason I don't think the revolution is going to happen in the "Maker" space is that so much of the Maker crowd (at least around me) seems to be tied up in "let the 3d printer/laser cutter/CNC mill build it" (or maybe I'm just projecting and need to get more involved), and that those spaces are kind of the target of a gold-rush and therefore there's a lot of patents tying things up and keeping innovation stifled.

But I do like Meuon's notion. I'm currently working with Daniel on building his guitar, and I love the boy dearly, but there's a whole lot of critical and practical thinking that he didn't get in school or Boy Scouts. Somewhere there may be an intersection of that that gets us back to answering number questions with numbers, and being able to visualize assemblies and keep a mental image of what a part might look like after a process so that we can postpone that process until other things require a reference edge are done...

#Comment Re: made: 2012-12-11 12:54:21.984372+00 by: meuon [edit history]

The new edge: My pick is open education. Just introduced some bored with school S. African teenagers to Khan Academy. 13 year old Natalie is tearing it apart. She's demoing working javascript that she seems to understand, and is learning other things of interest to her as fast as she and her sister can borrow access to a computer.

The world it foresaw has largely come to pass... except that the real world destroyed the electronic alterworld we used to have, and we only got to bend the real world a tiny bit before all of our good stuff got swept away and drained of life. The future is here but all the awesome got ripped out along the way and what's left is a bunch of commercial horseshit, like we're all living in a mall.

The hackerspace thing has a lot of the "make some noise and change things" attitude. I get a lot of satisfaction from my participation in ALTSpace.