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Mindful Cyborgs: Globalization, Writing and Japan

January 16, 2014 /

A quick catch-up episode in which Chris Dancy talks about his trip to Japan and the effects of globalization, and I talk a bit about the cognitive experience of writing. Here’s a taste:

One of them being this writer Arnon Grünberg who I think has actually might have been on Wired. I’m not sure. No. Where was it? Actually, it was New York Times. He is writing a book while he is connected to a bunch of sensors hundreds of sensors on his head, on his body and the book will be read by people wearing similar sensor. So, they have a bunch of volunteers to see if they can sync the feelings of what he wrote and what people experienced and I thought quite profound that we have almost a shared biological experience with the writing.

It was on November 29th. So, just couple of weeks ago in New York Times. Thoughts?

KF: That’s really interesting. I’d be curious to see what they find. I find the writing and reading are radically different experiences for me. So, I wouldn’t really expect the writer and the reader to really have synchronized experiences but I’m definitely curious to see how that plays out.

CD: I’ve never written fiction. So, if you’re like typing out a scene, I’m sure a lot of our listeners maybe aren’t writers, maybe some of them aren’t writers, professional, but when you’re doing science fiction and you’re in a really dramatic scene, you don’t get excited or you’re just seeing it and typing how it feels almost like you’re a court recorder or how does that work for you?

KF: Well, for me most of it . . . every writer’s different. I guess for me most of it is I already know what I’m going to write before I start typing it. So, by the time I’m trying to describe it, I think I’m a little bit more detached from the emotion of it and then the other thing to keep in mind is that. I don’t know what the saying is “75% of writing is rewriting” or whatever. Most of the time that you spend you spend on something is going to be revising it over and over again. So, I don’t know by the time you’re done, a lot of the visceral or emotional impact that you would expect to get from reading something is kind of worn off and you’re just sort of sick of reading the same sentence over and over again trying to figure out how to improve it.

CD: That’s really interesting.

KF: There are writers who don’t really know . . . I know that there are definitely a lot of writers who don’t really know what’s going to happen in a scene when they sit down and write it. I imagine that that would be kind of a different . . . they would be working in a very different state from me but I would still expect most of their time to be spent on rewriting and I would also expect . . . I would still expect like that feeling of sort of channeling creativity to be different from just reading it but again we’ll have to see how it plays out.

Download and Full Transcript Mindful Cyborgs: Episode 19 – Review, Musings, and Catch Up

Mindful Cyborgs: Defrag Wrap-Up

December 27, 2013 /

Here’s the wrap-up from Defrag, with our new co-host Alex Williams. Lorenda Brandon is our guest. Here’s an excerpt where we talk about whether people can or want to customize their own technology processes:

KF: There’s like a whole school of tech that thinks the opposite is the best way to go. There are opinionated infrastructure is better . . .

CD: I love the name.

KF: Because people don’t want to come up with their own process. They don’t want to decide how to do something. They just want to be able to go to something and do a thing and not have to . . .

LB: I think there’s room for both. To be honest, we in this industry can get a little insular. We sort of have a level of acceptance about technology and about infrastructure that 90% of the population doesn’t have. They don’t have the understanding of how do I design my own process.

CD: I want to interject. I have a neighbor who’s diabetic. She’s 65, African American. Very, very heavy I mean, probably 400, 500 pounds and she needed help a month or so ago and I went over and her internet, her router or something had got jacked up and I just reset it and I was talking to her for a minute and she was telling she didn’t get to Spotify for like 2 hours and her Netflix thing was down and she was describing all these things that she needed the router for and it dawned on me that my 500 pound diabetic neighbor who’s 65 manages more cloud services effectively than most of the organizations I meet.

AW: She’s networked.

CD: Someone said to chief integration officer – We don’t have WAN. They’re everywhere and I think that’s a skill, right? I just said to you earlier, Klint, you’re in IT system, right?

KF: IT department, yeah.

CD: You’re an IT department of Klint. So, the whole IT department there and how do you deal with that but we should put my neighbor in charge of Healthcare.gov.

LB: We should.

AW: She would probably improve it.

Download and Full Transcript: Mindful Cyborgs: Episode 17 – Spirit Animals and Defrag Wrap-up Part 1 and Part 2

Mindful Cyborgs: Why APIs Are Important

December 13, 2013 /

I missed this Mindful Cyborgs recording session, but in this episode Chris Dancy talks to API evangelist Kin Lane about APIs and why it’s important to have access to your data:

KL: I mean, really just the pace at which everything is. In 2012 . . . so, I started API Evangelist in 2010. First year and a half I was evangelizing. I was really telling stories over and over and over trying to make the mainstream aware of what was happening. Now, I don’t have to do that. The pace is there. I mean, you see articles in the New York Times, in the Washington where they say API in the title. You used to never see that acronym. It’d be in the body of the post but . . .

CD: Well, it doesn’t seem so scary.

KL: It isn’t.

CD: It doesn’t seem to scare especially when people use hundreds APIs every day and they are just labeled with do this with this API, you become more comfortable with it but they seem to be exponentially scary. Are you familiar with Zapier? Yeah, Wade Foster I think is this really great guy, great customer service too but one of the things I thought they did that was really unique is because of the way they work with different APIs and then they’ve got this Zapier or bundle servicing where they can take up service without an API and kind of like give you some access to it.

For Google Glass which some people love, some people hate. It is what it is, because they had a wrapper. They just built a wrap around it and suddenly you have all this access to all these services that would never show up on Glass that overnight you have 100 new glass applications. That can be scary for companies.

KL: Yeah. That’s empowerment right there. That for me APIs are not just for developers because someone can access their own resources.

CD: It’s your data, yeah.

KL: And the thing is we operate in all of these clouds. We’ve migrated to the cloud environment and we exist in 14, 15 different places and these people are monetizing our data and so I’ve been doing a lot of talk at the university level lately. I’m working on a project right now called reclaim your domain which is basically teaching people basic web literacy stuff and the fact that those are your Instagram photos, those are your Flickr photos, that’s your Twitter data. You can get it out. How do you reclaim your domain and start taking control and APIs are how we do that.

Download and Full Transcript: Mindful Cyborgs: Data Hacking with Fanatics and the API Coming Out Party

Mindful Cyborgs: Cyborg Anthropology 101 with Amber Case

November 5, 2013 /

Mindful Cyborg

This week Alex Williams filled in for my usual co-host Chris Dancy. We talked with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case. Here’s a taste:

I sat down with a kid who wasn’t really doing well in school. He wasn’t talking to his dad and I asked his dad I was like “Well, how do you hang out with your kid?” and he says “Well, I don’t really know.” So, I saw the kid on a laptop and I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” and he said, “Well, I’m playing a game” and I said “What game?” and he said, “Club Penguin”. So, I logged on to Club Penguin on my laptop, got myself an account and I said “What’s your username?” and I literally just went in and joined the game with him. And of course I couldn’t show that I never played the game before so I had to catch on really quick. So, initially, what the kid did was, he didn’t really necessarily want to show me around. He just wanted to show me that he was really fast in it and kind of leave me in the dust, so I had to catch up.

And so I caught up and I got control of my virtual self so to speak and then I was comfortable and then at that point I had proven myself and then he started showing me around. He said hey, let’s go over here and let’s do this and then we started doing all these activities together like sliding down a mountain or mining for gold, for instance. We could get upgrades which was difficult for me to watch and also participating.

All these different things we ended up doing and then after a while he started telling me about school that day and how frustrated he was with students and just started spilling everything, just everything came out. It was the equivalent of me in the past being his dad and throwing a softball, a baseball to him. Doing something where you’re walking with somebody. You’re doing something tangential and suddenly all the information comes out.

I later sat down and told his dad. I was like, he’s having trouble in school. Here’s why. If you want to hang out with him . . . you’re in computer software you should be able to figure out how to play Club Penguin.

Full Episode, Notes and Transcript: Mindful Cyborgs Episode 13: Always/Already, and Becoming More Still – Cyborg Anthro 101

See also:

My interview with Amber from 2010

Our dossier on Amber

Mindful Cyborgs Interviews Alex Soojung-Kim Pang on Contemplative Computing and the Distraction Addiction

August 30, 2013 /

The Distraction Addiction

This week Chris Dancy and I interview Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul. We talked about contemplative computing, the history of meditation and more. Here’s a taste:

KF: One other thing I wanted to ask you about, Alex, it was one of the more surprising things in the book to me was that you pointed out that contemplative practices seem to have started somewhere between 800 and 200 BC as a response to colonialism, global trade and urbanization. That actually does kind of bring us back to that idea of the technologies that causes this sort of problem aren’t hammers and bows and arrows but they’re network technologies like social media comes back to that comparison of urbanization and economics and so forth. I would have thought those practices would still have developed much, much earlier in history so I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit about the research you did in that area of the history of contemplation.

ASP: There’s not a huge literature on this yet, I mean people definitely are working on it but I think that what’s distinctive about that period which historians of religion refer to as the Axial Age is that it’s the first time that contemplative practices stopped being a secret. They stopped doing things that are for initiates that are part of … It’s the first time that we begin to see people like Buddha arguing that these are and should be accessible to everyone. That they’re open, they’re public sort of in a sense that they go from or they continue to the network metaphor they go from being proprietary to being open source. Anyone can do them. Anyone can improve upon and add to them.

You can find the episode on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher, or download it directly.

Transcript and show notes

Oh, and see also my article on Pang’s book.

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Mindful Cyborgs: Robotic Emoting Baristas from Enterprise Precariat

July 30, 2013 /

Mindful Cyborg

This week on Mindful Cyborgs Chris Dancy and I discuss the rise of the “precariat” and what it means for the future of work:

One thing that’s really been on my mind with regards the Marketplace story about the BART transit strike and the tech industries’ response to that. There was a quote from the CEO of UserVoice, Richard White, and he said, “One of the guys in our team said he’d be putting in his two weeks’ notice once he found out what he could make working for BART.” White said jokingly. His solution to address those disgruntled BART workers, get them back to work, pay them whatever they want and then figure out how to automate their jobs so that this doesn’t happen again.

People have been talking about the automation of work and how technology is potentially displacing workers and there’s a good book on this called Race Against the Machine by some MIT academics. But you don’t really see a lot of tech CEOs who are openly calling for blue-collar workers, or any workers, to be replaced by technology. Forrester even did a report a couple years ago suggesting that tech company’s downplay the potential of technologies to replace workers. So, it’s really unusual to see the CEO of a tech company just openly saying, “I want these meddling workers to be replaced by machines. So the inconvenience that it causes me has diminished.”

It was a pretty surprising thing to see somebody really just come right out and say and there’s this subtext to it that really bothers me as well, the bit about, “Oh, you know, one of my workers was going to quit and go work for BART,” just suggesting that they already get paid too much even though as noted in the article they’re not actually making what their family needs to get by in the area. The BART workers aren’t. There is this sort of subtext like anybody who’s not part of the tech industry doesn’t deserve to get paid a living wage. That was really disturbing to me.

You can download the episode on Soundcloud, from iTunes or download the MP3 directly.

More notes, plus the full transcript inside.

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Cyborgologist Nathan Jurgenson Interviewed On Mindful Cyborgs

May 27, 2013 /

Nathan Jurgenson This week cyborgologist Nathan Jurgenson joined Chris Dancy and me on Mindful Cyborgs. Nathan is the co-founder of the site Cyborgology, co-founder of the Theorizing the Web conference, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry and a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland.

You can download or listen to it on Soundcloud or on iTunes, or just download it directly.

Here are a couple highlights from the transcript:

If you’ve taken a lot of photos, if you’re a photographer and you spend a lot of time with the camera in your hand or up your eye. You develop the thing that is called the “camera eye,” that is even when the camera is not at your eye you start to see the world through the logic of the camera mechanism. You see the world as a potential photo with a framing, lighting, the depth of field and so forth. And that’s called the camera eye and I think social media, especially Facebook, has given us the sort of documentary vision or the Facebook eye where you see the world as a potential Facebook post or tweet or Instagram photo.

That is you see the present as always this potential future past, this sort of nostalgic view of the present. I don’t think it takes us out of the moment. Some people say that, that you’re not experiencing life in the moment because you’re worried about posting it on Facebook. I think that’s just a different experience of the moment. But it’s worth debating whether that’s a better experience or worse experience.

What Eric Schmidt was getting at when he was talking about how using a smartphone is emasculating and you need to have this Google Glass that is somehow more masculine or something like that. It was really, I thought, offensive. And I think the correct reading of that was that the smartphone, now, everybody has a smartphone. How can you look like you’re a rich, powerful man if you have this thing that everybody has?

Well, there’s Google Glass now and again reinforces how what a cellphone used to do. When people see you wearing the Google Glass will say oh, well, you’re an important rich, powerful man. It’s really I think sad in sort of an offensive way to market that product. They’ve done a terrible job marketing Google Glass I think.

More show notes, plus the complete transcript, inside.

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Big Dada, IRL Fetish And More On Mindful Cyborgs Episode 2

May 9, 2013 /

Mindful Cyborg

Mindful Cyborgs: Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration.

Hosts: Chris Dancy and Klint Finley.

Listen or download on Soundcloud and iTunes.

Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest.

Transcript, show notes and more inside.

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Mindful Cyborgs Ep 1: Data Exhaust, Augmented Dating and Fractalnoia

April 25, 2013 /

Mindful Cyborg

Mindful Cyborgs is a new podcast (or internet radio show, if you will) hosted by Chris Dancy and me. The tagline is: “Contemplative living in the age of quantification, augmentation and acceleration.” In our first episode we talk about data exhaust, augmented dating, fractalnoia and more. You can listen to it or download it from Soundcloud or iTunes.

Show notes and full transcript inside.

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Patton Oswalt and Punisher War Zone Director Lexi Alexander Talk About how the Movie Got Made

October 17, 2011 /

Patton Oswalt joined director Lexi Alexander on an episode of the film podcast “How Did This Get Made?” to discuss Punisher War Zone.

How Did This Get Made? Punisher War Zone

Here are my notes from the interview:

-Lexi Alexander didn’t really want to do a Punisher sequel, but there was a sense that doing a big Hollywood movie was something she needed to do.
-The first meeting was right after the Virginia Tech shooting, and the news showed a clip of the shooter’s bed room and he had a Punisher poster.
-Alexander put the meeting off until later, and the studio ended up picking Rounders director John Dahl.
-But Alexander ended up being tapped for the film again when Dahl asked for too much money.
-The way the studio actually talked her into doing the movie was by telling her that she would be the first woman to direct a major super hero adaptation and that she could serve as a role model for girls who want to direct action films.
-Alexander says she really does hope she can serve as a role model to show girls that they can grow up to direct films other than Lifetime movies.
-Alexander started by doing focus groups of Punisher comic fans and asked them what they disliked about the first two Punisher movies.
-Alexander says all the ways that Frank Castle ends up killing people come from the comics, except the bit where he blows up the parkour guys with a rocket launcher.
-She said she included that bit because people kept telling her not to include any parkour guys because parkour was being over done. She decided instead to include them, but have them get blown up.

And here’s a clip of the Punisher from Super Hero Squad on Cartoon Network, which was played in the podcast:

See also: Oswalt’s review of Punisher War Zone

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