tup.

03:08 pm: Prices for Oil in Poland
Czesc dudes and dudettes, hello! This is the future calling!
They say that futures's here, only unevenly distributed - and they usually mean Japan. For once, I'm happy to announce, the sometimes backwaterish country of Poland has been your future, until just very recently, my friends! Gas prices oscillating around $4.5 a gallon for years. Years! So you might want to "repeat after me".

But today I'm here to talk about the past.

That was a night I took a strange pill, or maybe just a half of it. Four years ago, on a warm autumn evening, in a village deep in the Polish mountains. There was a church lit up like a ballistic rocket ready for a launch. And stories of world war two guerrillas surfacing out of the past, in the pilly haze. And then we were all guerrillas, dressed up in old communist army uniforms of our host's father, sneaking through the hills, between the trees, to disable that rocket!

That's when the vision hit me, of a world without oil. The pill builds a strange reality where all the elements lock in around a central premise: electricity will soon be gone. What do we do? How do we cope? I was walking then with two friends through a forest late at night, and plans had to be made fast. And plans needed to be based on an understanding: of what happens when electricity goes out. The friends were clearly missing the point, missing the utter terror of what happens when electricity goes out. I guess it was the other halves of their pills that made them so foolish and uncaring. The issue, in their minds, got reduced to a simple darkened lightbulb, and people reading newspapers by the candlelight.

No newspapers! No hospitals! No trucks to deliver groceries to supermarkets! No clothes and shoes from China! No Maroccan strawberries in the winter! No more trips to the seaside! Remember that crazy story about the Soviet town dependent on fuel shipments by sea, stranded in the middle of heavy northern winter without working heating, with people covering radiators that pumped cold from frozen pipes rather than heat into rooms already on the verge of freezing - it's coming! No more TV! No more internet! Cory Doctorow will really stand in the middle of SF with BoingBoing written on scraps of paper, like in that freaky SF story! Leaking chemicals! Exploding nuclear powerplants! Transportation ground to a halt! Riots! Violence! And no more homogenized, pasteurized milk too, most probably! And no more disney as well, unless we remix it into popular, folk theater plays shown in the countryside by wandering troupes!

Imagine the terror! Half of a pilly pill would surely help, but I'm sure your imagination has been fueled enough recently to attempt this cold turkey.

So there's no electricity. And two thirds of your population, like in my case, are oblivious to the drama, dreaming bucolic dreams of neo-luddite simplicity. Which is like, EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Wrong. So what do you do?

I remember what I did, and the thought still sends shivers down my spine...

But I need to go now, they're starting to ration gas, my mom says the last time it happened was during martial law, and that if we survived that we can surely survive this as well. Anyways, they have some gas for sale starting tommorow at a station nearby, and the line up is starting already, so I better run and grab my spot.

talk to you later...

10:34 pm: 1 in 5
1 in 5 humans survive on less water a day than the amount used to flush a toilet. Go read Seed Journal's infographics on the state of the planet.

07:59 pm: let's get ready to go dilettante
The exploding public sphere, rapid growth of content filtering and flowing through it, will make all of us dilettantes as we can no longer afford, mainly time-wise, to stay up to date with what is commonly considered a baseline canon for a well-versed, cultured reader and participant in a culture. There is just to much, as if there was a crucial difference between a rich culture, a saturated culture and a bloated culture. Cultural niches, of which there is much talk, are of course a result of this. But at individual level, this means that others, but also me myself, cannot expect myself to know the stuff that should be known. It's okay not to know things. You don't need to know all these blogs. Of course there's still pressure to be 'expert', which basically means knowing a body of knowledge that's not only commonly defined but usually quite tight. And getting even tighter, because noone can know too much. And of course this means that there's a potential for inequality, as people with more brainpower can at the same time grasp deep and wide. And this intertwines with the global mixup of cultures and peoples, in a multi-culti situation you cannot expect your peers to come from the same tradition.

05:30 pm: Don't know about ->you but Europe will switch to digital TV in say about ten years.
Think about all the analog equipment. Millions of TV sets, suddenly useless. Try not to think about billions to be spent on new equipment, now that's a bonus for the producers. But let's think positive, let's think creative. All these TVs, maybe videos too? Game consoles? ETC.
There's a chance to create a brilliant 'old media' movement, old media sit at a cherished, conservative position between the constant frantic hype of new media and the graveyard of dead media. Old media are to be cherished. I think that with enough forethought, planning, etc., we can gather enough video tapes, for instance, to lead a meaningful tv life for a long long time. It'll be like helping an old person die peacefully. And what a way to kick the habit, say no to digital when it comes around, and once that vacuum tube pops for good, you'll be free from tvs at last.

This message will now start circulating around the internet. There is time. Let me know if you are interested.

06:33 pm: the truth about the blog*sphere
...can be found in a paragraph down at the end of a good Jeffrey Zeldman rant on what's wrong with tag clouds that come out of folksonomic behaviours. Zeldman suggests that movements of the blogs are pretty much "mindless accidental randomness", which brings us right down to the (not neough contested) claim that blogging is an emergent response to information processing and knowledge building problems of today.

ANyways, Zeldman says:
"Every blogger knows of a half dozen services like Blogdex or Daypop that list “hot” posts in the selective ring of small publications some of us inaccurately choose to call “the blogosphere.” A post becomes hot when two people with somewhat visible blogs link to it. Once it appears in Blogdex or the Daypop Top 40, a hundred more bloggers will link to it, either because it interests them or just to signify their membership in the tribe."
"m-a-r"

10:19 am: LJ as a shiny amoeba

here are some ima-ges of livejournal made with visualisation software. the second is of a network of 300,000 notes. whew. there’s some smartness to network analysis and beauty to visualisation, but I must say the comments, posted by self-defined “lj researchers” are telling: i see there ample cases of visualisation addiction: excitement is present, but no one really knows what’s so good about the fix.

10:11 pm: a letter from the front
I am currently trying to keep up with the deluge of information by packing it all into del.icio.us, the brilliant and much touted online bookmarking up. the way it works, when i find something interesting and have no time to read it, i bookmark it online with delicious and categorize, so that (if i get the categorizing right), when I need to know more about X (for a paper, say), I check my X category and whammo everything's there. i'm my own google, kind of, as i tread through the web. then there is the social aspect, i can look at other's lists of bookmarks and say to myself, hey, this guy is better then me or google when it comes to feedsplicing aggrrregator appps, I'll use him as my source of info, and i "subscribe" to him and the subscribe function, that's like a big bookmark for an individual.

actually, the description is not completely true. it's not "when i find something interesting'. it's: "i use bloglines and got all these feeds there and they keep spewing out content, i only manage to skim the titles usually, and it wouldn't be so bad if there was nothing there ('nooooooooo, more time wasted on stupid stupidity!") but there is too much there, a single reading of bloglines, especially after several days, can give you a solid fix of info, so it's "nooooooooooo, more time wasted on smart stupidity!)

anyways, so that's the way it goes and it seems useful. but now i am thinking, my bookmarks will grow, the categories will either start overflowing or the category tree will grow grow grow, or i'll have to search inside the delicious space, and that's not the point, right?

so after a while someone will need to give me some tool to sort out the delicious space.
and the info arms race will continue.

i'm seriously considering a notebook to be best thing ever.

or just quit thinking i'll deal with all this information, forget all those people (DOCTOROW!!!) who seem to or pretend to be staying on top of the wave, cure my info-addiction and be happy.

or start sending 'save our souls' messages to the internet.

04:56 pm: human visual culture and "me" pictures
THE LJ JUST ATE MY POST.

Anyways, Joi Ito nevertheless, no matter what LJ does, has a faceroll on his blog. A sideline full of clickable faces. And then there are all sorts of people that put photos on their blogs or pages, photos that might be those of a neighbour or a 50s actor, but which nevertheless scream, this is me, the author!
I just realised I pay attention to such photos. We all know that Internet is supposed to be a detached medium, away from all sorts of offline limitations. We also all know that humans are often suckers for looks. And that its hard to know whom to trust online.
So I think we should all ask ourself, do we use looks as a heuristic for establishing quality of a source? I will make a confession. I've just looked at a blog and stumbled upon a sideline photo of presumably the author. The person was well into 40s. The photo, the background, the pose had the characteristic style of middle school photos, which I truly detest (my middle school photo still, somehow, hangs around my mom's house). I closed the blog immediately.

I just realised it is not that man that made me think about photos, but images people put on FlickR. (FlickR is really cool). People there often put their own faces in the "me" picture. Unlike on LJ! You could think they are just more mature, I thing this has to do with the fact that there is only one "me" picture slot. Give them more and they'll start fooling around. So these people, with their "me" pictures, they get very very serious looks, or rather specific looks. Which I find kind of unnerving.

And then there are all the webcam photos, you know the ones taken with a camera squatting on top of the screen. All of them have this freaky internal resemblance, starting with the quality, the angle, but also the glare of the screen, the aura of the Internet, the soul of the User. It's an autonomous media form of sorts, that webacm "me" picture.

12:59 am: kool
This is very cool. I've just read a BoingBoing guestblog by Rudy Rucker, some kind of wonderful man. He told me that the letter "k" was really hip in the 20s/30s, just like the "x" was until recently. In Poland in the 90s, for instance, it was fashionable to have a store name end with "-ex" and the best ones were secondhand stores called "lumpex", which translates to something like 'hoboex'.
And then Rudy Rucker points to his daughter's webpage, and there is a cool comic story there about semi-trucks, which reminds me of cars someone among you was drawing in class:
http://www.goodidrawing.com/trucks.html
so here we have, in full glory, the father and daughter superhero team, providing us with entertainment.
there are more of these, like for instance Bruce Sterling, who sometimes leases his already outlandish blog to his daughter, so that she can post screenshots from the MMORPG she plays. talk about true superhero extravaganza. I think that's what being a superhero is about: some of them didn't do any marvelous feats, only were brave enough to do things that other's wouldn't attempt - like pretend you have superpowers. that's what my online superheroes are, hope i'm still making sense, people who dare to go with blogs where other's don't go. This is similar to what O'Reilly calls 'alpha geeks', only here were doing with kultural, not technological innovations.

09:37 pm: archival goodness // find your own frequency
1. there is a new tool out in the streets, ljArchive" that lets those of us with big enough archives to do some fancy tricks with them. Including "a psychological profile of your journal through Regressive Imagery Analysis". Wow.

2. Something should be done with the onslaught of information on the net. When Lessig distinguishes four modalities of establishing control online: code/architecture, law, market, norms - I tend to thing the last is the least utilised. So we need social constructs and personal rules, a technoethics and technomorality of sorts, to cope with the onslaught. Cause if I put on my futurist prophet hat on (for the first time in my life), I predict that Google, del.icio.us, the whole zoo will not do, even when the new hybrids are unleashed by yahoo and microsoft.
There is some average number, discovered by sociologists, of people that an average human comes into contact with. And the people we're in contact with, they're enough to populate a small village. Today, of course, these villages are quite global, sometimes. That number, I believe is around 150, and it's a manageable number of people to remember their birthdays and namedays, faces and silhouettes, hobbies and vices. Well, taking into account how impersonal information is, on the net the number could be higher. There is this comic book written by Warren Ellis (forgive me if social thought based upon popculture became passe with overexploitation of Neuromancer as a heavyduty social theory volume) called Global Frequency. That's the name of an organization of 1001 professionals, not one more, drawn into a global network that protects the planet from all sorts of malice. Not one more! So basically, we all need such frequencies. Cause today, we are all in a single spectrum, blasting our broadcasts into it, and often hitting noise or interference. If we all set up such frequencies, our communications will glide by without interruption. And I know what some will say, that everyone wants to read BoingBoing. The moderate version says, okay, there can be broadcasters and frequencies in that new media space of hours. But a radical version is possible as well, where the frequency members tatoo "not one more" on their forehands and stick to it. 1001 persons in your little online global troupe, sounds like enough space to fit in every digiexpert imaginable.
(This is another way for us all to become comic book superheroes).