"I’m 53. I feel the same way about it. I don't claim it as mine, even though I was here first, watched it grow up…I may not inhabit it in the sense that I feel required to check in on Foursquare or share every damned atom of information, but this mindset is not limited to people who grew up think they have the wisdom of the ages because they had a hotmail account when they were ten…

Perhaps “uncomfortably” worked better in the original Polish; maybe there’s an idiomatic implication to the word that would help me understand him better. Oh, right: global culture is more important than language, so nevermind. But while every system can be replaced, it is wishful thinking to believe this means it’s replaced by something better. Unless he equates efficiency and better suited to his needs as “better.” Isn’t there a moral component to consider? Whether or not something is good? Or are “more opportunities” sufficient? You can Godwin that construct with ease."

"We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us…"

[Update: Response by Alan Jacobs: http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/18029873515/participating-in-cultural-life-is-not-something ]

[Update 2: Lengthy response, take-down: http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/12/0212/022212.html ]

[Chaser: http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/02/twitter-nprs-morning-edition-and-dreams-of-flatland/ ]

[Cross-posted by Alexis Madrigal: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/we-the-web-kids/253382/ ]

"…Coupland leads Gibson through a discussion on culture, technology, & the craft of writing. “What makes us human,” Gibson says, “is our ability to recognize patterns, & to externalize forms of synthetic memory that preserve those recognized patterns.” The internet & its attendant communications technologies, Gibson argues, are a natural evolution of this synthetic memory, the current iteration of the cave painting human ancestors used to record their activities. These technologies function as a “global instantaneous memory prosthesis” & aspire to a transparency of experience whereby distinctions btwn the “virtual” & “real” are thoroughly dissolved. “We are already the borg,” Gibson says.

…Coupland & Gibson address cultural phenomena including Whole Foods grocery chain & Levi’s jeans, & thinkers including Marshall McLuhan & Jaron Lanier. They also explain why Facebook is like a mall & Twitter is like the street, & ask whether life is best understood as a story or as a spreadsheet."

"“I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world…"

"When I’m writing a book I get up at seven. I check my e-mail and do Internet ablutions, as we do these days. I have a cup of coffee. Three days a week, I go to Pilates and am back by ten or eleven. Then I sit down and try to write. If absolutely nothing is happening, I’ll give myself permission to mow the lawn. But, generally, just sitting down and really trying is enough to get it started. I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more. And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking."

"Within the Net, working together by circulating gifts is now a daily experience for millions of people. As well as in their jobs, individuals also collaborate on collective projects in their free time. Freed from the immediate disciplines of the marketplace, work can increasingly become a gift. The enlightened few are no longer needed to lead the masses towards the future. For the majority of Net users are already participating within the productive relations of cyber-communism…Having no need to sell information as commodities, they spontaneously work together by circulating gifts. All across the world, politicians, executives and pundits are inspired by the rapid expansion of e-commerce in the USA. Mesmerised by neo-liberal ideology, they fail to notice that most information is already circulating as gifts within the Net. Engaged in superseding capitalism, Americans are successfully constructing the utopian future in the present: cyber-communism."

"I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them-it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world."

"This is a remarkable text that shows the affinities between anarchy and the principles of organization of complex systems composed by many interconnected units. Perhaps, only when a mechanical worldview will be replaced by a cybernetic one, anarchy as organization will be finally recognized and accepted, probably under a different name."

"Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. …<br />
<br />
We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies.…<br />
<br />
If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts."

"But an equally important use of information is much more vague. It’s why we read newspapers every day, exchange idle gossip or attend conferences. It’s why we suffer an education. We’re not seeking a specific piece of information. We’re accumulating a semi-random collection of data, ideas and gut feelings which have no immediate or apparent use.

We build up this semi-random cloud of mental stuff to equip ourselves with a continually updated ‘feel’ for events—so that, when in the hazy future a need or opportunity arises, facts and intuitions will hopefully fuse into patterns that allow us to take actions appropriate to their context. We also hope that, while wandering and wondering in this space, we might stumble across valuable facts or ideas which, had we sought them, might not have been found. Let’s call this imaginary cloud ‘a space for half-formed thoughts’."

[via: http://plsj.tumblr.com/post/938736809/a-space-for-half-formed-thoughts]

"Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here." from A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)

"Ever wonder where the authors of science fiction get their ideas? Judge the process for yourself in the MIRRORSHADES Postmodern Archive on the WELL. It's a mix of weblog, archive, and commonplace book, plucked out of Bruce Sterling's email and from websites worldwide. Currently tracking: art, science, design, environmental catastrophe, crime, virtual war, rip-off cybercreeps, dead media, anarchy, spooks, sickening outrages and cheering developments.

"OLPC may be facing some tough times as of late, but there's no denying that the little-laptop-that-could has made an impact where it's been distributed, as evidenced by this latest indication of the project's reach in Rwanda. Apparently, in addition to helping students with their schoolwork, the laptop is also teaching them the fine art of finding free WiFi, and this particular group seems to have quickly discovered that the Kigali International Airport is one of the best spots in town. And just what are they using the laptops to look up in their time outside the classroom? Bruce Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who, coincidentally, also brings the world together in his own special way." Related: Kids in Guinea Study Under Airport Lamps: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071901225.html OR http://www.mylot.com/w/newsarticle/336286.aspx

"Online safety is a developing theme with lots of educational resources becoming increasingly available, but there are few resources for teachers to enable them to understand the psychology of cyberspace. Part of the craft of the teacher though is knowing enough about how humans react to a given environment so that they can teach their students how to cope in situations."

"we constitute the final generation of an old civilization and, at the very same time, the first generation of a new one...Next, of course, must come the creation -- creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea."

"And we must remember that going to Cyberspace, unlike previous great emigrations to the frontier, hardly requires us to leave where we have been. Many will find, as I have, a much richer appreciation of physical reality for having spent so much time in v

"Communities need...physical element...Libraries will be places where people will go to exchange ideas & librarians will be...guiding people to information, knowing where to find it...the objective is not silence but conversation"

"To win, candidates must now be "cybergenic" — able to surf, blog, IM and twitter their way into the hearts of activist "netizens...mediagenic contrast between Obama and McCain also is not tilting in McCain's favor"

"joy of hacking comes more from creation of something new & clever not simply ‘breaking’ into a system while still maintaining its previous paradigm. Breaking into a system to explore how it works [qualifies]...for commercial gain [does not]"

"Current attempts at verisimilitude seem to underestimate our imaginative capacity, while tripping our deceit sensors. It's a matter of timing. The world needs artful telepresence more urgently than ever before. Can we please get on with it?"

"Cyberbullying case leads to a teen girl's suicide, and an internet mob forms to take justice into its own hands. Experts say it's just the latest example of a social imperative running amok online."

"But these young people are not battling alcohol or drugs. Rather, they have severe cases of what many in this country believe is a new and potentially deadly addiction: cyberspace."

"...our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish digital from real, virtual from real. In future, that will become literally impossible...distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't is going to be unimaginable."

"If you have trouble with intimacies, cyberintimacies are useful because they are at the same time cybersolitudes."

"The first half of my life was about landscape, place, dirt, physicality, facts, and experience. I now find myself trying to understand a world which has moved off the territory, where such things exist, and onto the map, where they are replaced simulatio

"It's almost like ESP, which can be incredibly useful when applied to your work life...Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees."

"Blogs often lead to such divisiveness that people end up caring more about clan membership than truth after a while."

"His currently most ambitious project is on the particular Internet culture in Korea relating to the “Cyworlds” that are created on a number of web-pages. Here young (and not-so-young) Koreans create their own Internet blogs, where they establish alte