The Slow Media Manifesto [ http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto ]

“1. Slow media are a contribution to sustainability. …
2. Slow media promote monotasking. …
3. Slow media aim at perfection. …
4. Slow media make quality palpable. …
5. Slow media advance prosumers. …
6. Slow media are discursive and dialogic. …
7. Slow media are social media. …
8. Slow media respect their users. …
9. Slow media are distributed via recommendations, not advertising. …
10. Slow media are timeless. …
11. Slow media are auratic. …
12. Slow media are progressive, not reactionary. …
13. Slow media focus on quality. …
14. Slow media ask for confidence and take their time to be credible. …”

"1. Pricing: In general I want the pricing model to be simple & transparent. I don't mind a slight difference in pricing between movies with regard to the age of the movie.
* Rentals should not exceed 1/3 of the cinema price.
* Purchases should not exceed the cinema price.
* Monthly flat rate prices should not exceed 3 visits to the cinema.
* TV shows should cost 1/3 the price of movies.
* Payments are for the content, not bandwidth.

2. Languages
* I can obtain the audio in every language produced for the content.
* After purchasing a movie, all the languages are available.
* Fans are legally allowed to create and share subtitles for any content.

3. Convenience
* The content I paid for is instantly available.
* Content is delivered without ads, or disrupting infringement warnings.
* I can find movies or TV shows by year, director, language, country, genre, iMDB ID, etc.
4. Choice And Release Dates
* The release date is global. There are no limits regarding the country I live in…"

"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/ ]

"4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of autonomy. Each to her own rhythm; nobody must be constrained to march on a uniform pace. Cars have lost their allure of rarity and above all they can no longer perform the task they were conceived for: speed has slowed down. Cars are immobile like stupid slumbering tortoises in the city traffic. Only slowness is fast…

10. We demand that art turns into a life-changing force. We seek to abolish the separation between poetry and mass communication, to reclaim the power of media from the merchants and return it to the poets and the sages.

11. We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and through solidarity revolt against exploitation. We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body…"

"You need to unlink your feeds.<br />
I understand why you did it. I’ve made the same mistake myself. But it’s hurting your friends, you, & the Internet. You need to stop.<br />
You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another.<br />
I know it’s tempting. New service, not sure how you’ll keep up w/ ever demanding maw & there’s the “import your content” button, right there in sign-up process. A quick trip through a login screen or an OAuth link & there you are: All your stuff automatically aggregated…<br />
No muss, no fuss, right?<br />
This is an illusory solution. It’s a false idol. It’s contributing to noise pollution…It’s diminishing the quality of your output and of others’ experiences.<br />
You need to unlink your feeds and put a tiny bit more effort into using each service for what it is.<br />
More [links to each of these topics]:It’s hurting your friends.It’s hurting you.It’s hurting the Internet.There’s a better way."

"Love the quick profit, the annual raise,<br />
vacation with pay. Want more<br />
of everything ready-made. Be afraid<br />
to know your neighbors and to die.<br />
And you will have a window in your head.<br />
Not even your future will be a mystery<br />
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card<br />
and shut away in a little drawer.<br />
When they want you to buy something<br />
they will call you. When they want you<br />
to die for profit they will let you know.<br />
<br />
So, friends, every day do something<br />
that won't compute. Love the Lord.<br />
Love the world. Work for nothing.<br />
Take all that you have and be poor.<br />
Love someone who does not deserve it.<br />
Denounce the government and embrace<br />
the flag. Hope to live in that free<br />
republic for which it stands.<br />
Give your approval to all you cannot<br />
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man<br />
has not encountered he has not destroyed…"

"Cheerful software, above all, honors the truth about humanity:

Humans are not rational beings.

A human is a walking sack of squishy meat and liquids, awash in chemicals.

We laugh. We cry. Sometimes we laugh while crying. We love, and hate, and dream about tomorrow while paying no attention to today. We do ridiculous things in pursuit of love or happiness or self-esteem. We sabotage ourselves. We see faces in inanimate objects, clouds, rock formations, and unevenly toasted bread. Then we sell them on eBay.

We pray to giant humans up in the sky. We think that a fly could be our grandmother. We work for free because we’re bored. We create art, dance, and sing even if we are starving. We give to others when we have little, or we give none when we have a lot, even if we gain no clear survival benefit either way."

"Bookfuturists refuse to endorse either fantasy of "the end of the book" [bookservativism and technofuturism] -- "the end as destruction" or "the end as telos or achievement" as Jacques Derrida would have it. We are trying to map an alternative position that is both more self-critical and more engaged with how technological change is actively affecting our culture.<br />
<br />
We're usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We're tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren't destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech."

"But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. …"

[via Tim Carmody for Kottke: http://kottke.org/10/08/the-personism-moment ]

"10 things that were constantly reinforced during my 12 years of public school in America that had to be unlearned as an adult desiring to be an entrepreneur.

1. Fit in instead of be original

2. Follow the rules instead of questioning why they exist

3. Helping others is cheating despite the fact that everything you do as a successful adult is a team effort

4. Have good handwriting instead of teaching me to type

5. Do it because the teacher said so, instead of teaching me to understand why doing it is important

6. Don’t challenge authority instead of teaching me that I deserve respect too

7. Get good grades in all my classes, even though I will never do trigonometry ever in life. (Sine these nuts. lol)

8. Don’t fail instead of teaching me to value trial and error

9. Debating and arguing with friends is a bad thing, instead of encouraging independent thought and self confidence

10. Be a generalist and learn things I hate, instead of developing my genius at things that i like.

More Dumbshit that I still dont understand.

*Getting to school late will be punished by making you stay home for 3 days…WTF

*Memorize stuff that now can be looked up on Google.

*Learn to do calculus by hand, despite being required to purchase a $200 calculator.

*Appearing smart is more important than being effective…. REALLY?

These are all that I can think of now. Feel free to add dumbshit you learned in the comments section.:

"1. Slow Media are a contribution to sustainability. 2. Slow media promote Monotasking. 3. Slow Media aim at perfection. 4. Slow Media make quality palpable. 5. Slow Media advance Prosumers. 6. Slow Media are discursive and dialogic. 7. Slow Media are Social Media. 8. Slow Media respect their users. 9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising. 10. Slow Media are timeless. 11. Slow Media are auratic. 12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary. 13. Slow Media focus on quality. 14. Slow Media ask for confidence and take their time to be credible." [via: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/06/the-slow-media-manifesto/] [see also: http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2010/06/29/slow-media-manifesto/]

"On the occasion of having read yet another fawning blowjob for Bruce Mau (“that sound you hear is the knees of designers hitting the floor as they genuflect before the great man”) and his “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” there’s no time like the present for: An Annotated Manifesto for Growth"

"Our culture needed compliant workers, people who would contribute without complaint, and we set out to create as many of them as we could.

"Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication"

"I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances ... I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. ... I imagine attention-based pricing, in which prices of information commodities are inversely adjusted to the cognitive investment of consuming them. ... I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. ... I imagine software, a smartphone app, perhaps, you can use to audit your attentional expenditures."

"Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you & we understand the world & what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences...We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce...authentic, deep democracy — everywhere...We want to slow down — so we can become better...You wanted to biggie size life...We want to humanize life...We want a society built on authentic community...We want to be great at doing stuff that matters. You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We're not for sale: we're learning to once again do what is meaningful...Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge...ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy & to create...an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity...Generation M is more about what you do & who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?"

"I have no expectation of what happens next, but here’s a manifesto. Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble.