The Tech Gonzo Diary

Being an irregular round-up post featuring quotes from the awesome recent writings from the Top Secret: TechGonzo Official List of Allies.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles: “Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point” by Wolven

The beauty of this show is in the intricate, subtle interplay of the characters–human and cyborg/machine–and how what they learn, what they know, and what they don’t know that they’ve learned…all play off of each other and create lives and a world, while they are all in the midsts of seeking to not just save but literally create and sustain their futures. Now, the show is ostensibly about the human element: human reactions to robots, robots impacting the lives of humans, OMG Uncanny Valley, blah blah blah. If you can’t tell, by now, let me put it simply: I think that’s boring. I’m not saying that there isn’t useful, interesting fiction there, mind you, just that I’m bored by it, because it has been done to death. Yes, human psychology is a fascinating thing. Yes, the end of the world (personal and collective) is deeply affecting. Yes, stress and change and madness all take their toll on the mind living in the constant glut of it, and watching that can be deeply jarring, on an emotional level. But I know all that, already. What I don’t know is: what is the psychology of a created intelligence? Why does Skynet persist in viewing us as a threat to itself, seeking to hunt us down to the irrational end of self-fulfilling prophecy? What does a machine that is programmed to feel… feel? There are some really interesting tastes of this in T:SCC and I would now like to talk about them, at length.

Unbranding and the hipster backlash by Paul Raven

You see, I had a minor revelation on the way to Tesco the other evening, in which I realised that part of the difficulty with, say, writing reviews of books or music in a networked world, is that you can’t isolate any one cultural artefact from the world in which it exists, or from its creator (not entirely), or from its consumers and detractors. To review effectively – to critique – is an act of comparative cultural anthropology, performed in a room lit only by a Maglite velcroed to one’s own forehead. Context is everything. The character and intellectual history of the critic is crucial to your understanding their understanding of the subject of their critique. The critic’s greatest insights (and, by the same token, greatest blindspots) are necessarily invisible to her. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the critic can’t see her biases for the same reason that a tourist stood in Trafalgar Square can’t see England.

…

Well, say you’re a marketer for fashion brands (or for a new author, or an advocate for a new school of transcendent philosophy). Making your own brand/author/philosophy look good is incredibly hard to achieve reliably… even more so nowadays, with the memetic flux swirling so fast. Yesterday’s viral sensation is today’s lingering and sniffly common cold. So what to do? Instead of giving your brand to cultural icons that reflect the aspirations of your target subculture, you give your rival brands to cultural icons who embody the opposite of those aspirations [via BoingBoing]. Couture-marketing psy-ops. Sounds ridiculous, a possible indicator of the end of civilisation (wring hands, mutter about the Romans, miss point entirely). But with clarity born of hindsight, this morning’s revelation, triggered by the two articles linked above and prompting the rapid-fire unedited writing of this little screed:

William Gibson’s been writing this stuff for years.

How does he keep doing that?

Back-Casting From 2043 by Chris Arkenberg

So here we are in 2043 and, like all of our history, so many things have changed and so many things have stayed the same. But this time it’s the really big things that have changed, and while all change is difficult we’re arguably much stronger and much more independent for it all. Sure, not everybody can afford these sweet Ray Bans. And the federated state bodies that kept us mostly safe and mostly employed are no longer the reliable parents they once were. We live in a complex world of great wealth and great disparity, as always, but security & social welfare is slowly rising with the tide of human technological adaptation. Things are generally much cheaper, lighter, and designed to reside & decay within ecosystems. Product becomes waste becomes food becomes new life. Our machines are more like natural creatures, seeking equilibrium and optimization, hybridized by the ceaseless blurring of organic & inorganic, by the innate animal disposition towards biomimicry, and by the insistence of the natural world to dictate the rules of human evolution, as always. After all, we are animals, deep down inside, compelled to work it out and adapt.

My man in Budapest, Damage, and his team of cybernetically enhanced monkeys have brought their wicked cyberculture magazine The Dose back from the dead:

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

It’s only 4EUR for the digital download. So snazz up your iPad with some euro-cyberpunk, why doncha.

So, like  some 10+ years ago, I made an initial foray into film making. I took an intro to production course at what was then a brand new community cable network.  I played with their cutting edge non-linear editing equipment.  I read all sorts of film-making books.  Devoured Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew.  Would beg, borrow or steal people’s cameras and make these little (terrible) on the fly short-films.  All of which are on various ye olde video formats, like Super VHS and VHS C.

I even sat down, wrote a screenplay and spent a fun day making an almost feature-length movie that we never got around to editing.  Because it was terrible and we knew it.  But it was fun!  Plus, there was this cameo by a miniature horse that wandered onto our guerrilla production.

Now, it’s the age of YouTube.. a more permissive time, when you can make fun little videos and upload and share them, and get on BoingBoing; stuff like that.  Which is just what my friend Heath has been organizing for our little local troupe of fun loving Actors / D&D players.

First, there was the lip-syncing tribute to PopCap’s Plants Vs Zombies game – Zombies On Your Lawn:

Then, answering a call Neil Gaiman had made, an enactment of a scene from The Graveyard Book – Dancing the Macabray:

What future quirky vid will make this a trilogy?  Who knows..  But it sure is a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon with friends.  Thanks Heath!

This is Rabbit and the Moon; music by Squozen, narrated by Vetti.. another wondrous creation of Crumpet’s.

Rabbit and the Moon from Leonie Connellan on Vimeo.

Catch a glimpse of her latest work. It is something.

Mad Uncle Cliff is one of three local Steampunks featured in this month’s issue (with the John Lennon cover) of the Australian Rolling Stone:

Check out some of his creations in his etsy store; drool over his communicator!

I met Cliff after his excellent Steampunk Manifesto presentation at the McSweeneys #32 launch; which, of course, I recorded on my futurephone, and you too may now enjoy:

Good show old chap!

It’s fascinating to see the profile of this movement rise, as big media begrudgingly give it the attention it deserves.

I recall with interest the piece MTV did about a year ago, which I viewed whilst fighting against a kanji keyboard in a net cafe in Osaka, Japan. That country is chock full of steampunk goodies, but everytime I mentioned the word I was rewarded with nothing but blank looks.

Perhaps because they think nothing of integrating imagined pasts and futures with their present condition, and thus don’t need a special word for it.