Compare these two quotes. The first from Nick Bilton. He’s remarking on the Google I/O experience. The second is from Neal Stephenson’s third novel “Snowcrash.” The parallels are surprising and possibly terrifying:
“Everywhere I looked at the conference, people were wearing Google Glass. Hundreds of them. Maybe more than a thousand! They were on the escalator. At the coffee stations. Press lounges. Lingering in the hallways like gangs of super nerds. They looked like real people as they nibbled on M&M’s and nuts at the snack bars. Except they weren’t; these “humans” were able to take pictures with their eyes and then post them to the Internet.”
-Nick Bilton
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
-Neal Stephenson
(Source: The New York Times)
Google is making smart design decisions that make using their product easier and more straight forward to do. Not to mention they actually work.
It’s the little things.
Still pissed about Google Reader, though.
Drawing by Kitty Wong, an illustrator and fashion designer living in Hong Kong. Follow her blog here, her lovely tumblr here, and shop around in her Society6 shop. And if you like this, there’s more to come.
A few weeks ago, my father graced my inbox with a list he’s talked about for years: Zig Ziglar’s list of 100 things he learned on his way to the top. The list is a little old school, but the beauty in wisdom is that it never expires. I tweeted out an offer to send the list to anyone interested, and the response surprised me: dozens of people responded or emailed me directly, interested in this list of lessons.
This was a really cool realization; all of the people who responded are conscious livers of life. Instead of passively passing through their own lives, they’re interested in motivation, wisdom and advice on how to better approach all the millions of moments ahead.
Kitty was one of those who emailed me, and of course, I stalked her a bit and realized her drawings run the gamut from glamorous and beautiful to photographic, in a sense, sometimes telling the literal story of the subject in one snapshot.
We decided to work together, and Kitty offered to draw some of our favorites from this Zig Ziglar list, since almost all of the graphics we found were outdated or cheesy.
Kitty interpreted #45 personally: “Our chief want in life is someone to inspire us to be what we want to be.”
It look me much longer than I thought it would to translate the concept into a drawing. And I wanted them to be cool.
I made so many sketches for this, but then I for some reason kept thinking about Fran Lebowitz all the time for the word ‘inspiration’, mostly from her doc Public Speaking. So I drew her. She seems like someone who would be an amazing and terrifying mentor who’d toughen you up and be pretty inspiring.
And there you have it; a personal interpretation of wisdom is the best kind.
We hope to do one drawing per week together, and create postcards to give away or buy. We’re still tossing around ideas.
If you’re interested in this list, or in a guest post or illustration, please email me: bri.garcia7 @ gmail dot com
:)
Stop “Disrupting” Everything via Slate
The valley sells innovation, yet serves up picture apps and other frivolous nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, some of those things can make money for investors, but to couch it as “disruptive” is about as convincing as a McRib sandwich. Maybe we can tone down the “disruption” hyperbole and simply admit that many of the startups funded by VC’s are purely about cashing in on the latest fad. Most VC’s could care less about innovation.
(via marksbirch)(via marksbirch)
On Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and the need to decouple gender and sexuality - NYmag.com / The Cut (via annfriedman)
Drop that knowledge.
The Coloured Collective | -celebrating women of colour in a world of black and white- (via colouredcollective)
“These pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps perspectives are short-sighted products of the privileged”
(via colouredcollective)
Why I subscribe to @TonxCoffee: coffee; wit; design. (Referral link: https://tonx.org/a1aecacf)
Every other time I go out to eat with a group, be it family, friends, or acquaintances of whatever age, conversation routinely plunges into a discussion of when it is appropriate to pull out a phone. People boast about their self-control over not checking their device, and the table usually reaches a self-congratulatory consensus that we should all just keep it in our pants. The pinnacle of such abstinence-only smartphone education is a game that is popular to talk about (though I’ve never actually seen it played) wherein the first person at the dinner table to pull out their device has to pay the tab. Everyone usually agrees this is awesome.
What a ridiculous state of affairs this is.
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