The Analogous City – Hypertext meets Neocortex – The Pattern

Humans have spent all existence confining, defining, and refining concepts of relation between things. Any activity can be defined as a series of state changes whose only common denominators are energy / matter in a positive / negative / imponderable state. The level of refinement needed is inversely proportionate to the level of sustainability expected. The level of refinement needed is inversely proportionate to the level of scalability expected. The level of refinement needed is inversely proportionate to the level of commutativity expected. The level of refinement needed is inversely proportionate to the level of profitability expected. The above assertions are interrelated, often correlated; […]

Someone please educate our judicial system on technology?

I am horrified by a story I read today that ran on BBC News. It was about the recent LVO key leak, but the horror rested at the end of the article, where the following appeared (sic): “A US judge has thrown out a mass lawsuit brought by users of the PlayStation Network, following a huge security breach in May 2011 which saw the user information of 69 million customers exposed. The suit accused Sony of failing to adequately protect information and exposing users to identity theft. Judge Battaglia from the US District Court of Southern California pointed to a […]

On the nature of “social” and the reality of anti-social networks

It occurs to me that much of the mess plaguing “social networks” at the moment arises from a failure to genuinely reflect and remind ourselves about what it means to be “social” and what it means to “socially network”; to revisit what “social networks” may legitimately be defined as and, more importantly, to establish what they are not and why such a judgment may be levied. To this end, I decided to traipse back to the dictionary and good old etymology and hash this out for myself. I believe and think that there are many who may find what I […]