Nov. 5, 2016 "Same old song": Today I found this book review by Navneet Alang in the Globe and Mail. I can't copy and paste it here, so I would have to type it up of some excerpts.
The review is about how technology has affected our lives. This also mentions about how there are analog and old technology around:
"...the financial necessity for Apple and Samsung to induce compulsion through design."
"For each cacophonous, mindless new media thing, there is a corner of the web filled with irreplaceable beauty, some new game that forces us to reconsider what are might be, endless reams of brilliant writing, and the entire kaleidoscopic encyclopedia of human knowledge colliding in unexpected ways. It is not simply 'digital'; it just is.
"... a business book, each chapter the revenge of a new sector- retail, print, film- and is thus a work meant to uncover entrepreneurial opportunities lying in wait."
Earlier this year, when Andrew Sullivan – famed blogger and one of the early scions of the digital age – took to the pages of New York Magazine to decry what he called his digital distraction sickness, I felt so certain I'd disagree with its much-discussed premise, I planned to skip it entirely. But then a professional responsibility took over, and I eventually did read it begrudgingly; its 7,000-word length proved nearly impossible for my broken attention span.
While Sullivan outlined the deleterious effects of digital on his health, his mental well-being and his capacity for sustained focus, I found I would make it a paragraph in, only to pick up my phone, or swing over to another tab. It took me a week of half-hearted attempts just to get to the end.
Slightly more than a decade ago, no one had ever tweeted. No one had checked Facebook while walking down the street, or posted images of their meal to Instagram. Now literally billions do. That pace is mostly unprecedented in human history, and it is perhaps just how quickly we seem to have shifted from books and TV to the Internet that has prompted a deep worry: Of whether or not, in our rush to the digital era, something fundamentally human has been lost.
Of course, to ask the question at all is to assume we know what defines the human. History has given us various answers:
Thomas Aquinas or Descartes might have said God,
Kant might have said reason,
while the poststructuralists (if they'd deign to give an answer at all) might have said language.
But in an era in which the pulsating screen of the smartphone has come to encompass so much of our lives, the human has found a new emblem: the simple pleasures of the analog – the rough texture of paper, the feel of grass underfoot, or the contact of skin-on-skin.
The latest entry in that burgeoning genre is David Sax's The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. The revenge in question, however, is not only of something fundamental, but also something both purer and better. Outlining a growing resurgence of analog technologies – vinyl, paper, film, retail – Sax puts forth the idea that the return of analog is at once the rediscovery of a lost treasure but also what is in fact a superior medium for life.
At each turn, from a newly busy record press in Nashville, to a booming notebook brand in Italy, Sax highlights a world that, just as quickly as it dived into digital, is redeveloping an appreciation of analog things.
Where, though, is the line that separates healthy nostalgia and our ever-present regressive streak?
***
The key change wrought by digital is that, where scarcity was once the norm, surfeit is now our default. Digital thus represents a kind of inversion. Once, more was better:
Technology was improved by more features,
knowledge increased with ever more facts
and greater choice.
Now, it is subtraction that in fact adds to a scenario.
The best digital services are those that constrain in some fashion.
Netflix and Spotify have both succeeded because they have figured out how to recommend small numbers of titles from thousands of choices.
In his book, Sax outlines the many ways in which analog tech bests digital because of what it does not do.
Your paperback novel cannot interrupt your reading to tell you the weather,
your newspaper has a start and a finish,
and your analog recording studio forces you to make decisions and just cut a track,
rather than the malleability of digitally creating "a moving target of unachievable perfection."
In the face of such endlessness, it is subtraction, boundaries – less – that is the strategy for survival in the digital era.
For many, though, this upending of Western thought also represents a world gone topsy-turvy. Sax echoes Sullivan's complaints about the relentless pace of digital, and its related psychological effects.
These are real issues, not to be dismissed lightly. At this early stage of the digital era, we are still stuck on how to achieve balance, particularly now that our technology and the flood of information it brings is with us all the time.
When Sax cites the tendency of even young millennials to prefer print, it is because they, like we, are seeking relief. Digital as a tool or medium seems primed to plug most directly into our receptors for
pleasure,
for the dopamine and serotonin centres that thrive on novelty,
lust or conflict,
and the unending flow can quickly turn to excess.
In contradistinction to that torrent, it is the tactile, physical nature of analog that is its saving grace – its seeming permanence, it's there-ness, its tendency, quite unlike digital, to be in one place at one time doing one thing. In his book, Sax's lively, evocative prose conjures reminders of the physical world: Record presses spit and heave, cameras satisfyingly click, and paper crinkles and smells in ways pleasingly familiar.
But the neat line separating digital from analog is more fuzzy than it might appear. Sullivan, Sax, and I – all part of a generation who spent their formative years before the Internet and their adult ones completely saturated with it – have also grown up with plastic Nintendo controllers, button-filled digital cameras, and DVD players armed with an array of LED lights.
My own home is littered with the tactile remains of no end of technology, and the chubby, reassuring thickness of the first iPhone I still keep tucked in a drawer has already taken on the same sheen of nostalgia I reserve for old school notebooks or sweaters.
As Sullivan's piece spoke of a return from the seductive screens, Sax's constantly extols the superiority of what the text calls "real things." It is, however, a world cleaved neatly into two neat spheres, digital and analog – so much so that near the end of the book, Sax claims that "digital is not reality. It never was and never will be." It's a claim that one might generously characterize as nonsense.
To assert that the almost unfathomable explosion of human creativity that fills the Internet sits somehow lower on a hierarchy of ontological realness is absurd.
It is this needless, false dualism that should make one skeptical of claims not only of the superiority of analog, but that such a neat distinction exists at all. In The Revenge of Analog, the alluring material quality of objects is always highlighted, but ignores the fetishism that has led us to revalue it, skipping over the more simple fact that analog has become appealing for the same reason you can't put your phone down: novelty.
Similarly, when speaking of Silicon Valley's tendency to use lots of paper, Sax's claim that "analog proves the most efficient way to run a business," simply isn't true. One would hardly be better served by doing one's accounting or inventory using a pen and paper. What works better is finding the right balance between analog and digital – largely because at this moment, that is the only choice there is.
***
Humanity's history is marked by periods of steady accumulation. But there are some rare shifts in technology – primary among them, writing, the book, television, and the Internet – that aren't so much additions to our humanity as an upending of them.
"Is digital good or bad?" is far too imprecise a question, because the ground one is now standing on is too new. In these infrequent paradigm shifts, we awake into new terrains, the technology so profoundly altering things that we enter new conditions of emergence, the old measurements and metrics useless.
But cultural criticism, as Louis Menand recently suggested in The New Yorker, is admitting that understanding contemporary culture is impossible, but trying anyway.
So we can look, for example, to the economic incentives that power Twitter and Facebook and see how their pace, their craving for viral content, and the tailored realities they present connect to their need to generate revenue.
We can see, in the incessant buzzing, ever-growing feature list, and ceaselessly refined interfaces of our smartphones, the financial necessity for Apple and Samsung to induce compulsion through design.
We are embedded in the engines of digital production, and the unending attacks on our attention are meant to cast as cogs in an enormous, global machine.
What is more difficult to discern, however, is some unique, inherent quality to either digital or analog, let alone whether one is more real than the other. For each cacophonous, mindless new media thing, there is a corner of the Web filled with irreplaceable beauty, some new game that forces us to reconsider what art might be, endless reams of brilliant writing, and the entire kaleidoscopic encyclopedia of human knowledge colliding in unexpected ways. It is not simply "digital"; it just is.
***
The Revenge of Analog is at its core a business book, each chapter the revenge of a new sector – retail, print, film – and is thus a work meant to uncover entrepreneurial opportunities lying in wait. It works best as polemic, as an interjection into a world that has too eagerly assumed digital is in some simple sense better, and perhaps ignored that the limitations of analog are more vital than ever. But in the eagerness to sell a marketable idea, Sax mistakes the fact that digital things cannot be touched for the fact that they are insubstantial.
It is what can be held that enthralls Sax, however, and he is most transfixed by Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, a thing he calls "exhibit A in analog's revenge." Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, created the Cool Tools book as an homage to the Whole Earth Catalogue, a kind of how-to guide for life from the late sixties that told you how to grow food or build a home – and the sort of thing rendered quite obsolete by the Internet. Cool Tools began as a blog, and started out simply reviewing tools that you need for a dizzying array of practical endeavours – everything from milling your own grains to ways to increase the WiFi signal in your home. Kelly then made the decision to create the book, which quickly sold out on its first run.
For Sax, the book highlights what is best about analog. It lends itself to idle browsing, drawing in anyone who happens to pick it up, its catalogue of useful things evoking the possibility of a life better lived.
But beyond its obvious digital origins, or even the inevitability of its creation on and through computers, Cool Tools reveals a world forever changed by the digital landscape.
The book's
non-linear mishmash of ideas,
the serendipity of their discovery,
is a function of its digital past,
now formalized by the analog.
The two spheres are inextricable, indivisible, not simply in practical terms (each review has a QR code leading to an online store) but in ideological, epistemological ones, too. We cannot help but read the book from our moment in the present where there is no offline and online, but only what scholar J. Sage Elwell calls "onlife": an existence that is always both digital and analog at once, and irrevocably so.
For now, we may struggle to pay attention, but this is our lot. It is already too late for analog's revenge – the thing to do is figure out how to be human after digital's victory. There is no going back.
"Becoming Steve Jobs is a smoother take on the life of Apple’s co-founder": I found this article by Shane Dingman in the Globe and Mail on Apr. 11, 2015:
Title Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary LeaderAuthor Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli
Genre biography
Publisher Signal
Pages 447 pages
Price $32.95
“F--- Neil Young, and fuck his records, you keep them,” snarled Steve Jobs to Fortune magazine reporter Brent Schlender some time in the summer of 2009. This is perhaps my favourite anecdote in
Becoming Steve Jobs, the new biography of Apple’s former genius/impresario, as it sums up much of what troubles me about the book.
First, it’s mildly titillating for a Canadian to hear one of our favourite sons dismissed so savagely and crassly by one of America’s greatest business and technology heroes of the 20th century. Secondly, it captures the rough edges that Schlender struggles to grind off as he tries to create a smoother version of the Jobsian mythos.
Very early on, Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to distance itself from previous biographies that Schlender (and many of Apple’s core executives) believe have put undue emphasis on the distemper, even rage, that Jobs exhibited throughout his life and career.
One of the most disconcerting things about the book is the decision to refer to Steve Jobs solely by his first name. This overfamiliarity is extended to some of the other characters, though not all.
Creating that clubby sense of “let me tell you about my pal Steve” is the point of the book, which claims to be the insider’s tale of a journalist who knew Jobs for more than 20 years.
That’s Schlender’s chief credential for claiming that others, such as bestselling Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, got it wrong. Schlender has a trove of untranscribed recordings with Jobs that he pulled out of storage to write this book, his first (with the help of his editor and co-author Rick Tetzeli).
His argument: Steve was actually a sweet guy who changed dramatically as a man and a business leader between his early days at Apple, his years in exile at Next and Pixar, and finally his tremendous comeback story at Apple starting in 1998. Basically, he wasn’t just some egotistical jerk.
What undermines this mission is the text itself: More often than not Schlender ends up apologizing for Jobs after he relates some brutal interaction or rant. Many of the insults seem so childish: Jobs is constantly calling people bozos, former Apple CEO Gil Amelio is called “a doperino.” These schoolyard taunts aren’t the stuff of visionary leadership. Worse still are the cases where he froze out or cut loose former long-time collaborators.
Jobs never seems to apologize for himself, or offer much more than a sort of sheepish “my bad” acknowledgment of ill behaviour. The barracking of Neil Young comes because the crooner called MP3s a crummy playback format for audiophile music lovers (a demonstrable fact that nevertheless enraged Jobs).
The book is peppered with a litany of brash, rude behaviour, mostly attributed to Jobs’s youth or upbringing. Schlender thinks Jobs was quite spoiled by permissive working-class parents; despite this diagnosis, those parents are barely one-dimensional shadows of characters in this book.
Even poor, benighted John Sculley (a.k.a. “The Man Who Fired Steve from Apple in 1985”) is a more fleshed-out human than the people who raised the boy genius.
If you haven’t followed the story of Apple before, the book contains many useful insights and revelations that will help you understand
where the company came from,
how it almost collapsed
and how critical Jobs was to its transformation into a colossus of smartphones.
Close observers will have heard much of this before, but there are fun tidbits. I, for one, forgot that Jobs prioritized creating iMovie video software over music organizing tools that became iTunes,
and I also forgot how poorly the first iPod did in its first year (and what mistakes were made with the buttons and click-wheel interface).
But the narrative is often interrupted by Schlender’s archival quotes, many of which are the kind of short, throwaway one-liners that had no place in the Wall Street Journal or Fortune stories he was writing at the time.
Now, in the fullness of historical perspective, he tries to add weight to what comes across as small talk with industry giants. He tells a wholly pointless story about driving Bill Gates to the airport after a famous 1991 joint interview with Jobs.
Schlender remarks, “You guys get along pretty well,” and Gates snaps at him, “Why shouldn’t we?” This could be anything from mere politeness to a deep expression of affection between rivals; Schlender clearly believes it is the latter.
He does the same later, relating a story Jobs told of calling up former Intel CEO Andy Grove at 2 a.m. to talk about taking control at Apple. After some time, Grove reportedly tells Jobs, “I don’t give a s--- about Apple.” That is freighted with meaning, as if to say that’s how little Apple mattered before Jobs whipped it into shape. Though to my eye, Grove just wanted to go back to sleep.
There’s no question Schlender spent a lot of time hanging around Steve Jobs. But the result of all those interactions doesn’t add up to a revealing portrait of the man.
Schlender had a falling out with Jobs near the end of the Apple leader’s life, and so the period of time Jobs spent with the rival biographer Isaacson is almost entirely absent from this book.
But the reality is that neither deathbed insights, nor 25 years of back-channel gossip, will ever be enough to satisfy our curiosity about what made the man tick.
This week's theme is about technology:
"Workers at Blue Origin, Bezos's rocket company, allege sexism, safety risks"/ "Bezos sued by ex-housekeeper over racial discrimination, working conditions"
http://badcb.blogspot.com/2023/07/workers-at-blue-origin-bezoss-rocket.html
"End of an era: Apple discontinues its last iPod model"/ "After 20 years, Apple is saying goodbye to the iPod"
http://badcb.blogspot.com/2023/07/end-of-era-apple-discontinues-its-last.html
Jul. 14, 2023 "As rents soar, tenants organize local protests. But what's needed for a national housing movement?": Today I found this article by Vanessa Balintec on CBC:
Striking tenants who are refusing to pay big rent increases in several buildings in Toronto's west end say they've been flooded with support from across the country.
York South-Weston Tenant Union organizer Bruno Dobrusin said support for their rent strike has been "overwhelming." Not only are people paying attention, but he said they're interested in learning how to organize themselves.
"It's a hopeful sign that people are rising up and fighting back," said Dobrusin.
"We're seeing that there is more and more demand for broader movements. But provincially or nationally, the question now is how can we support each other?"
Advocates like Dobrusin say Canadians shut out of the country's tight housing market may be more likely to consider organizing as a way to push for solutions to the housing crisis.
"I think folks are starting to be more open to the notion that the missing link is not ideas, the missing link is not technical solutions. The missing link is the political will to make change and … it will require some pressure," Tranjan said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-housing-social-movement-1.6905072
My opinion: This is good for tenants to go on strike to lower the rents for the cost of living.
Jul. 16, 2023 "Missing Alabama woman 'Carlee Russell' being evaluated at hospital after found alive and safe": Today I found this article by Briana Gregory on WVTM 13. This is some good news:
HOOVER, Ala. —
Missing 25-year-old Carlethia “Carlee” Nichole Russell has been found alive and safe, according to Hoover police.
Police said they received a call that Russell returned home to her residence late Saturday night.
Police responded to the scene to investigate and Hoover fire medics responded to the scene to assess and transported Russell to a local hospital for evaluation.
On Thursday night, around 9:34 p.m., Hoover 911 received a call from Russell stating she saw a toddler on the interstate near the John Hawkins Parkway exit.
She was on her way home from her job at the Woodhouse Day Spa in the Summit and was about 10 minutes from her house, according to her parents, Talitha and Carolos Russell.
Carlee Russell then stopped to check on the child and called a family member, according to police. The family told investigators that they lost contact with her, but the phone line remained open.
When police arrived, they found Carlee Russell's car and belongings, but there was no sign of her or a toddler.
Family gathered to search for Carlee Russell Friday morning at the Hoover Met and asked for help.
"We're just gonna scour the earth," said Carlee Russell's dad, Carlos Russell. "There's no stopping us."
Her parents noted that there is a report from a trucker who said they saw her car with the door open and a grey vehicle had pulled in front of it.
The Russells also said they believe that the child was used as 'bait' in order to lure Russell out of her car.
https://www.wvtm13.com/article/carlee-russell-alabama-missing-found/44554229
Jul. 15, 2023 "A woman is praising SKIMS after surviving a shooting: 'Kim Kardashian saved my life'": Today I found this article by Kaitlin Reilly on Yahoo:
A woman is crediting a bodysuit from Kim Kardashian’s shapewear company with saving her life.
The soon-to-be American Horror Story actress took to her Instagram Story on Friday to re-post a TikTok from May 18th, in which a 22-year-old Kansas City resident named Angelina Wiley claimed her SKIMS bodysuit helped her survive a mass shooting.
The video went viral on social media earlier this week, and in the comments section of the TikTok, Wiley’s followers tagged SKIMS and Kardashian in hopes that the reality star would eventually see Wiley’s story.
“Kim Kardashian saved my life,” Wiley said in the video. “The night that I got shot, under my dress I was wearing a SKIMS shaping bodysuit. It was so tight on me that it literally kept me from bleeding out. I recommend it. I'm definitely going to buy some more, I mean I should wear it every day — it's like body armor for women…Call it fate, or Jesus, but I'm gonna call it Kim.”
Kardashian wrote “Wowwww” underneath the re-posted video.
In a phone conversation with Yahoo Life, Wiley explains that the shooting occurred in Kansas City on New Year’s, when Wiley was waiting for a car to go home after celebrating with friends. It left her with four gunshot wounds, a ruptured bladder, and a fractured pelvic bone.
https://ca.style.yahoo.com/skims-saved-angelina-wiley-life-shooting-kim-kardashian-192558156.html
My opinion: This body suit was a factor in saving her life.
Jul. 19, 2023 "Chinese man wins $10 million in lottery by using his family’s birth dates": Today I found this article by Ryan General on Yahoo:
A Chinese man won a lottery jackpot worth 77 million yuan (approximately $10.6 million), with the winning numbers derived from his family’s birth dates.
Stroke of luck: The winner, identified as Wu from Hangzhou, China, combined the birth dates of his wife and three children in a set of numbers that he applied to all 15 lottery tickets he purchased for 30 yuan ($4.15) earlier this month.
According to local reports, Wu lives and works in Hangzhou while his wife and children reside in another city.
"I have been using them in my betting since the beginning of this year and had a feeling they would do well recently. That's why I bought so many betting tickets using the same group of figures," he was quoted saying.
Winning moment: Wu, who is in his early 30s, discovered that each of his tickets won the first prize when the winning lottery results were announced on July 11
With his tickets winning 5.14 million yuan (approx. $711,200) each, he ended up with a remarkable 77.1 million yuan, the highest lottery award in Zhejiang province this year.
Supportive family: Wu revealed that his family has been supporting his hobby of purchasing lottery tickets since 2009.
According to Wu, he has already shared the news about this multi-million-dollar winnings with his family, who are currently living in another city.
“I chose their birth dates to express my feeling of missing them,” Wu was quoted as saying.
Acknowledging the substantial amount of the prize, he noted that he needs time to plan how to manage his newfound wealth. He also expressed gratitude to his family, believing their presence brought him luck.
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/chinese-man-wins-10-million-213904754.html
Jul. 14, 2023 Capilano Eye Centre: Today is my day off. I went here to get my glasses fixed. One of the rubber part where the glasses put on the bridge of the nose was broken. I took the bus there in the afternoon. The man Chris fixed it in 10 min. and put the new rubber on both parts. He also polished them.
He offered a free bottle of a lens cleaner and a cloth. I didn't take them, because I already have some. He fixed them for free. I thanked him.
Sullivan's Crossing: I also watched the last 2 episodes of this show. This is average. I only like the stories where the lead character Maggie is performing makeshift surgery on a character who accidentally got shot and another character who fell.
This is more a family and friends drama in a small town. I don't find the show that interesting. I Facebook message Barbilee to watch this show because it's not violent.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21064598/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_2_nm_6_q_sullivan%27s%2520cro
Leo opinion: Would you prefer to live in a house or an apartment?
House: 86%
Apartment: 14%
My answer: House, because I live in one. It's okay if I live in an apartment.
Jul. 15, 2023 Vancouver Spiritual Events group: I went to this free online workshop 8pm-9:30pm. This was facilitated by Amartya. He's East Indian and in his late 20s. A woman named Suzanne told him he was like in his 60s because he seemed so wise.
There are 7 women including me and we discussed about healing our inner blocks.
This stood out to me the most: What is the belief system that is creating the trauma?
https://www.instagram.com/seraphimsoul9999/?hl=en
https://www.fulfilledwithin.com/
https://www.meetup.com/vancouver-spiritual-events-group/
Free admission to K- Days:
Plus for one day only, Sunday, July 23, you can get in to the grounds for FREE with your EPL card! Make sure to get your library card in advance.
https://www.epl.ca/k-days/
