Digitalize Your Walk

"The Wonderful Power of Storytelling"
Bruce Sterling at the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991, San Jose CA

But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down.

By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head.

The unintended consequences of digitization are really interesting to me. Cellphones had lots of of those. They sewed together a net, made of everyone you know, and they used it to catch us all. I resisted getting a cellphone for years, but that doesn't matter now.

{paraphrase of me in 2004}
Civilization is based on the strength of the individual, the strength of silence, of thought and calm. And cellphones will devour our solitude. Our quiet times, when we meditate in our steps, and over many miles grow as people.
{/paraphrase}

wikiNTERJECTION: The old theories of evolution said that we were the monkey that got smart, but Lucy indicated, we were the monkey that learned to walk.///

{paraphrase of me in 2004}
Cellphones create a false sense of community; of a net ready to catch you. But this isn't any traditional community, it is a digitized one; made up of people who are abandoning reflection; becoming bytes, able to interrupt you at anytime; without obligation or responsibility to anyone.
{/paraphrase}

There would be no more Alone, I protested.

wikiNTERJECTION: The pillars of the French discipline Parkour are escape and reach. Is this the definition of freedom?///

Now I have a cellphone and soon it will have the internet. Reach. And Escape?