Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Medicare has given me a sense of safety and freedom that I had been sadly 
lacking for the last 20 years due to a pre-existing condition from which 
I'd been cured 35 years ago.   That didn't matter to the health insurance 
companies And when I had lost my job-related insurance 25 or so years 
ago, the woman on the phone at one of the companies I applied to actually 
laughed when she told me to forget about it.
  

    


Commonly I end these WELL things in some personal burst of visionary
eloquence. Last year, I wrote a long culture-critic essay all about
Cibelle.  Cibelle, the London-Sao Paulo multi-artist.  I just heard
from Cibelle.  Cibelle's still performing her music, in extravagant
costume, with video,  but she told me that she'd like to go to art
school and get an MFA in painting.  Could be a sign of the creative
times: if you're gonna do every possible artsy thing all at once, then
you might as well get good at it.

I concluded this isn't the year for writing any long, learned,
stick-to-the-point summations.  Instead, this is a unique year when,
during this State of the World discussion, I was actually living in
Lebkowsky's house.  Thanks for the hospitality, Jon!  Great to share
some analog geolocative presence!

Tomorrow, I head off to Mexico City to teach design school for a
month. You'll hear about this on Twitter if you follow @bruces.

The blog just upgraded to a new incarnation of Wordpress.  Check out
my new, upscale, toney and curatorial "Tech Art" section.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/category/tech-art/

So it's time to gently conclude the State of the World by venturing
off for tequila.  In a Texan cantina.  Chuy's.  We kinda need the
consolation, and that's as good a place as any.

Chuy's 
‪4301 W William Cannon Dr, Austin, TX‬

‪(512) 899-2489 ‬

Should be there after 5:30 pm or so...  Drop on by, y'all.
  

    
"analog geolocative presence" is a great term.
  

    
Wish I could share some "analog geolocative presence" and some nice
older tequila. Instead, a digital gesture of a toast to you and to the
future and to the beauty of the unfolding sky, from here in San
Francisco.
  

    
Great as always, thanks to both of you for your time and thinking out
loud. 
  

    
I just wandered in from a very good talk at the University of Texas by
Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo Research
(http://elizabethchurchill.com/). I was there with my pals Gregory
Foster, Bill Anderson, and David Ryan, all Austin-based technologists.
Another friend, tech entrepreneur Tristan Slominski, was across the
room. The rest were mostly UT students.

Churchill is a psychologist and user experience expert whose done a
ton of research for Yahoo - much of it about how and why people engage
with websites and web communities. Google, Facebook, and Twitter get a
lot of attention for their social and collaborative spaces, but Yahoo
was there first, and has dug as deeply as anybody into the study of
online behaviors. I was reminded of a couple of things - how long we've
come in evolving the web environment, and how it's a totally human
environment... it's all behavior manifest in technology-mediated
environments. I've been working on and with the web for two decades
now, and I'm still completely fascinated. I love this work, even (or
especially) with the challenges we face today.

Churchill mentioned core values of Computer Human Interaction... I
think about most of these every day:

fulfillment
agency
identity
equality
subjectivity
reflection
empowerment
social justice

After two long weeks of discussion here on the WELL, itself a seminal
online community that's been operating for over 25 years, I'm feeling
perky: the world can work, we're going to do just fine. 

Hope some of you will show up at Chuy's later today.

And we'll be here again next year (maybe by then we'll have bought a
huge hippie house and started a commune...)
  

    
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weltschmerz

Weltschmerz: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the
actual state of the world with an ideal state

Thanks and a tip o' the hat to Garry Golden for the pointer to this
relevant definition.
  

    
That's M-W's definition, really?  I was taught that it had to do with feeling
the pain of the world, not just being disappointed in it.
  

    
And given that the German means world-pain, that makes more sense. 
  

    
There's a differentiation of meanings on this page 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltschmerz
where a distinction is made between the modern German use of the word
and the original idea from the early 1800's
  

    
Underlying many of the issues you discuss, it seems to me that there
is a fundamental unwillingness to understand, appreciate and
acknowledge the complexity of the world we live in.  Be it economics,
politics, healthcare, climate, technology - the underlying systems
complexity is increasing dramatically, while the media, statesmen,
policy makers etc insist on the soundbite, the easy answer, the
executive summary - and more worrying are supremely confident in their
understanding of the system and how to change it for the better.  

Until we have a big push at understanding complexity - and how to
communicate that complexity to the public - there will be very little
meaningful progress in any direction.  

Karim
  

    <scribbled by bruces Sun 30 Dec 12 01:49>
  

    
How do you engender an appreciation for complexity? Seems to me that
human beings are just not wired for it. We like stories. Linearity.
Simple cause and effect with one cause and one effect.
  

    <scribbled by jeffk Sun 30 Dec 12 09:56>
  

    
If you're tempted to post here, this is last year's SOTW topic. Topic
459 is SOTW 2013.