Amazon Re-Keying The Future
Everything To Everyone Is What All The Big Players Want To Be How far into your life are you willing to let Amazon reach? You have your library locked in on Kindle, and your DVD collection was replaced by Amazon Prime, your music is in their cloud, your website is...
Government Social Media Programs
China Wants To Rate How Good It’s Citizens Are When it comes to dystopian futures I love a lot of them (the depiction I mean, not the notion of living in one), but I tend to think that Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where incompetence, and not some vast shadowy...
End To End Encryption Isn’t The Problem
A lot of column inches have been given to the UK’s continuing crackdown on companies that use end to end encryption. This technology means that only the people communicating can read the messages, and that it can’t be eavesdropped on, even by the company...
AI And The Future
It has been a staple of science fiction for a long time – from Robbie The Robot, through Hal, and the Terminator, Bishop in the Alien series, to the machines in The Matrix, to Ex-Machina, even Bender from Farscape. It’s always pretty bleak – as soon...
Bladerunner 2049: Alternate Film Futures Or Why Sci Fi Isn’t A Predictive Medium
Science Fiction Is More Of A Gauge Of What Is Going On In The Current Day Bladerunner 2049 is great – an unexpectedly great sequel to a cult classic. William Gibson isn’t particularly fond of being expected to predict the future. Warren Ellis often writes...
Star Trek: Discovery – To Boldly Go
The movie franchise has been doing pretty well, and it was something of a gamble to reboot the franchise with new actors playing familiar characters from the original TV show, and first movie offerings. Enterprise served as a prequel to the first series and this is...
Pushback Against the Gig Economy
Is The Gig Economy Inevitable? Airbnb is not popular everywhere nor with everyone – as seen in a recent spat with the Hotel Association of New York City. Uber’s battles have been perhaps even more public; with the parties involved seemingly even more...
Twitter Expanding To 280
Will 280 Words Allow For More Nuanced Tweets? 280 words instead of 140. Does it mean anything? I have read that it may be intended to increase the signal to noise ratio – upping the complexity of what can be communicated, bringing more nuance to the table, but I...
Game Of Thrones – Checkmating The Leaks
Game Of Thrones Makes A Move Worthy Of Baelish How do you beat people that would leak your product before you are ready to let them see it? Answer – make multiple versions so that even the players involved have no clue which way you are going to jump. I wrote an...
Another Blip On The Wall – Facebook Snooze
Facebook Is A Black Box I read about this today on Tech Crunch, and supposedly it is supposed to give me more control over my Facebook feed. The thing is I keep trying to set the damned thing to most recent rather than Top Stories, so that I get more than the same ten...
Daft Punk: The Genius Of Anonymity In The Midst Of Celebrity Culture
Daft Punk Unchained, the documentary, is an interesting journey for anyone that is a fan of the band. It is an interesting lesson in the importance of creating a sense of mystery. Nowadays Google throws up every damned thing that was ever written about someone –...
Airbnb Disaster Response Tool
Results Should Be Prized Above Altruism With These Programs Facebook’s Safety Check had been one of those things I initially thought was a little bit intrusive and excessive, and then I got to use it, and I saw that some of my friends in dangerous places were...
Betting On Vaporware
Waiting On The Unarrived Future It’s kind of a broken promise: vaporware – tech that has been described and marketed as if it existed, but which doesn’t actually exist in the real world. But maybe there is a hope buried in some of this imaginative...
Courting The Backfire – The Ill Advised Notion Of Smear Campaigns
The ads being put out by the Hotel Association of New York City are cynical at best, and that is being kind. I understand the problems that airbnb is causing for them as an industry, but backing an ad campaign that suggests your rivals are connected to terrorism seems...
What Does GAFA Mean For Everyone?
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – they tower over civilization like the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this concerns some people. The European Union doesn’t like the control that these companies are exerting on the market, but they are fast...
Step In The Ring – The Circle Arrives
Social Media Is Already Exploiting Some Of What We See In The Circle The Circle, the movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, showed a feature called Soul Search, where the network used its extensive resources, in terms of the people that were part of the community,...
Letterman On Netflix
Letterman – longest running chat show host back in the game with Netflix! I am not sure why, but the idea of Letterman on Netflix excites me more than The Letterman Show ever did. I know it is a totally personal thing, but I seem to remember reading some...
No Ghost In The Shell – What A Bad Remake Can Teach Us
Sci Fi Is Always About The Human Element, As Is Marketing! Take a classic movie and miss the point. Or rather, take a cult movie and miss the point; a cult manga too. When you take something that has so much source material – source material that has a proven...
Sousveillance – With A Whimper Not A Bang
Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies. Aug 30, 2016 Brave New World and 1984 got it wrong – a lot of dystopias do. We are the ones who are helping to...
Innovation & The Evolutionary Necessity Of Moonshots – Thinking In Futures
If You Want To Get Anywhere, You Have To Aim Higher! You can of course choose to plod along, looking at your feet, thinking only of handling the problems that confront you in the here and now. Sure, there are engineering problems that need to be handled to make the...
13th Doctor Revealed & The Reactions
It’s kind of interesting to watch certain sectors of fandom implode when something happens to their franchise of choice that they do not consider to be canon – these are the same kind of people who complain when a band releases an album that is different...
Escapism Versus The Barrage Of Daily Disruption
People Need To Lift Their Heads Up, Not Bury Them Some people are taking a time out from social media – they are getting stressed out by the deluge of bad news, and the constant fighting between people who emerge from their echo chamber to make a lightning raid...
Comic Books Don’t Need To Be Turned Into Films
Comic Books Aren’t Just Storyboards For Movies They do different things, and they bring very different things to the machinery of storytelling, and those who only ever interact with comic book stories through their movie versions are missing out on a very...