dichotic noise

“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wikipedia, Here be dragons)

As a reaction to the Utopian science fiction (frequently set into a distant glorious future), cyberpunk projected all our fears into the uncharted territory of the very near future.

What separates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspecified, yet imminent apocalypse. Hence, most of the cyberpunk scenes are post-​apocalyptic ones, where the apocalypse is a given, part of a forgotten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Chapter 2)

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Technically an anti-​hero lacks the attributes of the hero, of the “knight in the shining armour” type. I believe that one particular aspect of not being a (classical) hero is the use deception, living double lives, etc.

In The Matrix, Neo lives a double life: he works a dull cubicle job by day, helps his landlady take out the garbage; by night he’s involved in illegal information trade. He is trapped into this double life and he looks for an exit: an answer and a saviour (Morpheus).

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Well, as opposed to these typographical differences, I believe that this illustration gives you the feel of Arial versus Helvetica.

In a near dark future we may have to go this way. Have our public tweets bot proof, and the Twitter API returning base64 encoded images of our tweets instead of text, unless you’re a really good friend … then you may have some of your friends sell your plain text tweets to advertisers, friends hacking friends’ accounts to harvest more sellable tweets, etc.

Well, that’s a dark vision of the future, fueled by the readings I’m doing for a Cyberpunk course at the Peer 2 Peer University.

I’ll assume that who reads this knows what Ubiquity is, if not check it out, it’s awesome.

Since Ubiquity can remember edits you do to a page (via edit and save commands), it may also be able to remember what other commands you applied to a piece of content, such that when you revisit that page you’ll see a small visual hint (could be similar to Alex Faaborg microformats experiments, or Aza Raskin’s mouse Ubiquity experiments) that would let you re-​apply the command.

Imagine that you visit a blog post about a party, and the map command is just one click away just because you did it before.

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Aza Raskin on conversational computing and “The Semantic Web” (loving the quotes)

OK, how can we have Ubiquity publish what people map (with their permission, of course), what commands they use on what piece of content?

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Science fiction — before the cyberpunk split — was more or less different retellings of the same archetypes where aliens replaced ghosts and monsters, space replaced the oceans and technology replaced magic. This provided the grounds for scientific speculations, — and for a long time that was the main theme — and that was the fuel of the (technical) imagination of the mankind. We reached the Moon in a story first in Kepler’s “Somnium,” then with Jules Verne’s “From Earth to Moon.”

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This is how my espresso machine malfunctioning feels…