spinnerin

April 20, 2012

The cost of a lumen of light is dropping precipitously; there must be more things than lightbulbs that can benefit from that. There’s vast amounts of databases, real-world data, and video that remains unindexed. Who knows what a billion Chinese Internet users will come up with? The quantified self is just getting going on its path to the programmable self. And no one has figured out how to do augmented reality in an elegant way.

The truth is, though, I’m a journalist, not an entrepreneur. I know that my contribution is more likely to be distilling a feeling that is already broadly felt rather than inventing the future. Still, I want us to get back to those exciting days where people were making predictions about the affordances of the future that seemed wonderful and impossible. No doubt the future remains unevenly distributed but now, when you get your bit, it seems as likely to include worse cell reception as it does seemingly magical superpowers.

This isn’t about startup incubators or policy positions. It’s not about “innovation in America” or which tech blog loves startups the most. This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we’re all too stunned to figure out what’s next. So we watch Lana Del Ray turn circles in a thousand animated gifs.

— The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic (via new-aesthetic)

(via new-aesthetic)

12:15pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZG3vbyJzu1PK

(Notes: 29)