The Age of Trump and the Rise of the Fake Generation

The president-elect truly wielded the digital might of Twitter into office. There are some basics about our digital communications which most Americans don't know, however. 

Overseas, nations like Russia, China, the Philippines, India, and more, have thriving digital economies built solely on defrauding digital communications. I'm not talking cyber-spies and plots. This is pure economics. 

Armies of low-paid workers create and use fake social media accounts, often hired by companies developing software or hardware or any product, really and they click away 24-7 around the globe. 

Also worth a read - clickfarming.

The problem so clogged up the giant Instagram platform that in 2014 they had to purge over 18 million suspected fake accounts.

Such digital tactics have been honed into a targeting political tool which found great success in the presidential election.

Cutting across many demographic groups, the rise of believers in Fake coalesced around a TV celebrity, Donald Trump, whose identity is and remains more of an Avatar than a person. He's the perfect spokesman of the Fake generation.

Accuse the spreaders of fakery (and their leader) and they'll respond such accusations are proof of guilt of the accusers. A political writer at Politico chucked mainstream news outlets for a couple of weeks and just followed the Fake generation online for information:

"Indeed, my feed was totally saturated with Pro-Kremlin sentiment. Part of that seemed connected to the likely Russian hack of emails that weakened the Clinton campaign and were published on Wikileaks, an organization that seems to have the trust of the alt-right. Anti-ISIS sentiment was baked in, and many Tweeters were just parroting the nation’s most prominent Russophile, Donald J. Trump. In any event, Russian propaganda intersected with Trumpian propaganda to such an extent that I observed little skepticism of Putin or RT, his English-language mouthpiece. At one point user @neverRINOs retweeted an image of Bashar Al-Assad on RT, saying, “Western media has no credibility, morality.” Above it, he wrote, “FACT CHECK: TRUE.” As Cernovich tweeted, “Putin is a larger than life alpha male who loves his country and will fight to defend it. Why don’t you admire him? Brainwashing.”

It's a swamp that isn't being drained, it's growing.

The Fans That Destroyed The Earth

Who should play the next James Bond?

Why should fans of 007 pick the next performer to play the role? Are they so scared in Hollywood or that lazy?

Too often the Internets gets blocked up with What Fans Want.

Well, if a Fan of some genre or media knows so much, why are they just Fans? Can't they get the jobs to make the stuff that gets Fans?

Fans churn out reviews of movies and tv and books that are old, new and unmade - like they're possessed, and yet it's always about someone else's works. Fans even make videos of themselves opening packages of what they are Fans of, and those videos have millions of Fans.

Perhaps we shouldn't have provided Internets space to Fan Fiction, Fan Movies and Mashups, just insane niches that feed Fan Entitlement. ("My Little Pony" has, for instance, expanded and distorted into a weird mix of Salvador Dali and Larry Flynt.)

I get it - we make things from the artifacts of our lives. I've done it, but not in any coordinated Fan Horde Attacks.

And the Internets is a machine that builds Fans. See this "Sexts, Hugs, and Rock'nRoll" article about the ongoing DigiTour of ... well, never heard of these folks until now so I'll call them Internets Idols:

"With full lips, Bieber bangs, and piercing blue eyes, Hayes has the unsalted-butter looks of the love interest on a CW show or the villain in a John Hughes movie. He dresses in the superficially alternative but fundamentally nonthreatening uniform popularized by Urban Outfitters and adopted by every (white) Cool Guy in every high school in America: jeans, skate shoes, graphic T-shirt or baggy tank top with the armholes cut low. He speaks slowly and indistinctly, with a soft North Carolina accent. He has beautiful teeth."

And all he (Hayes) does is make Fans.

Fan demands of casting and scripting are ridiculous, media makers use them for publicity, but it's too far - look what happened to the simple science fiction awards known as Hugos: a weird Fan Coup has butchered the proceedings.

You're a Fan of something? Great. Shut up. I'm working here. 

Every 1970s Movie Reviewed

This website I'm linking to is so good I hardly know where to start. The name nails it well - Every70sMovie. Every day writer-filmmaker Peter Hanson posts a review of a 1970s movie, a task he's been at since October 2010.

So yes, big. And an incredibly wide range of theatrical and TV movies are here. Random sample One:

The Devil's Widow (1970)
Only movie directed by actor Roddy McDowell, starring Ava Gardner and Ian McShane
Based on a Scottish myth, "The film begins at the sprawling Scottish estate of Michaela Cazaret (Gardner), a middle-aged woman of unclear national origin who populates her castle and its grounds with swinging young people."

Sample Two:
(this is one of my favorite 70s movies by far)

The Last of Sheila
written by actor Anthony Perkins and Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, but this is no musical. The story is that Perkins and Sondheim and friends were game lovers, played many scavenger hunts, and this murder mystery movie grew from that. It's got a fantastic cast - James Coburn, James Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, and more rich-and-idle characters who find out too late they are all soon to be victims of revenge
Hanson calls it a "jet-set caper movie.


Not even the tip of the iceberg of this site, which also lists movies by title and a giant list of names of all the players. Just go read and get lost for a while.

A Decade of Writing on the Web

I've been so busy I missed my own blog birthday - 10 years are done and I'm now on Year 11. Yay me.

Obviously The Regular Reader knows the posts here have been intermittent in the last year or so, but that's changing as a few new adventures are compelling me to become more prolific here. Details on that will follow very soon.

When I began this page, the Web was exploding with blogs, and many of those are now kaput. I am not kaput. That noisy proliferation has now turned into a far more vast cacophony of voices and images which get Tweeted and Pinterested and Instagrammed and Facebooked and far more names of platforms being created. I'm a long-form writer who abhors brevity. Except when I don't.

And still, our world is only just inside the doorway of what is possible with the Internet. If the Internet is the New Alphabet then we've only gotten 3 or 4 letters figured out. More is to be discovered and the new combinations possible are far too large to even imagine ... so far.

When I was a wee boy, knowing down in my bones that I wanted to be a writer, I think I saw a Writer as a process that ended with being a Good Writer Who Writes. Now these many years later, I see it's a process of creation that never ends.

What's been the best writing here? The most popular? 

The Google stats say "Dr. Evil Running Congress?" has been the most viewed post, with over 22,000 views is Most Popular, but that's likely because the image I used of Dr. Evil became a hot listing via image searches using Google. Also popular, pretty much all posts about Frightmare Manor, the haunted attraction located just down the street, have been huge hits on the Web. And they are getting ready to open up again for 2015.

I have various favorites, but here are two posts that I rank as my own best.

First, "Martian", a rumination on the planet Mars and the robots we've placed there. It's from the very first weeks of publishing, and I really like it. In fact, other than movies, I've probably written the most about my fascination with our universe, our solar system and how we do and do not explore it.

My next favorite is also from the early days, "Would You Like To Hear Some Stories?", a post prompted by my sister-in-law and the very real and astonishing experiences of her family during World War 2 and how the posting of those events led to the discovery after many decades of what happened to Katherine's mother's cousin, revealed in the comments of that post.

Heading Into A Digital Dark Age

One of the million or so pieces of cuneiform writing awaiting someone to decipher it.

Google V.P. Vint Cerf - often tagged as one of the Internet's founders - warned of a coming lost century since digitized information fades fast as technology and software change.

"Ancient civilizations suffered no such problems, because histories written in cuneiform on baked clay tablets, or rolled papyrus scrolls, needed only eyes to read them. To study today’s culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents, and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with dedicated software and sometimes hardware too.

"The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks, upload Jet Set Willy from cassette to the ZX spectrum, slaughter aliens with a Quickfire II joystick, and have Atari games cartridges in the attic. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is mostly found only in museums.

"The rise of gaming has its own place in the story of digital culture, but Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, describing how Lincoln hired those who ran against him for presidency. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved, and reconstructed their conversations. “In today’s world those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be vanishingly small 100 years from now,” said Cerf."

Full article is here.

Meanwhile, some folks are thinking and working on the structure of a 10,000 year memory structure. Meet the Long Now Foundation.

History no longer belongs to those who write of it - it belongs to those who know how to archive and access it across thousands of years.

Sony, Korea and Millions of Shoes

Movies can be dangerous things. Comedy and satire too mingle with danger, tyrants and dictators aren't powerful due to their great sense of wit.

Yesterday, fearful of a promise of violent attack on movie theaters showing "The Interview", Sony Pictures pulled the movie from release. The movie's comic misadventures in a silly CIA plot to assassinate an actual, living human dictator in North Korea catapulted it from obscurity to infamy and history in record time.

Immediately too, cries that removal of the movie from distribution was giving terrorists control followed Sony's decision.

Sadly, caving in to demands of supposed terrorists seems more a rule than an exception.

Millions upon millions of shoes being removed at airports seems proof of that. Nation after nation has embraced a grim surveillance society since 2001. Haven't we already caved?

As for the movie -- did North Korean hackers acting on behalf of the state attack Sony? Some say no way:

"It's not possible. It would have taken months, maybe even years, to exfiltrate something like 100 terabytes of data without anyone noticing. ... Look at the bandwidth going into North Korea. I mean, the pipelines, the pipes going in, handling data, they only have one major ISP across their entire nation. That kind of information flowing at one time would have shut down North Korean Internet completely."

"Monsegur thinks it's also possible this was an inside job, that an employee or consultant downloaded all the information from Sony's servers and then sold it to someone else."

The potential of lawsuits against distributors and theater owners seems large, given they had been "warned" ahead of time of an attack on theaters.

The screenwriter of "The Interview" is beyond amazed by all this.

Tennessee's 1st Communist Town? Plz Don't Tweet or Repost!

Bad ideas - and perhaps a few good ones - thrive on the Internet.

Officials in the local government of South Pittsburg, TN are learning the hard way.

Earlier this month, for reasons as yet unknown, the town's elected folks voted to "ban" negative comments on social media about the town, applicable to  "all city elected representatives, appointed board members, employees, volunteers, vendors, contractors and anyone associated with the town in an official capacity who uses social networks."

Cue the avalanche of negative (if hilarious) comments.

"Guess we need to change the welcome sign..to say the first Communist town in the south," wrote one resident."

Fake social media accounts for Mayor Jane Dawkins (@NotJaneDawkins) have been created by one Reddit user, and another for Commissioner Jeff Powers. Hilarity and parody flow.

How Many Web Sites Are There?

It's a guess, really, but trends and data available say that there is roughly one web site for every three people who use the web, according to this Washington Post report, which features the graphic shown above (via Internet Live Stats).

Meanwhile, the site WorldWideWebSize says there are 2.39 billion web pages as of today, estimated by the numbers of pages indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo search. The Internet Live Stats estimates there were 1.5 million blog posts today - plus one, this one you are reading right now.

While these stats don't tell us just what is on all the pages (cats? porn? advertising?). 

Every day the visualizations of so many people on the planet are manifest on the Internet. I find it interesting that (according to the above) there are 1.5 billion searches on Google so far today - interesting because that makes it seem that half of the folks in the digital world are seeking something, some information, some photo (some cats, probably).

Email appears to be the most widely used aspect - I sent about 6 today, and likely will send out a dozen more before the day is done.

Capturing the attention of billions is no simple task, especially here on this humble blog, where I noodle about with words and images and ideas. I can usually grab a few hundred views here a day - sometimes more, sometimes less. Big numbers land here mostly when I link to an oddity or a bit of someone else's hostility or such. 

But I do perceive a few things in all these numbers - people have joyfully abandoned publishers and broadcasters to share every kind of thing imaginable. It has been and continues to be liberating - for the cost of obtaining Internet access and some device to access the Internet, anyone can reach global distribution. 

And still, after only 20 some years of such new technology, we are only at the edge of what is going to happen due to this massive shift in human interaction.

I often wonder what might happen if, as in some cheesy story, all that access was suddenly gone, never to return. 

I often wonder if over the next fifty years people will somehow master this wild and wooly digital world, or if such mastery is even possible (mastery meaning that the majority of users add something to this digital conversation that is beyond rude-boy antics and advertising).

I often wonder if the future will steadily erase ideas of borders and countries and race and state and tribe ... what then will follow?

Smartphones Can't Be Searched Without Warrants, Except When They Are

I suppose I'm a Debbie Downer today, but the Supreme Court ruling yesterday giving privacy protections to smartphones and requiring warrants to search them ... seems just a little hollow and a whole lot of ironic.

Despite the ruling's support for privacy protections, there's a telling phrase in Justice Roberts majority opinion:

" These cases do not implicate the question of whether the collection or inspection of aggregated digital information amounts to a search under other circumstances."

Well. With reports that computer and mobile devices can be delivered with components which provide agencies access to every action, warrants may be moot. Then there's the commercial agencies which have provided spying tools worldwide:

"The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team’s larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.

They allow, for example, for covert collection of emails, text messages, call history and address books, and they can be used to log keystrokes and obtain search history data. They can take screenshots, record audio from the phones to monitor calls or ambient conversations, hijack the phone’s camera to snap pictures or piggyback on the phone’s GPS system to monitor the user’s location. The Android version can also enable the phone’s Wi-Fi function to siphon data from the phone wirelessly instead of using the cell network to transmit it. The latter would incur data charges and raise the phone owner’s suspicion."

The court seemed to indicate the larger issue of warrantless data collection will have to be taken up by Congress and policymakers rather than decided by lawsuits.

Still, the court's ruling is welcome - but enormous questions about privacy and security, for the individual and the nation, remain unanswered.

You Won't Believe What These 10 Bloggers Said!

And a fine Saturday morning to you, dear readers. Does it seem like I have not been writing? Sadly, this is true - I've not been writing and I fear I may be suffering from an affliction of age perhaps or of aging, which I shall try to explain. (NOTE: There is no list of what bloggers said in this post, I'm utilizing a click-bait post headline.)

News and information storms the world from every outlet, being shared and repeated and misreported and re-oriented, invented and re-invented, magical mathematical formulas hoovering up every nano-bit of content for global distribution and personal consumption - each keystroke and image commingling like turbo-charged teenage desires,captured and stored and re-visited and re-distributed .... the digitization of civilization means there is room on some remote server for your great aunt's collection of googley-eyed potato chips she's been "crafting" since all her kids grew up and left, just as every troll-fired insult, every secret, every wrinkle in Fame's fabric are all residing in numerical notations in vast continents and seas of data.

It sort of reminds me of the old-style tourist trap stores, where endless shelves of unspectacular crap are crowded with artifacts which no one really wants or needs - a mundane proof of life.

And yet here in this odd store, one could discover the works of poets and philosophers, of heads of state and victims of those same states, history, geography, science ... both real and unreal ... and then there are the commentaries of folks who have access to this tsunami of details. 

Outright lies, theories and fantasies endure among the eternal flow of what your child did or did not do, what you ate or did not eat, what you heard or saw or imagined you heard or saw, among the steady rain of outrages and screeds of the Offended. Petty cruelties live alongside endearing tales of pure goodness.

I've discovered that though I am (in digital terms) an old practitioner of online writing, I prefer to wait until I've found something worth saying, worth writing down for all or none to see and read.

The brittle and bitter and the superfluous all bellow for attention. My fingers poised above the keyboard - but what could I say? Some aspect or trend or idea strides across the digital landscape and I ponder what (if any) insight such items offer. The result is that I may decide not to add to the negativity swirling overhead, or to proffer some heartwarming tidbit, or simply to be satisfied that some other person has made note of the event.

And being somewhat non-young, I move and think slower than the hotshot young gunmen and gunwomen who stomp out into the streets for high noon showdowns. 

And so this post has an ambiguous ending -- did anything change? Was some realization made? You will have to return here to find out ... and I will be here.

Are You What You Like?

PBS Frontline aired a program titled "Generation Like", exploring the rapid spread and rise of online activity on social media websites, which left me with several thoughts.

-- Social media users disgorge details of their lives to the world while that info is collected and sorted and stored for numerous business activities, especially marketing. But who is using who?

-- Is the world (well those parts with constant online access) joined in a brave new conversation? Are users just seeking validation via shared enthusiasms?

-- The multi-faceted chain of events which follow when a user clicks a Like button or retweets or reblogs something is vast. The reductive nature of the Like concept also is vastly multi-layered, but it strikes me as a sort of yearning for less loneliness, and a plea we share to seek some change to thought or action. "Like" encapsulates so very much.

-- Optimistically, I'm thinking the rudimentary hunt for Likes and Shares are akin to the early stages of communication, and the creation of a self identity. Optimistic, I say, but only time will reveal if people are growing, devolving, or headed into an unknown social construct.

TennCare Requires Enrollment on Imaginary Online System

$35 million spent for a required online system to obtain TennCare - but it doesn't exist. Tennessee politicians have made sure to fight healthcare reform at every step, no matter who gets hurt.

"The state committed $35.7 million -- $32 million of that in federally allocated money -- to a three-year contract with global cybersecurity contractor Northrop Grumman to create a new system called the "Tennessee Eligibility Determination System," or "TEDS," which will result in a new TennCare application website.

But the project, which started in December 2012, is not completed -- and there is no projection as to when it will be finished, Gunderson said."

Secrecy, Paranoia and Daily Life

Last year a spy movie franchise based on Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne series hit movie watchers with a cornucopia of paranoia and high tech fears. Was it all fiction or perhaps just the edge of how vast and responsive surveillance and security can be?

The movie boasted scenes of drone attacks sending missiles at single individuals, embedded tracking chips, secret drug controlled assassins, a secret room with the tech crews to combine and search every camera on the planet, and on and on. And just last week the paranoia hit the US Senate as Senator Rand Paul took the floor and for 13 hours worried aloud about the abilities of drone programs run by the federal government.

Both Ludlum and Rand however are sadly out of date. Our nation has pushed past surveillance and civil liberty standards 12 years ago. Let's look at some basics of where we really are --

-- Right now it is county sheriffs and state police which are working to deploy drone surveillance, which easily by-passes federal laws or protections. The military-industrial research on Smart Dust is approaching reality and reduces the size of a drone to dust motes.

-- The creepy invasion of laptops and more by deviants who want to spy on girls and raid their personal files is surely shocking. And that same software was used by Syria recently to spy and oppose rebel forces' communications and battle plans.

-- A rise in commercial research into data acquisition in the last few decades now operates at stunning levels, and information is the endless edge of weaponry and surveillance, and many folks are happy to pay for the devices and apps that track them. Combine the info we are fairly sure we provide without thought with the info secretly acquired, and most details about you are easily found.

Returning to some previous world of less surveillance will simply not happen. The software that might be looking at you, though, can also look at the lookers.

Fake Girlfriend, Media FAIL, Football and Being 'Catfished'

Moving at Internet speed yesterday, the Sports website Deadspin revealed Notre Dame's football hero Manti Te'o did not actually have a girlfriend whose romance and sudden death made international news.

The in-depth and riveting story on Deadspin prompted the college, Te'o and the nation's into a scramble of explanations.

The fact is every media outlet failed to confirm the stories they sold as inspirational - the New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, ESPN, CBS, and many more all got caught short.

The "Catfish" phenomena is growing.

J-Rabbit's Jazzy Acoustic Christmas Music

Two Korean ladies, Jung Da Woon and Jung Hye Sun, take their acoustic music to the internet, under  the name J-Rabbit. You can keep your Gangham madness. They have their own YouTube channel and their own website loaded with music, both covers and originals. Above and below are some samples of their Christmas music, and their covers of jazz standards are mighty impressive too.

Best Political Website of the Month

It's really not a website, but a Tumblr account: Floor Charts is an archive photo collection of all the charts brought up to the floor during debates and comments In Congress. They range from awful made-at-the-last-moment monsters to the oddest moments imaginable and of course, lots of colored charts, shapes and lines.

More Great Moments in Writing

Great writing is flourishing in the comments section of Amazon (as I've recently noted). Today's example comes via the hundreds of  'reviews' of a BIC ink pen ''designed for her":

"I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day's tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks."

---

"Normally my hand writing is defined and strong, as if chiselled in granite by the Greek gods themselves, however upon signing my name I noticed that my signature was uncharacteristically meandering and looping. More worryingly the dots above the I's manifested themselves as hearts, and I found myself finishing off the signature with a smiley face and kisses. Obviously I had no choice but to challenge the delivery man to a gun fight on the rim of an erupting volcano in order to reassert my dominance. Had I not won this honourable duel this particular mistake might have resulted in a situation that no amount of expensive single malt whiskey and Cuban cigars could banish. I leave this review here as a warning to all men about the dangers of using this particular device, and suffice-it-to-say will return to signing my name with a nail gun as normal."

---

"Gone are the days when I had to wrap my delicate lady hands around an ugly man pen to write my recipes and devotional love poems to men. Now I can commit myself to writing to do lists with an oh-so-soft grip between the frail appendages that - were they stronger - could be called fingers."

TN Legislators Back Sweeping Changes to Internet Privacy via CISPA Bill

In stark contrast to the widespread awareness and opposition to the recently failed PIPA and SOPA bills, awareness of the vast and fundamental changes to internet privacy created in a new bill, called CISPA, is very low.

Part of the reason for this is that this new bill is framed as a must-have tool to protect vital computer operations from attack, a tactic Tennessee's legislative coalition is pushing, as presented in this article from the Tennessean, headlined "TN Seen As Likely Cyber Target":

"Tennessee Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper and Republican Reps. Marsha Blackburn, Chuck Fleischmann and Phil Roe have signed on to legislation that would encourage the intelligence community and private sector to share certain information to better protect computer networks from cyberthreats.

"The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act would allow private companies and the government to share any information “directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to,” a computer network. Currently, the government can’t share classified intelligence on cyberthreats with the private sector.

“Because our Pentagon and other government agencies are attacked thousands of times a day, we have learned ways to help American business and individuals guard against identity theft of their customers, disruption of electricity and water service, and other threats to daily living,” he said."

But  there is far more is at stake here, and private businesses already are further ahead when it comes to security measures, since their businesses depend of secure operations.

Opposition to the legislation and the wide range of powers it creates gets a presentation here, noting that this legislation creates several problems:

• An overly broad, almost unlimited definition of the information can be shared with government agencies. And because that info is shared “notwithstanding any law,” CISPA trumps any federal or state privacy law that currently prohibits disclosure.
• Enactment is likely to lead to expansion of the government’s role in the monitoring of private communications.
• It could shift control of government cybersecurity efforts from civilian agencies to the NSA.
• It creates a backdoor wiretap program because the information shared with the government isn’t limited to just cybersecurity, but could also be used for other purposes, such as law enforcement or by intelligence agencies.

Pages and pages of rules and regulations such as this are akin to the long and confusing paragraphs for the average Terms of Service Agreements which the average internet user encounters and OKs without really reading. Forcing private business to give their information about you to an intelligence agency may well be the norm if this bill passes - and most internet users will never even know it's happening.

Does The Internet Have A Future?

Technology leaps ahead thanks to computer usage and internet access - though some innovators fear the strongest threat yet to all-access open internet is here today, thanks to governements, businesses and even Facebook and Apple.

At least, that's the opinion of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin in this interview, part of a series of reports by the Guardian on the internet, as both support and opposition worldwide grows for the current round of new internet restricion legislation, CISPA, a new 'cyber-security act'.

"He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.

"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

Both Google and Oakley are working hard on new tech/internet delivery systems in the form of glasses which would project images and info right into your eyes, combining smartphone and, I suppose EyePhones. Actually it's called Google Glass, and here's a video of how it might be used ... funny, you'll notice in the video that a meeting at a 'bookstore" is featured. Is that supposed to be ironic?

Oakley's CEO says: 

 

"Ultimately, everything happens through your eyes, and the closer we can bring it to your eyes, the quicker the consumer is going to adopt the platform."

Google is busy in court these days too facing fines and lawsuits.

Unwired: The Final Installment of a Non-LiveBlog

This is the Third and final part of an experiment I made to live and work offline and write about my results via a sort of non LiveBlog.  (Part two is here.)

The final installment is below, and I must say that - unsurprisingly - the overall results are deeply boring and uninteresting to most everyone. The life of a writer is a fairly boring thing. I tend to work all alone, though I have often collaborated with a few folks. But mostly my time would be akin to watching paint dry. Thinking, scratching out notes and ideas, re-writing and re-writing again are dull events to observe. It's a far, far more exciting time within my brain of course, an electric-synaptic-orgy of thoughts and actions.

I wondered if my creation and eventual publication of a life lived offline would draw in readers. It has not. Not only am I a solo writer, I am a solo human - never been married, no girlfriend currently, so no spousal/near-spousal dramas or comedies to share; no children to tote from one life-affirming event to another; no financial chicanery or wizardry to recount; no daring recipes of dazzling foods to share (though I often do make a fine and tasty dish, plus there's always a fine cup of coffee close by); and as a solo writer, while I do have so many fascinating and intelligent friends, I don't always share such conversations here on this blog, though I often write about the results of my thoughts after such conversations.

Me

I do act, write, direct and produce several stage shows thru the year - and all those I shamelessly do self-promote here. And since a few (very few) have asked, this post includes a fairly recent picture of my very handsome, lovable self.

But I shall add today to this blog the final entry of my Three Part account of my Offline Experiment. Because, as any writer does, I hope what I write does get read. But in all honesty, the writing and the publishing tend to be most important to one lone person: Me.

Should you read, enjoy and share all 3 parts, dear reader, I thank you greatly. Now on with the show!!

PART 3

DAY EIGHT (continued)

11:38 a.m.

All the presentations of status, actions, events, stats, tweets, posts, results both googled and binged, all texting, messaging, and all the jabs of communication short and long … online I am aware these things will reach an audience of readers, whether one or ten or one thousand. Absent the Web, I’m back to the Old Ways of the Writer – what I’m saying and writing may never be seen by anyone.

So the basic foundation of writing is as it ever was: who is the writer writing for or to? Himself? Future generations which might find the scribbled notebooks (or in this case a reader who decides to search the memory of my lone computer)? The drive to make these sentences has been greatly fueled in the last eight to ten years by the reality that I can publish what I write on a global scale without being a lowly worker for a large or small publishing company, newspaper or any other media owner – I pay for my access to the web, write and publish as I wish, daily, weekly, hourly, and I publish whatever I wish. And I know what I write gets read (according to my stats counter) not only by readers in the U.S., but in Europe, Asia, South America – anywhere the Web exists.

And while it is true that without a publisher my earnings from my writing is limited, there still exists a large opportunity that a sizable paycheck will arrive in the future – a matter of my efforts to promote it, or perhaps someone else who decides to share it, or my skill or luck at saying something which snags the world’s imagination and wallets.

11:56 a.m.
Boop-bedoop-bah-bah … grrrrrrr.


8:20 p.m.

Televised coverage of the celeb arrivals for Oscars’ red carpet is deeply dull. Essentially, the actors and performers all parade past a crowd of mostly publicists, herded like cattle, yet politely, but the celebs seem to have little of note to say or do, aside from wearing clothes and jewelry. So few improve skills are displayed – even being interesting seems to escape them … though is the problem instead that today’s celebs don’t like this parade, even resent it?

9:15 p.m.

Producer Brian Grazer … how old is he, 60? Crazy scientist/spiky 1980’s pop star/anime hair looks odd on old people.

10:00 p.m.

Cirque du Soleil performs a showcase of … well, what was their show about? As the cast swings around the theater I keep thinking about how the producers of the Spiderman show on Broadway should have used them. I still think the backstage is the place to be these days.

So sad that Crystal doesn’t have Jack Nicholson to make jokes about this time around. He does Clooney jokes instead … but the mirth is oddly muffled.

11:30 p.m.

Let’s see – a French silent film comedy filmed in L.A., Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, Woody Allen’s script, black actresses playing maids in the 1960s, a song by the Muppets, and efx/tech awards heaped upon Martin Scorcese … the show tonite seemed steeped in nostalgia.


DAY NINE

8:00 a.m.

I’m cranky and unhappy without the ability to seek and read news from the wide range of sources via the Web. There’s such a superficial gloss, an total lack of critical thinking and a loving embrace of the spin from PR men and women on television.

9:00 a.m.

This offline experiment is a drag so I am ending it. However, I will extend it through today so that I might prepare some closing remarks … which hopefully will contain some kind of notable conclusion. Hopefully. Right now, I’m lacking any wisdom here, other than I am suffering a debilitating addiction to the internet. Does that make me pitiable or do I have merely a ‘first world problem’?

I’ve cleared more than a week without it, approaching 10 days. What time period is needed to truly flush my system of digital cyber-toxins? A month? A year? Or is it like alcohol or drug addiction – meaning I am forever an addict forced to live one day at a time with the constant threat that the addiction will return with even the slightest usage, just one email is all it would take and boom! I’m over the edge of the abyss.

How long could you go without the online world, dear reader? An hour? A day? Do you dare even attempt it?

1:00 p.m.

Grim hours ahead as I cling to my experiment in spite of a raging urge to go online …

Perhaps what has been absent is more than just my ability to amuse, entertain or even educate myself via the Web … perhaps the removal of access is also the removal of my one constant avenue of self-expression in our modern world. No access means no voice for me about the world I inhabit? That’s a chilling thought …

DAY ELEVEN

I'm going back online tomorrow .... what have I learned, if anything, trying this offline experiment? That, dear reader, is a question I will have to ponder .... and yet I wonder most -- how long could you go with no online access??