Tidied up the sidebar a bit here. Happily deleted the Google Ads (what a strange and distracting experiment advertising proved to be. I mean universally, not here, where I think I got $10 or so across the decade. Entirely undistracted.). I felt sadder cutting down all the links to other people. The people are still here, but the destinations are long gone. I’ll replace them soon I hope, but I didn’t like the smack of anachronism a link to another person’s dead webpage had. That said, looking through some of the older blog entries here, maybe the Web and the Unixy way I had of looking at it was always a nostalgia-tainted vision of the future. Like we were recapitulating the dreams of the Seventies in an attempt to shove away the grip of the present. A short circuit.
I get the same generational cross-patch feel watching J.C.R. Licklider speaking in 1986. You can’t quite place where Licklider is in time here: he’s an old man, over 70, talking about man-machine prosthesis and virtual reality goggles as though they were ancient experiment. But you know that everyone there was looking in a straight line to the future, bucket-brigading these ideas out of the past, smuggling them past all those Eighties DOS boxes.
Those moments are disorienting, when a new future finds its secret history. When all the Rubyists began to find a joy (ha) and a history in Vim, a tool built for a different world; when young artists find themselves veering toward skills thirty-years gone instead of what they are supposed to learn in college. It’s not just about fashion, it’s about a second victory of an old school, on the verge of a total eclipse. There is a political analogy here; right now there always is with me.
(The other thing that’s caught my eye is differences in writing style in 2001. I’m possibly reading too much into a drily factual blog entry, but does even Glenn nowadays write like Glenn wrote then?
February 7th, 2016 at 6:25 am
Maybe your experiment will spur me to clean up my incredibly old list of links. Oh Lord I kind of don’t even want to look.
I want to hear more about the political analogy, of course.
February 7th, 2016 at 9:07 pm
Well I guess the political analogy (is it an analogy?) is the revitalisation of much of the traditional Left, which definitely had a rough patch in communicating its ideas between c.1989-2008, after the fall of the Wall but before the Great Dyspeptic Capitalistic Flailabout. Easier to see a lineage with many ideas kicking around now from the 70s and 80s than that period.
February 8th, 2016 at 8:13 am
It can be easier to figure out useful lenses to use when another one clearly hasn’t worked. And this makes me think that if I were awful I would write an app that gamified “which social science lenses make sense of this situation?”
February 9th, 2016 at 4:54 am
“maybe the Web and the Unixy way I had of looking at it was always a nostalgia-tainted vision of the future”
Our visions of the future are always actually our idealised notions of the past, with jetpacks.