There are a variety of ways to measure the degrees to which an *out there idea becomes somehow normalized and convention: (in no particular order) (1) It becomes bandied about at conferences and lectures and so forth; (2) Someone writes a book about it; (3) It is a canonical hashtag; (4) It is a canonical normal, ol…

Further to the point of how stories, ideas and language can shape the world in material ways, this came out of the blue on the thread of something or another, the family motto of Phil’s clan, of Australia:

[[This just in. Sounds fun and curious. Almost makes me not loathe the academic conference context if only because the topic seems far enough beyond the typical that it may in fact suggest that there is an active imagination or two left in the tower.]]

Well, see there. The trouble with writing weeknotes at the beginning of the week following when I was supposed to write them is that I don’t easily recall what happened in the week in which the week’s notes refer. Damnit.

An exceptionally short, late Friday dispatch just as a waypoint on the way to *then — the audio *podcast from the Design Fiction panel with Jennifer Leonard, Sascha Pohflepp, Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy, Bruce Sterling and myself, she’s available now. As Bruce mentioned — it is missing something without the video, wh…

Here’s that scene from The Dark Knight where Batman has secretly installed a surveillance system that traces the legal, moral and ethical contours iconic to ubiquitous computing networked devices of this sort. What’s going on — as explained in the short bit of dialog — is that all of the mobile phones used by all of…

Well, it was half SXSW 2010 and half back in the studio with some exciting, hungry activities moving things into the happy quadrant. SXSW was a wonderful swirl of head-exploding conversations. Scott Kraft helped me with the material metaphor for the Nokia 1100 — it’s the Mercedes 200 of mobile communications. Like t…

The week before was mostly reassessing the Trust project communication and making notes on what might need to be redone and what might need to be tossed out. The communication itself has a good rhythm although the last share of it — well, basically it felt like falling while skating, but never quite hitting the grou…

The variety of permissions and their signals in Austin Texas during SXSW 2010. No firearms, smoking’s okay — and no firearms — licensed or unlicensed — because of this peculiar 51% law in Texas, versus only the forbidding of unlicensed firearms which means, like..there exists unlicensed firearms. Just people buying…