3a) The Future of Popular Music?

3a) Here’s a free business idea for you: Start a universal registry of NFT music owners’ names, preserved for eternity on blockchain, but updated with each change of ownership—and give free shares to record labels and star musicians who sign up as participants. The musicians and labels still retain all their intellectual property rights, but you’ve given them some sizzle to sell along with their stakes. And each of them receives partial ownership in the registry business for free, just by joining—so their participation is a no-brainer. It’s like the “name a star” registry, but with the kinds of stars that really matter.

Not only is the NFT owner recognized on this proposed blockchain, but the entire lineage, including every previous owner—traced back to original seller (or recording artist)—is preserved as well. Now Jeff Bezos can point proudly to an entire family tree tracing his ownership in Kind of Blue back to Miles Davis himself. That’s an NFT proposition to make billionaires salivate like Pavlovian poodles in a belfry. 

Ted Gioia – Would You Buy Shares in Your Favorite Musician?

5a) Daily Zen

 

5a1a) "The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic." 

Arthur C. Clarke on the future, BBC Horizons 1964

5a1b) The issue at its core is that bosses hiring people “full-time” often do so, as dramatic as it sounds, to capture their soul. Within the hours of 9 to 5 (but let’s be real, it’s more than that), they expect to own the time, attention and energy of that person. The nebulous badge of “full-time” brings with it a level of ownership of the person - they cannot go elsewhere, what they create is yours, on some level they are yours, because you have deigned them worthy of a salary and benefits and whatever other crumbs you pass their way. In return, you expect them to dedicate their existence to you - on levels of dramatic ranging from “I need to see you in the office” to “I want to make sure I can text you at 10PM and badger you about some shit that bothers me.”

Ed Z – The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains

5a1c) "Um...I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow...

5a1c) It is both baffling and banal that Clarke's prediction has not fully been realized due to social memes that appeared during the Industrial Revolution. But before we head too far down the path of humans frustrating foibles, here are some additional areas of nascent technology that imagine greater. What will the next five decades look like?

5a2) All the World's Data in DNA | Dina Zielinski | TEDxVienna

5a3) Quantum Computers, Explained With Quantum Physics

8a) Oh, the Humanity

 

8a1a) Super Mario Bros: The Human Limit

8a1b) A fascinating look into community problem solving. 

A player community spread across the internet has a puzzle to solve. At first only the best compete. But it ignites imagination among others. As a result, more efficient and quicker solutions are teased out. By both designing and using digital tracking tools, they find where they need to improve physical coordination to solve the human limit. In the end, the player community reduces nearly every movement to maximum efficiency, approaching the once impossible human limit. Given the evolution from definition to efficient action, we can assume there will be more to tell. 

       

This is more than just a speed-run solution. It is humans doing what they’ve always done best. Using technological apparatuses to work together to solve problems. While this particular story is focused on speed-running Super Mario Bros, this player community shows us at our best–the best of the human community in the miniature and specific.

8c) Force for Change

8c1) AMC said on Thursday that it did not know "how long these dynamics will last.
        "Under the circumstances, we caution you against investing in our Class A common stock, unless you are prepared to incur the risk of losing all or a substantial portion of your investment," it said.
        Analysts have also warned that the stock may be overvalued due to the rise of streaming and competition from other entertainment companies.
        David Trainer, chief executive of investment research firm New Constructs, said: "AMC's business was trending in the wrong direction even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic... We think AMC's stock is worth $0 per share, given its weak earnings, dilution from recent stock offerings and mountain of debt."
Despite that, AMC has been among the biggest winners from a spike of interest in meme stocks, fuelled in part by a new generation of social media-centric small traders.
        On Wednesday, #AMCstock was trending on Twitter in the US as investors discussed their holdings and the share price nearly doubled.
        The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler said at a hearing last month that it will report on issues around volatile "meme" stocks this summer.
He said that although online forums such as Reddit can serve as a "real community", he is concerned about "the risks that nefarious actors may try to send signals to manipulate the market".

AMC cinema chain issues warning to small investors at BBC News

8c2a) Follow Matt Levine at Bloomberg for humorous and informative analysis on financial markets, but specifically the recent spate of meme stocks and the cult of Elon Musk.

8c2b) but I do feel like a healthy dose of nonsense is what is needed here. The way to understand AMC is to abandon your conscious mind for a while and just float on a sea of vague associations. How boring to apply traditional notions of corporate finance or supply and demand to AMC. AMC is a new thing.

Matt Levine - Money Stuff at Bloomberg

8c2c) Bitcoin Slips After Musk Tweets Broken-Heart Emoji for Token

8c3) Even when cultural change happens swiftly, it's hard to be aware of what is actually changing and how it will affect the future. In some ways, the future ends up becoming subtly weirder than could be imagined in the present. 

        Um...but the idea that were living in some sort of science fiction scenario is becoming more salient

        Yes. It's a bit of a cliche to claim the future is happening in our time. Not much different than wearing a sandwich board declaring the end is near. But it seems as if the COVID pandemic produced forces that superheated the rate of change. 

        The internet has been a latent agent for change since its widely adopted use. In actuality, it hasn't done much more than prove Marshall McLuhan's point that the medium is the message. In the sense that there wasn't much more there than what appeared on the surface–a grand web of mutual communication, full of humans being human. 

        Yes. It has changed our cultural reality in some subtle and also not so subtle ways. But now it's getting truly weird. 

        The Occupy Wall Street movement did not accomplish much more than giving some bored kids a vacation from reality. Granted, I am being reductionist. But take meme stocks as an example. Even if concentrated in a few isolated firms, they are driving financial markets. 

        Value is a concept of socially constructed belief. It's utility is based on what we believe that utility might be. The best tool for the job also requires an awareness of how to use the tool with efficiency and skill. Otherwise, it's just an inert artifact. 

        For benefit or detriment, the people have discovered the power of the internet. File sharing, black hat hacking, 4Chan, QAnon, all these were arguably pranks. Children playing in the shallows. But from potentially terrifying ransomware hacks to the populist uprising of r/WallStreetBets, the pandemic seemingly produced enough time and boredom to turn the internet into a true force for change. 

        Force for change. How often that phrase, or something like it, is used as a beacon of hope. An indicator that this place we are in won't last forever. that the future is brighter. I tend to think so. But we should also be careful what we wish for. The ripples of the pandemic have only begun to show. 

8b) Thing or Device?

8b1) Twitter announced on Thursday the launch of Twitter Blue, the company’s first subscription service designed for power users willing to pay a monthly fee for exclusive features.
        Twitter Blue users will get an Undo Tweet feature that allows them to set a customizable timer of up to 30 seconds to take back a tweet if it needs to be fixed. The feature is not quite an edit button, a feature often requested by users, but it will allow subscribers to preview what their tweets look like and adjust them before they’re published. 

Twitter launches its first subscription service at CNBC

8b2) For Borgmann, a device is a thing that is used as a means to an end. Therefore, a device is seen as "the compound of commodity and machinery" while "the distinctive pattern of division and connection of its components is the device paradigm. This term is meant to signify or distinguish between technological devices and "focal things and practices," which matter to people in their everyday affairs.
        A focal thing is something of ultimate concern and significance, which may be masked by the device paradigm, and must be preserved by its intimate connection with practice. Borgmann used the case of wine to explain this. He cited that the focal thing in winemaking involves the implements used to produce wine. Wine becomes a device when it employs technology and machinery not merely to produce wine but obtain specific qualities such as grapey, smooth, light, and fruity flavors or clean and clear appearance.
        As technological devices increase the availability of a commodity or service, they also push these devices into the background where people do not pay attention to their destructive tendencies. For example, the technology of central heating means that warmth is readily available and family members can retreat into the solitude of their rooms instead of working to chop wood or stoke the fires. Social interaction is reduced and the family struggles to find activities that enable such nurturing and care for each other. The ubiquitous nature of information technology also makes it an important example of device paradigm.

Device paradigm at Wikipedia

8b3) See 060321_2b

2b)060321_2a2 Counterpoint

 2b1) The progress of technology, says Borgmann, is driving us further into what he calls “the device paradigm”. The point of a device lies solely in its output — what he calls its commodity. The commodity of central heating is warmth. The commodity of a car is transportation. And unlike a thing, a device gives its users that commodity disconnected from the process of its creation. Frozen food lets you have a meal without cooking it for yourself. Central heating lets you have warmth without fussing around with a wood stove. A device is a kind of shortcut to its commodity. And if we think that all we really want is that commodity — then we want the device to hide from us all the mechanisms by which it creates those commodities. We want the process shoved out of sight, excised from our lives. So we make better devices, that give us faster access to what we think we want. They are better, from our perspective, because they further disentangle the commodity from all these other burdensome elements.
        Of course, the key is that we only think these other elements are burdensome. But these burdensome elements also drive us into the complex world, says Borgmann. They drive us into social relationships, into activity, into a rich and sensuous experience of the detailed world. Devices divest us of that. They give us only the thing that we thought we had wanted. But that’s good only if we know exactly what’s good for us.

C. Thi Nguyen – What Zoom Removes

2b2) Even though on some level Nguyen takes a more pessimistic view of the technological apparatus that is a hallmark of human life than Deutsch does below, they largely agree on the ability of humans to think beyond their tools. 

        The great joke of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that the zero-gravity toilet has a complicated list of instructions. Humanity has escaped their terrestrial cradle, only to be trapped by the most basic biological function. 

        But this is also Deutsch's point. 

        Utopia is monotony. Life without change is monotony. Creativity is flattened and the horizon of change stretches beyond the human lifetime. But life itself, the memetic and biological concept carries and integrates change. Creating layers of complexity forming and reforming its environment to its purpose. Change quickens and is controlled. Unintended consequences abound, but are eventually bound.  Creating more unintended consequences and contributing to the cycle of change. Making each new (r)evolutionary act yet another opportunity to stave off monotony.

        Zoom is a but a blip in technological history. Certainly not in Nguyen's life. But Nguyen is also offered a chance to use that most human skill, reflection. And pass it on to us. In the end, he has changed the consideration of the device allowing him to continue to use the device without allowing the device to use him. 

        Deutsch says that "Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces. We are users of cosmic forces." As Deutsch appears "in person" by remote at TED, as Nguyen teaches "in person" on Zoom, our reality changes. Explanatory information is passed on, offering us all an opportunity to control cosmic forces. 

 

Things spread their tendrils through our lives, they reshape our interactions and procedures in a thousand countless ways.

And isn't that the wonder of being human. 

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