The Casual Optimist Posts

Pharmaceutical Sincerity — Michael Bourne on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 40 years on for The Millions:

I can still remember sitting in the basement of my parents’ house in Northern California, practically whizzing myself with delight at that dizzying list of pharmaceuticals. I was fourteen and I’d read Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and all the other books about and for nice, well-heeled boys whose lives have gone a little off the rails, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was different. It wasn’t just the mind-blowing drug use or the lusty middle finger Thompson seemed to be giving straight America; no, what was so startling, so riveting to my fourteen-year-old’s mind was how sincere the whole thing seemed.

Base Camp — Levi Stahl compares J.G. Ballard to Joseph Conrad (via The Second Pass):

Ballard’s scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad’s company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad’s characters, Ballard’s have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home–and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn’t totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Disrupting Molecules — Apple designer Jonathan Ive profiled in the Daily Mail (of all places):

Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist’s atelier.

With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the ‘design’ begins. It’s a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It’s what Ive calls ‘effort and care beyond the usual’. He has very few distractions…

…With the MacBook Air, he told me it’s, metallurgically speaking, about as far as you can actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm and engaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outer limits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, with getting to what he calls the ‘local maximum’, is what gives Apple products their extreme appearance.

Semantic Slippage — The Information by James Gleick reviewed in The New York Times:

[In] its ordinary usage, “information” is a hard word to get a handle on (even after a recent revision, the Oxford English Dictionary still makes a hash of its history). It’s one of those words, like “objectivity” and “literacy,” that enable us to slip from one meaning to the next without letting on, even to ourselves, that we’ve changed the subject.

That elusiveness is epitomized in the phrase “information age,” which caught on in the 1970s, about the same time we started to refer to computers and the like as “information technology.” Computers clearly are that, if you think of information in terms of bits and bandwidth. But the phrases give us license to assume that the stuff sitting on our hard drives is the same as the stuff that we feel overwhelmed by, that everybody ought to have access to, and that wants to be free.

Kick Out the Jams — Wired Magazine profiles everyone’s favourite funding platform Kickstarter (via Waxy):

While plenty of people are willing to extol Kickstarter’s earth-shattering potential, its founders are not among them. “We never had change-the-world aspirations,” says cofounder Yancey Strickler, who insists he just wanted to help artists get stuff made. (Strickler’s team approves every project before it’s posted, and Strickler has personally funded 340 of them, making him the site’s greatest patron.) But the world may have other plans for the site. The Kickstarter guys may have kick-started something bigger than they ever intended…[J]ust as Twitter outgrew its beginnings as a humble messaging system, Kickstarter may not be able to maintain its low profile much longer. “The most interesting companies demonstrate emergent behavior,” says Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, which invested in Kickstarter. “People’s use of the service is never what the creators intended.”

And finally… Just in case you’ve been in a dark room with the lights off for the last 24 hours (and who could blame you?),  a US federal judge has rejected Google’s legal settlement with authors and publishers reached in 2008. Read about at The Guardian, The New York Times, or the media outlet of your choice.  MobyLives stops just short of dancing on it’s grave, and Jacket Copy looks at what might come next.

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