David Bowie on an interview with Jeremy Paxman from the BBC said that in the 80s and 90s music started becoming more about the subgroups and the communities than the artists. To him the epitome is the rave, where the crowd is as important as the performer, if not more.
He said in 1999 that the Internet had created a fragmentation of views, and that we weren’t even at the tip of the iceberg of what the Internet would do to society. “It’s not a tool, it’s an alien lifeform.”
Paxman insisted that it was just a different delivery system, Bowie honed in on how the state of content would be beyond anything we imagined. He said that the interplay between the user and the provider would change our ideas of what mediums were all about.
“Do you know how expensive it is to get involved in the internet?”
I knew the Internet was going to be bigger than just a medium, but did not call remix culture, and Patreon, and the creator economy like he did.
We lost Bowie too soon. I can’t imagine the things he would have gotten up to with crypto. Nevermind NFTs, he would have gone nuts with creator tokens - he actually launched Bowie Bonds to securitize his collection back in the 90s.
The man was talking about how the Internet would blur the line between creators and users through sharing and mixing a full year before Metallica whined in court about how Napster was being mean to them.
You can watch the whole interview below.
Let’s talk about some things that we as open source creators need to get better at, including supporting other developers ourselves.
(A talk I delivered at at the first CodeDAO meet-up during Berlin Blockchain Week in August 2019, about sustainable open source development).
My goals for this talk are to:
A talk on conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, while discussing mistakes I’ve made.
Creativity, innovation, mash-ups, and science fiction writers… as a lens on lessons from the software industry.
I delivered this talk at SAP Inside Track Berlin in September 2018. The audience was mostly enterprise developers, almost all of them specifically working with SAP as a platform.
Given how many companies I’ve seen flirting with the idea of distributed ledgers, I thought it would be useful to give people an idea of which cases I see as being a good fit for them, to give them a leg up the next time it enters the discussion.
I delivered Remember The Rubber Hose, a talk on privacy and distributed applications, at DappCon Berlin 2018. Skipping the introduction and going straight to the beef…
Last week I had the privilege to speak at infiniTIFF Summit, a part of the Transylvanian Film Festival dealing with technology, storytelling and experimental narratives.
I wrote Stories We Tell Ourselves for the summit. Below is a slightly longer version of the talk I gave.
I got invited to speak at Monkigras 2018, a superb conference on software, technology and craft. This year’s theme was “Sustaining Craft”. I wrote and delivered It’s about the curry - you’ll find a (close enough) transcript below.
I’ve been advising a startup on the data transformation space. As part of this, we re-wrote the core engine in Clojure. The new version is, at the worst case, 16 times as fast in the same hardware, and in some cases over 200 times faster. And it does it with a fraction of the lines of code.
We did this in under 3 months of part-time work. We couldn’t focus our entire attention on it, as we had other concerns as well - I was involved with general team and management tasks, and the second developer was helping on other internal projects as well. To further raise the bar: we had to keep it functionality-compatible with the current version, so I had to get acquainted with the existing feature set, and it was the other developer’s first Clojure project.
Clojure made our lives so much easier. But this is not a post about why Clojure is cool.