Archive: March 28th, 2011

The first Event Apart of the year has just kicked off here in Seattle. Every Event Apart is excellent, but the Seattle instantiation has two extra things going for it:

1. a great venue and
2. a really great hotel with some colourful history.

Jeffrey opened the proceedings with a long-zoom stroll down memory lane, giving us a history lesson of technology, the internet, the web and web standards.

Reflecting on the history of the internet today seems especially poignant with the recent passing of Paul Baran. Which reminds me…

Ten years ago, the Zelig-like Stuart Brand conducted an interview with Paul Baran. You can read the transcript on Wired.

It’s fantastic! A mixture of cold-war history and eerie emergent network effects:

It didn’t take very long before we started seeing all sorts of wonderful properties in this model. The network would learn where everybody was. You could chop up the network and within half a second of real-world time it would be routing traffic again. Then we had the realization that if there’s an overload in one place, traffic will move around it. So it’s a lot more efficient than conventional communications. If somebody tries to hog the network, the traffic routes away from them. Packet switching had all these wonderful properties that weren’t invented — they were discovered.

The word “awesome” is over-used. I’m about to over-use it some more.

The internet is mostly awesome. Some human beings are also awesome. When you combine the two, you get awesome things. Here are just two such awesome things:

1. Anton Peck is a brilliant illustrator. He’s currently executing a project called 100 Little Robots. Anton will craft postcards for 100 people, each postcard displaying a unique hand-drawn robot. If you want to be one of those 100 people, order your robot card now. I got mine and it is, well …awesome.
2. James Bridle is a brilliant writer. He just finished a series of articles called Seven posts about the future. Read them all. Seriously. They are all wonderful and the final story reads like a Nerdpunk copulation of Salman Rushdie and William Gibson.

Awesome.