The 40-Year-Old Pot Virgin | Vice
“Jamen Shively only started smoking herb a-year-and a-half ago, but he’s been making up for lost time ever since. Now an aspiring marijuana mogul, as well as a dedicated cannabis connoisseur, the 45-year-old former Microsoft executive even credits the very conception of his latest high-profile start-up venture to the enlightening influence of some top grade ganja. Specifically, a powerful sativa strain he broke out at an exploratory business meeting last November, just days after Washington state voters overwhelmingly approved pot legalization.
‘I pulled out my stash, the dankest of the dank,’ he recalls of that fateful occasion. ‘We fired up, and the concepts we generated were just incredible. Off the charts. Until the idea started to flow into creating a global juggernaut in what’s going to be a trillion dollar market. We brainstormed so many different aspects of it, including the supply chain, financing, geopolitics, lobbying, genetics, even greenhouses. And it quickly became clear that we were sitting on an absolute gold mine.’”
Read on.
“What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.”
“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
“Allows user to take easy, hands-free photos at any time by just screaming as loud as possible”
Thirty-Five Arguments Against Google Glass
“I put forth the modest proposition that Google Glass, conjured and constructed and conceived only in terms of “cool” and propped up by ostensible “journalists” who have never thought to question Mr. Brin’s brilliant PR, could pose more problems to our world than any digital invention we have seen in some time. Contrary to Mr. Brin’s suggestions, his device will not “free” us. It will quite possibly destroy several vital qualities of life we now take for granted, preying upon kind and decent and hardworking people who are still playing pickup from an economic blitzkrieg in which they had no power, little hope, and no control. One would think that a man born in Moscow under Brezhnev would grasp the cruel irony of being directly responsible for an entirely new set of encroachments upon freedom and human possibility. On the other hand, great hills of money often move mountains in other ranges.
Here are thirty-five arguments against Google Glass:
ARGUMENT ONE
It could destroy whatever shreds of privacy we have left.
This is the greatest criticism against Google Glass. So let’s look at this in terms of law. If present terms are not refashioned by Congress in the next year to meet the realities of 2014 digital life, Google may be helped by current law, which may not protect the American public from the “electronic communications” of video recorded from a pair of glasses and uploaded to Google. The Stored Communications Act, drafted and legislated in 1986, was put into place well before webmail, social media, and cloud computing were realities. And until the SCA is updated by legislators to reflect today’s world, it remains possible that a Google Glass video — if it is defined as an “electronic communication service” comparable to email — will remain unprotected because of how the SCA now defines “electronic storage.” (See these recent cases for the present state of affairs, including Jennings v. Jennings, in whichthe South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing another person’s email doesn’t count as a violation — even when the other person correctly guesses the email account’s security questions. But see also Viacom Int’l, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., 253 F.R.D. 256, 258, 264 (S.D.N.Y. 2008), in which a court defined YouTube as “remote computing service” — the counterpart to “electronic communication service” — without supplying a reason.)”
READ ON.
“In the next generation or two—say the next 30 to 60 years—there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony.”
![New York City to Ban Awls | The Awl
“First they came for the sodas—wait, actually, first they came for the black people. But after the City mounted a sophisticated campaign to harass and subjugate basically all non-white people, up to and including Forest Whitaker, then they came for the sodas. Now, the New York City council is going to vote to forbid the possession of awls by minors. We are not even joking, somehow. […]
This is, essentially, an addition to the law banning boxcutters for all people under 22. (How do young people open boxes?) We feel specially situated to comment upon this addition. In short: we are strongly opposed!
Most people, we find, actually have no idea what an awl is. We regularly find well-educated and lovely people who pronounce “The Awl” as if it were named “The Owl” or “The Ale.” No other three-letter word causes people more anxiety. And now, this legislation will just push awls further underground, at the very least in the province of pronunciation. When only criminals have awls, will The Awl be criminal?
Soon there will be nothing left to legally own in this society, and then we will not be able to pronounce anything.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/7b95b1cf85d9b85664e9b773f3eab3c7/tumblr_mjlw2sAUKy1qzprlbo1_500.png)
New York City to Ban Awls | The Awl
“First they came for the sodas—wait, actually, first they came for the black people. But after the City mounted a sophisticated campaign to harass and subjugate basically all non-white people, up to and including Forest Whitaker, then they came for the sodas. Now, the New York City council is going to vote to forbid the possession of awls by minors. We are not even joking, somehow. […]
This is, essentially, an addition to the law banning boxcutters for all people under 22. (How do young people open boxes?) We feel specially situated to comment upon this addition. In short: we are strongly opposed!
Most people, we find, actually have no idea what an awl is. We regularly find well-educated and lovely people who pronounce “The Awl” as if it were named “The Owl” or “The Ale.” No other three-letter word causes people more anxiety. And now, this legislation will just push awls further underground, at the very least in the province of pronunciation. When only criminals have awls, will The Awl be criminal?
Soon there will be nothing left to legally own in this society, and then we will not be able to pronounce anything.”
The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It | Wired
People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web.
The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream, a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired almost exactly 16 years ago.
This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.
It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: Picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment … Until you touch it, and then, the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a sort of reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down, and the pages start turning again.
Today, this diary-like structure is supplanting the spatial one as the dominant paradigm of the cybersphere: All the information on the internet will soon be a time-based structure. In the world of bits, space-based structures are static. Time-based structures are dynamic, always flowing — like time itself.
The web will be history.
