What was New & Rheingoldian: April - July 1995
July 21, 1995
Today is the tomorrow we thought about yesterday, so here is another Filtering tools are the way to go.
July 19, 1995
- If you ever use the prefix "cyber," you really owe it to yourself to learn something about Norbert Wiener, the boy genius, eccentric, and moralist who actually stopped working on government-sponsored computer research because he didn't like the way his discoveries were transformed into weapons.Read all about it in Ex-Prodigies and Antiaircraft Guns, the latest installment of Tools for Thought.
July 14, 1995
- The last and latest installment from my latest Tokyo chapter of Rheingold Roadshows finds me in a Tokyo branch of Electronic Cafe, International, a place I call Cyberia in Shibuya. I ought to note that today is exceptionally hot in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am sitting in my back yard, writing this with my laptop, totally nekkid. Gotta iced java right here. Ahhhhh. Whoever said cyberspace was unnatural?
July 10, 1995
Yes, yes! I'm seized by the tweak!
July 9, 1995
July 2, 1995
I'm off to Tokyo tomorrow. Maybe I'll format some html on the plane! If I'm really nutz I'll plug into one of those airplane phones and update my site from the air, for about a hundred bucks in telephone charges. But I can't leave the country without saying something about the stoopid "Rimm Study" of "Pornography on the Information Superhighway."
- It turns out that Time Magazine based its lurid "Cyberporn" cover issue last week on research so flawed that "bogus" is an appropriate description. Read about the bogus porno research in the latest installment of Tomorrow..
June 28, 1995
Yes, yes, YES! I'm still tweakin, with no end in sight. Do you detect the motion? My website is beginning to wheel, slowly, like a great vortex, sucking my life down into it. WHeeee!
- My html guru, Justin Hall, turned me onto backgrounds and tables. A new background now frames my art gallery, Pixel Theater.
- And it's time for another rollicking chapter of Tools for Thought. This time, the infonaut in the spotlight is one of the all time great Faustian figures, the grandfather of all present inhabitants of cyberspace, none other than the flambouyant, the cosmodemonic, the original thermonuclear game theorist himself, Johnny von Neumann.
June 25, 1995
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Yes, I've noticed that I'm tweaking daily. It's an obsession, okay? Nobody move and nobody gets hurt. Sunday was an epiphany. The image of a Snaketree jumped out of the place that the good hot gooey stuff comes from, answering that age-old question, "what does he mean by "Photonucleic Art?"
June 24, 1995
- The center is everywhere now because the Net propagates tools from any node to all nodes, if the tools do the job. Innovation originates at the edges and propagates instantly (IRC from Finland, MUDs from a college in England, The Web from a physics laboratory in Geneva). Books have been written about the way a global economy is emerging from the information and communication technology, but it doesn't really sink in that it isn't just the multinational corporations who are doing world business until you get away from San Francisco, Tokyo, London, and see what's happening in the provinces. Two more Tomorrow columns are my eyewitness reports from the wired centers of the infosphere: Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada, and Chillicothe, Ohio.
June 16, 1995
June 14, 1995
June 5, 1995
- Although I seem to have some karmic connection to Tibetan lamas, living and dead, my guru du jour is actually a smartass Swarthmore student. Meet My Guru, Justin Hall.
June 1, 1995
May 27, 1995
May 25, 1995
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In the early 1980s, I read an article in The Scientific American by Alan Kay about "Microelectronics and the Personal Computer." Kay's ideas about using computers to extend human capacities to learn, imagine, communicate, and design captured my curiosity. He had been working at a place called the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. So I pestered PARC until I got some gigs writing articles for Xerox in-house publications. It was then that I discovered the potential of personal computers as mind-amplifiers. I had not yet been introduced to virtual communities. I explored BBSs and The Source in the early 1980s, but didn't happen onto the Well until 1985. Something big was brewing, and everybody else seemed to be putting their attention on the new gold rush underway in Silicon Valley, and few people were looking at the decades-long cooperative effort, most of the way against the mainstream, that went into creating personal computers and computer networks. I wrote Tools for Thought in 1983. It was published in 1985. On the publication date, Simon & Schuster dissolved their computer book division. Then the local sales rep called to tell me they had misprinted the catalog and left my book off. Naturally, the book sank like a stone. They didn't tell me it was out of print until it was also out of stock. I only have a couple of copies. I sent one to Alan Turner, who made the best bid on the WELL for typing it into ASCII and turning the ASCII into html. I hope to post a new chapter every few weeks. It's an interesting retrospective look at my first foray into futurism.
May 18, 1995
- Another assault on civil liberties in cyberspace as the US Senate Subommittee on Terrorism meets to considering censorship of dangerous information on the Internet. We need to understand and explain to our fellow citizens why Tomorrow column.
May 13, 1995
- Finally got my report together about the digital culture scene in Europe. Internet culture is just beginning to break out in Paris. Meet Lionel Lumbroso and Annick Morel, who will be checking in regularly with progress reports as the City of Light switches on.
- The Net, the Web, virtual communities, civic networking are alive, healthy, and throbbing in Netherlands. A couple hundred have been online for a while now, a few score have been activists; now, they are being joined by thousands as telecommunications deregulation and commercial providers bring Internet to Dutch computer users. I think it pays to pay attention to what comes out of a country where taxpayers support artists, and the largest Internet provider was started by hackers. Here are a dozen or so of the people who are creating the scene today. You'll find them, along with my Japanese and French reports, sprouting off Rheingoldian Roadshows. Or you can go directly to my meeting with a savvy young Internet entrepreneur, a drop-in to a media think-tank, meet a couple dozen Dutch digerati I encountered in De Balie, a cool public place where they mix coffee, culture, politics, and media. Amsterdam has a lot going for it, in real life and the virtual world.
- Two more Tomorrow columns: One about Buffy Sainte Marie and Native Americans online another about an exciting way to get students excited about technology.
April 29, 1995
- I've completely revamped Rheingoldian Roadshows to include pix and words about Digital Worlders in Amsterdam, Paris, and Tokyo. My encounters with Tibetans and other Extra Terrestrials now have their own section, Zeitgeist Busters, and I've begun a new anthropixological study of intriguing graffitti from around the world, Handwriting on the Wall.
April 16, 1995
April 10, 1995
Brainstorms | New & Rheingoldian
by Lionel Lumbroso, Rheingoldian reporter in Paris 