When the app Yo was released earlier this year I was pretty sceptical. It was too simple to not be a giant troll by some bros poking fun at the mobile/app/social space. I mean it was released on April fools day and only did one thing which was to send “Yo” to a friend via a message which without context was pretty useless. My first thought was to create a competing app called WTF Bro!
During the 2013 election campaign Tony Abbott repeatedly promised to build the roads of the 21st century. Sadly, this wasn’t a nifty metaphoric flourish reflecting a program of investment in Internet infrastructure and education to drive economic growth. When Abbott said roads, he meant roads; coal miners need roads, ports, and cheap labour, not the Internet. You could be forgiven for thinking Abbott was actually saying he would rebuild the roads of 20th century, rather than the digital roads of the 21st century.
There have been a lot of words written about the European Court of Justice ruling in May this year which forced Google to remove links to content when requested. Here are some I’ve written to expose how the issue is being handled in a simplistic way by most of the media. The European Courts ruled that according to personal data protections search engines (Google & Bing) are “obliged to remove from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of a person’s name links to web pages” if they are “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”.
After 12 years in many different roles, I have moved on from Melbourne IT. When I started as a contractor in the development team, the company had had two massive rounds of redundancies and was busy transitioning from being the monopoly registrar of .com.au domain names in Australia, to registrar of domains in a competitive market. Now the business is in another transition, having purchased Australian competitor NetRegistry, and seeing in the introduction of 800 new domain spaces like .company, .technology, and .wtf
When I walked into the office with my sleek iPad Air tucked away in my new Kit Universal Bluetooth Keyboard Case, a coworker looked at it and said, “What the fuck is that?” After explaining to him that with a good keyboard I could ditch the laptop altogether and lighten the load of carrying my 4.5kg corporate issue Dell, he seemed to accept it, just. Steve Jobs famously “had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display” before the iPad or iPhone and I’m positive he would be more horrified with …
Two things happened recently that made me pay attention to wearable tech and the idea of the quantified self, and how both highlights how tech culture is getting it wrong. The first was over lunch when I saw a senior manager plug her Fitbit into her iPhone and sync up her data. I cheekily asked her what it did, and she told me it told her how many steps she had taken and show she had slept. I responded that I always knew how well I had slept by the way I felt when I woke up. She didn’t disagree, but the …
I was reading Dr Zeus’ Horton Hears a Who to the kids the other night, and I got to the bit where the well-meaning compassionate Horton meets a nasty Kangaroo who laughs at Horton’s desire to look after a “speck of dust that is able to yell”. The speck is of course a tiny planet inhabited by a race of tiny humanoid creatures called Whos, and Horton is their hero. The Kangaroo rather cruelly tells Horton, “I think you’re a fool” and quite frankly behaves like an asshole stealing the speck of dust and ignoring Horton’s meek request Please don’t harm all …
Over the Easter break, I’ve been inhaling the excellent Netflix series House of Cards, watching the Machiavellian maneuverings of the brilliant and positively frightening Frank Underwood as he journeys from Congress to The White House. It was somewhere near the end of the first series whilst watching ABC’s Q and A that I saw Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online and author of a glowing apologia of Attorney General George Brandis, announce himself as a Marxist Libertarian.
“The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony I have been appointed judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our Old Commandant in all matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the apparatus. The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt. Other courts could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many heads and, in addition, have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case here, or at least it was not that way with …
For my first twenty eight years I celebrated my birthday, today in fact, with my sister. The sharing of a birthday makes it less a narcissistic celebration of self and more a celebration of self hood, the acknowledgment of a shared primordial experience of birth, blood, tears, and laughter. Sadly, my sister died of a drug overdose when she was twenty eight, just a little over a month after our birthday. Most birthdays I make sure I raise a glass to her and reflect on what she, her friends, family, and I have missed due to her early departure. It …
