After both Nicolas Nova and Rudy Rucker recommended Accelerando to me, I bought it and just started today. This passage caught my eye.

Manfred [the protagonist] is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them…There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.

Not too far off from the truth for many of us!

Bruce Sterling said something similar in his talk on Design Futurism

Futurist activity of “scanning” – newspapers Internet, television, conferences, other futurists, landmark events, reports, weak signals. Always asking “What are the things out there that might affect clientele (which could be anything!)?”

Note: Nicolas Nova blogged the same quote several days before I did. Copycat or coincidence?

Yeah, dude. Keep eating sugar cereal like this and you’re going to have a serious diabetes problem. You already look like you’re suffering from ADD. You (or your guardian) might want to have a doctor check that out.

I’m attending an interesting event next week. It’s a two-day summit on the topic of (as far as I can tell) what we want from our cities in the future. There’s an implied (to me) technological bias, but not any assumption that technology is good.

This is not a topic I feel very expert in, not even very well informed, or strongly opinionated about. Given the discussion-based slant the organizers are taking, this could be a risk, but I’m hoping that diving into the issues will unearth some perspectives on, well, living life in the spaces we live in, that I haven’t previously written or talked about.

Tipping the scales for me, therefore, to attend, are the facts that the event is free and local and especially that organizers/presenters include Eric Paulos and Matt Jones, two big-thinking design/culture/technology folks whom I admire.

This summit is part of a larger event going on in San Jose (electronic art, and presumably some other themes; I can’t really parse the details or remember the name of the conference without regular use of the web) – I won’t be part of that.

If you are attending the interactive city summit, let me know!

You can’t look forward without looking backwards. LukeW writes about Web2.0 – a buzzword that some will be sick of already while others have certainly never heard before. Luke’s soundbites are likely only to confuse those outside the geekstream, but I’ll say that to me it refers to (and maybe this is obvious) the next era or (ulp) paradigm shift in dot-com companies. I suspect this meme is connected to the story about Silicon Valley being “back” (in terms of VC money, IPOs, new companies, jobs, and just general dot-com-type excitement).

An important and timely companion to thinking ahead is to look at where we’ve been. Kevin Kelly, writing in Wired, looks back at 10 years of the Internet in We Are The Web. Elsewhere in that issue is an excellent timeline that ironically doesn’t seem to be available online.

Camelon, touted as CLOTHING OF THE FUTURE – IN THE PRESENT is a multi-purpose garment that comes from the Renaissance Faire/SCA community. An interesting piece of clothing design, through pulling some drawstrings etc. you can convert into four different dresses, two skirts, pants, shirts, shorts, capes, a poncho, a tunic, a handbag, a hauling bag, sleeping bag, or a pillow. Aesthetically, I thought the future stopped looking like the past around the time of 2112, but perhaps that’s just me.

Also, be sure to check out the Cameleon aka Bill’s Pants video on this page.

Thanks, Connie!