On May 13, 2015, at 10:54 AM, Robert M Ochshorn wrote:In this week's New Yorker, there's a profile of Marc Andresson (of a16z VC fame). One of the points is about how silicon valley works together harmoniously. it's not always specific collaborations, but a general direction. For example, Uber is a conspiracy made possible by a vast infrastructure: gps, mobile phones, turn by turn navigation, mobile payments, &c&c&c
Unfortunately, we don't have that symbiosis working for us creating spatial media, and are on our own to make the building blocks.
When getting discouraged about the missing symbiosis, it's important to remember that Marc Andreessen is talking about industry, not research. We're playing in a different arena.
PARC had to build their entire system from scratch -- they designed their computers from scratch, they invented their own operating systems, programming languages, programming environments, UI concepts, and applications from scratch, they invented ethernet, they invented their laser printers, etc. They had to invent their own building blocks for personal computing, because industry at the time had no such concept as "personal computing".
Dynamic spatial media is interesting work, for me, because it shares the two main properties of the PARC work --
(1) there's a yearning vision of an empowering environment of empowered thinkers. [In this case, of thinkers that are in-the-world, physically together, moving around, whole, happy.]
(2) it's coming out of a blind spot for the rest of the world. [In this case, a world focused on hallucinatory technology for isolated sedentary individuals.]
The downside of (2) is that we have to make many of our own building blocks. The upside is that we might get to live in (1).
