Towards a leisure society

2007/2008 deja vu?

In my inbox from an estate agent:

Hello all,

I have just taken on a beautiful house, 10 minute walk from Turnham Green tube.

I have attached some pictures, Please have a look. I have no other details and to be honest, the way the market is, it will be sold before I have them!

Excellent Condition Throughout  South Facing Garden  Period Property  Three Double Bedrooms  Two Bathrooms  Double Reception Room  Elegant Hallway  Cellar  Dining Room  Fitted Kitchen  10 Minutes Walk to Turnham Green Tube Station

I can possibly get some one off viewings.

Please let me know if you would like to view. My direct line is xxxx

Thank you 

Or will this time be different because we know the government will continue to backstop?

Is life digital?

Reading Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. Absolutely fascinating.

This from the updated version had me absolutely gripped:

A computer is a real machine, hardware in a box. But at any particular time it is running a program that makes it look like another machine, a vitual machine. This has long been true of all computers, but modern ‘use-friendly’ computers bring home the point especially vividly. At the time of writing, the market leader in user-friendliness is widely agreed to be the Apple Macintosh. Its success is due to a wired-in suite of programs that make the real hardware machine - whose mechanisms are, as with any computer, forbiddingly complicated and not very compatible with human intuition - look like a different kind of machine: a virtual machine, specifically designed to mesh with the human brain and the human hand. The virtual machine known as the Macintosh User Interface is recognizably a machine. It has buttons to press, and slide controls like a hi-fi set. But it is a virtual machine. …..

I now turn to the other background idea that we need to import from computer science, the idea of serial and parallel processors. Today’s digital computers are mostly serial processors. They have one central calculating mill, a single electronic bottleneck through which all data have to pass when being manipulated. They can create an illusion of doing many things simultaneously because they are so fast. A serial computer is like a chess master playing twenty opponents but actually rotating around them. Unlike the chess master, the computer rotates so swiftly and quietly around its tasks that each human user has the illusion of enjoying the computer’s exclusive attention. Fundamentally, however, the computer is attending to its users serially. Recently, as part of the quest for ever dizzying speeds of performance, engineers have made genuinely parallel processing machines.

One such is the Edinburgh Supercomputer, which I was recently priviledged to visit. It consists of a parallel array of some hundreds of ‘transputers’, each one equivalent in power to a contemporary desk top computer. The supercomputer works by taking the problem it has been set, subdividing it into smaller tasks that can be tackled independently, and farming out the tasks to gangs of transputers. The transputers take the sub-problem away, solve it, hand in the answer and report for a new task. Meanwhile other gangs of transputers are reporting in with their solutions, so the whole supercomputer gets to the final answer orders of magnitude faster than a normal serial computer could. I said that an ordinary serial computer can create an illusion of being a parallel processor, by rotating its ‘attention’ sufficently fast around a number of tasks.

We could say that there is a virtual parallel processor sitting atop serial hardware. Dennett’s idea is that the human brain has done exactly the reverse. The hardware of the brain is fundamentally parallel, like the Edinburgh machine and it runs sofware designed to create an illusion of serial processing: a serially processing virtual machine riding on top of parallel architecture. The salient feature of the subjective experience of thinking, Dennett thinks, is the serial ‘one-thing-after-another’, ‘Joycean’ stream of consciousness.

He believes that most animals lack this serial experience, and use brains directly in their naive, parallel-processing mode. Doubtless the human brain, too, uses its parallel architecture directly for many of the routine tasks of keeping a complicated survival machine ticking over. But in addition, the human brain evolved a software virtual machine to simulate the illusion of a serial processor. The mind with its serial stream of consciousness, is a virtual machine, a ‘user-friendly’ way of experiencing the brain, just as ‘Macintosh User ‘Interface’ is a user-friendly way of esperiencing the physical computer inside its grey box. It is not obvious why we humans needed a serial virtual machine, when other species seem quite happy with their unadorned parallel machines…..

A renegotiated definition of productivity

David Graeber’s latest in The Baffler:
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide

“Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.”

Time to Wordpress it…

I started this Tumblr with the intention of Tumblring short, concise leisure-related curios whilst travelling in Japan — a country that I believe is experiencing the leisure effect.

It has now mutated into a full-on blog (due to my clear inability to be concise).

So I think I will start a separate personal blog on Wordpress — not focused around any particular theme — for my more long-form thoughts.

I will dedicate this Tumblr to what it was originally intended to be, a catalogue of leisure society developments in the world. Quotes, photos, links. Not much more.