I put up a short science fiction story on Medium about telepresence using augmented reality. You may wonder why.
1. Aaron Ross Powell put in a strong plug for Medium.
2. I remember when Robert Metcalfe once was asked what would be the Internet’s ultimate killer application. He replied, “telepresence.”
3. When I posted the other day about the shortfalls in technology relative to Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, it made me think of my own questionable prediction, Headsets, which I’m still longing for in a way. Think of this as an upated version of that essay. Sort of.
Headsets are physically uncomfortable for me to wear.
I don’t want to ruin the Medium party, but it seems the place for hard-core left wing essays. I actually like the platform, and I liked the opinions and goals of its creator (listen to them in this podcast https://after-on.com/episodes/013) but just a look a the recommended page, the site gave me this two gems:
“https://eand.co/how-economics-failed-the-economy-9f464e0eed9d”
and
“https://theestablishment.co/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-a-straight-rich-white-man-43b0800d7a26”
The first one compares the Soviet Union with the current state of America, “its precise mirror image”. Go figure.
I don’t want to expand our ideological silos but there’s plenty of network effects in social networks that amplify the ideological ideas of the majority of its users. There’s a reason why there’s only hard-left commentary in Tumblr and neo-nazis in 4chan, while both networks are open to everybody.
Maybe I’m wrong and it would be a wonderful place for non-lefty ideas, but since I’m guessing they have to curate the content at some point, they are not going to include essays with a more right of center view if most of their clients don’t share those.
If you follow a bunch of people you find interesting, Medium will use those people and similar to build your recommendations. I’ve found Medium a much more hospitable place for interesting conversations, even across ideological lines, than you might expect.
In the Headset piece – from 2001 – the opening dismissal is classic: “Web-enabled cell phones were dubious in concept and worse in execution.” I don’t even remember what was attempted at that time, but I’m sure the observation had a lot of truth to it. But it’s a good lesson on the merits of humble prediction.
What I see in software management is that a lot of my colleagues do wear headsets quite often due to the many conference calls with scattered participants and now increasingly video conferences.