9th March 2011
On Cyber-Utopianism
“On another level, though, Shirky’s new book is more than corporate-visionary hackwork. What’s striking is how Shirky pursues the utopian drift of the cottage industry in web apologetics to its logical conclusions—beginning with the collective time evoked in his book’s title. He estimates that this pooled global cache of time capital is a “buildup of well over a trillion hours of free time each year on the part of the world’s educated population.” Obviously, plenty of free time goes into all kinds of endeavors—from producing execrable reality television to composing crowdsourced fan fiction. To assign it all an aggregate value of potential hours of creative and generous activity is about as meaningful as computing one’s velocity on a bicycle as a fraction of the speed of light: it tells us nothing about either the public value or the opportunity cost of any given web-based activity.
Why assign any special value to an hour spent online in the first place? Given the proven models of revenue on the web, it’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of those trillion-plus online hours are devoted to gambling and downloading porn. Yes, the networked web world does produce some appreciable social goods, such as the YouTubed “It Gets Better” appeals to bullied gay teens contemplating suicide. But there’s nothing innate in the character of digital communication that favors feats of compassion and creativity; for every “It Gets Better” video that goes viral, there’s an equally robust traffic in white nationalist, birther and jihadist content online. A “cognitive surplus” has meaning only if one can ensure a baseline value to all that dreary inconvenient time we “while away” in our individual lives, and establishing that baseline is inherently a political question, one that might be better phrased as either “Surplus for what?” or “Whose surplus, white man?”
The Social Network, the End of Intimacy, and the Birth of Hacker Sensibility
“Think about the person closest to you and the connection that you have. Feel the sense of familiarity and trust. Think of the wonderful experiences your intimacy has enabled. But now imagine this intimacy is torn away. Their eyes intimate indifference. You’re just one of the billions of people to whom they could possibly devote their time. There is nothing that defines your shared connection and makes it stand apart. You’re just the tag end of an economic calculation; a move in a game that will likely never end.
What if this could happen? What if it was already beginning to happen? What if intimacy is just a mode of behaviour that depends upon a certain kind of societal superstructure and technological underpinning? What if intimacy itself could be annihilated by a revolution occurring at the level of that superstructure?
7th March 2011
How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner
“First they had to save a company in crisis: at the beginning of 2009, Rovio was close to bankruptcy. Then they had to create the perfect game, do every other little thing exactly right, and keep on doing it. The Heds had developed 51 titles before Angry Birds. Some of them had sold in the millions for third parties such as Namco and EA, so they decided to create their own, original intellectual property. “We thought we would need to do ten to 15 titles until we got the right one,” says 30-year-old Niklas. One afternoon in late March, in their offices overlooking a courtyard in downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Iisalo, a games designer who had been at Rovio since 2006, showed them a screenshot. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. They looked cross. “People saw this picture and it was just magical,” says Niklas. Eight months and thousands of changes later, after nearly abandoning the project, Niklas watched his mother burn a Christmas turkey, distracted by playing the finished game. “She doesn’t play any games. I realised: this is it.”
