Occupy Steve Jobs

Last night, while walking through Zucotti Park, the center of the mico-city that is emerging within the Occupy Wall Street protest, I overheard part of a conversation about Steve Jobs. I thought that maybe he, like Radiohead, had been rumored to make an appearance. Only after I got home and online did I realize that he was dead.

My Twitter feed was full of tweets on both subjects. I follow a lot of tech enthusiasts, and also a lot of people interested in social justice, so the confluence didn’t surprise me. Many other tweeters noticed the combination, and some began to snarkily point it out, as if to expose a hypocrisy. How could anyone who is genuinely concerned about the ubiquity of corporate influence and the accumulation of wealth among an elite few, truly mourn the passing of a man who was a part of that elite, and ran a major publicly traded corporation?

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School Lunch

I remember some kind of repugnant reddish-orange soup, circa third grade. I think it was “tomato” soup, served with grilled cheese sandwiches (Velveeta on white bread). Every time, the same routine: the lunch lady would present me with the tray, already complete with sandwich and soup.

“I don’t want the soup,” I would tell her.

“You don’t have a choice,” she would say.

“I’m going to throw it away right now,” I would say. Read the rest of this entry »

When Computers Were Neither Media Nor Social

The cartoon that started the meme “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was printed in 1993, but already this is no longer true. If you’re online, you’re probably on Facebook, Linkedin, and other real-life networking services. Everybody you meet online who could possibly know who you really are is probably going to find out.

Question: What happened?

Answer: The popular kids took over the Internet.

When my family got our first computer in 1984 (Apple II+), my desire to talk about it at school was a sign of social awkwardness. Nobody in their right mind discussed technology with a straight face school unless a) they just didn’t get how the social system worked, or b) they had already given up on any hope of ever being even mildly popular. It was understood that computers were for people who were unable to negotiate the more nuanced planes of human relations, and had to take comfort in the “ones and zeroes.”

There was some truth to this. It wasn’t an accident that one of the first computer games to become really popular was Adventure, a text-only fantasy in which the user discovers treasure, fights dwarves, and negotiates labyrinthine cave passages (ironically based on real cave passages). Read the rest of this entry »

Kubrick Is As Kubrick Does

For about five months spanning the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, I woke up every morning thinking about Kubrick. Lately, here in 2009, I’ve also woken up many mornings thinking about Kubrick. The difference is that ten years ago, it happened because I was in film school, taking a masters-level class on Kubrick at USC. These days, I work in web development, so I’ve been spending a lot of time with Kubrick, the default WordPress theme on which so many others are based.

Both periods during which I’ve studied Kubrick have turned out to be transitionary periods for Kubrick.

Kubrick the film director died in 1999, toward the end of the semester, shortly before the release of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. The professor, Dana Polan, came to class the next day dressed all in black, and delivered a eulogy to the class.

Kubrick the WordPress theme may be on its way out as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Early Video Games And The Art Of Personal Engagement

When I was in fifth grade, circa 1982, I had one of the hand-held football games pictured above. It was about the size of two iPhones. The game was played by using your thumb to maneuver a player from one end of the field to the other.  The opponent’s players were LEDs that were lit up. The user’s player was an LED that was lit up a little bit brighter.

Moving the avatar down meant that the current LED would go out, and the LED just below it would come on. Avoiding the opponents meant maneuvering around them before they had the chance to tackle you. Whether or not they tackled you while you were adjacent to them was purely a function of how long you lingered on any particular spot. The whole screen represented only ten yards; you had move through it ten times in order to run the length of the field.

I loved it. Never was I bothered that the players were represented by LEDs. In fact, the disparity between real football and the little plastic device with the panel of red lights was the whole appeal of the activity. Being good at the game didn’t indicate dexterity or a knowledge of football. It indicated the ability to think abstractly, to imagine a whole world where there wasn’t one. How long could you stare at that little screen before two adjacent lights started to look like nothing more than two adjacent lights? When that happened, you’d hesitate. And that’s when you’d get tackled. Read the rest of this entry »