Wristphones
The wristwatch/phone hybrid used to be the way forward. Now it’d be considered clunky or annoying to use - either a case of too much bulk or no room for buttons - and associated with all sorts of bizarre RSI. The delicious irony is that today most people use mobile phones to tell the time.

Written by: Andrey Pissantchev

Poster Child:
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In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more instances.

The entries were fantastic and after a long and occasionally contentious dinner-meeting with my gracious panel of judges, it’s time ( Read more... )

Today I would like to talk about proving the existence of God. Then I would like to complain about technology and design writing.


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Films like Tron have a lot to answer for … Children see these worlds, and the men and women they become try to build them.

Will Wiles posting on Spillway

For most of my life the videophone was telecom’s holy grail, & now? Just another of the Net’s many afterthoughts, & a B-teamer at that..

Julian Dibbell, on Twitter


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((Hi there, how’s your weekend going? This is slightly off-topic for Quiet Babylon, but it’s about the future of journalism which is one of my side-obsessions.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees ( Read more... )

This is a review of a documentary.

When I first heard about the Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought about Neale Stephenson’s Snow Crash. There’s this refugee raft city, cobbled together around a dead tanker that is slowly drifting counter-clockwise from Asia to the States. It’s been at sea for years, turning into this kind of ( Read more... )

“The future”’s glamor, its sexiness. It’s never just one day. We don’t imagine May 20, 2050. The present is almost always the one given day.
Unless something starkly Ubertrending happens, and usually something bad. And that’s when the present feels like “the future”.
-William Gibson on twitter.

I feel like I live in the future ALL THE TIME.

My ( Read more... )

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Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.