Deviant Abstraction

According to Joseph, one of my close friends, we are transitioning from history to “post-history”. Prehistory to history was marked by invention of writing. Post-history by keeping everything online.

We are in this time because everything someone makes/write is digital. It can be kept for a cost approaching zero. Future historians will have more than a glimpse of this time: they will be able to experience this time.

Digging a little bit more, this is not yet true: currently most of the dataset are deleted but the time where everything will be archived is not far away. We can see it coming thanks to a few archiving websites.

Another example: phone operators keep the content of all your SMS. Right now, only the police can access them (in Europe) but historians will be able to… And you too !

I don’t know how new is this idea but I find this idea fascinating.

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This application shows you similar Flickr pictures than your sketch. I hope they add soon a “similar picture” feature.

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Directly from the mind of Bruce Sterling

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An interesting report from the excellent Read/Write Web blog on an interesting conference.

Two different but interesting thread of ideas have emerged at this conference:

1) Future of Web

• Deportalization or SOA for consumer (remember the original Web services vision?)
• Personnalization (actually those two ideas are deeply coupled)

(source: Flickr)

2) European start-up

• Be ambitious
• Fail if needed
• Think big

(Same remarks those three ideas are corollaries of the think big meme)

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Science fiction writers were right again (usually they are the first to spot/create new ideas). Hibernation would happen soon and if this technology is industrialised, it would change a lot of things. At least, we will have different timesets for different people (as in sci fi books).

Why now? Someone got by himself into hibernation and it saved him. Now scientists are trying to reproduce it and then understand it. Now that we have a proof, funding is there again.

(from Flickr)

It seems we are on the verge of much more change than my father has seen for his whole life. This is only on of the “cool” and short term hot research area. Results will soon start to pour in.

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