'Information Consumption'

‘The opening chapters of Accelerando involve a character operating several steps up from the wearable-computing experiments of people like Steve Mann. So plugged in to his various devices, screens and implants was Dr Mann that, when a bunch of airport thugs decided he looked like a human bomb and forcibly detached him from his hardware, his ability to function normally was so demolished that they ended up having to wheelchair him into the plane. Manfred Macx in Accelerando is much the same way. But Dr Mann was largely a broadcaster of information, a system he termed cyborglogging (which became moblogging, which became “that thing my phone does”). Macx is a consumer of information. He’s running 200 more apps on his wearables than I am on my laptop; receiving, logging, sorting and digesting more info in an hour than I’ll eat in six months. Macx is a 21st century animal who eats information and excretes ideas. Ideas are nothing more than the connective spark between the charmed synchronicities of items of data. This is why restrictive societies like to control the flow of information: very few political soil pipes are built to take the pressure of millions of people squatting out ideas all over the place.’

—Warren Ellis, Wired UK 3.10

Posted 2 years ago & Filed under information overload, Accelerando, Charles Stross, 7 notes