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Sam Harris meets Russell Brand

by Gareth Rogers • 3 November 2019

Sam Harris is always worth listening to, but the podcasts are perhaps most engaging when his cool rationality is in contrast with a more spontaneous, over-the-top character (the Ricky Gervais ones are also great). Brand is all that and more, but has clearly thought deeply about the topics under discussion - the nature of mind, the nature of the self, among others - and might actually have a point in suggesting that for all Sam's enlightenment, he spends a lot of time criticising...

Distant Past

by Gareth Rogers • 3 November 2019

Mad. Brilliant.

John McLaughlin's Electric Albums

by Gareth Rogers • 26 July 2019

My first John McLaughlin phase was in my late teens, part of a more general journey of discovery through that incredible explosion of jazz-influenced musical creativity around the late 60's early 70's: Miles, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and so on. I did own a copy of Electric Guitarist (dolby cassette), but was mostly too blown away by Bitches Brew, My Goals Beyond, Love, Devotion and Surrender (John and Carlos loafing in matching white suits) to pay much attention.

My Spotify-inspired re-discovery of these two albums now officially constitutes JM phase two.

The sheer emotional intensity of My Goals Beyond, for example, is tempered here with cool compositions and 70's rhythms, all executed by brilliant, professional musicians.

As if he's been on a journey and come back, and decided to take the best of all that is around him and just now make beautiful sounds - and leave the listener to make their own minds up about their path to enlightenment (though nudging you in the right direction).

Check out Electric Dreams, Electric Sighs, or New York on my Mind, and I'm sure you'll agree....

Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget

by Gareth Rogers • 22 June 2019

Caught onto this book a bit late as it was published around 2010, but the ideas are if anything even more relevant now than then. It is full of brilliant insights concerning the development of the internet, which he expresses in the book better than I would paraphrase, so I strongly recommend you read it for yourself.

Still this is my web page, and inspired by the author's own attitude to self-expression, here are my thoughts...

One of the things that really resonated with me was the criticism of what he calls Web 2.0 designs - but let's just call if facebook - from the perspective of bad software design. As someone who grew up with the development of the internet, and was working in IT for a lot of that time, there is something disappointing about applications such as facebook becoming almost synonymous with the internet. It reminds me of my father's words, written in the 90's, about the possibilities of communication in the approaching internet age - and you can't help thinking there are more interesting possibilities out there.

More specifically it is the representation of people according to some reductive set of searchable profile attributes (i'm single/in a relationship/it's complicated) and design of throwaway fragments of communication to achieve one-click responses. As a software application it was probably fine for looking at women at his ivy league college, but as the software is scaled up into a global communication platform that design becomes locked in and ends up becoming restrictive to the way people communicate with each other.

In many ways it's a requirements problem: how do you model people for the purposes of meaningful communication? Would need to think about that one, but pretty sure the solution is not a facebook profile.

The inspiration I've taken from this book, though, is that we shouldn't allow our personalities to be represented by bad software and manipulative business models: it's time to take our online presence into our own hands! So just as soon as this website's finished, it's bye-bye fb, I promise...

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