Quotes from 2009

We won’t need to spend all our time pounding keys and clicking mice inside our web browsers. Instead, we’re going to end up with the internet smearing itself all over the world around us, visible at first in glimpses through enchanted windows, and then possibly through glasses, or contact lenses, with embedded projection displays.

I’m hoping this will be the difference between old new media and new new media; real-world smeariness.

What is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

The lesson to be learned here is that when something screws with your careful plans, you take control of that thing, warp it to your every demand, and channel it into a concentrated stream of Awesome. That is how you do PR.

Here’s another. You get the work you do. If you want to do something else start doing it.

No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.

If you are a sexy, cool charismatic brand, you will have a fairly easy life on social media – people would want to hear from you and be associated with you. They will create fan page for you on facebook, they will talk with their friends about you and share stuff about you on Twitter. They will probably take part if you ask them to submit something etc. If you are not one of these brands, you will have to work much harder to earn your social capital. I’m not saying it’s not possible but you will probably have to invest more. More time and money to help you be more fun, interesting, funny or useful. And you should also find those who love you and nurture the relationship you have with them.

If you’re an asshole kind of brand, you’re pretty much fucked.

Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended. These users always browse with a maximized 1024×768 window, and are never running, say, an OLPC laptop, or looking at the web with a monitor that’s more than four years old.

Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.

Art bollocks has become institutionalised, normalised and is now practically the default way of writing about art and culture for seasoned journalists and a-level students alike. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, art bollocks is variously used in a knowing way, as an in-joke, a private language, a posture, or maybe out of fear – to maintain some questionable status among equally questionable peers.

For the record, I Cursor Miner have predicted many of the trends in music and culture over the past decade. I predicted the rise of the synthpop/electroclash stuff. I predicted the move towards lower tempos of dubstep, I predicted neo-rave and acid revival. I predicted the fantasy/glam/costumed up 70s bands that we seem to be seeing now. I predicted everyone making more stickers. I predicted the return of aviator shades, beards and hats. I predicted the credit crunch. I predicted the move away from quantisation that I think is ‘wonky’. I predicted helicopters. In fact I know exactly whats going on but do the masses listen and herald my albums as the workings of an inspired prophet? Do they shit. OK, so now I’m going to set it down in timestamped bits and bytes 10 things you’re going to hear about soon, so that I can blog here again in a few years and say HA.

Time is the most perishable good in the world, and it is not replenishable. You can’t earn an extra hour to use on a busy day. Nonetheless, we usually have a vague feeling that there is plenty of…