If billions of years preceded our existence on Earth, billions of years will surely follow after our existence as well. So that our life here is like one flash of a strobe light. The wink of an eye. And if your life is merely a microscopic blip in the vast dimension of time, is its importance to you just an illusion?
The code and data were always designed to outlive the company … basically we were always working on open geo primarily, and a lot of that work feels more durable than any particular company.
This year for xmas I made Raspberry Pi video players for everyone in my family, so they could share my love for BergensBanen minutt for minutt HD:
When the Pi boots up, it updates its time using ntpdate, pulls down any updates from this git repo, then plays back starting from a specific timestamp based on the current UTC time. This allows for a communal slow TV viewing experience.
Clearly there are cases today, and many more that will develop in time, in which the option of a paid prioritization offering would be a necessity based on either technology or needs of consumer welfare. I for one see great value in the prioritization of telemedicine and autonomous car technology over cat videos. (1:43:20 into the C-Span archive)
My response on Twitter seems to have struck a chord:
I made pancakes this morning, based on an Oatmeal Buttermilk Blueberry Pancakes recipe Ellie suggested from the NYTimes. It uses yogurt instead of buttermilk, since that’s what we had around. At some point I should resolve this with my Dad’s pancakes recipe.
½ cup rolled oats
1 cup regular milk
1 cup plain yogurt
1 cup whole wheat flour
½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons peanut oil
1 cup fruit and walnuts (I used a pear, next time I’ll chop it into larger chunks)
Combine the milk, yogurt, and rolled oats in a bowl, and set aside.
Combine the flours, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt in another bowl.
In a third larger bowl, whisk the eggs. Then whisk in the vanilla extract and the oil.
Mix everything into the larger bowl and quickly whisk together. Do not overbeat; a few lumps are okay.
We ate them with butter, maple syrup, whipped cream, and some homemade cranberry sauce leftover from Thanksgiving.
In WeWork’s future, the hastily privatised public space is returned to citizens. However, it comes back as a commercial service provided by a lavishly funded data company, not as a right. Meetup’s civil society will keep on talking, inside WeWork’s buildings. But the struggle against alienation will now consist of applying even more data analytics and nudging to the tortured souls of overworked cognitive workers, who, in escaping alienated workplaces in the comfort of makerspaces and face-to-face meetings, have discovered that the workplaces have colonised their non-work lives instead.