Let’s find out. This interview elicits a number of quibbles from me.

[... Y]ou never had the technology of perfection that was as available and as cheap and as ubiquitous. You never had Google Glasses before, you never had self-driving cars, you never had doors that recognise who you are and let you in.

We still don’t have two of those things; declaring them “technologies of perfection” seems premature. Wikipedia says we’ve had the third technology for about four millennia.  I agree that connecting the system to Klout instead of  human-mediated systems of status-determination is annoying, but it seems like an incremental change.

If [Valley royalty with political ambitions] join the Democrats or the Republicans, then it would be very boring. If some of them decide to go and resurrect the democracy movement, then that would be very exciting to write about.

It was initially a bit gobsmacking to see a critic of Silicon Valley’s political naivete declare that an tech-led attempt to create a third party would be “very exciting to write about.” But perhaps he finds this exciting in the same sense that a hunter looks forward to a deer wandering into a meadow.

In America, you need to drive and you need to drive more and more

Vehicle miles traveled is declining, and the global trend is toward urbanization. But his point about the potential effect of self-driving cars on the commuting equilibrium is well-taken.

As drones get cheaper and 3D printers get cheaper, all that can be done in a very different manner. And there will be huge implications for mobility from 3D printers, which again some people don’t expect.

3D printers are mostly good for producing alternatives to injection-molded plastic and, to a lesser extent, ceramic and metal, in applications where price and the strength of the material are not important considerations. Looking around my desk, the items that could plausibly be produced by 3D printer — without an expert to assemble other pieces, at which point the automation rationale falls apart — include a coffee scoop, a pencil case, and a few collectible figurines. And I assure you that my desk is extremely messy.

Products like this are mostly imported and cost basically nothing, and consequently there’s not going to be a ton of capital available to build a huge same-day iPhone case-manufacturing infrastructure. Yes, Staples is going to offer in-store 3D printing, and yes, I am pretty excited about it for hobbyist reasons. But it’s going to be a niche. This technology will continue to have a growing impact on industrial design (where it’s been in use for decades), fabrication of bespoke objects like running shoes and medical implants, and might make some consumer goods slightly more feasibly repairable. But I think people are confusing “how super-cool is this technology?” with “how likely is this technology to change how we live and work?” Seriously, go give Thingiverse a good look. It’s lovely work, and some of it would be quite handy (albeit wildly expensive compared to existing injection-molded or stamped alternatives). But not that much of it.

Most useful objects are made of multiple materials, and 3D printing is not yet very good at that kind of fabrication. Perhaps it will grow to be! In the meantime, I suggest that optimists try pricing a pick-and-place machine, then imagine what it might cost to buy one that works in three dimensions. My next pair of sneakers could be 3D printed; parts of my next bicycle probably will be; my next kneecap certainly ought to be. But this is a tiny fraction of the manufactured world.

I have loved the Toynbee tiles for a while. They’re all over the east coast, and Philadelphia in particular. There’s something urgent and singular about them. I’d looked the phenomenon up on Wikipedia a few times, but what I found was always just a description of a mystery.

But it’s a mystery that turns out to be solved. My colleague Bob pointed me toward this documentary, which I watched tonight and really enjoyed. I won’t say it’s the most artfully composed film, but the story it tells is wonderful.

The underlying impetus is necessarily about mental illness, and as with every fascinating story in this vein, one is all but certain to find tragedy if the temptation to keep digging is indulged for too long. Luckily (though perhaps also callously) the film avoids this, while still convincingly explaining the Toynbee tile mystery.

Spoiler alert, I guess: one industrious stranger has been fixated, for decades, upon the idea that science will be able to deliver the afterlife that he feels God has promised but failed to deliver. Molecules will be traced to their historical source, and reassembled, and life will be renewed. On Jupiter.

It’s crazy, of course, but watching the movie’s subjects trace minute particles of information through decades, assembling them into a completely coherent whole–it’s a thing to behold, and makes the tiles’ thesis seem a little less nuts.

(Also worth noting: the extent to which this investigation is enabled by the internet has to give pause to anyone worried about our modern panopticon. The film doesn’t dwell on this point, but it’s absolutely clear that this mystery would have persisted–and perhaps never even been noticed–in the days before the net.)

I’m sympathetic to what Matt says here, but I think he misses the bigger value of Twitter snark: as long as journalists and experts use Twitter for social ends (whether by telling the best snarky joke or whatever) their participation in the medium will remain at least somewhat grounded.

The alternative is to make the professionalization of Twitter complete. I already have quite enough of that, thanks — I don’t need more of people pushing their day’s clips at me through pathetically thin news-hook framing in what amounts to a really shitty, lossy RSS reader. Who would want that? I know it’s fun when you’re the one staring at ChartBeat (I do it all the time!), but for the people on the other end of the equation it’s a drag, even if they don’t realize it.

The great thing about Twitter is that you can absorb the thinking of and even interact with people who have a huge amount of expertise, who might be inaccessible via other means. They’re steeped in whatever it is they work on constantly, and if you follow them you’ll start to understand their perspective and vocabulary. But that works best when they’re being honest. Honesty means direct, non-calculated, first-order interaction with the medium. And that won’t happen unless they’re able to satisfy human drives other than the need for clickthroughs, which to be honest seems like it might not have even been in Maslow’s hierarchy in the first draft.

I’m glad that Nick Beaudrot has figured out that he wants to interact with Twitter on a more limited basis, I wish him luck with his self-promotion-only strategy, and if I had been following him before now I would cease doing so immediately.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that I wrote something similar a few years ago. The framing’s different, but the upshot — that social network users attempting to avoid trivial content become a free rider problem — seems relevant.