Tower of Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas.

Babel seeks multilingual and multicultural writers, editors, bloggers and translators proficient in using web tools to continue building in over 250 languages what has been recognized since 2001 by the United Nations as one of the most import social and human sciences online periodicals.

There are over 250 subdomains of towerofbabel.com ready to be configured by those who are interested in taking the language-oriented subdomains and helping to build the tower ….

Design your language’s tower however you wish but continue what has already been pioneered as an attempt to build a tower aiming for the highest egalitarian, altruistic, philanthropic and humanitarian structures.

Tower of Babel: Link.

Babel English Blog: Link.

“I’m often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite, or as a raving technophile. I’ve always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.”

“Cyberspace” as a term is sort of over. It’s over in the way that after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix “-electro” to make things cool, because everything was electrical. “Electro” was all over the early 20th century, and now it’s gone. I think “cyber” is sort of the same way. The things that aren’t cyberspace seem to comprise a smaller set than things that are.

William Gibson: Link
Interviewed by Noel Murray: August 22nd, 2007

Electro-Tank: Modern Mechanix, 1935

Cory Doctorow posts his thoughts about O’Reilly Press and Web 2.0:

Trademarks are intended to protect consumers by ensuring that goods and services aren’t misleadingly labeled. A trademark holder, say, “Coke,” gets the right to sue companies that use the word “Coke” in their products and services in a way that would lead the public to believe that Coke was behind them.

But trademarks aren’t “property” — they aren’t words owned by companies. They’re the ability to use the courts to protect a company’s customers. That’s a pretty good idea: the public deserves to be protected from misleading marketing.

The question is whether using “Web 2.0″ in a conference name is misleading: will the average person who hears about a Web 2.0 event assume that it must be put on by O’Reilly, or will she assume that it’s just an event about the Web 2.0 technology and business-practices that O’Reilly defined?

O’Reilly has an amazing, wonderful gift for popularizing hard ideas and for explaining abstruse technology in catchy ways. “Web 2.0″ is only one of O’Reilly’s many accomplishments, which started with the publication of the first user documentation for Unix, and has continued through many iterations of excellent, world-changing ideas and memes.

The downside of creating amazing, industry-shaking ideas is that they become embedded in the popular consciousness. While the digerati know that O’Reilly originated Web 2.0, the idea is so infectious that it’s just become part of the fabric of the industry. One of the things that makes O’Reilly’s ideas so great is that they go on to be part of the infrastructure, invisible and huge and powerful.

But that means that O’Reilly’s ideas are also not uniquely associated with O’Reilly.
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I like O’Reilly Press books — I like them a lot. When learning a new technical discipline, one of the first things I do is buy whatever O’Reilly has published on the subject. And when I’m asked what books I recommend on programming, web design, and so on, I always reply: In a Nutshell? O’Reilly Press.

Knowledge and Propaganda
by Joseph Goebbels

As an idea develops into a worldview, the goal is the state. The knowledge does not remain the property of a certain group, but fights for power. It is not just the fantasy of a few people among the people, rather it becomes the idea of the rulers, the circles that have power. The view does not only preach, but it is carried out in practice. Then the idea becomes the worldview of the state. The worldview has become a government organism when it seizes power and can influence life not only in theory, but in practical everyday life.

Now we must consider who is the carrier, the transmitter, the guardian of such ideas. An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know too, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others. I meet a good friend and say to him: “I have found a wonderful picture. I have to show it to you.” The same is true of ideas. If an idea lives in an individual, he has the urge to tell others. There is some mysterious force in us that drives us to tell others. The greater and simpler the idea is, the more it relates to daily life, the more one has the desire to tell everyone about it.

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Speech by Bruce Sterling @ O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference, March 2006:

At the moment, we’re eagerly debating the proper terminology for a future internet of things. This is a rather literary, language-centric speech tonight – as tech gigs go, anyway. Very wordy. If you want to talk Web 2.0, you can at least say, you know: “FlickR, ” “Wikipedia.” You might even meet Jimmy Wales or Caterina Fake, who are not futurists, but actual working web technologists. Web 2.0 is kind of a loose grab-bag of concepts, but Jimmy Wales isn’t a loose grab-bag, Jimmy Wales physically exists. In the case of an Internet of Things or ubiquitous computation, the top guru in the field, Marc Weiser of Xerox PARC, has been dead for several years now. In the Internet of Things debate, people are still trying to find the loose verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work is basically a literary endeavour. When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today’s verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

A good example of freezing the language too early is, I think, Artificial Intelligence. We very early got into the lasting bad habit of referring to computers as “thinking machines.” I suspect this verbal metaphor seriously harmed technical development. Even the word “computing” sounds too much like human mathematical thinking. We might have made a much better language choice if we had called computers something like the French called them, ordinateurs, “ordinators.”

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