Google is the Future

Recently there's been a lot of reasons to want to make sweet, passionate love to whatever idol of Google you can acquire. Whether it be advanced cellphones, cheap and reliable internet infrastructure, their support of an open internet, availability of free and awesome apps including the collaborative online office-clone suite Google docs, Google maps, Gmail, blogger (the platform that this blog is written from), driver-less cars, the Google search engine, Google is the best and brightest that the technology world has to offer.

Technology people fucking love Google. If any company is going to take us into the future it's going to be Google. You can basically guarantee that almost* anything they put their effort into will be shaken to its core and innovated.

* Social media notwithstanding

So why not just throw in our lot with the Googs? Clearly they are the tech dynamo end all and be all, and basically can do no wrong.

What do we see when a company finally hits critical mass? There's always contraction and what appears to be calcification; companies lose relevance. We've seen it with countless other institutions, right now basically every cell phone company in the world at one time or another offered unlimited data plans for a large sum. As prices went down², our options to even have it dried up! I have an unlimited data plan because I was grandfathered in with my last contract but now if I upgrade I'll have to choose a plan that costs the same amount as my current one, but no longer offers unlimited data.

Forget that, unlimited texting costs me almost half my phone bill each month when the actual cost of sending and receiving a text is 140 bytes³. How much does a voice call cost? That information isn't freely available from phone companies but Skype, a leader in VOIP, claims you need 30kb per second⁴ just to maintain a call at low quality. As a point of reference, one kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes. So you would have to send 219 text messages to equal 1 second of a voice call, and yet the price difference for these two plans is negligible. Ho-hum.

We are in a country where it pays to be lazy and mysterious. Telecoms want you to pay huge premiums on newer technologies even if those technologies are a hundred times more cost effective then anything else they offer. The United States infrastructure in third-world in quality and despite making hundreds of millions of dollars these companies are doing nothing to help you. Oh wait, Time Warner bumped a lower tier's internet speed up by 5mbps to 15mbps for free. They also started making people pay a surcharge of $5 to lease their modems, a service that has been free for the last 10 years.

Google is currently offering Google Fiber in small areas as a way of threatening these other companies with competition. Google's internet is a Gigabit upload download for $70 a month or free for life for a one-time construction fee of $300. If you'd like to compare Time Warner, we'd do the unit conversion of 1 gigabit = 128 mbs. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn't fuck up the math.

There is a sad thing that seems to happen when it comes to companies now, people think that no matter what you do you're a shill for them or you have some kind of vested interest in their well-being that supports a little fervor.

This post is no different. I'm definitely a shill for Google. But it you're going to be a shill for any company, let it be one that threatens you with innovation instead of stifling our progress.

1http://stopthecap.com/2012/11/05/time-warner-cable-will-increase-standard-broadband-speed-to-151mbps-nationwide/

2http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/capping_the_nation_s_broadband_future

3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

4https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need

Twilight and the "Reading Decline"

[Ed note: I have not nor do I plan to read the twilight series. It's not because I'm counter-culture or anything, I just don't care for romance novels. I have read one of Stephanie Meyer's other works and think that she has great potential as a writer of science fiction and I wish her the best of luck in the future]

I was putzing around reddit.com's r/writing subreddit (Instead of actually writing) and came across a very interesting series of comments about the Twilight story and its success. People are surprised and appalled by the success of the series because of a laundry list of complaints; the characters are one-dimensional, the conflict can be resolved simply within the setting, it sets a bad example for tweens, whatever.

No one pisses and moans when a war strategy book appeals to a wide audience (Ender's Game), or when wizard stories grab children's imaginations (Harry Potter), or when a group of children murders one-another in cold blood for 3 books (The Hunger Games). But god forbid if you grab some tween attention from a book with some plot holes.

Look, girls and woman are going to dream about their perfect romance. If they're channeling it through a sparkly vampire, whatever. Stephanie Meyer created a work in the public space that became popular, and pioneered it into a series of movies that did well at the box-office because the books were popular. That is a huge achievement. It may not be the best writing, the characters might not be incredibly deep or interesting, but she got people reading. How can anyone, as a reader, be mad about that?

According to the National Endowment of the Arts research paper Reading on the Rise (2009), American adult readers have grown almost 7% since 2002 with the 18-24 age bracket growing by 3.4 million readers. Mind you that the first Harry Potter came out in 1997, the next two books in 1999, next in 2000, then 2003, 2005, and the last in 2007.

This is the first time the NEA has seen growth in readership in 20 years. Previously we were looking at a loss of 20% of readers since 1982. Now it's only 10%, and hopefully it will improve from there with more 'blockbuster' young adult lit (whether or not people deign it to be acceptable). On a personal note, I'm excited to see the reading of fiction is responsible for nearly half of the increase.

Readers and non-readers in the US are now to polarized groups each at near 50% of the population. It's an interesting demographic change!

Also note that poetry is in steep decline. Sorry guys! :(

Literature (yes literature) like Twilight, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games are going to feed adult readers. It may not be in earth-shattering numbers but it will be. And as a writer and an advocate of literature, I just want people to be reading and consuming content.

If it starts at Twilight, maybe it will evolve to be Nietzsche some day. Maybe someone will find, from reading about sparkly vampires, something people identify with having more 'meat' like the book I am Legend. I think we need to stop attacking people for their taste and just be glad they're licking.

A writer can dream, can't he?