In many ways the Internet Age feels like hedonism to me. I love to read and have fallen headfirst into the vice of information snacking fed by an endless stream of content sites, RSS feeds, twitter links, and Facebook posts. I enjoy learning about the latest news in science, business, economics, startups, and the tech industry. But with all that it's still fun to indulge in old-fashioned books in print. I can't help but buy new books, I'm currently reading Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants", Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." I also just finished Andrew Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail." The modes of interaction with the physical object of a book seem ill-substituted by content on a web browser or even e-book readers. Sitting with a book in hand invites reflection, iteration, and even conversation in ways "e-ink" does not.
The effect feels more pronounced when you come across such a sweet little philosophical tract like James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games. He has you from the beginning with:
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.hay day hack
The book proceeds from this little definition to elaborate ideas about culture, identity, power, property, title and society with the implicit backdrop that life is really just a series of games. I've always found the notion of a dreaming universe and worlds within worlds extremely romantic. I love movies like Inception and The Matrix and books like Godel Escher Bach.
I guess I'm come to learn what my niche is. I was surprisingly pleased to learn Kevin Kelly spent a decade penniless walking around shooting photos in China. Now he writes about the inevitable self-organizing movement of technology. I want to be a voice in this new culture where free thought addresses the changes that are drastically shaping our lives.
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