Muniment #004

The Spime* of Bruce

Welcome to the fourth edition of Muniment. In this issue we'll be covering Austin's favorite geo-flexible techno art critic, thinker, speaker, and writer. There may be some stuff about art and jobs, too.

The Mad Pope-Emperor

When Bruce Sterling was still throwing SXSW after-parties at his old house up on Cedar Street, back in 2001 or 2002, I spent a half an hour on his porch talking to a guy I swear was Jeff Goldblum. If you ever attended one of Bruce's parties, you know this isn't as implausible as it sounds. It's also possible that people into chaos theory just naturally start looking like Jeff Goldblum.

Bruce Sterling is Austin's own cyberpunk laureate. He's a contemporary with William Gibson, and indeed, they even wrote a book together. When not writing books, both fiction and not, Bruce provides commentary on art and technology. He also starts revolutions. Bruce is one of those people who pays attention, complete with italics. There's a reason he was the cover-boy on the first issue of WIRED.

You should pay attention to Bruce, and what Bruce is talking about, because Bruce loves thinking about the interactions and relationships between things. It may be a side effect of his art critic nature, but Bruce really loves to tell you why. Why you should care, why it's important, why it will change things. Bruce loves poetry. He cares about art, and politics, and people. He's a storyteller. He knows that's how people come to understand things, and he's great at weaving stories from facts.

I read The Hacker Crackdown, Bruce's chronicle of early hacker subculture, while in high school. It was notable because Bruce worked a deal with his publisher where the text was released as freeware online, sort of an early Creative Commons thing. It was one of those text files every BBS had. After I joined the WELL in 1997 I met Jon Lebkowsky, and through Jon, Bruce. We finally did something together in 2000, when Polycot, the company Jon and I started, began hosting Bruce's Viridian Design Movement. That's why I'm one of the Viridian Curia.

The best, most concentrated helpings of Bruce's thoughts come out in his talks. He closes SXSW Interactive every year, and it's well worth your time to watch/listen/read them. I'd start with 2011 and 2006, but for a more complete list, here's 2014, 2013 (text), 2012, 2011 pt1/pt2/pt3 or audio, 2010 text & Honoria Starbuck's paintings, 2007, 2006, 2005 transcript, 2004 transcript, and 2002 notes. Download them and stash them away before they're gone. As a bonus, here's Bruce's closing keynote at Vimeo's 2010 festival, with a great bit on the Dick Van Dyke Show.

You can follow Bruce's latest on twitter and his Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired.com. He wrote a tech-romance novella called Love is Strange recently, which I reviewed on my blog. If you have another day to burn, here's a search for Bruce Sterling on Vimeo and YouTube, with dozens of keynotes and talks. Put them on your iDevice or GoogleSlab. Consume them and be enlightened.

[Processing...]

Processing is a toolkit designed to enable creation of digital art. Here's a great Kickstarted Vimeo documentary, HELLO WORLD! Processing, to show you the backstory. There's a great set of exhibitions at the Processing web site, as well as lots of tutorials. You can even run Processing in your browser with Processing.js, including this lovely toy. I recently dropped back into Processing after stumbling across Peter Ha's Instagram account. Couple this running on a Raspberry Pi with a pico projector and maybe some kinect-style depth map hardware, and you have the makings of a magical object.

Better Resumes Without Giant Interstellar Cats

I've been helping a few friends plan their next career moves lately, both inter and intra-company. As part of that I've been looking at a lot of resumes and promotion packets, and thinking about how to make them better. Aside from the obvious addition of bright magenta felines, one really great tip I ran across was from Laszlo Bock, the head of hiring at Google. It's in a Tom Friedman NYT Op-Ed, but the gist is at the end, and called out in this Quartz piece by Matt Phillips:

How do you write a good rÃ©sumÃ©?

"The key," he said, "is to frame your strengths as: 'I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z.' Most people would write a rÃ©sumÃ© like this: 'Wrote editorials for The New York Times.' Better would be to say: 'Had 50 op-eds published compared to average of 6 by most op-ed [writers] as a result of providing deep insight into the following area for three years.' Most people donâ€™t put the right content on their rÃ©sumÃ©s."

So there you go, it totally makes sense. I don't know if everyone got this note and is already updating their LinkedIn profiles or not, but the next time you do, keep this in mind.

Wrap Up & Shout Outs

The Kramer Satellite is officially in space, after the SpaceX CRS-3 mission launched on April 18th. Alas, the harsh radiation-filled environment of space has proven challenging for KickSat, and it looks like KickSat will burn up on re-entry before it deploys the Kramer Satellite into free-flight. It's a sad day for us all here at the Kramer Space Program, and a sobering reminder that Kickstarter dreams do not always come true.

Next time!

- Jeff Kramer

* If you're still wondering what a Spime is, Bruce invented the term Spime to refer to an object which can be tracked in time and space throughout its lifetime. Meatspace objects with RFIDs and tags and search engines and GPS. There's more here. He made a speech about them at SIGGRAPH in 2004 and wrote a book called Shaping Things in 2005. It was the Internet of Things before that just meant your Nest and a bunch of embedded linux devices that never got security updates.