(2012-04-30) Ellis The Manfred Macx Media Diet

Warren Ellis: The Manfred Macx Media Diet. I re-read Charlie Stross’ ACCELERANDO at least once a year. More often, I’ll return to just the first three chapters once every few months.

I got asked a question on Tumblr yesterday — which I’ll get to in a later post – that set me to thinking again about Manfred Macx, who can’t do what he does without processing vast amounts of information each day

I think I’ve probably gotten into the concept of agalmics and how it relates to the attention economy before now. Attention Philanthropy is the takeaway, and how this site mostly works – using whatever profile I have to direct you to works of interest.

Do you ever feel like that upon waking? Six hours behind the moment. Sleeping took you off the road to the future.

he’s not just taking in information, but processing it and excreting more information. Also, extruding it out on to a public space where people can fiddle with it. (curation, working in public)

If we’re not doing something with the information we’re taking in, then we’re just pigs at the media trough.

What is also happening here, of course, is that he’s doing the work of a public intellectual. “Critical creativity,” as I think Umberto Eco once put it. Only without the requirement of space in a newspaper or magazine, of course, which is what the internet brought us. And, as the net trends towards microblogs and status updates, it is also what we’re taking away from the internet now.

In other senses, of course, this does exist. Checking Likes, Instagram and Tumblr hearts and even +1s. Your reputation’s only as good as the last piece of content you gave to a social network. How much time do we spend assimilating content and spitting the tastiest bits back out into the world in order to gain reputation as a gifted regurgitator?

Intelligent Agents (daemon) are going to be a pipedream for a while longer, I suspect. Which makes me sad. But there’s something here – Weavrs and other software instances like Google Alerts can enact discovery, and bring us information we wouldn’t necessarily have the time or awareness to grab manually.

"What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively. Manfred is thirty when he says this. I’m forty-four.