<nettime> the download times they are a changin' digest [tony|hwang|porculus]

["nettime's_throughput" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Re: <nettime> where has all the bandwith gone?
     Tony <tony@fucker.net>
     Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
     "porculus" <porculus@wanadoo.fr>

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Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 13:26:33 -0400
From: Tony <tony@fucker.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> where has all the bandwith gone?

Content of social or intellectual value is non-requisite to driving 
bandwidth demand.

Streaming video is being pushed hard by demand for adult content. The 
life cam phenomenon is also growing. But all this is trivial usage when 
compared to the
argus concept of everybody watching anything.

Argus had 100 eyes; Argus^5 = 10,000,000,000.

I'm not just talking about wearcam.org/neal stephensen style gargoyles 
stalking about and feeding everything they notice to the interested.

I'm talking about a democratized justice system where events are tracked 
not by a single big brother owned camera, but by many little brothers 
and sisters who have floating cams and can verify physical events with 
correlated image captures. not rodney king hand cams, but cheap hovering 
cam drones (small flying wing), solar roof cams, kite cams, sidewalk 
cams, treecams, deercams, catcams, dirtcams, etc; also microphones.

this may sound icky in terms of privacy loss; the alternative is a big 
brother exclusive.

there you have it, a compelling demand for bandwidth. in terms of 
efficiency of bandwidth used- we can fix our bandwidth paths using RSVP 
protocol. a cute little algorithm developed at bell labs two years ago 
allows us to layer the hoses just so, in real time.

Morlock Elloi wrote:

>>were inspired by a immature or at least incomplete intellectual culture
>>and not by social needs. the broadband future was mostly described
>>
>
>Aside, there is no such thing as "social needs" - that is the phrase used
>to justify whatever needs to be justified at the moment (to paraphrase
>famous propagandist, "when I hear 'social needs' I go for my gun").
 <...>

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Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 15:19:29 -0400
From: Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> where has all the bandwidth gone?

"Nobody will never need more than 640k."
	-- Bill Gates, 1981

Morlock Elloi wrote:

>The issue with bandwidth is really simple. There is no content (outside
>movie industry) to justify it. Average user has nothing to offer to
>average user. Zilch. Zero. Average user is a dumb empty nitwit that may be
>able to create 0.5-1 kilobytes of original material per day. And outside
>his own house he can't really force his family videos onto anyone. The
>only other possible use would be videoconferencing, and guess what -
>people don't really like to videoconference.

First of all, please let's make sure we are not confusing output in 
kilobytes with intelligence. "Attack of the Clones", digitized, would 
probably take up 1 million times as much hard-drive space as a copy 
of "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." You aren't saying George Lucas 
is a million times smarter than T.S. Eliot, are you?

The spread of technology seems to have a bit of a rhythm to it, 
tacking back and forth between innovation and capability. You need a 
little of both. Napster would have been worthless if it'd been 
invented 10 years ago: mp3-file-sharing is pretty much unusable at 
anything less than a 56k modem at the minimum. But I wouldn't be 
surprised if Napster encouraged some people to finally splurge on 
home DSL.

So maybe right now we have a little more broadband than average users 
know what to do with. But that will probably change. For example, 
it's not impossible to imagine in a future where Joe Average takes a 
2 gig of his family picnic and then emails it to his mom. I'd 
conjecture that the main thing holding this back is not the issue of 
paying for bandwidth, but the issue of getting digital videos into 
the computer, and editing them into a presentable form ... Well, 
that's essentially the core of Apple's consumer strategy, and they're 
not the only one pushing that angle, either.

As for whether people don't like to videoconference, the jury's still 
out on that one, isn't it? I mean, we know people don't like 
videoconferencing on grainy two-inch windows, but videoconferencing 
won't always be like that, will it? If you want to look out to the 
far-bleeding-edge, you can look at Jaron Lanier's telepresence 
project, which is basically wall-sized videoconferencing. When it was 
first tested a few years ago, it sucked up so much bandwidth that at 
first Internet 2 admins thought they had been DOS'd.

Francis
-- 

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From: "porculus" <porculus@wanadoo.fr>
Subject: Re: <nettime> where has all the bandwith gone?
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 21:49:06 +0200

> The issue with bandwidth is really simple. There is no content (outside
> movie industry) to justify it. Average user has nothing to offer to
> average user. Zilch. Zero.

itz cause average uzer keep her his sex partner for just oneselv what iz
abzolutely bourgeois and conterproductiv in term ov sexpol..bezide average
uzer is a tiny bandwith i am quite ok wiz you! zen internet is not at all a
noosphere bull (of a catholique priest in more..think..zis guys pass all
their fucking time to distract you about zexpol ) but a thousand year reich,
but a wilhelm one, remember about his orgone..so in zis perspectiv..it's
evident we need superhuge bandwith..it'z noosphere bulk asci bull that need
just some ko, kinda virus scale zing..at the beginning iz the tiny verb
etc..baaah..my ass..at the beginning is the kilotonic octet keopz..the
search ov enlargement pillz need huge bandwiz

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