Check out my just-released interview with Colin Marshall in his excellent podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture. You can find it on iTunes (The latest episode, episode S2E12) or Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed. Our conversation was lively and ranged widely, but over my favorite things! He summarized our conversation thus:
Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space withStan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco’s position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we’ve left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city where people go to do projects and make things; how and why he became “Wandering Stan,” and the importance he’s found of digging into others’ lives when he’s in actual places; whether younger so-called “digital natives” can better handle technological addictiveness; how wide a swath of the human experience San Francisco offers; how he discovered the difference between his engaged-in-a-project face and his dead-eyed Reddit-browsing face; and how Avril Lavigne reached Nepal before she reached him.
Source: Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E12: Good Old Shareware with Stan James