I read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem about a year ago. It must have been the time of year or something, but I’ve been thinking about it recently. To avoid simply re-reading it I’ve been finding some of the interviews with Neal Stephenson floating around the Intertubes. I don’t know if Mr. Stephenson has done more interviews &c. surrounding this book – but there were a lot to be found. One was a video of a question and answer session he did at Google.
All of these interviews were about a single book – so it’s natural that they would have a lot of similar questions and answers. One of the themes is “long attention spans” vs. “short attention spans”. We’re not talking about A.D.D. or anything – we’re talking about philosophy, society, and what I like to call “systems of thinking.” In one interview in particular – it was either the L.A. Times or the newspaper in Seattle – Mr. Stephenson talked about “vegging out” and “geeking out”.
He usually stays away from making big, judgmental statements about such things. In the Google Q&A he said that he’d like to give the answer that makes him sound good and say that he spends all his time reading and none in of it in big-box retailers. In this newspaper interview he says that he has his fair share of “veg-out” time. But he says that it is very important that society supports people’s “geek-out” time as well. This got me thinking about the SchniviCon or OctoCon or whatever we were going to call our little geek-festival.
In 2002 I went to my first “DEFCON” convention in Las Vegas. I’ve been to every one since, partly because I am interested in the convention’s topics, but mostly because I like the geek-out factor. Last year some of my attendee-buddies said they were going to sit-out the next year, maybe go to the Dayton Hamvention instead.
They were kind of burned out on this particular convention. It’s easy to understand. Their solution was to geek-out at a different convention; my idea was to have our own. Not a “convention” with badges and speeches and attendees and sponsors, but a geek-out of our own. My vision is a “retreat” at some remote resort (with a decent connection to the Internet). We’d get a few rooms for everybody and some shared space for projects.
Perhaps we would give everyone a table to work on whatever they wanted. Maybe we could have one project each time and each time would be another person’s turn to decide what we all worked on.