Time for a break from email, mobile phones, todos, spams, tweets, and all the rest until April 19th. See you in two weeks!

^{The “better than nothing”, seen in Venice CA last year.} 

There is a disturbingly increasing number of early adopters who tell me they are fed up with their jobs. Those same people who were creating homepages with 28k modems back in the 90s are now closing their blogs, snubbing Facebook, moving around with no computer or iPhone, wishing aloud they had less commitments and more money to open a restaurant, a store, or engage in a life involving more down to earth activities. It could be anodyne - and probably is in some ways as we all tend to always want the opposite of what we have - but I feel there is something interesting here. Let’s review some of the arguments involved:

• The web industry got boring, at least if you like adventure. I already wrote on this last year and it is truer than ever. Changing the world got complex after a rare period where you could wake up in the morning, fire your computer, and write a piece of code that would change everybody’s life. Now launching a website requires 12 months of work, a team of 10, and whatever you want to do has already been done. Boring.

• Humans need to have something to show for their work. Websites are not the most tangible achievements there is, and for example half of what I have ever done in my life is now gone (like frequence-laser.ch, the Financial Tracking System whose has been updated a long time ago, Bernard Nicod’s 1996 website). The other half is made of services, events, advices, discussions, reports, many things that do not really materialize. I think that, over a long period of time, this has an impact on people. Human beings need to touch, feel, show, share, and new technologies tend to cut them from such fundamental needs. It finally made an impact, and this is probably one of the main reasons behind the tiredness and rejection of technology you start to get from early adopters.

^{The Beatles: early among the early adopters}

• Another factor is the partiality of online interactions. Many early adopters ended up with rich and intense careers involving heavy usage of computers. When you have done that for many years you get hundreds of emails per day - most of them from people you care about, but that you have only seen once or twice. Once again it feels a bit like trying to trick a fundamental truth, forcing our sensitive (in the sense: that needs to feel and touch) nature to rely only on incomplete interactions to survive and maintain a high level of socialization.

• Tools are limiting. Why is it so hard to maintain a network (i.e.: have accounts on 20 websites), read emails without feeling overwhelmed, work on a laptop more than three hours while on the move, connect to the internet anywhere? Why don’t we (I’ll put myself in it for this one) have a really good solution to handle tasks that have become so recurrent and crucial? Even the most basic and simple need of all has no good technological solution. How to manage your todo list on anything else than paper? Tools are taking their toll on productivity and creating frustration, and are one of the most cited factor of tiredness. Computers are making shovels and hammers appealing again, don’t tell me you saw this one coming :D

It will be interesting to see if what happens these days is a fundamental shift, or just a temporary crisis worsened by hard economical conditions. Can the people who built new technologies really reject it?

It’s a bit hard to believe it’s a first, but after storied appearances in movies a home robot now made it to a theater.

Tuesday marked the theatrical debut for the Wakamaru, which appeared onstage alongside real-life actors in a play that’s being hailed as a first in robot-human artistic collaboration. Hataraku Watashi (”I, Worker”), by playwright Oriza Hirata, focuses on a couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work.

Link

Nice example of nature and man living together, captured today outside of my flat in Geneva (yes, I finally spent one day home!)

Sitting in yet another late plane - this time thanks to the repeated incompetencies of Asiana - a company trying hard to drive me nuts after canceling another flight I was supposed to be on three days ago - I realized how bad things have gone in the airline business in a few years. My friends tell me I’m lucky because I travel a lot. And usually my answer to that is “you obviously say that because you don’t travel much”.

From a dream industry, for which almost every little boy wanted to work a few decades ago, it is now an uncomfortable, dehumanized, struggling and aging industry. Passengers are treated as “self loading cargo units” as industry insiders call them.

^{Asiana mechanical problem = 2 hours delay, missed connections, and a replacement plane not used since 1980 in bonus!?}

Seems nobody is proud to work for an airline anymore. And how could you be proud? When processes have completely taken personal initiative out of the picture (anything you ask at a check in counter now results in “you have to ask someone else”). When you work with tools from the stone age that make every single little tweak a nightmare. When clients are treated like cows, and end up interacting with you only in case of problem. When the magical moments that used to be involved in air travel (bringing your kids to visit the cockpit, getting a surprise upgrade once in a while, drinking a glass of wine while 11km above the ground) have been removed for security or economic reasons.

^{“Food” at the Lufthansa business lounge. The dream life of frequent travelers.}

The bottom line of this industry is to move people, and it certainly does that with a record efficiency and reliability. But how long can a company stay afloat when it treats its clients and workers like crap? Where should the balance between efficiency and humanity be established? Is this another one of these domains where market economy dictated an unbalanced consensus, like the one that just exploded on the financial markets?

One thing is sure: after this latest incident (part of a long list of flights canceled or delayed, of lost luggage, and even a spat with a drunk passenger on a Lufthansa flight that resulted in zero excuse or compensation from the company), it’s probably time for me to stop traveling a bit and focus on what is happening around my city. Globalization is making me sedentary after all, how ironic ;)

I’m not a big fan of these semi-personal notes where you hear a blogger praise or complain about a product or service. But if you work on a laptop it’s probably worth noting that a 29$ device can save your back from the multiple problems that spending eight hours in a ridiculous posture can create.

Grab an Alto stand and pay me a beer when we’ll be 70, and you’ll still be able to see your golf ball take off from the tee without the help of your Chihuahua.

I changed my phone number. Please use +41786966480 to reach me when I’m in Switzerland, and +821035949525 is my Korean number.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is in the news these days as the CERN just turned it on. We discussed this ambitious experiment at Lift07 with Brian Cox at Lift07, a member of the LHC team, and nuclear science’s sexiest doctor if you listen to the women who met him.

Check his speech where he explains what the LHC is all about, what it might prove, and why if there is a black hole we won’t have time to feel earth disintegrate anyway ;)

Jan Chipchase - who will speak at Lift Asia 08 after his remarkable keynotes at Lift07 and TED - continues to share his observations of our planet’s inhabitants. He brought this pearl from his world tour’s latest stop: Afghanistan.

Crude - but your icon is only a Photoshop away from becoming someone else’s icon. Actually - your everything is only a Photoshop away from becoming someone else’s something.

Link

Photoshop, used to reinvent symbols, and also people’s past!

Faking death to force a better valuation of life, that’s the recipe a Korean entrepreneur has found to help prevent suicide among his stressed compatriots:

In a country infatuated with “well-being” […] training companies are now offering courses on dying a good death.

“Korea has ranked number one in many bad things such as suicide and divorce and cancer rates, so I wanted to run a programme for people to experience death,” says Ko Min-su, a 40-year-old former insurance agent who founded Korea Life Consulting, which offers fake funerals as a way to make people value life.

Korean corporations […] send their employees on Mr Ko’s courses regularly, partly to encourage them to question their priorities in life and partly as a suicide prevention measure.

Link (thx Michelle)

The FT describes the whole experience, one nobody will ever go through as it is a funeral from the first person perspective.

Mr Ko […] begins the course with a motivational presentation that includes a “life calculator” counting the time until one’s death down to the millisecond.

Then participants are led to a dark room where they are told to sit at candlelit desks and write their wills, prompted by some sample questions. If you died today, what would you tell your family? What would you say about your job and your life?

As they start to write, the room becomes filled with sniffing, women in particular struggling to hold back their tears.

Will completed, they collect their funeral portraits – participants are asked to pose on the way in – and enter the “death experience room”, a large, dark space containing a series of open coffins and decorated with posters of famous bygones such as Ronald Reagan, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Lee Byung-chull, Samsung’s founder.

In front of an altar covered with flowers and his funeral portrait, Mr Ko instructs his trainees to choose a coffin, put on a traditional hemp death robe and then read out their wills one-by-one.

Next, it is time to be buried. Participants lie down in their coffins, while a man wearing the outfit of a traditional Korean death messenger places a flower on each person’s chest. Funeral attendants place lids on the coffins, banging each corner several times with a mallet. Dirt is thrown down on the lid, as loud as stones on a tile roof. The attendants leave the hall for five minutes – but it seemed like 30 minutes to those taking part.

Once the lids are lifted, Mr Ko asks the trainees how they felt. “When they were nailing the coffin and sprinkling the dirt, it felt like I was really dead,” Ms Baek says. “I thought death was far away but now that I have experienced it, I feel like I have to live a better life.”

How long until we have such courses in Europe? Is playing death acceptable in western societies?