Well, I think I’m winding down here. I can tell that I’m close to being out of things to say (for now, anyway); my mind has begun to wander back to my last multi-part monoramble on seeing time… Perhaps I’ll check in on that sometime soon.
In the meantime, the last few notes I had are probably not enough to chatter on about individually, so I’ll just briefly mention them here.
* * *
Is there a difference in the ethics of a user and the ethics of a creator? I think there is. When I began listing some ideas about ethics and technology, this was the first thing I wrote down. I never really fleshed it out, and still haven’t really. But what I’m thinking of is this: We all are users. There are no creators that are not also users. But there are some users that are not creators. Many of them, in fact. Therefore, creators have an ethical responsibility that users not only do not have, but cannot have. The user-creator has a scope of understanding that the user-consumer does not share, which creates the responsibility. What, specifically, is within the purview of that responsibility is probably very debatable. Does the user-creator have responsibility for issues of economy—the influence a technology might have on the world around it—sustainability—the resources required to create, distribute, and maintain a technology—or the well-being of the user—whether the use of a technology could have negative physical, mental or social repercussions? Are these questions being asked before an idea becomes a product? Are these questions being asked before a product is advertised?
* * *
The internet is a country Or, perhaps better said, corporations dealing in data must begin to think deeply about the political and diplomatic issues that arise from what they do. In response to efforts within some countries to restrict their citizens’ internet access, Secretary of State Clinton recently said:
“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.”
I agree in principle, just as I agree that many people in the world would be largely better off if their country looked a bit more like ours. However, some of the freedoms and systems that we enjoy are inextricable from our culture, and therefore wouldn’t always be simple to export elsewhere. Political systems shape culture expansively, and are not as easily spread as, say, fast food franchises. What I’m getting at here is that I’m not sure we can say so simply that the internet is this meta-political, meta-cultural entity to which countries are subordinate. Perhaps this will end up being true—that the technological manifestation of the world population will supersede political boundaries in a way that restricts the level of control that sovereign nations have enjoyed for millennia—but at this point in time, it seems to me that internet companies should be acknowledging the political and diplomatic restrictions that are in place now. That is, unless they want to be international activists. If so, then go for it. But if not, I’d ask why a business dealing in information shouldn’t have to play by the same rules overseas as a business dealing in hamburgers.
Ok, one last thing…
* * *
Here’s an ethical rule that seems to be an internet extension of the The Golden Rule: Ask not for that which you would not give yourself. This is a huge problem in marketing: On the one hand, I as an individual am unlikely to trust those to whom I feel obliged to share personal information (i.e. corporations, banks, etc.). In those transactions, I am subject to their terms and have no means by which to control the relationship. This structure is responsible for the trend we see online today, where applications and services enable users to sign in with pre-existing social accounts (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and the like) rather than have to create entirely new ones. But this is not necessarily a benefit to the user. Sure, it’s convenient in the short-term—one less username/password to remember—but it also creates connections by which your information is now shared in a greater network than you probably intended. If you declined that opportunity, and created a unique user account for every service, you’d be shocked to discover some day that Twitter knew your comings and goings on Mint.com, down to the transaction, and therefore was able to build a detailed profile of your interests, decisions, etc. enriched by your tweets and then sell it to advertisers. Of course, this specific situation is not happening right now with Twitter, but it could. It is happening with Facebook, which is the largest advertising network on the internet today, and operating in exactly this way. Regardless of whether your Facebook account information has any overlap with any other service or website, Facebook has taken it upon themselves to follow you everywhere you go on the web, and sells that insight to anyone who wants to advertise to their millions of users. The exchange is socialization and convenience for the monetization of human beings.
Thoughts?
So far, my ramblings have gone from monopolies of information to the filter bubble to the economics of the internet.
Today, what about automation in general? Is is ultimately dehumanizing?
Cyborgology had a good post recently about automation called Commentary on Race Against Machine, in which they noted that Norbert Weiner, mathematician, father of cybernetics and author of The Human Use of Human Beings, wrote that automation is essentially…
“…the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.”
In other words, Weiner believed that if any process can be automated or maintained/accelerated by robotics, than the only hope to compete “organically” (i.e. using human beings) would be to employ slave labor. I think what that really means is that there is a limit to growth, or that growth is unsustainable without either moving toward full automation or treating people like slaves. In either case, the poor as a swath of society grows.
So we need to think a bit more critically about progress. What it means and what we’re willing to do to create it. Oh, and what the world might actually be like if that progress is made.
“Any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product.”
That comes from an Economist story about automation and artificial intelligence that begins with an anecdote about Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford famously paid his workers top wages in order to ensure that they could afford the product they had a part in creating. In doing so, he attracted the most talent 1914 had to offer to Ford and away from competitors. But the article goes on to point out that today’s technological progress—far beyond replacing a man with a motor—has reached a level of sophistication which renders not just the doer obsolete, but the entire job. Today, artificial intelligence is beginning to surpass the cognitive abilities of humankind, which means that the technologically-induced obsolescence previously limited to manual labor will now expand to swallow creative work as well. Indeed, if Eric Schmidt is right, we have already turned a corner from employing machines to help us with the work our thinking has produced to asking machines what we should be thinking about. He has said:
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Huh. I wonder, who, exactly, does he mean by “people”? Everything in me bristles at this, but you know what? I may just be a relic of the past. (Yes, I’m fishing for you to tell me otherwise.)
But back to Henry Ford. What I’m wondering about is what happens when you pair his idea to make it possible for his workers to drive the cars they made with automation? If economies are inexorably moving toward greater levels of automation, and putting vast swaths of working people out of work and into poverty, at what point does the number of poor exceed the number of consumers that would buy the products being produced by automation? There must be a fine line past which imbalances are too disruptive if not irreparable. In other words, does this situation not ultimately undermine itself? I feel that it certainly does, though that does not necessarily preclude it from happening. Myopia has always been a critical flaw of society.
Doug Rushkoff has been thinking out loud that perhaps society is simply moving away from work as its central pursuit. After all, if it gets done, why worry that it’s not us doing it? So he asks, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” I think he’s probably on to something, but unfortunately, I don’t expect working society to go quietly into the night. Even if the trajectory of technology would otherwise support us spending our time differently—he points out that isn’t this what technology is for, anyway?—I wonder if good, old-fashioned human nature isn’t too large an obstruction to this kind of societal shift. It prompts many very serious questions. Who are we if we’re not working? If we’re not producing? I’m sure the answers are simple to the enlightened, but one person’s enlightenment is another person’s crazy. In between us and the kind of tomorrow Rushkoff describes is, I imagine, quite a bit of conflict.
Shifting this just a bit:
Something that fascinated me while I was reading The Numerati a few years ago was not that new software was capable of doing the large-scale data analysis that Stephen Baker described in the book—stuff that people used to do but just slightly more accurately than a coin toss—but that the major role of human beings in all of it was sales. The few who had the brainpower to conceive of the algorithms upon which the machine “intelligence” was built did so with self-sufficiency in mind. The goal was not to design a complete system, but to design the beginning of one that would learn and develop itself into one beyond the sophistication of which its creators were capable. In the interim, the only other role of note is facilities maintenance—ensuring that the world of the machine mind doesn’t run out of juice and blink out of existence. But surely that, too, is a role the machine could take on itself at some point not too far off. Ultimately, this sort of technology leaves its creators behind.
So, this is the transitional space we’re in. It’s an uncharted, hazy place in which huge leaps are being made in machine intelligence and automation that are largely unseen and unacknowledged by the majority of the working populace. When progress outpaces our ability to perceive it—to really get our minds around it—conflict is unavoidable. The “gains” of this sort of technology can only look like losses to everyone else. And of course, someone stands to profit, because someone will own that technology. But those someones become even fewer in number, an even more obscure elite. This is what prompts revolutions, which is why, before any real utopia is possible, we must first survive an even more severe winnowing of opportunity and equality.
Continuing these thoughts in a meandering sort of way (Part 1 → Part 2 → You Are Here).
Yesterday I was talking about the filter bubbles that we are so easily caught within—especially on the internet, where an algorithmic approach to dealing with information begins with benign personalization, but can lead to a very real distortion of our worldview. The better the machine knows you, the more it tints your windows to your liking. On the one hand, it’s a surprising turn of events for those who have been engaging online since the days of Geocities—once a thriving a diverse community with one major thing in common: virtuality; now a ghetto in a snow globe. On the other, it’s human nature. We want the world to look more like us. It’s safer that way.
Today, the economics of the internet.
Just as we thought that the internet would increase the existential weight of diversity, we also believed it would evenly distribute opportunity and wealth. But that is not what has happened. Instead, the internet has apparently only further isolated wealth to the very few. When I mentioned this to a friend, his face took on a very distinct mix of confusion and distress—a look that is the result of knowing dissent but not what to make of it—and said,
“Well, what about email? Everyone uses email and benefits from it!”
I thought about that momentarily and realized that email was actually a perfect example of my point. Yes, email is in many ways a wonderful communication tool. For people like me, who lead in small companies and therefore have a large amount of autonomy, a fairly short line exists between tools like email and real, monetary value. But for most people who actively use email—aside from their personal use—their productivity has increased over time but out of proportion with their economic gain. Most people today are not earning substantially more than they were 10 or so years ago, taking inflation into account. Yet, corporations are making far more than they were 10 years ago (I dare you to Google “corporate profits vs wages” and not drown in the charts, but here’s a comprehensible one). Among other things, this shows that the corporation derives the value from technologies like email, but the individual does not. And, of course, this is just one isolated technology. The same could obviously be said about social media technology when you consider the vast number of hours we spend immersed in social networks which offer users virtually zero monetary value.
On that note, Edge.org recently pointed a camera at Jaron Lanier and let him talk for an hour, the result being a pretty fascinating point of view on the economics of the internet, or as Lanier calls it, “The Local-Global Flip.” If you’ve got an hour to spare, I’d recommend it. But on the social media side of things, here’s a quote I pulled from it (there’s no fancy technological way available for me to do this other than starting/typing/stopping/rewinding/starting/typing/etc., by the way):
“I’m really kind of astonished at how readily a great many people I know—young people—have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms, in any meaningful way, and traded them for being able to screw around online. There’s a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet to be seen by somebody once in a while gives them enough ego gratification that it’s ok with them to be still living with their parents in their thirties. That’s such a strange tradeoff and if you project that forward obviously it really does become a problem. I think that leads to a world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses—just barely enough to keep the poor in check and they just kind of whither away through attrition or something.”
I think implicit in all of this is a very good question as to the meaning of progress.
I’ve quoted from Howard Rheingold already in this series of posts, so I’ll do it again. This come’s from The Virtual Community:
“What does it mean that the same hopes, described in the same words, for a decentralization of power, a deeper and more widespread citizen involvement in matters of state, a great equalizer for ordinary citizens to counter the forces of central control, have been voiced in the popular press for two centuries in reference to steam, electricity, and television? We’ve had enough time to live with steam, electricity, and television to recognize that they did indeed change the world, and to recognize that the utopia of technological millenarians has not yet materialized.
An entire worldview and sales job are packed into the word progress, which links the notion of improvement with the notion of innovation, highlights the benefits of innovation while hiding the toxic side-effects of extractive and lucrative technologies, and then sells more of it to people via television as a cure for the stress of living in a technology-dominated world. The hope that the next technology will solve the problems created by the way the last technology was used is a kind of millennial, even messianic, hope, apparently ever-latent in the breasts of the citizenry. The myth of technological progress emerged out of the same Age of Reason that gave us the myth of representative democracy, a new organizing vision that still works pretty well, despite the decline in vigor of the old democratic institutions. It’s hard to give up on one Enlightenment ideal while clinging to another.”
As I write this I realize that the lines between the economics of the internet and the politics of the internet are extraordinarily fuzzy, if not in some ways nonexistent. After all, economies are political structures, and political structures are economic. What Rheingold had his eye on back in 2000 is how this particular technology—which was already scaling beyond most other discreet technologies in history in terms of use and application—brought to the surface not only issues of politics and economy, but deeper, more foundational ideas of progress, even purpose.
Ten years later, immersed in it as we are, it is difficult not to follow the question of the purpose of the internet with another one: What is our purpose?
So, picking up on yesterday.
The next thing that came to mind as far as ethics and technology are concerned is the filter bubble (as coined by Eli Pariser, author of the book of the same name).
Whether done algorithmically or not, the filter bubble is the result of the intentional routing of relationships through conceptual filters, rather than real-world situations. This is another one of those counterintuitive truths of the internet: by ignoring geographic boundaries, we thought it would enable a greater diversity and elevate humanity above the usual demography. But the way the internet works is to foster the exact opposite; to enable people to cluster ideologically, or, more pervasively, around commonalities of consumption (I wear Levi’s jeans/I like Coke vs. Pepsi/I use a Mac/PC). While these seem, in the short term, to empower the consumer (a mob associated with Mac seems to have leverage over Mac’s decisions, no?), brand allegiance is a false dichotomy. Why is it Mac vs. PC? Why does that not include “I made my own computer”? Sadly, it seems that there are far less people with the requisite knowledge and skills to build their own computer today than in previous decades. Hence Doug Rushkoff’s latest book.
If you’re willing to push a bit further, brand allegiance is also not exactly a giant leap from a Matrix-style, battery-people kind of dehumanization. The more we define ourselves based upon what we consume, the more we become little more than walking advertisements. I took the image below while in New York City for conference over a year ago. I knew it would eventually come up in some rant or another ;-) If you’re not disgusted/angered/saddened by what you see here, you need to open your eyes to what’s around you. Here are two adults who, at some level, believe that they have nothing better to offer the world than their own backs as beasts of burden to advertising. However distorted their depleted sense of self-esteem and value, it is only reinforced by the willingness of someone else out there to craft backpack billboards and employ these men to wander the streets wearing them. I’m picturing a Mr. Potter or someone of that ilk. That such an inherently humiliating job even exists is disgusting and depressing.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the irony of the particular company these two are advertising.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Back to the original thought: The filtration of social networks on the basis of products and even ideas is always going to be reduced down to one versus another, rather than a more distributed field of options. By doing this, the power rests not in one side over another, but in the hands of whomever decides which the two options will be. Who, exactly, are those people?
Just the other day, I read a powerful piece by Charles Taylor in Dissent Magazine on the problem with film criticism in which he held the internet accountable for this sort of polarization—and probably for far more than could easily be defended. Here are some of his ideas consolidated, though if you’re interested in this issue in general (or film criticism specifically), I encourage you to read the entire thing:
“In its contribution to the ongoing disposability of our cultural, political, and social life, in encouraging the cultural segregation that currently disfigures democracy, the Internet has to bear a great deal of responsibility for the present derangement of American life…The probable death of movies as popular art, and the retreat of serious critics into contemplation cells, points up a larger problem: the falseness of the claims made for the Web as a new beacon of democracy. In many ways, the Web has been a disaster for democracy…The rigorous division of websites into narrow interests, the attempts of Amazon and Netflix to steer your next purchase based on what you’ve already bought, the ability of Web users to never encounter anything outside of their established political or cultural preferences, and the way technology enables advertisers to identify each potential market and direct advertising to it, all represent the triumph of cultural segregation that is the negation of democracy. It’s the reassurance of never having to face anyone different from ourselves.
I don’t believe it’s an accident that this segregation has become our cultural norm at a time when America is as politically polarized as it’s ever been. The hard fact of democracy, which is always a crapshoot, is that for it to work we can’t shut out who or what we don’t like, who or what we have not bothered to encounter. Popular art, which depends on crossing barriers, can’t exist in such confines. And criticism—which is meant to help people make sense of work they don’t know or assume they won’t like, or work that they know but haven’t really thought about—becomes something like samizdat in a culture set up to enforce the boundaries that art and criticism must transverse. The snarkiness of the film writers who tell us nothing is to be taken seriously, as well as the dourness of the film writers who wear seriousness as a hair shirt (and who may yet succeed in making movie watching as joyless as academics have made reading novels), play into that divisiveness, telling their followers they’re not missing anything by ignoring everything beyond their own self-proscribed compound. It’s not movies and movie criticism that are drowning in the tyranny of the “like” button. It’s democracy.”
Chesterton said something (oh, right, it was in Heretics—thank you, internet!) about how civilization has been built upon the tendency in human beings to seek out ideological relationships even if they are geographically inconvenient rather than accept the challenge of being in relationship with their neighbor. Think of the people on your street, or in your apartment building, or in your school or town—there’s ideological diversity there, as well as economic diversity, that is likely far broader than that of your online relationships in many cases. Add to that the idea that you may just not like the people nearest to you, and that today’s technology enables you to spend time—albeit virtually—with people you like. Beforehand, you would have had to choose between loneliness and your irritating neighbor. But choosing your irritating neighbor reinforced all kinds of good things: tolerance, grace for others, patience, humility, etc.
As I write this I realize that in the past week alone, I have spent hours communing with friends from afar over Skype—one of whom I still have never met in person—yet have only had one very brief interaction with my neighbor who’s front door is only a matter of yards from mine. So, yes, there is some hypocrisy in my rant, but does that make it any less true?
I thought not.
P.S. I should mention that, thanks to Warren Ellis, I’ve been listening to this fantastically strange radio program—The Time Attended To—as I wrote this, which must have (in some way) contributed my mood.
A few weeks ago, I sat down for a cup of coffee and conversation with a new friend—someone who had been put in touch with me by a mutual friend of ours who knew that we had a shared interest in technology, ethics, and all the “big ideas” in between. Vance teaches this stuff—hes’s an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy department at Guilford College—while I try to figure out how to apply it in a working world where few actively or deeply consider ethics (until it’s too late, that is). Our connector was Paul, director of iBiblio.org and Clinical Associate Professor of the schools of Journalism & Mass Communications and Information & Library Sciences at UNC. These guys are both way smarter than me; I’m glad to know them both.
Anyway, there Vance and I sat for several hours batting around all kinds of issues and ideas—from monopolies of information to informational transactional responsibility to the filter bubble to the economics and politics of informational systems to automation and on and on. This was one of those conversations I wish I had recorded, because when I got home, I felt that panicky sensation as my brain began—out of necessity—to hemorrhage vast swaths of detail that had been exchanged between us. I did jot down a bunch of notes and have been adding to them here and there since.
Which brings me here. I’d like to take my note-jotting to the web. So here begins a few days of rambling on what comes to my mind when I think about ethics and technology.
I’ll start with monopolies of information. Let the unedited rambling begin:
* * *
The big news: Digitized information is centralized, and therefore, easily controlled. I know, I know—the conventional wisdom has been that the revolutionary nature of the internet is in its decentralization of information, which is disruptive to the powers-that-be. But no, I don’t think that’s actually true. The internet has created the impression of decentralization. But, once information is digitized, it’s bits are part of someone’s property. Maybe that someone is just some relatively unknown person who happens to have her own server, but for the most part, that someone is Google, or Facebook, or some other massive corporation that has offered storage so plentiful that it almost disappears from common perception. As James Bridle has pointed out, the cloud is a lie. The cloud is marketing speak for sprawling, hot server facilities that horizontally out-scale most architecture you’ve ever encountered. They’re not invisible, they’re not lighter than air, they’re not public. They’re massive, opaque, and very, very private. The point is that once information is digitized, ownership becomes pretty complicated—which works to the corporate advantage, because in most cases, you the uploader actually hand ownership over the the host. The question of who owns your emails, your documents, your videos, pictures, music, etc. is fraught with issues that have not been worked out with you in mind. Think about what this means in the long term.
If books are digitized as a way of “extending” their reach (the anecdotally accepted motivation behind e-books), their success in extension will create economic pressure to no longer produce any physical copies. That’s just one example—one that many are pondering right now. But once that happens, where the physical is truly eclipsed by the digital, the entity which controls the storage of the digital controls the flow of information. Perceptions and knowledge can be controlled as never before. Of course, this isn’t a novel idea. Even at the beginning of the web—at least the web as we know it today, Howard Rheingold wrote of his concern for how the internet could be too easily dominated by too few powers:
“The telecommunications industry is a business, viewed primarily as an economic player. But telecommunications gives certain people access to means of influencing certain other people’s thoughts and perceptions, and that access—who has it and who doesn’t have it—is intimately connected with political power. The prospect of the technical capabilities of a near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth Net in the hands of a small number of commercial interests has dire political implications. Whoever gains the political edge on this technology will be able to use the technology to consolidate power.”
Before digitization, we had distributed freedoms—to browse and discover information in unique ways based upon the individualized freedoms of other individuals, store owners, and librarians to curate collections. Though access was challenged in physical ways (e.g. no central inventory, things going out of print, costs barring ownership in some cases), those factors were not centrally controlled. Once a book was printed, it was very hard to alter or destroy or control. But if all books go digital, they will be comparatively simple to alter, destroy or control. If someone at the top of the corporate food chain wanted to (or was persuaded to) blink a text out of digital existence, it could be possible to do so. It’s ironic: digitization appeals to the desire to spread and share information, yet it makes it easier than ever before to control, alter, or censor.
In between me and discreet information are other issue of exposure and access. When I am shopping on Amazon and see “people who bought ___ also bought ____” I think I am getting an objective, qualitative recommendation. After all, if people bought that thing I want also bought this other stuff, then maybe I’m more likely to want this other stuff than other other stuff. But the question underlying all of that is, What about the other stuff that’s not even in this ecosystem? Or, bigger yet, what about making stuff for yourself—not necessarily all of it, because the DIY thing can become an idol of its own—instead of buying everything?
And what about the role of privacy in all of this? What is amazing to me, now reading back in Rheingold’s writings, is not that some of the outcomes have indeed come to pass and were unseen by him decades ago (he did see many of them) but that the possible human responses to some of those outcomes elicited a could-you-imagine?! incredulity that, in its naiveté, makes me shake my head in sadness. Example:
“The second school of criticism focuses on the fact that high-bandwidth interactive networks could be used in conjunction with other technologies as a means of surveillance, control, and disinformation as well as a conduit for useful information. This direct assault on personal liberty is compounded by a more diffuse erosion of old social values due to the capabilities of new technologies; the most problematic example is the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged on several fronts by the ease of collecting and disseminating detailed information about individuals via cyberspace technologies. When people use the convenience of electronic communication or transaction, we leave invisible digital trails; now that technologies for tracking those trails are maturing, there is cause to worry. The spreading use of computer matching to piece together the digital trails we all leave in cyberspace is one indication of privacy problems to come.
Along with all the person-to-person communications exchanged on the world’s telecommunications networks are vast flows of other kinds of personal information—credit information, transaction processing, health information. Most people take it for granted that no one can search through all the electronic transactions that move through the world’s networks in order to pin down an individual for marketing—or political—motives. Remember the “knowbots” that would act as personal servants, swimming in the info-tides, fishing for information to suit your interests? What if people could turn loose knowbots to collect all the information digitally linked to you? What if the Net and cheap, powerful computers give that power not only to governments and large corporations but to everyone?
Every time we travel or shop or communicate, citizens of the credit-card society contribute to streams of information that travel between point of purchase, remote credit bureaus, municipal and federal information systems, crime information databases, central transaction databases. And all these other forms of cyberspace interaction take place via the same packet-switched, high-bandwidth network technology—those packets can contain transactions as well as video clips and text files. When these streams of information begin to connect together, the unscrupulous or would-be tyrants can use the Net to catch citizens in a more ominous kind of net.”
Not only has all of that come to pass, but we have come to pass on being concerned about it. What Rheingold characterized as “unscrupulous” and even tyranny has become basic business practice. So things have changed, but more importantly, so have we. The connection between information and democracy is extraordinarily meaningful, yet it seems to be one we take largely for granted. Of course, Rheingold continues on in that chapter to rail against “the selling of democracy” in a way that chillingly corresponds to what is going on all around us today. You should really read this. What it shows is that today’s circumstance didn’t just happen to us, it is the deliberate fulfillment of an agenda—one that should cause anyone to sincerely question the integrity of the democracy we live in.
That’s probably enough for today. More tomorrow…
Thoughts?
“Over time, to the extent the customer service experience gets worse, it will only increase the shift away from mail to alternatives. There’s almost nothing you can’t do online that you can do by mail.” —
analyst on today’s announcement that the US Postal Service will be making $3billion in cuts to its First Class delivery service.
So, “almost” nothing? That “almost” includes a ton, if you want it to. Here’s just one example—I intend to keep making those as long as I can.
“What does it mean that the same hopes, described in the same words, for a decentralization of power, a deeper and more widespread citizen involvement in matters of state, a great equalizer for ordinary citizens to counter the forces of central control, have been voiced in the popular press for two centuries in reference to steam, electricity, and television? We’ve had enough time to live with steam, electricity, and television to recognize that they did indeed change the world, and to recognize that the utopia of technological millenarians has not yet materialized.” — A passage from Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community, which, though written in 2000, chillingly corresponds to what is going on all around us today. You should read it.
“When a site’s goal is to satisfy the great sucking maw of the Internet with a constant feed of new items, sourced or unsourced, nothing is around long enough to make an impact. When perpetual turnover is the norm, the shallow, silly, and irrelevant rule.” — Charles Taylor (on the problem of film criticism, among other things, and how the Internet is at least in part responsible)
“The present day is no less crazy. We routinely do things that just five years ago would scarcely have made sense to us. We tweet along to reality shows; we share videos of strangers dropping cats in bins; we dance in front of Xboxes that can see us, and judge us, and find us sorely lacking. It’s hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn’t somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That’s pretty much all we have left. Just yesterday I read a news story about a new video game installed above urinals to stop patrons getting bored: you control it by sloshing your urine stream left and right. Read that back to yourself and ask if you live in a sane society.” — Charlie Brooker
(Source: Guardian)
“
The shiny bright City of Tomorrow is also full of slums and favelas.
We get stuff wrong. Property development magnates build gated communities for billionaires that open for business just as the real estate market crashes. The office buildings of a booming middle eastern emirate go up so fast that the municipal sewage system can’t cope so skyscrapers end up being serviced by huge queues of sewage trucks. Country dwellers migrate to cities that can’t expand fast enough to give them adequate housing, so they end up in favelas and shanty towns. And people keep driving ancient automobiles long after Ford or General Motors would like to have sold them a new one…Part of the problem is that we build rafts of infrastructure on top of existing design decisions. Which means that fixing a bad decision requires the abandonment of lots of stuff that depends on it.
” — Charlie Stross on worldbuilding
…it’s not even looking in the right place…
(Source: circlesofcircles, via oberholtzer)
CIVILIZATION!
My latest article for Newfangled is up today. Here’s a clip:
There is No Box!
We used to joke around the office that our work amounted to an unending cycle; “Another day, another rectangle,” we’d say. And in some ways, that still works. After all, new devices are popping into existence all the time; each one with its own unique, glowing, rectangular screen into which will eventually be squeezed the information we create. The trouble is with over-thinking the rectangle part. We used to get as specific as possible about the dimensions of our designs, doing our best Bob Villa impressions just short of pulling out our tape measures to frame up just how wide, exactly, this thing is going to be. Today, that’s a quaint approach. As if we can really know for sure.
As far as context is concerned, we’re at a point that is far beyond individual devices—or even screen dimensions specifically. Think of it more like playing baseball without the field. How much of the game would work without being grounded—literally—with all the hard edges and linear cues that players and spectators are used to? In baseball, the game is the content; the trappings of the game—the field, the equipment, the lights, and the stands—are all parts of the container. The question is, does the game exist outside of the container? Some might say no, but then what of fantasy baseball, a thriving virtual league that exists unconfined by the field in computers, on pieces of paper, and in minds of enthusiasts. This is exactly what is happening on the web. Our game—content—is being released from its field. Rather than see this as a shocking catastrophe, one that sends us sprawling to catch every last worm spilling from the proverbial can, we should instead take note of the opportunity before us. We no longer have to design the container! Instead, we can focus on designing resilient, flexible, and scalable content…
More of these, please.
(Light Show Projections by Tony Martin, via But Does it Float)
“We’ll probably never fully debug our lives. In fact, it is in those “reboot” moments that we are reminded of our dependency on technology, both in its fragility and its power. We have formed a symbiotic relationship with technology, its bonds growing stronger every day. In days to come, we’ll see fantastic changes at blinding speed, and we will always struggle to adapt to them, make sense of them. We will continue to confront the gap that exists between human and machine — indeed, it will always be there (at least I think it will).” — Michael Babwahsingh
(Source: michaelbabwahsingh.com)