Christopher Butler

Seeing Time, Part 6

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:01:02 -0400

“Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.” (James Gleick, Faster, 286)

…which is probably why futurism is dying right now. But I should probably qualify that, because words like future and futurism seem to be used all the time. The kind of futurism I’m talking about is the kind that involves imagination of the long-term variety, not the kind that involves relatively short-term predictions of things with relatively short-term impact — things like who will win the next election, what the next iPhone will look like, etc. I’m not the only one who feels this way; I posted back in October a short note about how we’re distracted by the now as a result of this kind of short-term futurism, which was actually just a “hear, hear” to Matthew Sheret’s post, The Future is a Blank Canvas Pinned to a Brick Wall. (Note to self: I need to get more creative with my blog post titles.) And Sheret’s post was really just a response to a quote from William Gibson:

“We have too many cards in play to casually erect believable futures.”

In any case, my main point back then was this:

“What’s happening, as far as I can tell, is that our imagination is being inhibited. We’re so focused on the now — that email, text message, instant message, Twitter DM or @, Facebook post, you know what I mean — that our sense of the “next” is being squeezed down to the momentary rather than something larger…there’s no data to prove this. But I do appeal to our ability to sense what is clearly happening. The reduction of the scope of our imagined future from years, to seasons, to moments. Sure, there could be other factors at play, such as loss of hope due to global conflict, economic collapse, environmental issues, general entropy, but amidst that is a significant shift in the pace of life that has stolen the quiet moment of reflection from us.”

This seems related, so…

I was chatting with a colleague this morning about the various bad news (political/social strife, natural disasters, economic struggles, etc.) and he mentioned that there’s an old rule of thumb for stock traders — that 80% of people forget about news after 3 days, but then the rest forget after 21 days. Not exactly a long-term perspective. But given the volume of news today — the 24-hour news cycle — you can’t really blame us for dumping our news cache, can you?

Maybe it’s another one of those strange examples of existential time-dilation, related to what the Directorate of Time said about how “the more we have experienced, the faster time flows.” So the more we experience, even peripherally, the more distorted our sense of now, then, and later will be. Add to that the fact that we’re complicit in allowing rumors about possible entertainment gadgets (not to mention “reports” of such-and-such a celebrity being seen wearing something-or-other at someplace) to qualify as “news,” occupying the same level of importance as a dispatch from a war-torn country. If some guy’s musings about an unreleased cellphone’s feature set is news, then some kind of time-dilating, imagination-suppressing phenomenon must be to blame…

I think that’s it for seeing time.

Thoughts?

Seeing Time, Part 5

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:54:08 -0400

(Now that I’m on to a fifth installment of this series, I realized I can just provide a link to all of them by linking to the tag, Seeing Time. Duh. I work primarily on the internet.)

I also realize that titling these “Seeing Time” is a little grandiose when they should really just be called “random brain jazz after reading a really out of date tech book.” Just so you know that I realize. On that note:

“The printed word began as advanced technology for rapid transmission of data into the brain. In terms of bits per second, there was no better way to get information, or a story, or facts, from out there to in here.” (James Gleick, Faster, 283)

Here’s my question about this idea: if the printed word accelerated the transmission of data into the brain, what did it do for the retention of data by the brain? As I read this, I thought of how information was transmitted throughout ancient history — much of it orally, which is a method we no longer depend upon, not to mention a skill we no longer have.

So once we gained the ability to write down information, we began storing it anywhere but our own brains — cave walls, stone and clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, vellum codices, and so on. We outsourced our memory, even then, to technology, which is interesting to consider as this concept of cyborgification (so to speak) is all the rage right now because of how we’re doing the exact same thing only with digital media and computers. I suppose the really pertinent question is not whether we are outsourcing our memory to technology — we are, just as we have been since we first learned to write — but whether we are doing so to a reliable storage agent. All that we know of ancient human history is the result of the reliability of the stone, clay, and paper storage units for information. Yet, digital media is much more vulnerable. The volatility of file formats, proprietary (and therefore hazardous) database structures and languages, rapid succession of devices, and, of course, the market forces driving technological innovation today, all contribute to a poor substitute for analog storage methods — perhaps even oral tradition — in light of the retention of cultural knowledge.

James Burke touches on this at the outset of his series, The Day the Universe Changed, too…

By the way, I spent a few minutes Googling around on the history of communications technology and found some interesting stuff. For instance, the World History Site has a very long, categorized timeline of dates in the history of cultural technologies. While browsing there I made a serendipitous discovery. The timeline lists:

1824: Peter Mark Roget proposes theory of persistent vision.

Apparently, this is the same Roget for whom the Thesaurus is named. Neat!

There’s more where that list came from, by the way. Here’s a clearing house (of sorts) of information on communications technologies and world history. You could also hit up Wikipedia’s landing page on the history of technology. But then you’d be there for the rest of the day. There’s a ton there…

By the way, I have to end these with a question mark in order to trigger Tumblr’s “let people answer this” widget, so here you go?

Seeing Time, Part 4

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:00:22 -0400

For those late to the free-association party, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 have been hastily dashed off to the web with little regard for coherency or an overall game plan. The nonsense continues here…

“You are aware that the director of the Directorate of Time is something of a philosopher. He has written, ‘We experience time intervals as much shorter than when we were young.’ He even has equations for this: ‘Delta t(s) ~ Delta Exp/Total Exp’ and ‘dt(s) ~ dt/t or integrated t(s) ~ In(t),’ by which he means, the more we have experienced, the faster time flows. Depressants like alcohol slow time, because the brain receives fewer inputs per second. You may feel, as so many do, that your life could be plotted on a scale where the years from age ten to age twenty seem as long (as eventful) as the years from age twenty to age forty or from forty to eighty. Exponential growth at its most damning. On this scale, the moment of birth is at negative infinity, and as for death…someone else might quote Woody Allen, but the director favors Epicurus: ‘Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’” (James Gleick, Faster, 279-280)

As soon as I turned 30, I began spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about how my perception of time has changed. In particular, I began noticing exactly what the Directorate of Time describes — that the decade from age 10 to 20 seemed far longer than the following one, which brought me to 30. In some ways, the changes in my life were equally intense in both decades. Between 10 and 20, one doubles one’s age, which in and of itself is significant and isn’t as quickly done in later years. But also, one goes from childhood to early adulthood, experiencing hormonal and brain chemistry changes that greatly affect one’s sense of self. In the next decade, I experienced much more circumstantial volatility, but I suppose my sense of self was a bit more consistent. In any case, the distortion makes 40 seem as if it’s far closer than 9 years from now.

And now I’m less than two months from 32.

Incidentally, neuroscientist António_Damásio was recently interviewed on an episode of PRI’s To the Best of Our Knowledge on Memory, Mind & The Self about the role of memory in the development of selfhood in human beings:

“The critical thing in relation to human consciousness is not only the development of mind and the development of self, it’s the development of a self that has biographical characteristics. I think that that is really the passport into big-time consciousness of our kind. What you have there is the possibility of, of course, expanding memory so that it is not just a memory about categories of things, like say animals, mountains, and bodies of water and such, but also the possibility of having memories about specific individuals, specific events, including the events that have happened to you. Once you start having that kind of memory, then you have the possibility of creating some kind of record of what you have been. And eventually, once you get language, then you’re essentially creating the beginnings of culture.”

It seems that he is saying that one’s sense of distinction from other entities is the root of selfhood. I suppose that seems a bit obvious or circular, but it’s different from saying that one’s sense of self is (and always has been to humans) inherent to the experience of being alive. Damasio seems to be saying that our sense of self — the human sense of self — originates with our ability to recognize that we are not something else, that we have individuality in a categorical sense, before we had personality - individuality in the way we tend to see it today.

I wonder, back to Gleick’s passage (and my “I’m-post-30-now-and-running-out-of-time” feelings), whether my ability to forget enables the sense of time dilation the Directorate calculates. What might that dilation feel like (or would it exist at all) for a person with hyperthymesia? (Incidentally again, that same episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge includes an interview with Jill Price, a 46-year-old resident of New York who has forgotten virtually nothing since the age of 14, and whose case in particular led to the official diagnosis of hyperthymesia.) It’s tragic — the entry for Price notes that hyperthymesia is characterized by a propensity for “spending vast quantities of time thinking about one’s past,” which must be torturous given the detail available. Price confirms this in her interview, which makes me feel thankful for my smaller dispensation of torturous autobiographical recall…

Is anyone out there experiencing psychological time dilation…or perhaps real time dilation?

Seeing Time, Part 3

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:35:15 -0400

…Part 1 was on Monday, and Part 2 yesterday. I’m just going to keep going with this until I’m sick of it. First, another quote from James Gleick’s Faster…

“‘The historical record shows that humans have never, ever opted for slower,’ points out the historian Stephen Kern. We fool ourselves with false nostalgia—a nostalgia for what never was. Whenever we speed up the present, as a curious side-effect we slow down the past. ‘If a man travels to work on a horse for twenty years,’ Kern says, ‘and then an automobile is invented and he travels in it, the effect is both an acceleration and a slowing…That very acceleration transforms his former means of traveling into something it had never been—slow—whereas before it had been the fastest way to go.’ Until the futurist Filippo Marinetti began talking about speeding up rivers, ‘the Danube had never seemed so deliciously slow.’ Peering back through history, we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.” (277-278)

Sure, there’s a distortion of perception that happens when some new technology changes how we do things today and think about how we did them yesterday, but it’s not always just about speed. For instance, texting is not necessarily faster than a phone call. A text-based conversation could elapse over a longer period of time than a phone call, but it feels faster because we don’t have to focus on that conversation in the same way we do when we’re talking, live, over the phone. With texting, you can quickly send a message and then stop thinking about it until you receive a reply. Ultimately, it probably requires the same overall amount of attention, but in a less concentrated way. But texting is another available method that we didn’t have before. It gives us the choice of communicating one way rather than another. We once had only letters. Over time, our choices have multiplied: telegram, telephone, fax, email, instant message, text message, etc. I guess that means that, in light of Gleick’s passage, acceleration is one consideration and distribution is another.

The last part about speeding up rivers made me think about a slideshow I saw recently documenting Lost Rivers, which “depicts places poised between loss and beauty, acknowledging the price of urbanization while seeking to reclaim a sense of connection with these natural spaces.” It seems that attempting to “speed up rivers,” or in general, messing with nature to accelerate industry, is not a good idea…

But back again to slow, because the rivers made me think of the opening scene of Andrei Rublev, which depicts a group of 15th century Russian monks launching a hot air balloon. Some run along a river, making their way to the launch point. As the monks prepare, many references to time:

Hold on a second. Come on, quick! Come on, fast! We won’t have enough time. Just a second.

And then, spectacular footage shot from the balloon as it slowly crosses the landscape and eventually makes landfall near a horse —the contemporary vehicle of travel — by the river.

Beautiful.

Thoughts?

Seeing Time, Part 2

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:31:03 -0400

(…my last post being Part 1. I grabbed several quotes from James Gleick’s book, Faster, as I flipped back through it the other night, which is where this assembling series is coming from…)

“Your sense of acceleration has not blinded you to the brevity of the present moment.” (273)

This is the first sentence of the last chapter, titled The End. I’m still not exactly sure what it means. Sometimes I feel quite the opposite — that much of what we do only makes sense given a denial of our transience on this planet (building projects, storing up wealth, the way we spend the time we do have, etc.). I’ve often had this realization while waiting on line in stores, where I’ll be looking around at the people around me and wondering, “what are we all doing here, living like this, when we’re all going to die?” On the other hand, perhaps Gleick is right — that our ambitions and daily toil are also just as motivated by the awareness that we won’t be here forever, so the simple fact that we have desires validates what we are willing to do (standing on line, for example) to achieve them…

Meanwhile, last evening I watched (thanks to Frank’s recommendation) the first episode of Ways of Seeing, in which John Berger points out that the way we perceive a painting is changed by its surroundings — the sound around us when we’re looking at it, the wall behind it, whether it’s been reproduced and displayed somewhere else, etc. He meditates quite a bit on the pace of seeing, which caused me to marvel that even in our rushing about to do all we might do in life before we no longer have it, we still stop to look at things.

Then I thought, what if someone were to choose a painting, say for instance Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (Berger talks about it at length in the first episode) which has been placed in many different locations since it was first painted in the late 15th/early 16th century, and create a sonic story of its life so far? The image would never change, but the sound we hear would. Early in the piece, you might hear the echoing goings on of the Milan church for which it was painted. Then you’d hear the sounds of transport as it made its way to England. You might hear hushed conversations of spectators around it, perhaps the bragging of its owner of the time. Eventually, more transport sounds, installation in the British National Gallery, etc. It would be a purely sonic version of Noah’s Everyday, and rather than the brooding soundtrack he deftly chose — which turns mundanity into something more dramatic — the sounds of mundanity would bring life to the painting, which would remain still. Someone should do this…

This makes me think of a book I had as a child — The Little House — which tells the story of a house as its surroundings radically change over time. The image above, by the way, comes from a brief article comparing the storybook image to a real-life example of a house that refuses to give in to the pressures of progress. Anyway, The Little House is kind of an analog version of Everyday, isn’t it?

Seeing Time, Part 1

Mon, 14 May 2012 13:58:24 -0400

Today I was flipping through a book I read sometime in the last two years: Faster, by James Gleick. It’s been on my mind since I just started reading his newest book, The Information. This passage, in his Afterword, resonated more with me in this pass (apparently) than the first time I read it:

“We struggle to perceive the process of change even as we ourselves are changing. After all, flux is our style, if not our destiny. We don’t exist in a steady state, and we don’t have a motionless platform from which to observe the changing world around us. Sometimes we fail to perceive profound transformations that we’ve been staring at; sometimes we blink and we notice a revolution. The most profound comment on this is still Richard Feynman’s; he was sitting outdoors in New Mexico, looking up at a blue and turbulent sky and talking about the evolution of his field, theoretical physics. ‘It is really like the shape of clouds,’ he said. ‘As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.’” (287)

As soon as I read this, I immediately recalled a few picture-every-day type projects I’d seen on the web. They’re the sort of thing that only the late 20th century could have produced; the technology necessary for that much documentation was just not available or practical beforehand. Here’s one that began way back in 1976 and continues to track a family’s appearance each year. Here’s another one — particularly sad, I should say. Here, of course, is the famous Noah-takes-a-picture-of-himself-everyday-for-six-years video that was later spoofed by the Simpsons. I am sure there are many, many more… This one is the most recent I’ve seen, and perhaps the most stunning. The subject photographed himself every day between 1991 and 2007, and animated the images (which, incidentally, also track the position of the Earth relative to the Sun). I had to watch it several times in order to really process the physical change he experienced over 17 years. Even at such a rapid speed, you track with him and lose sight of the earlier images. By the time you reach the last image, you know he looks older, but you can’t exactly describe why. The last time I watched it, I also noticed how the intervals between haircuts grew much smaller as he aged.

But I also wonder if the relationship between the availability of that technology and the output of that kind of condensed observation project is parabolic — that maybe we’ll get to the point of an overwhelming amount of immediacy of media that nobody cares anymore to mine the insights that condensing it produces.

But then I think of a couple of other stories—one book and one film—that push this idea of constant/ubiquitous surveillance even further. The film is The Final Cut, the story of a “cutter,” a sort of life-editor/sin-eater of the continuous footage our lives produce via implants who creates the final cuts screened after one dies. The book is The Light of Other Days, which tells the story of the radical societal impact of a time-viewer, which is just as good at showing you an event 100 years in the past as it is one less than a second ago, which is to say that it makes everything, everywhere, everywhen available.

Anyway, this stuff is just on my mind. What do you think?

Networked Cities and Crumbling Infrastructure

Wed, 02 May 2012 08:15:51 -0400

I’ve been following the ongoing conversation around the internet of things and the networked city and have enjoyed it very much.

(To follow along, check out—in no particular order—Really Interesting Group, mammoth, City of Sound, frog, The Infrastructurist, Berg, Dentsu, Stamen, and Quiet Babylon. Very light on Americans, by the way. Something to think and perhaps feel a bit of shame about.)

There’s a feeling of being right on the cusp of something—that, soon, many things will be profoundly different for us not just in the world of screens that we’ve already been immersed in, but also in the physical world in which we exist (or, for lack of a less cynical way of saying it, the world in between screens). The only problem is that this future world—the networked city we’re imagining now—just isn’t that appealing to me. The idea of being followed around by the ghost in the machine, being addressed by name on public transportation (because of technology, not because I know the bus driver), being sold things in the park by disembodied voices, etc., is dystopic to me. All we’re doing is imagining a future in which the virtual world we already know so well, characterized primarily by commerce, is manifest as an invisible layer over the organic, physical one. How interesting, really, is that?

What we really need to do is apply the technology in ways that will network the city to make our day to day experience less virtual. Invisibility is actually pretty key to that. So is a focus on us, but not from the perspective of finding more ways to reach us with advertising (no matter how soft or “social” it may seem), but from the perspective of making the work we do more productive, more efficient, safer, more enjoyable, etc.

This occurred to me dramatically when I read an article recently bemoaning the fact that the United States physical infrastructure has declined to such a great extent as to rank us shockingly low in global terms. Yes, us. It’s sad that we walk around crumbling cities with shiny new gadgets in our hands. Our infrastructure is hurting. It really shows where our focus is—I could string together quite a nice metaphor about these screens being the reflecting pool to our Narcissus, but that’s been done. But what’s even more troubling to me is how quickly our narcissistic trance could be broken and transformed to anger and entitlement by a dumb and harmful accident due to lack of upkeep on a bridge or road or something similar. I can imagine the response, the outraged questioning: “Why wasn’t this prevented? How could we let this happen in America?” I know I risk oversimplifying things by imagining that the answer lies in our unproductive online distraction. But hey, I’m going to say so anyway. Maybe we’d get more done, and have a more reliable physical experience if we weren’t so obsessed by our virtual one.

So how would this tweak to the motivation actually change what a networked city could be? One example came to mind right away, and could be the confluence of several technological trends of interest right now. Imagine if every municipal trashcan had a sensor in it that could detect when it had reached capacity. That sensor could report back to a main database. That simple full/not full report could be measured over time, and once the data set represented a large enough span of time, we could begin to do analysis on it to predict in advance when the trashcans would be full. Couple that will an algorithm that would apply the full/not full statistical analysis to the pickup crews and their routes, and we could create a system that plans and assigns routes based upon realtime data. I believe that would be a truly smart system that would create all kinds of efficiencies: better route planning would, of course, save time and fuel by reducing the waste of hitting cans and streets that don’t need attention, but also reduce monotony for the workers, which I’m willing to bet would increase their happiness and reduce turnover.

My firm began working with a client several years ago that created software to coordinate municipal road projects, in particular between systems that don’t ordinarily know what the other is doing. Their tool would allow workers to know when a street is being or has already been dug up, whether to fix an electricity problem, communications issue, or a sewer, water, or gas main. They created it because many cities and towns impose moratoriums on digging in order to reduce traffic problems, so that if a street is dug up it can’t be dug up again for a period of years after. You can imagine, then, why coordination is so important. If a street is cut in order to do maintenance on an electrical line, then resealed before the sewer team can do the work they may need to do, the sewer work is delayed significantly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but their tool was anticipating where this networked city concept could go. The only limitation is that their tool (as far as I know right now) has to be adopted on the municipal level and is not being run in the cloud. To distribute it widely enough to make it really effective, it would have to be adopted and installed on enough machines and mobile devices to fill it with enough data to make it worthwhile. It’s just kind of clunky right now. But if each of the municipal systems were networked, the same kind of analysis system I described for the trashcans could be created to detect and anticipate problems and then plan maintenance routines that are efficiently coordinated across systems.

We don’t need more advertising systems, but we do need smarter infrastructure. We certainly have the technology to do this—we’ve spent at least the last decade amassing huge amounts of data from consumer technology use and continue to gather it at unprecedented levels; surely we have something better to do with this computing power than find new ways to do advertising (see here and here and here for an indictment of how we’re using our tech and time, and here and here for an indication of what’s technically possible).

Your thoughts?

Ethical Technology, Part 5

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:02:31 -0400

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 also resurrect that one 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?

Ethical Technology, Part 4

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:19:38 -0400

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.

Thoughts?

Ethical Technology, Part 3

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:54:27 -0400

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?

Ethical Technology, Part 2

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:49:51 -0400

So, picking up on Part 1.

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.

Thoughts?

Ethical Technology, Part 1

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 21:30:09 -0400

Last fall, 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?

My Books

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:15:00 -0400

On Monday, Michael Babwahsingh wrote an inspiring post recounting his personal history with sketchbooks. Since I’ve known him, the sketchbook as a concept has probably come up in 90% of our conversations. As far as I’m concerned, this is as it should be. Suffice it to say that we’re both committed to the sketchbook as a vessel for offline thinking. We’re even sharing one now, mailing it back and forth between us every few weeks. I covered it with bright yellow paper, so we call it the yellow book. More on that later.

(Though on the topic of “offline thinking,” I must say that if the late-1980s me who just received his first sketchbook were somehow flung forward through time and space to hear me use such a phrase, he’d have absolutely no idea what I meant by it. The same goes for the late 1990s me who sat down at his dorm room desk to work in his sketchbook no less than a handful of hours after being dropped off at college for the very first time. The notion of “offline thinking” is a symptom of the late 2000s, when the contagion of bot-social rot spread over the internet and infected us all with an insatiable appetite for screen staring and information management.)

ANYWAY.

As I read through Michael’s memories, I was struck by how many of them could have been my own. We share a similar history of art-making, and seem to have wound up on this side of 30 with a shared sensibility and appreciation (and sometime nostalgia) for our creative histories. Superheroes in our adolescence (though I was firmly entrenched in the DC universe); experimentation with children’s books (I was devoted to the books of Chris Van Allsburg and David Macaulay as a kid and was thrilled to end up studying where they did); drawing from life in our college days; transitioning into design as adults; recent pages taking on a decidedly analytical aesthetic; like I said, very similar paths. Although, one possible difference is this: Amidst the academic-to-practicing-designer transition, I had a significant burst of abstract drawing and collage experimentation. Michael doesn’t mention that in his history, but I bet it’s there somewhere. Actually, the majority of the images I have to share come from this period. I don’t have any of my sketchbooks from before 2002. One of the sketchbooks I kept during my senior year of high school and into my first year of college—the one I mentioned working in on that very first day—is somewhere. I just don’t know exactly where. I last looked through it a few years ago. It contained many paint-slathered and ink-stained pages, self-portraits, meticulous drawings of textures—in other words, very art school. But it has a wonderful smell, and jogs some powerful and important memories. I’d like to track it down if I can.

Graph paper, colored pencil, tape, and pen; Spring, 2004

Misc papers, labels, and ink; Spring, 2004

Sometime in the last decade, I stopped calling them sketchbooks. I think it started in 2002 when I was transitioning out of school and beginning to navigate the real world. My books began to function more as indices of that experience than as containers for art or even preliminary art—sketches. One of the earliest of these even says “INDEX” on the cover. Well, I meant it to say “INDEX” but it actually reads “INIEX” because I zoned out while I was spelling out the word with rub-on letters and went back to “I” instead of “D.” Not the easiest thing to fix, so I left it as it was. I knew what I meant. My book was a companion and caught a significant amount of the experience of my life. A design idea scrawled quickly in pen would often share the page with grocery lists, phone numbers, reminders, idly drawn patterns, wintergreen oil transfers, pasted clippings, rubbings, who knows. I was putting everything in my books at the time. So, I no longer thought of them as sketchbooks. They were just my books. If you want a strange but honest and very personal glimpse of my twenties, my books are where you’ll find it. They’re my Red Book, minus the genius, grandiosity, and hallucinogens. Maybe one day I should show them to a therapist.

Misc paper, labels, and pen; Summer, 2004

Misc papers, tape, and ink; Fall, 2005

Map, envelope, animal and pen; Winter, 2006

Michael mentioned a tension he feels is being worked out in his sketchbook—one between the formal and the functional. I can see that, and it makes a lot of sense given who I know him to be and his vocation. This may be another difference (and I only parse our differences as a way of seeing the full picture, which helps me more fully enjoy our similarities) between us. For me, much of the tension I remember experiencing around my books is long in the past. This may also have something to do with technology, though I’m not sure. Back in college (art school, remember) most of us were never separated from our books. We carried them wherever we went. When we met someone new, there was almost always an obligatory exchange of sketchbooks; it was a social ritual peculiar to artists who must have thought that the open sketchbook was a window into the soul. There was, of course, a sizing-up going on. As you flipped through the pages of an acquaintance’s book, you would ride an emotional roller coaster of neurosis and narcissism. Is he a better artist? More productive? Is she deeper? In hindsight, it’s clear that the social conditions that made the sketchbook an enthusiastically shared artifact of the self are the same that drive the way we use our Facebooks, Tumblrs, and Pinterests today. They are all avatars, and they are all aspirational. I’ve reached a point of personal saturation with this sort of thing. I systematically deleted everything from my Facebook and Tumblr accounts—clean slated them—not because I’m “over it,” “bored,” or any other fashionable derivative of jaded when it comes to the internet or social media, but because one can cross over from aspirational to acceptance by looking back upon those avatars and not liking what one sees. I’ve done this. I don’t especially like Digital Chris. He’s a thin veneer of arrogance, contrivance, slickness and lies—one that has always been buckling under the pressure of a thick, gurgling center of insecurity, anxiety, doubt and shame just waiting to burst. Thankfully, life circumstances put enough pressure on that shell to crack it wide open. What a relief. I want to keep it that way and I’m glad I want to. That makes it possible for me to keep going with these books—and anything else I do—without caring in the slightest what someone who looked at them might think of them or of me. That’s acceptance.

Collaged paper, pen; Summer, 2007

Proto-human, tape and pen; Winter, 2008

Various collaged papers; Summer, 2008

Pen; Fall, 2010

Except now I’m worried that this is too melodramatic. I suppose that’s to be expected. It’s that inner center I mentioned—the me that doubts above most else—and it’s out there. It’s the me I had to empower to write this without editing out all of its truth and replacing it with something I think is safer and more likely to elicit your respect and admiration. Instead, you got the slightly more erratic me that never intended to veer off into this sort of territory. I only wanted to comment on Michael’s post and share a few pictures! What happened? ;-)

Earlier I mentioned the yellow book, the one that Michael and I have been passing back and forth between North Carolina and New Jersey, with help from the US Postal Service. It was born out of a Skype chat we’d had toward the end of February in which Michael mentioned, as an aside, the idea of sharing a sketchbook. I jumped right on it. By the next evening, I’d pulled an unused notebook from the closet, covered it in bright yellow paper, filled in the first page, and slapped a post-it note on the cover that read: “Your Turn.” I shipped it up to Michael the next day. Since then, we’ve each had it twice and I’m about to send it back up his way for the third time this morning. I haven’t done anything like this since Able Parris and I sent elaborate postcards to our various homes between 2004 and 2006. Those were good times and I’m thrilled to be doing something like that again with a creative friend.

The Yellow Book; Winter, 2012

The Yellow Book; Spring, 2012

If you’d like to see more, I’ve uploaded several hundred pages from my books over the last decade here.

Rebooting

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:02:04 -0500

I decided to start this again with a blank slate.