Chuck Klosterman, in his essay, “Fail,” (one of several collected in the book, Eating the Dinosaur) wrote:
“We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.”
Is this really true? I tend toward thinking it is, particularly from my vantage point in a technology-driven industry as well as, frankly, my own tendency toward techno-pessimism. In a post from last month, I explored this theme a bit in terms of how we augment our bodies and experience with technology—that there is almost no separation between us and our technology. This quote from Klosterman gets at the same point, but it also brought to mind some trends that I see specifically in the workplace. Much of what we do is enabled by communications technology. In particular, email, instant messaging, shared calendars, project management applications, social media tools and the like enable a team to quickly mobilize and complete projects even if the resources are spread out geographically. This is the modern, web-working paradigm. While most of these tools have been a revelation as functional enablers of otherwise dysfunctional team setups, efficiency and cost savings, I wonder if they are always the most effective thing available to us. Actually, I’m willing to just come out and say that at least sometimes they’re not.
The iPad is a device for 3rd spaces--a device for the city. →
Totally agreed on this peripheral point, too:
Even better would be to ditch the shelf metaphor altogether in favour of something more appropriate for digital content; something more innate to the medium.
This is a wonderful PBS documentary on the digital life. It’s given me a lot to think about.
Gadgets have swept the world before, but mobile computing devices are different. Through applications and upgrades, they can acquire new powers. Apple alone offers more than 100,000 apps and has delivered more than 2 billion downloads. Phones are becoming maps, TVs, libraries, shopping tools, video cameras, car keys, and credit cards.
In more and more places, machines are running the world. On stock exchanges, high-speed computers armed with trading algorithms and superior pattern recognition are thrashing human competitors. Airline autopilots have become so reliable that human pilots can check out. In cars, software is beginning to assume responsibility for steering, braking, and parking. Drones are patrolling our borders, catching humans who try to sneak in. Computers are telling child-welfare agencies whether to take kids away from parents. Programs are running “virtual call centers,” measuring the output of dispersed salespeople and routing customer phone calls to the best performers. Computers don’t just work for us anymore. We work for them.
— William Saletan on Which is More Important, Politics or Technology?
The iPad better watch its back. According to an article on Motherboard, a U.K.-based company has developed the portable computer for the future: a laptop without a screen.
10 Proposals for Fixing the E-Mail Glut →
One of the good ideas:
Real-time services like Twitter and FriendFeed illustrate the potential usefulness of a streaming interface. I don’t have to see all the tweets in my stream; if something is specifically important it will be re-tweeted by people in my network. The more this happens, the better the chance that I will eventually see it. What if we made e-mail into a stream? If a message is important, people can re-mail it, and it then moves back to the top of the list.
From Russell Davies. So true. I rarely buy things that are not food from stores.
Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customization?
Telling an internal social media marketing specialist to “be human” might come from the marketing department, but only a company that has been engineered from the ground up to support a culture of human business has the ability to empower that employee to actually be human.
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Tom Webster, in his post, “What’s Wrong With Social Media Strategy”
He continues here, in what I think takes some courage to say:
I don’t think anyone “gets it” (myself included) because we don’t know where this is going. Telling a marketing department to be “helpful and human” on the social web is a tactical message. Reengineering the company so that its employees can actually be helpful and human may require an enormous overhaul of the very theory of the firm.
My take is that cloud computing, for all of its apparent (and supposed) benefits, stands to lose legitimacy and support (financial and otherwise) when the first big, millions-of-people-affecting, failure hits. Companies that tie themselves too closely to this particular model, as either service providers or customers, could be in real trouble.
—
Jamais Cascio says “I Told You So!” In a recent column on the failure of Microsoft’s Danger Sidekick, he quotes his own words from back in January (above) on the vulnerability of cloud computing.
I like this part:
But the point of resilience models is that failure happens.
Exactly, which is why I love the phrase, “Try to Visualize Catastrophe.”
The flaw of synchronous communication has been repackaged as the boon of realtime communication. Asynchrony, once our friend, is now our enemy. The transaction costs of interpersonal communication have fallen below zero: It costs more to leave the stream than to stay in it. The approaching Wave promises us the best of both worlds: the realtime immediacy of the phone call with the easy broadcasting capacity of email. Which is also, as we’ll no doubt come to discover, the worst of both worlds. Welcome to the conference call that never ends. Welcome to Wave hell.
The Kind of Program a City Is →
This is a wonderful piece (the unabridged version of what was recently published in WIRED’s UK edition of its Digital City issue) by Adam Greenfield on how cities are currently taking (and will continue to take) shape around technology. Here’s how he gets right to the point and frames the discussion:
It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.
Without necessarily considering the matter with any particular care, as individuals or societies, we have installed devices in our clothing, our buildings, our vehicles and our tools which register, collect and transmit extraordinary volumes of data, and which share this data with the global network in real time. If some of us once – and recently! – thought of this as the domain of “ubiquitous computing,” the words are already starting to sound obsolescent, as clunky as “horseless carriage.” This is simply the way we do things now.
And barring the usual panoply of potential catastrophes, it is only likely to be more so as time goes by, for an ever larger proportion of us. Under such circumstances, it’s only natural to expect that a great many of these systems will wind up speaking directly to the challenges cities were designed to resolve, as well as those with which they cannot help but confront us…
You’ve probably heard the point before, if not repeatedly: that the advance of technology has happened at such a pace as to “lap” our own ability to perceive it, such that we are tending towards the consideration of it in retrospect (e.g. “Oh yeah, I can send email, listen to music, take pictures, and make telephone calls all with the same portable device!”). What Greenfield is doing here is pointing out that when technology has such a shaping power over society, then the ways in which we are able to envision the future shaping of urban planning and architecture- in other words, how we will live- are challenged by our own myopia. His thoughts here are fascinating, and I encourage you to read the entire article.
Here’s one last pertinent quote:
it’s surpassingly hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms, however wise it might be, requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most…
In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them.
From the Berg blog, a description of their short film on RFID tags:
Following Nearness, the chain reaction film, is Immaterials: The ghost in the field, our next film with Timo Arnall at the Touch project. There are 4 billion RFID tags in the world. They may soon outnumber the people. Readers and tags are increasingly embedded in the things and environments in which we live. How do readers see tags? When we imagine RFID and their invisible radio fields, what should we see? Immaterials explains the experiments we have performed to see RFID as it sees itself.
Please contact Wired as soon as is convenient regarding the $8,000 needed to build a death ray in space. →
A clip:
A TubeSat is basically a space-going Pringles container, a shell and kit that’s sent to you for assembly. And the wonderful thing is that you can stick anything you like in it so long as it doesn’t break the mass or volume restrictions. Pack it up, send it back and those nice people at Interorbital Systems will combine it with 32 other TubeSats in the nose of a Neptune launcher and bang the lot up into low Earth orbit. The TubeSats are then deployed, in a controlled sequence, into their own orbits, which are designed to degrade in three or four weeks and cleanly incinerate upon re-entry.
The basic kit is absolutely Sputnik-level, allowing you to broadcast a repeating message or having the satellite function as a private orbital ham-radio relay station. But Interorbital does provide a list of suggestions for customisation: video cameras for Earth imaging and tracking; a private email server (in space!); biological experiments and more. The space available is quite small, but if you cut some bits off a tiny puppy first, it would probably fit. Even space burials are feasible (I once wrote a story wherein astronauts confess to having found Timothy Leary’s ashes in space, thawed them out and snorted them).
I don’t think, however, that Interorbital Systems has fully embraced the science-fictional condition. There is one important omission in its list, and it’s the reason why I need to borrow $8,000 from you.
Orbiting death rays.
