“future shock”
60 posts under this tag.
 Is an essay posted by Steve Jobs two days ago [link] proposing to do away with DRM protection in digital songs. It’s a brilliant, persuasive pamphlet and easily one of the most surprising recent turns in Intellectual Property’s (IP) unfolding evolution—and with IP soon becoming the only property that matters, we are talking about a civilization-defining process here.
Now of course Jobs’s letter is self-serving, as The Economist clearly explains, but is he right? Is a DRM-free world better? With thousands of pirated songs in my library I could hardly make for a devil’s advocate now but I still wonder. If we renounce technological solutions, how will we reward creators? Will policing and empathy be enough? (Don’t be so quick to answer, we will all be creators soon.)
A technological arms-race between pirates and anti-pirates was bound to end in senseless wastage, but that doesn’t mean new structures are not hardly needed—economical structures (based on trade) not political ones (based on force)—if IP will prove ultimately viable.
Let’s see what we can think of—the problem just got a whole more interesting.
But a finding in 2005 appears to have swung the argument decisively in favour of an ageing programme. A study at the Russian Academy of Sciences found that salmon can live much longer and continue reproducing when infected by pearl mussel larvae. In some cases, infection by this parasite extends life fourfold, to 13 years. It seems that the parasite has evolved a mechanism to avert the salmon’s abrupt death so it can continue providing shelter and food for the parasite’s development and reproduction. For a parasite dependent on the survival of its host, this is a sensible strategy. While the mechanism for this effect is not yet fully understood, it seems that the larvae produce a small protein that helps to mop up free radicals.
Here I go trying to coin yet another neologism ELZR in yet another abuse of the universal soapbox that is the blog. This time, why not be grand?, I’m going to tackle the most famous neologism lack of all: a name for the decade that yawns between 2000 and 2009. In written form, one usually calls it the 2000s but the “two thousands” is just plain silly. Other proposed names, taken from the 2000s pedia, are the “noughties” (the least narrowspread of the proposals), “the zeroes”, “double zeroes”, the “aughts”, “double-aughts”, “oh’s”, “double oh’s”, “oh-oh’s” “aughties”, “oughties”, “2K’s”, “uh-ohs”, “zoogs”, and “ozies”. Obviously, the search still continues.
So here’s my stab at it: let’s call it, elliptically, “the first decade”. It’s a tad millenialist but also fittingly portentous. It is also universal (“la primera decada”, “la première décennie”, “die erste Dekade”, “最初の十年”, “a primeira década”, “Первое десятилетие”, “la prima decade”), easily extendable (2010-2019 is “the second decade”, 2020-2029 “the third decade”, and so on), perfectly memorable, immediately understandable, and, let’s face it, just plain cool. It’s a whole new language for talking and thinking about our century.
Here some usage examples:
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Wikipedia is a multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project, born with the first decade.WP
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By the second decade, we’ll be adding more than a year, every year, to human life expectancy.ELZR
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Third-decade ipods will be able to carry every piece of content ever created.ELZR
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At the beginning of the fifth decade, there will be 9 billion people on the planet.ELZR
When they arrived in his office and Abir explained the concept for what is now called the decoder, Carbonell was floored by its elegance. “In the few weeks that followed, I kept wondering, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t the rest of the field think of that?’ Finally I said, Enough of this envy. If I can’t beat them, join them.”
I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.
Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.
Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
People, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values; media is the landscape where this interaction takes place; literacy is the ability to participate consciously in it.
..what we have to do first then is understand the nature of stories and why we tend to believe them, why we mistake our stories and our myths for fact, and that’s going to be the beginning of how we can dissemble them. The moment that I got this, was, I guess I was a freshman in college when the third, and probably still worst of the Star Wars movies came out, Return of the Jedi. Luke and Hans get captured by those little teddy bear creatures, the Ewoks, on the moon of Endor, do you remember this? And the Ewoks are having their little barbecue party or whatever they’re doing, princess Leia is allowed to be free, because she’s a girl, whatever, but Hans and Luke are tied up. Do you remember how they get out of captivity? C3PO and R2D2 tell the Ewoks a story. C3PO speaks perfect Ewok, and he’s all golden, they think he’s a god. He starts telling the great story of the wonderful rebels, Luke and Hans, and how they’re fighting the imperial starship. R2D2 starts projecting holographic images of this battles, and you see the little Ewok eyes going back and forth, going “Oh my god!” They’ve never seen holographic technology, they’ve never heard a story told this well. The story so wins them over that these Ewoks not only release Hans and Luke, but they fight a war on their behalf. They fight a war against those big robot things. In which Ewoks die. What I thought at this moment—as an emerging little media theorist—was: what would have happened if Darth Vader had gotten down to that moon first and told his story, with his special effects? They’d have fought for him, I promise you! They’d have fought for him.
...and the style of narrative changed too, we started to get shows like The Simpsons, which were no longer this [the traditional crisis, climax, sleep narrative]; we didn’t care of Homer, what, is he’s gonna live or not, is he gonna lose his job or not. No, now what we’re doing in this big chaotic fractal-like media-space where we’re all talking and exchanging ideas with each other, giving away software to each other, now it’s about making connections. It’s about finding patterns in this media space. When you watch The Simpsons, the reward is not the cookie that you get for making it through the story, the reward is making an association. Oh, here they’re satiring Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, this is a satire of that commercial. Here’s, that’s… Connections, connections and openings, connections and openings. It’s no longer a beginninzg, middle, and end: it’s a series of connections.
17% of Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime and only 23% believe in evolution. Why? Evolution gives you a way out, evolution gives you an alternative to this. Rather than the preordained story, we can write another one, we can change, we can evolve, something else can emerge. The frightening thing about having an emerging narrative is that it means there’s no pre-existing story. It means maybe we weren’t put here with meaning at all. Maybe there was no intent. Maybe meaning is something that we do. Maybe meaning is something that we make, not a pre-existing condition. That meaning is made. But how? Through collaboration. Ain’t gonna get no meaning alone, it can’t be done alone in a series of consumer choices. We’ve tried that one. If you could do it that way, would we be doing this conference? No. You can’t. You only get meaning by connecting with other people. Through the discovery of connections and interrelationships.
Question: Something that resonated with me was a comment you made about [how] we need to develop a new kind of story through collective ownership and collective authorship, and there’ve been a lot of news stories that have come through various different individuals. The example was given from the X-Files that the authorship was taken over by a collective of individuals. My question would be, where do you see that threshold point where it’s taken from an individual and moved into the collective?..
The bane of my existence this question, for a long time. Because the main thing I’m studying these days is narrative: why do we construct narratives on reality? why do we need narratives? and then, how can we develop new narrative structures? I think some of you got this novel I wrote called Exit StrategyAM, and the challenge with that was I wanted to create some kind of an open-source collective experience, but I didn’t want to have the situation were if you’re letting a whole group of people write Star Trek with you, one kid kills Spock on the second page, and then you’re dead. So far I’ve found that the easiest way to do collective narrative experiments is to let the collective recontextualize the story.. the Talmudic process really.. There has to be a certain amount of agreement at the beginning: we’re going to play with this myth, we’re going to play with this story.
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
 I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane InterfaceAM. You’ve got to love a book on interface design so fundamental and visionary that it dares to ponder such deep digressions as, say,
There is but one “I” in each us. But to say that there is one personhood per human being begs the question. That is, why are there not multiple personhoods per mind-body ensemble?
Jef Raskin, The Humane InterfaceAM, p28
or take,
Studies of the brain performed with such techniques as magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) WP and positron-emission tomography (PET) WP are helping researchers to elucidate the physical correlates of various mental activities. These technologies are mentioned because they may, at a future time, be directly helpful in the design—and, especially, in the testing—of interfaces. For example, there is an inverse correlation between a person’s localized glucose uptake—an indicator of how much energy the brain is using in a particular physical structure— and the ease with which that person uses a tested interface feature. Interface testing in the future may well make increasing use of direct measures of brain activity, but a further exploration of these methods lies outside the scope of this book.
Jef Raskin, The Humane InterfaceAM, p15
William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled bookAM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.
It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.
Education doesn’t make you happy, and nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free—if we are; or because we’ve been educated—if we have; but because education may be the means by which we realise we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears… tells us where delights are lurking…
Iris Murdoch character in Richard Eyre’s IrisIMDB script
I can’t believe how silly happy I am some days. And then when I remember the world, and its great treasons, and the billions of un-happy, in-war, un-healthy, un-eating, un-knowing (of so much beauty!), still-mortal people in the world I can’t stall work any longer—but, you know, despite and impudently in front of it all, it just makes me happy to be so happy.
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