The End of Cyberspace

Textual spaces

If you're in Philadelphia in the next couple months, check out the "Textual Spaces: an Architecture of Reading" exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania:

As we seek to understand the way in which the act of reading is defined by its material constraints, our line of questioning necessarily extends to the spaces in which reading takes place. Where do we read? And how do those places affect our reading? To answer these questions is to move toward an architecture of reading. To place a book within the rooms of a house or public space shifts the significance of historical context from background to foreground. Just as the material constraints involved in the process of printing, binding, and selling books arguably shape the attitudes of readers, so do their physical surroundings add to the shape of their reading experiences.

Technorati Tags: architecture, reading

The de-privatization of reading

Commenting on recent court cases over whether bookstores need to turn over records of book purchases to law enforcement authorities, Peter Brantley at O'Reilly Radar makes and interesting point:

[R]eading is tuning into a series of digital transactions, transitioning from a private matter of solitary, silent reading into an inherently social act suitable for data mining. Indeed, the fascinating historical work of Paul Saenger demonstrates how the revolutionary change wrought in the early Medieval Ages by the Arabs and the Irish of separating words with spaces and punctuation to ease the understanding of translated Latin texts enabled silent reading, which in turn created modern expectations for privacy in the matter of what we read and think....

So we all must then inquire of publishers building online digital text libraries, and Microsoft and Google with their online books corpora: what happens when the police and courts of the state come to you? : Are you prepared to respect and reassert in a digital age -- an age in which the act of reading is inherently recordable -- the individual's control of privacy that has been maintained over the last 700 years? The alternative is to begin a retreat to the sunken expectations for the disclosure of our thoughts and writing that echo with eerie fidelity the cloistered labyrinths of the oral culture of 1200 AD -- a world far more inimical to free expression.

[To the tune of The Church, "Under the Milky Way," from the album "Starfish".]

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, law, privacy, reading

Anthony Grafton on "Future Reading"

To say that Anthony Grafton has a "brilliant essay" in the latest New Yorker is a bit like saying that John Woo has directed an "action-packed movie:" in both cases, the adjective is superfluous, because their work is always like that. Grafton, a professor at Princeton, is unquestionably one of the smartest historians practicing today, and writes mainly on Renaissance and early modern intellectual history.

His New Yorker piece is on digitization and the quest for the universal library, and it nicely shows how a deep knowledge of the history of books and ideas can be used to help understand the future of new media.

Google’s [book scanning and library] projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year, Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times, that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race.

In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

Grafton argues that efforts to create universal libraries, and efforts to create personal tools for working with and making sense of ever-larger bodies of information, are as old as the written word itself. Further, as big as the projects that Google, Amazon and Microsoft have undertaken, they're still not likely to create a "universal library" that includes all the kinds of physical media-- from early books to letters to architectural models-- that make up the world of knowledge. Finally, though, Grafton argues that the future isn't one in which databases replace books and archives, but one in which they coexist:

these streams of [digital] data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books....

For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. But if you want to know what one of Coleridge’s annotated books or an early “Spider-Man” comic really looks and feels like, or if you just want to read one of those millions of books which are being digitized, you still have to do it the old way, and you will have to for decades to come. At the New York Public Library, the staff loves electronic media. The library has made hundreds of thousands of images from its collections accessible on the Web, but it has done so in the knowledge that its collection comprises fifty-three million items.

In a way, this isn't a new argument: the "books and electronic resources will complement, each other, not compete" vision isn't unique to Grafton, though he does do an especially good job making it. (I suppose you might call the piece unoriginal, but it if is, it's unoriginal the way a Gil Evans Orchestra cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" is unoriginal: Evans didn't write it, but he definitely took it places Jimi never imagined.)

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, history

Information technologies in the past

From Eamon Duffy's essay in the New York Review of Books, March 29:

Early Christianity was more than a new religion: it brought with it a revolutionary shift in the information technology of the ancient world. That shift was to have implications for the cultural history of the world over the next two millennia at least as momentous as the invention of the Internet seems likely to have for the future. Like Judaism before it and Islam after it, Christianity is often described as "a religion of the Book." The phrase asserts both an abstraction—the centrality of authoritative sacred texts and their interpretation within the three Abrahamic religions—and also a simple concrete fact—the importance of a material object, the book, in the history and practice of all three traditions....

Our modern book form, the codex, in fact evolved from the ancient equivalent of the stenographer's pad, bundles of wooden tablets linked with string hinges and coated with wax, on which information could be jotted with a stylus (often in shorthand). When the information was no longer needed, the wax could be heated and smoothed, and the tablets reused. The first papyrus and (especially) parchment books of pages were recyclable in just the same way, folded and stitched bundles written on with soluble ink that could be washed off to leave the pages blank again. To inscribe the words of Holy Scripture on such jotting pads would demean its sacred character and authority....

Why should the new religion have adopted this down-market and unfashionable book technology? The codex, it is true, has obvious practical advantages. Being written on both sides of the page, it is more economical than the roll, it can be readily indexed, it can be leafed through quickly to find a particular place, and it is more robustly portable. But these practical advantages, which certainly contributed to its eventual adoption as the normative form of the book, do not adequately explain the early Christians' exclusive preference for the form, even for their copies of the Jewish scriptures, which must of course have been transcribed from rolls. Historians have speculated that difference from Judaism may have been the point—that the codex was adopted to distance the emergent Church from its origins within the religion of Israel, or perhaps in an attempt to signal that its foundational texts were indeed a sort of sacred stenography, the living transcript of apostolic experience, taken from the mouths of the first witnesses.

Technorati Tags: books, history, reading, religion

Most literate cities

One of the most gripping stories about the end of cyberspace involved the overthrow of books, and more generally of print culture, by the Internet and e-books. Depending on what side you were on, this was either a technological inevitability, or a sign of the end of all things Great and Good.

There are lots of ways you can measure how wrongs these predictions turned out to be-- the book industry has certainly had its share of structural adjustments, and some high-profile closures of independent bookstores-- but one suggestive one is John Miller's study of America's most literate cities.

The thing that grabs my attention is that Seattle and San Francisco, two of the centers of software and new media in the United States, rank among the top 10 most literate cities in America. They're also in the top 10 cities for magazine publishers. Finally, they rank #2 and #1, respectively, in per capita concentration of bookstores. Of course, both cities have a long tradition of serious literary endeavors, strengthened by the presence of large universities and student populations, and a (now almost-defunct) combination of cultural richness and relatively low cost of living that attracted all kinds of interesting countercultural types (a phenomenon dissected in John Markoff's really great book, What the Dormouse Said). So it's not entirely surprising that there would be a correlation between high literary ranking and tech concentration; arguably, the former is an (at least indirect) attractor for the latter.

Technorati Tags: books, cities, city, end of cyberspace, library

The Digital Sublime

I recently read Vincent Mosco's The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. It's an interesting book, and it does a good job of ground-clearing of the "I read all these books so you don't have to" variety, but I have some reservations about it.

The book has several big ideas. First, ideas about cyberspace and its impact are myths. Not myths in the sense of ideas that are "delusional and completely wrong," but myths used by religious scholars-- concepts that order our understanding of the world, that, as Alisdair MacIntyre put it, "are neither true nor false, but living or dead." (29) Myths of cyberspace, promulgated by figures as varied as Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Negroponte, helped drive the dot-com boom, the belief that the Internet would transform modern life, and predictions about the end of history, politics, and space. The digital library, information highway, e-commerce, and virtual community were all, in one way or another, representations of the myth.

Myths of cyberspace were also part of a broader discourse that developed in the years before Y2K, characterized by "a general willingness to entertain the prospect of a fundamental turning point in society and culture" (55-56). The Internet was assigned the role of driver of changes that were already under discussion. Most prominent among them were arguments about the end of history; the death of distance (something that's been happening since at least the telegraph and railroad); and the end of conventional politics (exemplified by the arguments of the Progress and Freedom Foundation).

But it turns out that such technological myths aren't new. When they were new, the telegraph, electric light, radio, and television all seemed to some to herald a new age in which war would be obsolete, economies would prosper, and the lion would lie down with the lamb. In each case, those predictions turned out to be false. Just as Brian Arthur argues that it's after the boom that technologies like the railroad and telegraph really start to matter, so too does Mosco argue that "it is when technologies... cease to be sublime icons of mythology and enter the prosaic world of banality... that they become important forces for social and economic change." (6)

It's had some positive reviews in Technology and Society, First Monday (scroll down to the second review), SCRIPT-ed, Culture Machine, and University Affairs, among other places. Yet I find myself less impressed by the book. What's there to object to? I think there are a couple small things, and one big one.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, digital culture, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, ubicomp

Reading Everyware

I've started reading Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. I'm around thesis 10, with about 75 to go. So far, we're still in fairly basic territory, and I can't quite tell who the book is aimed at: interaction designers and other professionals, or a more general public?

On one hand, the book's strong on the intellectual history of ubicomp-- almost stronger on the history than you'd expect a book for practitioners to be. But the organization into theses makes it less accessible a read, and more prescriptive.

As usual, Gene Becker beat me to the punch, this time getting the Everyware-Martin Luther comparison out before I could.

The book it also makes clear just how valuable a biography of Mark Weiser, or at least an article that talks about the origins and development of his concept of ubiquitous computing, would be. Weiser keeps showing up in the story, as the Man With the (Original) Plan, the guy who first imagined what a ubicomp world could be like. Another book or two like this, and he'll be the Buddy Holly of computing.

Technorati Tags: books, Everyware, pervasive computing, reading, ubicomp

The next next world

At the end of Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling lays out what the post-spime world might look like.

The step after the Spime Wrangler-- tomorrow's tomorrow-- is neither an object nor a person. It's a Biot, which we can define as an entity which is both object and person.

A Biot would be the logical intermeshing, the blurring of the boundary between Wrangler and spime. This is happening now, but we can't perceive and measure it.

Today, every human being... carries a load of industrial effluent.... A human body can be understood as a sponge of warm salt water within a shell of skin; so everything we emit [or manufacture or consume] ends up partially within ourselves.

Some artificial substances are bioaccumulative; our metabolisms preferentially suck them out of the biosphere and try to make structure out of them. These processes are involuntary and take place beneath our awareness. (134)

A Biot is somebody who knows about this and can deal with the consequences. He's in a position to micromanage and design the processes that shape his own anatomy. (135)

When will be get to the Biot Age? Sterling guesses around 2070. What kinds of technologies will a Biot technosociety create?

In a Biot world, the leading industries are not artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, or spimes, but technologies for shaping human beings.... The driving technologies of a Biot technosociety would be cybernetics, biotechnology, and cognition. (135)

Because some of the most advanced, valuable technologies will be incorporated into the body, or lived with every day (with full awareness of the biological impacts of that contact), and because of the need for more environmentally sustainable design and manufacturing, a Biot technosociety would prefer

technology that can eventually rot and go away all by itself. Its materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's an auto-recycling technology.... It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxins. (143)

But there will still exist two other kinds of technologies. One will be

artifacts deliberately built to outlast the passage of time. This is very hard to do and much over-estimated. Many objects we consider timeless monuments, such as the Great Pyramid and the Roman Colosseum, are in fact ruins. (143-4)

The other will be

the kind [of technology] I have tried to haltingly describe here. It's a fully documented, trackable, searchable technology. This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It's a toybox for inventive, meddlesome humankind that can puts its own toys neatly and safely away. (144-5)

Technorati Tags: biology, biomimicry, Bruce Sterling, design, end of cyberspace, future, Shaping Things, sustainability, ubicomp

Spimes to the rescue!

How will spimes help save the world? Bruce Sterling lays out a scenario in Shaping Things. Essentially, it's the first book in which metadata is a superhero.

The fact that objects are divorced from information about them encourages us to focus on and take responsibility for only a tiny part of any object's life, and makes it far harder to perceive the consequences of our encouraging the creation of that object, our consumption of it, or our disposal.

Consider a bottle of wine (see chap. 9). Today, our interactions with it are reduced to consulting the price tag, drinking the wine, then throwing away the bottle. But

there must be a mountain of externalities, currently obscured and invisible to me, that involved this object. That growing and fermenting of grapes... topsoil loss, chemical fertilizer, insecticide sprays, the fuels involved in heating and distilling all that liquid.... [Were the workers] suntanned Italian peasantry in the full healthful glow of EU agricultural regulations... [or] illegal African or Abanian immigrants? If that's the case, then I've been invegled into oppressing these people under a veil of my own ignorance.... Why do I collaborate with someone who forces me, through obscurantism, to do that against my will?...

This bottle sure came a long way. How'd it get here to me? How much carbon dioxide got spewed into the planet's air ino order to to ship this object into my hands?...

I'm not supposed to worry my head about all of that, but you know something? I know I am paying for it somehow....

What goes around, comes around. If I ignore distant consequences merely because they seem distant, then distant people will similarly inflict their consequences on me. That's a beggar-your-neighbor situation, a race to the bottom.

But suppose I show them how the object came to be, and I link that information to the object. That would be "transparent production."

So a spime is a moral entanglement with a built-in decoder ring. It's no less a savior or destroyer of worlds than any manufactured object that came before; but by making it laying bare its composition, history, and real costs, you can make better decisions about whether buying and using it will be good for you-- by which you mean, good for you, the world, and the future.

Right now, if these externalities are dealt with at all, they're handled by markets or governments: the price might include a ltitle extra for better labor practices (or it might not), and our taxes cover the costs of disposal and environmental cleanup (or they might not). Our capacity to deal with them independently is pretty limited: knowledge about what companies are socially or environmentally responsible is separated from the point of sale, while detailed information about the composition and history of things is often simply unavailable. Today, how do you know you're making the consumption choice you'd make if you were fully informed? You don't.

This bottle arrived in my possession seemingly stripped of consequences, but those consequences exist.... My relationship to this bottle of wine is a parable of my human relationship to all objects....

My own single-handed effort is entirely unequal to that challenge of discovering all those relationships]. I can't simply know enough... but I can't Wrangle all the world's technosocial issues all the time.

It follows this much of this activity should be done for me by other people.

Who would do that? "Designers."

Just as John Markoff argued that the idea of personal computing was invented before the personal computer itself-- that the PC embodied an already-extant notion of how people and computers should relate-- so too does Sterling suggest that fifty years from now, we'll see concepts like the triple bottom line, environmentally aware consumption, and social investing as anticipating the things we'd be able to do, easily and with greater consequence, with spimes.

Technorati Tags: books, Bruce Sterling, cyberspace, design, end of cyberspace, pervasive computing, physical, Shaping Things, sustainability, ubicomp

The next world

In laying out his vision of the future in Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling employs two concepts that require a little decoding: metahistory and synchronic society.

Every civilization has a metahistory, a kind of internal cultural logic. One great flaw is that metahistories tend of see themselves as permanent; a contingent metahistory that allowed for the possibility of its own end-- and was more thoughtful about how to avoid that end-- would work better.

Our own current metahistory is damaging in its short-sigtedness and have yielded "slow crises cheerfully generated by people rationally pursuing their short-term interests." (41) As Sterling puts it,

The 20th century's industrial infrastructure has run out of time. It can't go on; it's antiquated, dangerous and not sustainable. it's based on a finite amount of ice in our ice caps, of air in our atmosphere, of free room for highways and transmission lines, of room in the dumps, and of combustible filth underground. This is a gathering crisis gloomily manifesting itself int he realm of bad weather and resource warfare. It is the legacy we received from world'shaping industrial titans such as Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller-- basically, the three 20th century guys who guys us into the Greenhouse Effect. (131)

Its no use starting from the top by ideologically re-educating the consumer to become some bizarre kind of rigid, hairshirt Green.... The only sane way out of a technosociety is through it, in to a newer one that knows everything the older one knew.... That means revolutionizing the interplay of human and object. It means bringing more attention and analysis to bear on objects than they have undergone. It also means engaging with the human body and our affordances. (131-132)

The fact that we can insulate ourselves from the histories and consequences of our decisions, and that markets can assist us in that process (by reducing our relationships to things to price, and treating everything from the social consequences of abusive labor practices to the environmental costs of disposal of packaging as an "externality" that neither you nor the manufacturer has to think about), means that we can live in a state of blissful, deadly innocence.

Ironically, in the artifact era, when most humans grew their own food and made their own things-- or were related to those who did-- we knew a lot more about where stuff came from, and the consequences of making things poorly (of using unsustainable farming practices or building a shoddy furnace); but there were also few enough of us so that anything we did was likely to have very little impact on the world.

Our ability to change the world, intentionally or unintentionally, has far outstripped our ability to make sense of those changes. (Will history regard the internal combustion engine, and not nuclear weapons, as the greatest technological terror of the 20th century?)

To deal with this, "[w]e need a designed metahistory," (42) and Sterling thinks it will

combine the computational power of an INFORMATION SOCIETY with the stark interventionist need for a SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY. The one is happening anyway; the other has to happen. (42)

It would be a synchronic society. Such a society

• Has a temporalist perspective: it seeks to generate more time and greater opportunity, both at the micro-scale, and the level of civilizations. (To this society, burning fossil fuels is the height of folly.)
• Sees sustainability as a process, not a fixed state;
• Seeks the knowledge to deal with the inevitable unknowns;
• Uses rapid prototyping-like methods to generate potentially vast inventories of solutions to copy and failures to avoid;
• Treats objects as expressions of and generators of information, interesting not just for their obvious physical properties.

If we design that metahistory to exploit the power of spimes, which are "information melded with sustainability," (43) we can create a dynamic by which we can preserve and learn from our history, thus giving us the chance to evolve our way out of the current mess. Spimes are especially important because they exist at:

the intersection of two vectors of technosocial development. They have the capacity to change the human relationship of time and material processes, by making those processors blatant and generalization. Every spime is a little metahistorical generator.

History is this technoculture's primary source of wealth. As it transits through time, due to the principles of its organization, it will increase in knowledge, capability, wealth, and power.

But wait, there's more....

Technorati Tags: Bruce Sterling, design, end of cyberspace, environment, physical, Shaping Things, sustainability, ubicomp