The End of Cyberspace

This is why I'm skeptical of sci-fi writers as futurists

From National Defense Magazine, a short account of a meeting of SIGMA, "a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation:"

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Naive Melody," from the album "Live at the Georgia Theatre, 31 December 2005".]

Technorati Tags: science, science_fiction, security

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

Notes on Nigel Thrift, "Movement-space"

Nigel Thrift, "Movement-space: the changing domain of thinking resulting from the development of new kinds of spatial awareness," Economy and Society 33:4 (November 2004): 582-604. [pdf]

In other recent articles Thirft has "looked at how, as a result of the intervention of software and new forms of address, these background time-spaces are changing their character, producing novel kinds of behaviours that would not have been possible before and new types of object which presage more active environments." This paper argues that "the activity of calculation has become so ubiquitous that it has entered a new phase, which I call 'qualculation'," (584) and this new form of calculation is starting to change the way we perceive and think about space.

The World of Paratexts

"All human activity depends upon an imputed background whose content is rarely questioned: it is there because it is there. It is the surface on which life floats." This used to be largely natural, but in the last century industrialization has created a new artificial background shaping human activity. "Now a second wave of second nature is appearing, extending its fugitive presence though object frames as diverse as cables, formulae, wireless signals, screens, software, artificial fibres and so on." This is a mundane, inescapable "fugitive materiality" that requires a lot of invisible support-- e.g., the creation of metrics, standards, addresses, and modularity. But if "all these characteristics can be imposed, then the logic of the system, as it becomes both necessary and general, will gradually become the logic of the world." (586)

From Quantification to Qualculation: The Growth of Calculation

"The growth of quantitative calculation in the world... is a long and complicated story" going back to the ancient Greeks. "But what seems certain is that the sheer amount of calculation going on in the world has undergone a major shift of late... [and] is becoming a ubiquitous element of human life" (586) thanks to the growth of computing power, growth of ubiquitous computing, and the of substitution of "analytic solutions... by brute computing force." (587)

Just as earlier systems for creating and organizing knowledge about the world-- ranging from the discovery of mathematical notation in ancient Greece (a process akin to the impact of writing described by Havelock Ellis and other), to new visions of space in the Scientific Revolution, to information management tools in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the rise of logistics in the 20th century, all "produced a new sense of the world and new forms of representation of it, so we can see something similar happening now." (587) In all these historical cases, and today, "number does not just describe, it constructs.... number tends to cast the world reciprocally in its image as entities are increasingly made in for ms that are countable. Number performs number." (589-590)

New apprehensions of space and time

"[T]he sheer amount of calculation that is now becoming possible at all points of so many spaces is producing a new calculative sense, which I will call 'qualculation'." In this new calculative order, "calculations become part of a background whose presence is assumed." (592) To those of us living today, qualculation is as much a part of the "background" of reality as animal tracks and weather were to our ancestors.

A new sensorium

So what effect will the rise of qualculation have on the sensorium? Two possibilities are the rise of new phobias (something we saw with the transformation of the Euro-American city in the 19th century), and "the rise of new forms of intuition" (like thin-slicing). (596) Most interesting, however, is a "reworking of space and time... written into the human body and language." (596) Thrift points to three changes:

Hands. "The sensory system of the hand is complex and capable of exquisite fine-tuning. It is not just an 'external' organ: it is so vital to human evolution that it seems quite likely that parts of the brain have developed in order to cope with its complexities rather than vice versa." (597)

[I]n a qualculative world... the sense of touch will be redefined in three ways as haptic engineering moves beyond today's primitive keyboard, keypad, mouse and data glove. First, from being conceived as a heavily localized sensation, touch will increasingly be thought of as a sense that can stretch over large spaces.... Second, entities that are able to be touched will correspondingly expand; all manner of entities will be produced with an expanded sensory range. Third, paramount among these newly touchable entities will be data of various kinds which, through haptic engineering, will take on new kinds of presence in the world as something closer to what we conventionally regard as 'physical' objects. In other words, the hand will extend, be able to touch more entities and will encounter entities which are more 'touchable'. The set of experiences gathered under 'touch' will therefore become a more important sense, taking in and naming experiences which heretofore have not been considered as tactile and generating haptic experiences which have hitherto been unknown. (598)

Space. "It will become normal to know where one is at any point.... As importantly, the ability to tag addresses to moving objects which started with barcodes and credit cards and is now expanding and becoming more infor mation-rich with the rapidly expanding use of radio frequency identifier chips will mean that over a grid of fixed co-ordinates will be laid a series of moving addresses specific to particular entities." (598)

Language. "[V]ocabularies of spatial configuration will multiply. The critical importance of spatial distribution in flow architectures will produce an extended spatial vocabulary which will provide new opportunities for thinking the world, opportunities which will themselves be constitutive of that world. We can already see something of this going on in the practical aesthetics of fields like architecture, performance and film." (600)

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, mobility, Nigel Thrift, pervasive computing, place/space, ubicomp

Royal College of Art talk, and the end of my own private Shibuya

Last week I gave an impromptu talk at the Royal College of Art, outlining the end of cyberspace argument and its implication for interaction design. Chris Hand and Andy Broomfield, two recent graduates of the interaction design program, both blogged about the talk.

The whole thing was kind of hurried and off-the-cuff-- one of the recent grads and now current faculty invited me right before I got on the plane, and the night I was giving the talk, I dashed from Paddington Station down to the RCA, on the other side of Hyde Park, managing to wander around for a few minutes before finding the right entrance. But it was a large crowd, basically supportive about the overarching idea but also highly skeptical of the particulars-- in other words, the sort that's at once satisfying without being too much of an ego boost.

I've been ending most of my presentations on the subject with a slide that shows various overlays of digital images atop a normal street scene.

Turns out the students didn't quite hate it, but they thought it didn't work. And upon reflection, I'm inclined to agree with them, for a couple reasons.

First, and most important, instinct says that we're quickly going to find that when it comes to overlaying information on top of our everyday views of the physical world, less will be more. To some degree, we've assumed that users would go for My Own Private Shibuya (hereafter, MOPS):

Colodio, "do androids dream of Tokyo?"

Stéfan, "Karaoke in Shibuya"

But after some reflection, I'm now questioning that assumption.

Part of the pleasure of these streetscapes is precisely that they're collectively experienced, rather than individual visions: for even a brief period, we share with other postmodern, globe-hopping flaneurs and expatriates and temporary natives the light of the ABC-Mart sign and storefront.

If I had a pair of glasses that fed me annotations of the city around me, what would I really want? Would I want dinosaur heads peering around buildings? In England, where I worry constantly about looking the wrong way when I cross the street, absolutely not: I'd be killed instantly. Indeed, in any big city, MOPS would be at worst a hazard to life and private property (how long would it take thieves to learn to target people who are walking down the street watching YouTube?), and at least an intrusion on my experience of the place.

Instead, most of the time I'd want a safety reminder or two, maybe directions if I'm headed somewhere, and then some occasional "look here for more information" icon that popped up whenever, say, I passed a building designed by a particular school of architects. At other times, I'd want other information: when I travel with my kids I want to know where clean, publicly accessible bathrooms are. But would I want MOPS? Almost never.

As is so often the case, the real value won't come in providing a constant stream of semi-processed data, but in useful abstraction and restrained but enlightening presentation.

So now I've got to find another slide to end with....

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, England, future, London, Royal College of Art

More on RFID

Last year the Institute published a series of memos on the present and future of RFID. (I was the principal author on them, but like everything at the Institute, lots of people were involved in the thinking and production.)

I just noticed that they're now publicly available as PDFs on the Institute Web site. Titles and links:

• Thinking About RFID
• Public Concerns and the Near Future of RFID
• Flashpoint and Controversies
• Smart Homes and Sociable Devices
• Implications and Recommendations

Technorati Tags: RFID, future, end of cyberspace, IFTF

Yellow

Adidas commissioned a series of short videos on color. I don't know if this is what they expected, but "Yellow" is just terrific: a short, sharp meditation on identity and intelligence, and the blurring of the boundary between human and machine.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, movies

Esther Dyson: "The Internet so far has existed mostly in cyberspace"

Esther Dyson's comments from a conversation with Vint Cerf, in last Friday's Wall Street Journal Online:

The Internet will have become more ubiquitous but less visible. It will still exist as PCs and monitors, but it will also be all around us in other devices: everything from buses and luggage transmitting their locations so they can be tracked, to friends and children signaling their presence anytime you might want to reach them. Rather than being a separate virtual world, the Internet will encompass the physical world as well; most things will have Internet identities available remotely as well as a physical presence available only if you are nearby....

The Internet so far has existed mostly in cyberspace, linking computers fed data by humans and by other computers. The Internet of the future will be much more tightly linked to physical space. First of all, many of its future users will connect via cellphones, and the net will know more about their physical locations and their identities than it does about those who reach it by computer. Beyond that, as Vint writes, the Internet will link things in space (on Earth as well as in off-Earth "space").

The Net of the future will know much more about the physical world and all the things in it ... and of course that information will be available to human users. The big challenges in the future will be limiting distribution of that information (security, privacy, confidentiality, etc.) on the one hand and filtering it out on the other (not search, but data-mining, exception-reporting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, behavioral targeting and the like). The big questions are who controls the filtering: individuals, organizations or governments? Will it be done transparently?

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, endofcyberspace, mobility, privacy, security, space

Rapid prototyping, bits, atoms, and education

I've been reading up on rapid prototyping technologies, and came across an interesting argument: that the use of 3-D printers, which allow students to make quick physical copies of things they've designed on computers, is making engineering cool, and helping kids develop spatial skills.

Timothy Jump, a teacher at Benilde-St. Margaret's High School, a private college preparatory school in St. Louis, Missouri... [says], "Until 3D printing came along, we were unable to show young people the beauty of the engineering process, taking an initial idea all the way to completion, until late in their educational experience.... 3D printing stimulates a student's mechanical-spatial awareness in ways that textbooks cannot."

Don Jalbert, a CAD/CAM mechanical design instructor at the Lewiston Regional Technical Center in Lewiston, Maine, says 3D printers can help young people realize they have a knack for engineering. "When I taught CAD 10 years ago, the concepts were wholly theoretical because the students could not touch or feel the objects they created. Now with the 3D printer, students can do much more than draw a part. They can evaluate it, refine it, assess how it fits in a larger assembly, and hand it to people. The 3D printer is a great recruiting tool for getting students excited about engineering."

When you think about it, massive multiplayer games are essentially fun-ride versions of CAD and CAAD systems: part of the appeal of Second Life is that you can build all kinds of interesting virtual stuff, from bodies to buildings. It may be that, in the long run, the phenomenon of video games eroding kids' mechanical or spatial skills will be replaced with a pattern in which they translate the design and engineering skills they learn in virtual worlds into the physical world, through the mediation of 3D printing technology. Just a thought.

There's no getting away from atoms.

Technorati Tags: design, education, end of cyberspace, prototyping

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

Everyware

Via Dogwonder, I came across the site for Adam Greenfield's new book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Since ubiquitous computing is the technological foundation (but not determinant) of the end of cyberspace, clearly it's a book I'll have to pick up:

The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?

The book is divided in 81 (consulting- and kenyote-friendly-- though I note that not with in a cynical way, but with the eye of someone who's in a similar game) theses, including:

Thesis 01: There are many ubiquitous computings.
Thesis 10: Everyware necessitates a new set of human interface modes.
Thesis 16: Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly.
Thesis 25: Everyware has already staked a claim on our visual imaginary.

Technorati Tags: books, end of cyberspace, Everyware, ubicomp