From Lewis Lapham’s TomDispatch post about publishing and technology, a passage about Marshall McLuhan’s idea that what we create ends up creating us:
“Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect — from Google, YouTube, and Facebook — the less likely we are to know what it means?
The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of ‘an acoustic world,’ one with ‘no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,’ a new ‘information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.’ He published Understanding Media in 1964, proceeding from the premise that ‘we become what we behold,’ that ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’
Media were to be understood as ‘make-happen agents’ rather than as ‘make-aware agents,’ not as art or philosophy but as systems comparable to roads and waterfalls and sewers. Content follows form; new means of communication give rise to new structures of feeling and thought.”
Is it possible to reduce STDs and sex trafficking and still make the world ickier? Perhaps. From the Edmonton Sun:
“Sex workers in Amsterdam will have a hard time finding work if two New Zealand academics’ vision of the future comes true.
‘In 2050, Amsterdam’s red light district will all be about android prostitutes who are clean of sexual transmitted infections, not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery, the city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services,’ write futurologist Ian Yeoman and sexologist Michelle Mars.
The duo’s paper, ‘Robots, Men And Sex Tourism,’ published in the journal Futures, centres on an imaginary future sex club in Amsterdam called Yub-Yum.
It posits that sex tourists will dish out big cash for all-inclusive robot sex romps.”
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of our interconnected digital world, answering a Wired query about how he shepherded the Internet from proprietary to public:
“Wired: So how did the internet get beyond the technical and academic community?
Cerf: Xerox invented the Alto machine which was a $50,000 personal computer given to every employee of Xerox PARC — so they’re living twenty years in the future for all practical purposes. They were even inventing their own internet. They had a whole suite of protocols. Some of the students that worked with me in Stanford went to work with Xerox PARC, so there was a lot of cross-fertilization.
It’s just that they decided to treat their protocol as proprietary, and Bob and I were desperate to have a non-proprietary protocol for the military to use. We said we’re not going to patent it, we’re not going to control it. We’re going to release it to the world as soon as it’s available, which we did.
So by 1988, I’m seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?’ There were no public internet services at that point.
And there was a rule that the government had instituted that said you could not put commercial traffic on government-sponsored backbones, and, in this case, it was the ARPANET run by ARPA or for ARPA; the NSFNet run for the National Science Foundation, and there were others. The Department of Energy has ESnet and NASA had what was called the NASA Science Internet. The rule was no commercial traffic on any of them. So I thought, ‘Well, you know, we’re never going to get commercial networking until we have the business community seeing that commercial networking is actually a business possibility.’
So I went to the US government, specifically to a committee called the Federal Networking Council since they had the program managers from various agencies and they had been funding internet research. I said, ‘Would you give me permission to connect MCI Mail, a commercial e-mail service, to the internet as a test?’
Of course, my purpose was to break the rule that said you couldn’t have commercial traffic on the backbone.
And so they kind of grumbled for a while and they said, ‘Well, OK. Do it for a year.’”
Americans loved gadgets before WWII, but the money wasn’t there to invest in machines during the Great Depression. A good part of the American postwar dividends was spent on machinery to ease life’s toil and just amaze, from kitchen appliances to bowling alley pinsetters. They had utility, but they were also fun to watch. Was our desire to see machines do their magic rooted in P.T. Barnum’s chicanery? Probably not. It’s probably an innate thing. But it’s an interesting theory. From Edward Tenner’s Atlantic essay, “The Pleasures of Seeing Machines Work“:
“The cultural historian Neil Harris has coined a phrase for this fascination with seeing things work, the Operational Aesthetic. One of the pleasures of bowling for postwar generations was the introduction of the automated pinspotter, the Roomba of the 1950s, which helped the sport’s explosive growth in the decade.
Who started it all? Harris has suggested it was none other than P.T. Barnum, whose American Museum in New York was widely (and rightly) suspected of fakery. But that helped build business. Visitors wanted to see for themselves, scrutinize the exhibits closely, and detect just how each illusion was accomplished. Barnum’s success was based not on cynicism about ‘suckers,’ but to the contrary, in appealing to critical intelligence to detect how it all was done.”
A bunch of rich guys, including James Cameron, Ross Perot, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Peter H. Diamandis, may be announcing tomorrow that they are getting into the business of asteroid mining, extracting precious resources from zooming space rocks. From Forbes:
“Diamandis has been interested in asteroid mining for a long time, and it sounds like this might be his time to put a plan into action. There are staggering amounts of gold in them thar asteroids, even if they are sort of far away.
‘The earth is a crumb in a supermarket of resources,” Diamandis told Forbes earlier this year. “Now we finally have the technology to extract resources outside earth for the benefit of humanity without having to rape and pillage our planet.'”
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Hyperspace, not free of risk, is nonetheless a handy option:
The Earth will be fine without us; we’re only capable of killing ourselves. So, the phrase “Save the Earth,” while driven by great intentions, has always been something of a misnomer. We need to save ourselves from our own destruction. And if we do that, we’ll eventually need to rescue ourselves from a dying sun and other ominous sounds ringing out from the reaches of the universe. But let’s not pretend we’re doing it for someone or something else.
Notes on the topic by the funniest American ever, George Carlin:
Connectivity doesn’t guarantee closeness. In fact, we may seem closer together and actually be further apart than ever. From “The Flight From Conversation,” Sherry Turkle’s New York Times essay:
“Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.
We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being ‘alone together.’ Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.
Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.”
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Turkle, talking to people about how we don’t talk to people:
Although they’re dressed like sheiks rather than spacemen, the 14 robed figures in this classic photograph had just completed the grueling three-day Astronaut Desert Survival School near the Stead Air Force base in Nevada. Mercury and Apollo astronauts were brought not only to the scorched sands of Nevada but transported all around the nation to prepare them for the rigors of outer space. An excerpt from Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon:
“There was some heavy and intense training to be carried out. The men had to condition their bodies to withstand multiple stresses such as those associated with weightlessness and acceleration, vibration, immobilization and disorientation, noise, and heat and cold. They had become proficient in the use of dozens of training devices and rescue aids, to simulate a number of incidents and learn how to avoid or survive them.
Just as they had undergone contingency training in the Panamanian jungle, the astronauts could not exclude a landing in the ferocious heat and isolation of the desert, so after the classroom studies it was back on the road again. They were transported to a survival-training group near Stead AFB in the dry sagebrush country of western Nevada. Once again they could use only the equipment they would have at hand after an emergency landing as their survival gear.
Apart from survival training, field trips saw the astronauts conveyed to all corners of the country, where they were acquainted with geological compositions similar to those they might encounter on the moon’s surface. They descended into the mile-deep grandeur of the Grand Canyon, scouted the Big Bend country of the Rio Grande, visited the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in the Katmai Monument in Alaska, and crunched over black lava flows in Arizona’s Sunset Crater.”
During the gas crisis of 1979, American car owners alternated days they could fill their tanks based on whether they had an odd or even number at the end of their license plates. What it looked like in Los Angeles.
Howard Katz, in charge of NFL scheduling, has trillions of options to consider when figuring out which matchups will best serve the league during any given season. And no schedule he designs will completely satisfy networks, players and fans. From Judy Battista in the New York Times:
“After recalling what he thought was a coup last year — putting a game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts on the Sunday night opposite the World Series, only to watch the Saints obliterate a Peyton Manning-less Colts team, 62-7 — Katz summed up the snap judgments of the schedule that are as quick to change as a channel.
‘We’re geniuses one day and absolute morons the next,’ he said.
For the networks that pay billions of dollars to carry N.F.L. games, they have been mostly geniuses. N.F.L. games were watched by an average of 17.5 million viewers last season, the second most since 1989, and off slightly from 2010. N.F.L. games accounted for 23 of the 25 most-watched television shows among all programming, and the 16 most-watched shows on cable last fall.
Designing a schedule that generates those ratings, while also guaranteeing competitive fairness, is more complicated than ever, even though a computer program in use for eight years now does some of the work that was once done entirely by hand — spitting out 400,000 complete or partial schedules from a possible 824 trillion game combinations.”
"Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends." (Image by Gilberto Santa Rosa.)
Can we, in this wired and connected age, have privacy as well as intimacy? Are we to break free from the shackles of Zuckerberg and allow the rise of networks that afford us more control of our lives? Or will we obediently create the content for channels that others program? From Ben Kunz’s new Businessweek article about the rise of “unsocial” networks:
“For nearly a decade, marketers have been agog over the promise of social networks to provide free advertising, a cascade of word-of-mouth in which consumers act as advocates for a brand or product. The dream is based in part on Robert Metcalfe’s law—the concept by the inventor of the Ethernet that in any networked system, value grows exponentially as more users join. Like the old 1970s shampoo commercial, you tell a customer about your product, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on, until the world is knocking on your hair-products door. Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends.
Trouble is, Metcalfe was wrong, at least with human networks. In a landmark 2006 column in IEEE Spectrum, researchers Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly showed mathematically that networks have a fundamental flaw if all nodes are not created equal. The authors pointed primarily to Zipf’s law, a concept by 1930s linguist George Zipf that in any system of resources, there exists declining value for each subsequent item. In the English language, we use the word ‘the’ in 7 percent of all utterances, followed by ‘of’ for 3.5 percent of words, with trailing usage of terms ending somewhere around the noun ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ On Facebook, your connections work the same way from your spouse to best friend to boss to that old girlfriend who now lives in Iceland.
Human networks, like words in English, have long tails of diminishing usage.”
The newest breed of information companies (Google excluded) create wealth, not jobs. That’s not an accusation, just a fact. Economist Brian Arthur refers to this dynamic as the “Second Economy,”–new technology shrinking the American workforce in an inversion of how railroad technology increased it during the 19th century. From Bill Davidow’ssmart, recent article about the Second Economyat the Atlantic:
“When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months), analysts tripped over themselves looking for an explanation. Of course, jobs numbers are bound to vary, but in my view the long-term trend calls for more jobs to disappear, and the reason is clear as day: the exploding Second Economy.
The Second Economy — a term the economistBrian Arthuruses to describe the computer-intensive portion of the economy — is, quite simply, the virtual economy. One of its main byproducts is the replacement of low-productivity workers with computers. It’s growing by leaps and bounds, brimming with optimistic entrepreneurs, and spawning a new generation of billionaires. In fact, the booming Second Economy will probably drive much of the economic growth in the coming decades.
Unfortunately, the Second Economy will not create many jobs.”
Some people move noses of aircrafts into their garages so that they can enjoy a flight simulator hobby. James Price is one of those people. From Zoe Francis at the Mercury News:
“In his spacious three-car garage Price has a well-traveled jetliner cockpit tucked in next to the family car.
Aviation experts say Price, 52, is one of only a handful of people in the world who have built their own flight simulator cockpit in an actual jet nose.
His dream of building a full-sized jet simulator began nearly 20 years ago when Price joined an online group of flight simulator hobbyists — folks who typically use computer flight simulator programs or build fake cockpits at home.
Price, an air traffic controller and a private pilot who’s never flown a jet but dreams of doing so one day, began buying genuine 737 parts and building mock cockpits.
‘My first couple of versions of the cockpit … were just basically made up of wood in my spare room in my house.'”
It’s difficult to believe that the average person in China will ever know the same quality of life that Americans enjoy today, even if their economy blows past ours (which doesn’t seem to be a fait accompli). Because of China’s population size, even a super economy probably wouldn’t be able to put three SUVs in every garage. But that’s not to say that a large population foretells poverty, nor do technologies that displace workers. In the long run, a critical mass of people and technology seem to effect a greater prosperity. From “The Population Boon,” Philip E. Auerswald’s anti-Malthusian think piece in the American Interest:
“Almost exactly four years after V-J Day, on August 13, 1949, an MIT professor named Norbert Wiener wrote a letter to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), containing a darkly prophetic message. Within a decade or two, Wiener warned, the advent of automatic automobile assembly lines would result in ‘disastrous’ unemployment. The power of computers to control machines made such an outcome all but inevitable. As a creator of this new technology, Wiener wanted to give Reuther advance notice so that the UAW could help its members prepare for and adapt to the massive displacement of labor looming on the horizon.
Now, if anyone in 1949 grasped the disruptive potential of computing machines, it was Norbert Wiener. A prodigy who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in mathematical philosophy at age 18, he had contributed to the development of the first modern computer, created the first automated machine and laid the groundwork for a new interdisciplinary science of information and communication that he termed ‘cybernetics.’ His work anticipated and inspired Marshall McLuhan’s heralded studies of mass media, provided the initial impetus for the explorations by James Watson and Francis Crick that led to the discovery of the double helix, and spurred science-fiction writer William Gibson to coin the term ‘cyberspace’ to describe a type of virtual world that Wiener himself had envisioned two decades before the creation of the first web page.
Reuther took Wiener’s letter seriously, responding promptly by telegram: ‘Deeply interested in your letter. Would like to discuss it with you at earliest opportunity following conclusion of our current negotiations with Ford Motor Company. Will you be able to come to Detroit?’ When the two met in March 1950, they pledged to work together to create a labor-science council to anticipate and prepare for major technological changes affecting workers.
At about the same time Reuther and Weiner were meeting, a brain trust was gathering in the orbit of John D. Rockefeller III to address another problem: global overpopulation. The basic concern of this group was both old and simple: Human populations keep growing, but the planet isn’t getting bigger, so sooner or later disaster will be upon us. Funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund permitted the creation of the Population Council in 1952. John D. Rockefeller III appointed Frederick Osborn to be the Council’s first president.” (ThanksBrowser.)
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Frightening you and your children about overpopulation, 1970s:
"The scientists have exploited the natural behavior of soldier crabs to design and build logic gates." (Image by Peter Ellis.)
Using the predictable swarming patterns of soldier crabs, Yukio–PegioGunji of Kobe University has designed a very unorthodox analog computer. From David Szondy at Gizmag:
“Thanks to Yukio–PegioGunji and his team at Japan’s Kobe University, the era of crab computing is upon us … well, sort of. The scientists have exploited the natural behavior of soldier crabs to design and build logic gates – the most basic components of an analogue computer. They may not be as compact as more conventional computers, but crab computers are certainly much more fun to watch
Electricity and microcircuits aren’t the only way to build a computer. In fact, electronic computers are a relatively recent invention. The first true computers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built out of gears and cams and over the years many other computers have forsaken electronics for marbles, air, water, DNA molecules and even slime mold to crunch numbers. Compared to the slime mold, though, making a computer out of live crabs seems downright conservative.”
Despite low crime rates, the 1% are spending extravagantly on high-tech security for their homes. Is income inequality making everyone jittery? Is it something else? From Lauren A.E. Shuker’s recent WSJ piece:
“‘We had the worst housing market of all time, but the security business grew right through it,’ says Jeff Sprague, a managing partner who follows the industry at Vertical Research Partners.
There’s no single factor behind the drive to fortify. Crime rates have largely fallen around the country; the murder rate is half what it was in 1991, and robberies fell 10% in 2010 from the year before. Still, some gate-makers note that the proliferation of personal information on the Internet has increased some owners’ feelings of vulnerability and desire for privacy. Others cite the recent focus on income disparity between America’s rich and poor.”
Are you concerned that one person and an ethically dubious one, Mark Zuckerberg, is setting the course for the new connectivity? You should be, because it is concerning. But the modern ways will not be unlearned, even if Zuckerberg himself should fall by the wayside. From “Facebook: Like?” by Robert Lane Greene at Intelligent Life, an essay which analyzes fears about the social networking giant but gives equal attention to the positives it provides:
“So for all the capricious decor and talk of breaking things, Facebook is very well aware that the eyes of the world are on it as an incumbent giant, not an insurgent. Besides ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ there are signs telling employees to ‘Stay Focused and Keep Shipping.’ Visitors are greeted warmly, but also presented with the standard Silicon Valley non-disclosure agreement before they can proceed past security. A billion people connected as never before in history. But Facebook also engenders anxiety on levels from the personal to the political, worries about a world in which private lives are always on display. What is 24-hour social networking doing to our self-expression, our self-image, our sense of decorum? Have we finally landed in the ‘global village’ coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s? What if you don’t like it there? Is there anywhere else to live?
And what is Facebook, anyway? The most obvious point of historical comparison is the social networks that preceded it. First there was Friendster, the flirt-and-forget site of the first half of the 2000s. Then everyone dumped Friendster for MySpace, and MySpace was bought by News Corp for $580m. Its value soared to $12 billion, and the received wisdom was that MySpace would take over the world. Then it didn’t, and News Corp sold it for $35m, because someone else had finally got social networking right. Started by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook went from a Harvard dorm room to the rest of teenage America’s bedrooms to hundreds of millions of people all around the world—even parents and grandparents. Along the way, Facebook has fuelled revolutions in the Middle East, and inspired an Oscar-winning movie. Other social networks can only try to build out from the few niches it hasn’t already filled. Facebook is the undisputed champion of the world.
But the real comparison is not with other social networks. To give real credit to its achievement today and its ambitions for the future, it can only be said that Facebook’s true competitor is the rest of the entire internet.” (ThanksBrowser.)
