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March 25th, 2009
I had a nickname at school; nothing insulting, embarrassing or derogatory, it was actually quite cute for a seven year old (which was around the time it started). But I’m not going to state that name here for fear of inadvertently resurrecting a meme that has taken so long to die. Even now, well entrenched as I am into my “middle years”, father of two, respectable professional etc, my Facebook wall (hey, remember when we all used Facebook) is regularly peppered with messages addressed to a name invented by children in a playground circa 1979.
Not that I mind, it’s kinda sweet really, but you have to be so careful with names, as the good ones tend to stick like tattoos. And now I have a second nickname, one which embarrassingly I have to take the blame for creating myself (is there anything less cool than the kid at school who made up their own nickname?). Sometime in 2000 I decided “zenbullets” would be a catchy little title for my homepage (hey, remember when we all had homepages). I’d lifted it from an issue of The Invisibles, which I was obsessed with throughout the last half of the nineties. But had I known that, 10 years later, I would be still be trading as zenbullets I might have given it a little more than a few minutes thought.
Personal branding is actually quite important in the crowded marketplace of the web, so there is a lot of value to having a memorable (and more importantly – unique) name. I could have done worse, and I don’t cringe too badly at it, but still I wonder if I can ever discard it now. I am well known, especially in Flash circles, by this moniker, and relatively unknown by my real name (which has it’s advantages too). So should I shed the name now, or just resign myself to being associated with a throwaway line in a comic book when I am in my seventies.
Of course, before I can shed one name means I first have to think up a better name to replace it. Which is an even more daunting task.
Posted in comics, computers ate my brain, introspection, tech, web |
April 18th, 2008
One of the memories I have from my school days is the visit of the “careers advisor”, a strange diplomat from the adult world come to impart her wisdom upon the young. I don’t know whether it still works this way, but in my day careers advice was not a regular part of the curriculum, just an irregular visit by some outside agency. Which is fortunate perhaps because the advice they gave was usually, at best, entirely useless. At worst, dispiriting and psychologically damaging.
“Our records show you’re good at maths. How about working in a bank?”
“Good at art eh? Ever thought about becoming an art teacher?”
Perhaps it wasn’t really her fault that every job I have done in my professional life didn’t actually exist when I was at school. In fact many of the technologies I’m working in at the moment didn’t even exist this time last year, this is how fast things are moving in my field. My career would have been extremely hard to predict, because there was a Black Swan involved – the Internet.
“Black Swan” is a term I probably need to explain before I proceed. There used to be a saying in Medieval England that something was about as likely as “finding a Black Swan”, meaning it was highly unlikely, akin to “when pigs fly”. According to historical record, this term was in widespread use until the 17th Century and the discovery of Australia, which bought with it the first sighting of a Black Swan in 1697. In scientific terms this is known as a paradigm shift, it was a discovery that couldn’t be incorporated into the current understanding, it had to redefine it. And clearly, the metaphor could no longer be used.
Nassib Taleb, in his book of the same name, defines the Black Swan as an event which is 1) hard to predict, 2) highly consequential, and 3) wrongly retro-predicted. The history of human culture is a progression of these Black Swans: the internet, the home computer, the motor car, wikipedia, Harry Potter, Princess Diana, facebook, the Renaissance. World War I was a Black Swan, it may look predictable in hindsight, but prior to it actually happening it was near unimaginable.
Cultural Myopia
If the careers advisor had any imagination about her, she might have talked to me about the job of the Futurist, which is perhaps my dream vocation. It’s basically like being a science fiction author, except better paid and doesn’t require an understanding of character and narrative etc. You basically just dream up big ideas, which is what I spend most nights doing anyway, but instead of losing sleep over them, a futurist sells their ideas to capitalist interests for them to worry about instead. There aren’t many people in this field – Raymond Kurzweil maybe, Bruce Sterling possibly – but if Black Swans are as frequent as Taleb makes out, the very concept of futurology becomes ridiculous. The progression of human culture is about as predictable as the stock market, the weather or any other chaotic system.
Figure and Ground
In trying to predict a chaotic system, a system where there are enough elements for it to be incalculable, we may not be able to accurately predict an outcome, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t still discern patterns. For example, we cannot predict the weather any further than two or three days in advance, but we can still say with confidence that it will be warmer in the summer than it will in the winter. It is by looking at the patterns of the past that we can make predictions for the future.
It is an oft observed phenomenon that every technological leap we make seems to be propelled by either porn or communication, two of the basest human functions, two things it is safe to predict there will always be a demand for.
While the Internet may have been a Black Swan, I’d like to think that a lot of its applications could have been foreseen (which is easy to say with hindsight). The aforementioned wikipedia and facebook for example are the newest of the new (although facebook, a year old now, is already starting to seem like yesterdays news), and weren’t actually possible before the WWW, but the principles behind them – sharing knowledge, keeping in touch with friends – are as old as civilisation.
Marshall McLuhan, sixties cultural theorist, of “the medium is the message” fame, in his later career came up with another epithet which I think is much more useful – “Ignore the figure and watch the ground”. What he’s saying is, when looking at culture and/or technology, don’t be distracted by the phenomenon itself, instead look at what’s going on around it, the effects it is having on the world. This is where the real story is.
While the technological changes themselves might not be easy to predict, the ripples that surround them will likely be quite familiar. Which means we probably can get an idea of where we’ll be in twenty years time, all we need do is look at the past, and squint a bit.
Posted in computers ate my brain, evolution, philosophy, society, tech, web |
November 14th, 2007
There are no shortage of horrors that can be witnessed on DVD, but the one that has the power to disturb me even 20 years after I first witnessed it is the brutal act Molly Ringwald commits upon Ally Sheedy at the end of The Breakfast Club.
I better give a spoiler warning for the ending of the film, even though if you haven’t seen it by now you probably aren’t very interested. Although it might make the film more enjoyable if you know the right time to look away. Anyway, in short; the grebo gets a make-over.
The Breakfast Club are the Rebel, the Jock, the Princess, the Basket Case and the Nerd. They all have their emotional journeys through their days detention and come out of it having learned something about themselves. All very life affirming and touchy feely so far. But Sheedy’s character, the Basket Case, the cute goth who quite reasonably has little interest in the rest of the lame stereotypes she’s stuck in a room with, has her emotional journey lead her within the viscious influence of Ms Ringwald, the Princess. Who then does THIS to her:
Clearly, the moral here is that all any confused, introverted, iconoclastic emo kid really wants is a makeover. This message; of conformity, superficiality, and a twisted sense of personal fulfillment, sends shivers down my spine.
Poor, poor Ally. Having had her individuality stripped, her face painted, and a stupid bow tied in her hair, she is then further humiliated with the sexual attentions of Emilio Estevez, The Jock (who only notices her for the first time once she’s dressed like bloody Barbie). Maybe it’s just me, but can you really see that relationship working? Was the sequel ever written, where we revisit Alison after the traumatic gang-rape by the rest of the football team?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in computers ate my brain, culture, film, tech, wtf |
July 13th, 2007
“I very much enjoy looking at the wind moving trees around, and I love looking at the ocean, and clouds. I always think if there were only one place in the world where you could see clouds everybody would be flocking there, clouds are so fascinating and we just take them for granted, we don’t even look at them.
That’s one thing in an environment like a Mall: it’s hard to find any examples of what I call ‘gnarl’, natural gnarl, where you see a leaf waving in the wind, or a fire flame, or some flowing water. We often box ourselves up into these rooms.
When you see something like the leaves on a tree, that’s a good example, there may be a simple equation underlying it, like the laws of fluid flow. We’ve got a certain amount of air and a certain number of leaf positions, the leaves are complex compound pendulums, and they begin rocking in these unpredictable ways.
The distinction that’s new, and that we didn’t used to make, is that something can be deterministic but not predictable. We tend to think they are synonyms but they’re not. Something can be obeying some law of nature but it’s not predictable because what it’s doing is so complicated that the time it would take you to calculate what it was going to do would take longer than the thing actually doing it. So you could compute it but you can’t compute the world any faster than it is happening.”
Rudy Rucker in conversation with Rick Kleffel, January 2007.
When Alan Turing did his pioneering studies in the 1930s, defining the bedrock for the field of Computing, there was no such machine as a “computer”. When Turing talked of computers he was envisioning human beings with pen and paper carrying out repetitive sequential tasks, not machines. The lump of metal and matt plastic we now call a computer didn’t really find it’s way into our lives until fifty years later, long after Turing’s suicide in 1954.
In the early nineties I started a Computing degree at Exeter University, which I endured for about a year and a half before, bored senseless, I dropped out. I then went off to be arty for a few years to restore some kind of left-right hemisphere balance to my brain. I was so repulsed by my experience of early 90s ideas of Computing that I made efforts to stay as far away from computers as I could for the next five years.
It was only towards the end of the last decade, after the World Wide Web started to take off, and everyone suddenly discovered what they’d been doing recently with video cameras, photography and hypertext was now being called “New Media”, that I was drawn back in, and I made friends with the machines once more. It was also around this time that I started using a Mac, rather than a PC, which may also explain my shift in attitude.
But I sometimes think that my original attitude towards the study of Computing may not have been so negative if it was made apparent to me at university that Computing is not something you need a Computer to study. This took me a long time to realise, because I’d never really encountered this idea until recently. Computation is everywhere.
Computing is what our DNA does at it unravels. It is what a stream does as it finds it’s way downhill towards the ocean. It is what the planets do as they move in their orbits. It is what our bodies do as they maintain the balance needed to keep us upright. Computing is what I am doing now as I process these ideas, and output them as text. The only place computers really come into it is in attempting to simulate these computations, or allowing us to create simple computations of our own. And computers are rather limited in this capability. This is why I can say without contradiction that I find Computers quite boring, but Computation is fascinating. If you don’t believe me turn off your primitive adding machine and take a look around you.
Even the most elementary of phenomenon in the natural world – the fluttering of a leaf, the spray of the ocean, the weather – are way beyond what can be computed by the technology we have. And it is theorised, via the work of Turing, Godel, Hofstadter and others, that we could never develop technology capable of simulating such a level of computation – it is simply conceptually impossible. This is why, as Dr Rucker’s quote above says, an entirely deterministic idea of Universal Automatism doesn’t mean we have to live in a world that is in any way predictable.
If you intended to develop an enthusiasm for literature, you’d study the classics; Shakespeare, Milton, Blake; examples of writing done well. You wouldn’t examine till receipts. Just as I’m sure no one was drawn to architecture by seeing a particularly well-constructed shed. Like Determinism and Predictability, Computing and Computers are not synonymous, and the study of Computing is not something to be done in front of humming box of electronics. Computing is better studied watching the wind in the trees, sat by a stream, or looking at the clouds.
Posted in computers ate my brain, introspection, philosophy, retro, tech, universal automatism, zen |
July 11th, 2007
There is a concept in science fiction, and science fact too, called the Singularity. It is defined as the point at which some technological advance, usually artificial intelligence, accelerates so rapidly that it overtakes humanity, and it becomes impossible for us to catch up and reign it in. It is usually used as an apocalyptic scenario, marking the end of human led society, and the start of something new, something post-singular.
The concept was first popularised by Vernor Vinge in the 1980s, but has been used in many books and films since. The machine led future in the Terminator or Matrix films is a post-singular world. In Neuromancer the world is on the brink of the singularity, as the recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence ‘Wintermute’ is born. There are countless other examples to be found in the sci-fi section of your local book, video or comic shop (just follow the smell of geek-sweat). Recently we have been hearing, in both fiction and non-fiction, a new twist on the singularity, the idea that the Web may suddenly develop an intelligence as it continues to grow exponentially.
The idea, as it is used in fiction, is usually that we humans will become enslaved by our machines – the popular irony of the master being defeated by their own creation. But I have great difficulty taking this seriously. I’ll give you two good reasons. Firstly, if we did develop an intelligence greater than our own, why would this intelligence feel threatened by us? And secondly, perhaps more pertinently, what more could our evil technological overlords enslave us into doing for them that we aren’t doing now?
Technology has already enslaved us. We afford our machines so much attention, and spend so much of our time nurturing their perpetual needs, that they are already our masters. My working life, and that of the majority of white collar workers, is spent sat in front of a computer, eyes fixed focus on a screen, completely immobile for most of the day, save for the flickering of wrist and fingers over mouse and keyboard. And the vast majority of this time is just spent managing the sheer amount of data my computer is capable of handling. I spend eight hours a day tending to my computer’s never ending needs, which is longer than I spend with my partner and son combined.
I foresee a future where our children look back on the late twentieth/early twenty first century, the dawning days of the information age, the same way we look back on the early days of the Industrial Revolution. We have difficulty believing that the working classes could be subjected to the dangerous and damaging working conditions of the factories, yet today we work longer hours than we ever have, and spend our working days entranced before screens, squinting at the glow, our bodies falling apart as we shovel snacks and neglect their needs for for movement and exercise. Then, once our labours are complete, we return home at the end of the day to spend our leisure time like zonked out junkies, slumped before other types of screens consuming other types of information.
We invented these technologies of ours as tools to improve life. Television was to be our window on the world. The folders on our virtual desktop were meant to be metaphors for real folders on real desktops. Email was meant to be what it says it is, an electronic form of mail. But could you imagine if you had to spend as much time disposing of spam that came through your real mailbox as you did through your email inbox? Or responding to as many letters as you have to write emails? Or storing as many paper files as you do computer files? And if the world outside your window resembled the world you now see on television, would you ever leave the house?
Just because we have this technology, and we have the ability to process this amount of information, do we really benefit from using it in the way we do?
The author Ken McLeod described the singularity as “the Rapture for nerds”, i.e. it has developed into an almost religious theory of eschatology within the realms of geekdom, with the post-human world eagerly anticipated. Perhaps, like the Christians, they see this submissive distopia as blessed relief, reward for enduring the end times. Incidentally, the term ’singularity’ is derived from Black Hole theory, the space-time singularity being the point of no return where gravity becomes infinite, and not even light can escape it’s pull. But we can escape the pull of technology, because all of our great technological inventions have one thing we humans don’t have – an off switch. We should use it on occasion, if only to remind ourselves who’s the boss.
[ follow-up post: The Mathematics of Clouds ]
Posted in computers ate my brain, culture, literature, philosophy, society, tech, zen |
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