This time last month everyone was compiling their lists of the year and lists of the decade. But I wasn’t playing, and when it came to music I just lazily directed folks to my lastfm stats – the warts-and-all representation of what I’ve actually been listening to since 2004, untainted by any consideration toward “cool”. With the help of scrobblepod my lastfm account tracks more or less everything I listen to, be it on laptop, spotify or either of my iPods (how does one manage with less than two iPods?). Discounting vinyl, CDs (which I never listen to now), 6Music and the videos I watch on NME.tv pretty much all bases are covered.
But the real joy of stats is visualisation. The image above is a slice of my listening habits in the latter half of 2009, beautifully rendered by http://lastgraph.aeracode.org/. This is only one of many free tools on the web, if you want to explore further this list is a good place to start.
Rudy, my four year old, is a huge fan of “daddy’s patterns“, so naturally he was the person I most wanted to accompany me on my visit to Decode, the V&A/onedotzero “Digital Design Sensations” exhibition.
Rudy, as part of the resident savvy child collective in our house, acts as my personal futurologist. The way he interacts with the world is the way the world will be when his generation is running it. Rudy fails to understand why all content isn’t on demand, why every screen is not a touchscreen, why his favourite media is not available on every device. And seeing him, after lapping up Decode, attempt to prod, wave at or talk to other inanimate exhibits around the rest of the V&A, I suspect he will now be questioning the relevance of any artwork that doesn’t involve, reflect or interact with the viewer.
Interaction; with our machines, objects, materials, environments, and each other, will soon become something that is simply expected. And anything that we can’t communicate with will have decreasing relevance over the coming decades. Those who snobbishly dismiss interactive art as being “something for kids” should remember that soon it will be these very same kids who will be making the decisions as to what is and isn’t art.
Here’s my proposal. On New Years Eve 2009 we close Facebook. Hermetically seal it and drop it in a data mine somewhere, as a noughties time capsule not to be dug up for a minimum of twenty years, when it can be gently mocked on a Channel 4 nostalgia show. We’ll look back on it and laugh at the primitive, puerile crap we used to do back then.
Ok, I still log in perhaps once a week, but I feel a bit dirty every time I do. Even only three years old, it feels hideously clunky and archaic now. And ever since the redesign it has felt to me like visiting my childhood bedroom after suffering a stroke. A place once familiar, now slightly twisted. Even so, I’d now find it difficult to sever all these tenuous connections I have re-established with people I’d once lost touch with (probably for a reason).
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is doing the rounds at the moment, promoting his new book “Delete”, on the value of digital forgetting, how our data trails don’t go away and the dangers thereof. I have talked about this before, and have myself been a victim of private data being used against me, but I still think, having not read the book (uninformed opinion alert) that it isn’t of too much concern.
Although, one thing that does worry me is the effect services such as Facebook have on adolescence and personal development. You can always tell when a Facebook user is of school or college age, because they have a minimum of two or three hundred friends. We wise, cynical old farts might (jealously) insist the majority of the people we knew at this age were probably, at best, acquaintances, but it doesn’t work like that when you’re a kid. It is only when you move on, leave home, go to university, that you grow beyond this stage and start to discover who you really are, and move in more exclusive circles.
Room For Re-invention
An essential part of that personal growth is re-invention. The first thing most young people did when they went to Uni in my day is go through their goth stage, punk stage, emo stage, dope-fiend stage, or whatever was on the fringes that year. This is because for the first time they had the freedom to reinvent themselves, and experiment (and make mistakes) with finding their personal style and identity. This is an important process; it is what separates the individuals from the sheep. It is those without the fear to find themselves who develop both the idiosyncrasy and, more importantly, confidence in that idiosyncrasy, to go out there and change the world.
But surely this is so much more difficult to do while you retain all these virtual connections to the people you went to school with, the people who used to make fun of you of every time you had a haircut, or a new coat. School is all about conformity; that is how the social structure of the playground works. And so is the real world too, if we allow it to be that way. If we enter the world with a status-quo reinforcing web of social connections already in place, it must be so much harder to branch out or grow beyond it.
I may be worrying about nothing. I recently re-read a 10 year old tech-sociology book (for the book, everything is for the book these days) which made a very big deal about how content on demand is going to mean the importance of the 8pm prime time TV slot is going to be lost. The answer that time has given to this problem is: so what? It is simply the way we operate today, from within the entrappings of social media. Hopefully, the iconoclasts of the 21st Century will find their own ways of dealing with it.
I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to announce this, but it’s finally sorted – I’ve just signed my first book deal! My Generative Art book will be on real and virtual shelves sometime next year. Contrary to reports it will be published by the lovely folks at Manning Publications, not the equally nice folks at Apress (as they rather prematurely announced).
It’s been over three months since I was first invited to pitch an idea, and has taken a lot of negotiation to get a contract I was happy with. But rather groovily I have managed to get consent to release a significant portion of the book under a Creative Commons license, so some chapters can be reproduced and distributed as widely as the winds will carry them. This means I will be able to publish large extracts here as we get closer to publication, as will anyone else who wants to.
Already I’ve got a list of people I need to thank for getting my idea this far, but I’ll save it for the book. But to those who know who you are; cheers to you, you and especially you, I feed on your enthusiasm.
Watch this space, and my twitter, for further updates.
MC Escher’s Relativity gloriously rendered in Lego by Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu. Full size version here. Read the ‘making of..’ here (they made “widespread use of SNOT – Studs Not On Top – techniques” apparently.)
I have to confess I have only ever seen one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. I say this not out of snobbery, but in admission of what a poorly researched knee-jerk rant this post is going to be. The only reason I made the effort to endure an hour of this insanely popular shitefest was Chris TT’s awesome appraisal in his Morning Star column, which gets right to the nub of what the program is about; power games and homogenising public opinion.
“It is a parallel to the corporatist vision of the owner not just possessing everything but possessing everyone’s values too and overseeing what is regarded as acceptable.”
While BGT may appear to be new nadir of prole patronisation as entertainment, I have to say I have seen worse. Probably the ugliest example I can recall was ITVs Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, (”a cross between Jim’ll Fix It and Dragons Den“) where worthy causes juggled, danced, or gurned for our entertainment, then held out cloth caps to a panel of millionaires, in the hope they would toss them a few scraps. It was truly appalling, and not just because the panel included loathsome twatLord Archer (I struggle to find a kinder adjective).
But I have to take issue with Chris on one point, or more accurately two words, in his article – “The Apprentice“. This programme cannot be dumped in the same shitbox as Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, 10 Years Younger and American Idol. Chris has questioned how so many of his seemingly intelligent friends are devoted to this crass reality show. I am one of this faithful, so allow me to stage a defence.
The crucial difference is context. The candidates on The Apprentice are not dreamers with a desire to find an audience for their meagre talents. They are comically extreme devotees of the Capitalist dream. These people are whoring themselves for the ‘prize’ of commuting to Essex for the rest of their lives. The ‘winner’ gets a nine to five job where they can continue to kiss their hairy master’s arse FOREVER.
The contestants on Britain’s Got Talent are victims. It is truly tragic that the only platform they have found that will allow their decidedly average faces on the gogglebox is one where they are manipulated and abused in some kind of emotional pornography.
Whereas the comedy we get from the candidates on The Apprentice is purely down to their own warped ambition, misguided self-belief and unshakable faith in a capitalist road to happiness. These people are exactly the kind of freaks our society SHOULD be ostracising. They should be in the stocks to be ridiculed, as to mock them is to make their shallow capitalist ambitions less socially acceptable.
The Apprentice is a capitalist comedy, it one of the few antibodies in the face of our biggest cultural disease. It is also bloody good telly.
“It’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible – in principle – to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”
Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”
Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive – it does, after all, command.”
We cling to our concept of free will like blood. Declaring one is without free will is akin to admitting you don’t have a sense of humour, it is effectively saying you aren’t human. For what are we without free will – robots; actors; performing monkeys?
Philosophy has wrestled with free will vs determinism for as long as there has been philosophy. In more recent times science has pitched in on the debate too. Physiologist Ben Libet, who died in 2007, conducted a number of experiments in the 1970s on the timing of neural events. His measurements demonstrated that when the decision to perform an action is made, the beginnings of the action occur before the corresponding activity in the consciousness centre of the brain. These findings seem to suggest that the conscious mind, the area we regard as our decision making centre, is actually nothing of the the sort. It is subconscious processes that make all our decisions; the only role of the consciousness is to retrospectively justify these decisions to ourselves.
Our sense of free will, if Libet’s experiments are to be believed, is nothing more than an illusion. It is just another bi-product of our massively over-sized brains. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in quantum mechanics seems to back up this conclusion, I burbled excitedly about this realisation in a post two years ago. But even if we had something more accessible than conceptual psychology or quantum mechanics to prove this point, would we ever be able to accept it?
My answer: who gives a toss? We are certainly the only animal who believes in, or cares about such a concept. The dog I questioned on the matter was very clearly disinterested in the subject, and I suspect his may be the right attitude. Does it really matter whether we have free will, or only the illusion of it? Our actions will still be the same either way. Whether we have a strong grip upon the rudder of destiny, or we are just socks thrown around in the washing machine of chance, our lives will still be the same – messy, chaotic and surprising.
Believing in free will is akin to believing in God. We are welcome to do so, but it’s probably ever-so-slightly nutty of us. If the concept makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can pretend we are more important than all the other bundles of matter in the cosmos, it doesn’t cost us anything, and it doesn’t do us any harm, does it?
Um, yes, I think it probably does do a lot of harm. But that’s another post.
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