via @hermes , who, incredibly, hired Amazon Mechanical Turk to transcribe the video.
BRUCE STERLING – SXSW 2013 – CLOSING REMARKS
So, thanks a lot for taking the trouble to show up. Very encouraging. So yeah, it’s true: I always speak at South By South West.
Apparently it’s become psychically necessary for me to show up with the closing benediction. Even when, personally, I’d much rather be watching Deadmaus and Richie Hawtin talk about techno music.
Really sorry to miss that, but you can’t do everything. This is like an exorcism. It’s like a ritual cleansing.
If you’ve ever been to one of these Sterling speeches at this event, you know the routine. I’m gonna complain a lot. Generally there’s also some weird gimmick in the speech.
So, let me get the gimmick out of the way first thing. I’m in costume. This is my costume as the Visionary In Residence for the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University.
Obviously it’s an Arizona State sweatshirt that I’m sporting here. ASU, if you don’t know it, is one of the biggest schools in the American Southwest. It’s about the size of UT Austin here. The sleeves are all blasted with laser cutter holes because, yeah, I’ve been messing with the hardware.
These are Processing bubble-packing holes, for you code-art fans in the audience. That’s why the patterns vary on each sleeve. I also have a Arizona bolo tie figurine here. This is a 3DPrinted, scanned, Bruce Sterling. You can’t actually see it, but I had my entire body scanned at the Emerge Conference in Phoenix, a couple of weeks ago.
Then I drove over here to Austin direct from Phoenix. Three peaceful days, out in the stony depths of the American Southwest. That’s the theme of this speech this year: it’s the Southwest.
So, I cut these laser holes in the design and fabrication workshop at Emerge 2013. We’ll get back to this adventure later, but, first, I want to talk about Austin as part of the Southwest. As a continuum of the Southwest, because, here we are. Obviously it’s the Southwest, and I am an Austinite. So I thought I would clue some of our guests in about Austin, the nature of the city.
There’s always a newbie wanderer at the event who’s like, “Why is it like this around here? It’s so strange, the food, the music?”
Okay, I lived in Austin before SouthBy ever came to exist, so commonly I’m forced to do this old-timer thing. Now when people confront me about it, commonly they’re anxious about the huge success of the event. It’s like: “Oh, is it terrible that the event no longer fits in your house? Has terrible harm been done by this huge influx of aliens every year?”
Well no, not really. I mean: some harm has obviously been done. It’s annoying to the locals, and so forth. But I can tell you about the actual harm that truly irritates Austinites. The great Austin grievance. It’s not a bunch of computer geeks at SouthBy. No.
The city got politically gerrymandered by the Texas right. So that, this city, the left-leaning capital of the State, would have next to no political influence. Austin’s political enemies just split the city up, very cleverly, so that any Austin congressional district can stretch all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, or even to Mexico.
So what you’ve got here in Austin is a blue pond in a red sea. It’s like a West Berlin. Austin is under constant cultural siege.
Every Austinite knows this in their bones. They know that if they ever stop being weird, they will be Dallas in thirty days.
It’s not all peach cobbler and microbrew beer around here, okay? When South By SouthWest occurs, it’s like that awesome scene in Lord of the Rings when the Riders of Rohan appear at the Gates of Minas Tirith.
Austinites are not the only people who suffer by this Civil Cold War situation. Raleigh is a lot like that — if you’ve ever been to Raleigh, North Carolina. Ann Arbor is very like that.
If you want to know what Austin would look like without this kind of tremendous Civil Cold War pressure: Boulder, Colorado. They’d all be Buddhists here. Very Zen, very yoga here, unperturbed.
If you want to know what the worst-case scenario is for us, what would happen if Austin conclusively lost? Waco. Waco, Texas. The defeated Austin. Waco, Texas used to be the “Athens of the Southwest.” That was its name. Waco was an intellectual center of education, of science, art, culture, and radical publishing.
Yes, in Waco — but the fundies got Waco. They just took it down. They won conclusively. Waco went down with all hands.
Even a lot of Austinites don’t know that stark truth. It’s a subterranean tragedy.
There are also subterranean victories in Austin. Like the “Document War” between Austin and Houston. You got Wikipedia? Look that up. It’s awesome, it’s amazing.
So anyway, I was driving over here through the great Southwestern deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. The real-deal Southwest. I like it quite a lot. It always has a calming, philosophical effect on me. Very visionary. Very blue horizon out there.
Normally, this is the part of the speech where I start screeching in indignation. But, I don’t have to. Listen to these quotes from Al Gore. Al Gore was here, and what was Al Gore saying?
“Our country is in very serious trouble — but that does not mean I am optimistic.”
“Our democracy has been hacked. American democracy has never been perfect, but more often then not, the will of the people did drive policy. Congress today is utterly incapable of passing any reform of any significance until they get permission from special interests.”
You know you’ve got problems when a guy whose party is in power is that mournful and upset.
And then there’s this other politician who drops by, this Cory Booker guy. Big on Twitter. He’s getting Sandy hurricane victims to sleep in his house.
And he says: “We are losing truth. We’re losing authenticity. We’re losing the soul of our politics.”
OK, obviously, I agree with all that — because it’s true.
Nevertheless, I feel like these two politicians have stolen some of my best Doomer riffs.
Especially this guy who should have been President, but turns out to be a futurist, instead. Hey, I’m a futurist. I never tried to be President.
So, last year I was up here — yelling a lot from the podium all about climate change, and industry consolidation, and youth unemployment, and Italian politics. And they’re all just as bad now. I mean, all four of those, absolutely as bad. But why repeat myself?
Somewhere out in the stony elemental deserts of the Southwest — it’s clean. The weather, always bad. The desert, very matter-of-fact about the worst-case scenario. It’s just been there, you know. It’s like: this is the desert! There’s no water! There’s no soil! If you’re stupid, you will die really fast here.
It’s not malicious or tricky about these realities. It’s not that the desert is pretending to be a lush tropical island — and then it takes all your water away by stealth. There’s just no water. The truth is obvious in ten seconds.
So, after this junket at Arizona State being the “Visionary in Residence,” I’m out in Arizona visiting a certain desert canyon. I always wanted to see it: Walnut Canyon National Monument.
Walnut Canyon, an extremely Southwestern place. It happened to have a little civilization in it once, from about 1100 A.D. to maybe 1250 A.D. The most high-tech guys in the Southwest.
Now the interesting thing about these ancient cliff-dweller guys is that they were much, much more high tech than South By South West. Because if if you’re in Austin for South By: yeah it’s pretty high tech. But: it’s not absolutely the most high-tech place that anybody’s ever heard of, ever.
But if you’re in Walnut Canyon in 1150 A.D., these guys are totally amazing! They’ve got canals, stone buildings, and advanced ceramics. They were so far ahead of everybody they knew, that they are absolutely the smartest guys anybody has ever heard of.
They’re the pinnacle of human achievement. They’re the Stone-Age Stanford. They’re the MIT of black and white pottery.
Now, of course they are not “high-tech” compared to us today. However, compared to everyone around them at the time, they are just amazingly progressive.
This canyon they are in: twenty miles long, four hundred feet deep. I saw it. It’s very scary. It’s amazingly crooked and treacherous. It’s full of ambush spots.
If you ever tried to invade that canyon, any child from Walnut Canyon can sneak up the back way, and drop a big rock, two hundred feet down, straight onto your head.
These narrow cliff trails are just tremendous barriers to market entry. The bravest warriors: Geronimo would not try it. Crazy Horse would think twice.
Now, people in the tech world, they’re always bragging about their “ecosystems.” These Walnut Creek guys have an actual ecosystem in there. There’s like one hundred and seventy-five different kinds of herbs and plants, all kinds of hallucinogens and cure-alls.
Their worst problem is actually their best advantage. They’ve got no water — but they hacked it. It’s a desert. There are tremendous droughts. So, in response, they just make these big ceramic pots and they fill them up with snow.
They just hold on to it while everyone around them dies of thirst. They’ve got urban water tanks in their little cliff community. Whenever it rains, they just run out and top off all the jars. They’ve got Cloud Storage in there.
Imagine you’re some desert nomad, an everyday Native American guy. You stumble across people who can do this. They’re not like you. You have to follow the herds all the time. They can actually store water!
They don’t even have to move. They don’t have tents made of skin, they’ve got solid stone houses. You can make stone arrowheads, but these guys make big stone building blocks.
They’ve got all kinds of cool features in there. They’ve got an eBay worth of stuff. Looms, carpets, deerskin sandals, cornmeal tortillas, peyote, kachina dolls, anything you can imagine. They’ve even got seashells from Texas and parrots from Mexico. They’re living in this waterless death trap, and that’s why they’re the richest, most intelligent, best organized people for hundreds of miles in every direction. They’ve really got it made.
And yes — the moral here is that you’re a lot like that. Only they managed to pull that off for one hundred and fifty years, while you’re only twenty-six years old. If I was going to compare you to the Sinagua people of the Southwest, we’d have to imagine this as South By South West 150.
Now, there’s a further twist: these cliff dwellings have been abandoned since the year 1250 AD. And yet the ruins still look great. Souvenir hunters ran off with some of the stone bricks, but there’s no major damage there. If Sinagua people showed up in Walnut Canyon tomorrow, they could have their whole Stone Age society booted up again in six months. Plant the corn and the beans, water up the pots. It’s a very simple, resilient kind of society. Whereas, you’re a South by Southwest world. Very contingent, and historically unique, and frail.
Now, I’ve been to a lot of these events. This one was okay. It’s a normal one now. It’s gotten really big now, it’s like Mardi Gras, a lot of drunk guys now. Nobody can expect to see all of it. You need the Cliffs Notes to understand SXSW nowadays.
But the well by no means has run dry. There’s plenty of wacky stuff going on. Tons of do-it-yourself manufacturing, 3DPrinting, wearable technology, disruptive medical stuff, trips to Mars, whatever you like.
Then I look over the SXSW crowd. I’ve seen a lot of them. You look pretty good, for a SXSW crowd. More foreigners around, Koreans, Germans, Britons.
Even a neighborhood from London: Hackney. I was super-impressed by that: Hackney. Hackney! That is unheard-of global ambition by a district of a town. It’s like South Austin had it’s own presence at the London Olympics.
I’m gonna take Hackney a lot more seriously from now on. Hackney is a force to be reckoned with. I’ll probably overlook their surveillance cameras, and their miserable immigration and visa policies.
There was Leap Motion here. There was Google Glass being demoed. All kinds of wearables, touchables, pokeables, printables, and sociables.
What was missing? Where was the empty stone box? Where is the abandoned part?
The personal desktop computer. Lots of pads, and slates, and screens, and projectors. Where are the computers? Where’s the stone box?
I’m a futurist. One of the problems of being a futurist is that you learn that things are temporary. Stone boxes are temporary. Plastic boxes, very temporary. I am temporary.
I’m a mortal human being. It’s not weird or amazing to have a human life span. It’s ubiquitous. It’s universal. Death. It’s just somewhat taboo to dwell on the subject in public.
My parents didn’t live particularly long. I used to figure I should be dropping dead around now. Dropping dead: a massive heart attack at the podium in South By. That would be awesome. Imagine how that would look on Wikipedia.
So it’s kinda disturbing to me to realize that computers are dying, not me. Computers are dying off, and I am actually in pretty good shape.
I’m not Ray Kurzweil, I’m not gonna outlive the Milky Way Galaxy personally. But I might well be hanging around for some unconscionable length of time, like maybe age ninety. That would make SXSW 57, and I would still be tottering up here, having outlived the personal computer — this amazing device which might appear, and even disappear, during my own lifetime.
And it really seems to be going. I don’t think I heard any speaker at any panel here ever use the term “PC.” Where are they? It’s just vanished like the word “Computer” in the name of “Apple Computer.”
Why does nobody talk about them? Because nobody wants them, that’s why. Imagine somebody brings you a personal desktop computer here at South By, they’re like bringing it in on a trolley.
“Look, this device is personal. It computes and it’s totally personal, just for you, and you alone. It doesn’t talk to the internet. No sociality. You can’t share any of the content with anybody. Because it’s just for you, it’s private. It’s yours. You can compute with it. Nobody will know! You can process text, and draw stuff, and do your accounts. It’s got a spreadsheet. No modem, no broadband, no Cloud, no Facebook, Google, Amazon, no wireless. This is a dream machine. Because it’s personal and it computes. And it sits on the desk. You personally compute with it. You can even write your own software for it. It faithfully executes all your commands.”
So — if somebody tried to give you this device, this one I just made the pitch for, a genuinely Personal Computer, it’s just for you — Would you take it?
Even for free?
Would you even bend over and pick it up?
Isn’t it basically the cliff house in Walnut Canyon? Isn’t it the stone box?
“Look, I have my own little stone box here in this canyon! I can grow my own beans and corn. I harvest some prickly pear. I’m super advanced here.”
I really think I’m going to outlive the personal computer. And why not? I outlived the fax machine. I did. I was alive when people thought it was amazing to have a fax machine. Now I’m alive, and people think it’s amazing to still have a fax machine.
Why not the personal computer? Why shouldn’t it vanish like the cliff people vanished? Why shouldn’t it vanish like Steve Jobs vanished?
It’s not that we return to the status quo ante: don’t get me wrong. It’s not that once we had a nomad life, then we live in high-tech stone dwellings, and we return to chase the bison like we did before.
No: we return into a different kind of nomad life. A kind of Alan Kay world, where computation has vanished into the walls and ceiling, as he said many, many years ago.
Then we look back in nostalgia at the Personal Computer world. It’s not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon. We weren’t driven away by force. We just mysteriously left. It was like the waning of the moon.
They were too limiting, somehow. They computed, but they just didn’t do enough for us. They seemed like a fantastic way forward, but somehow they were actually getting in the way of our experience.
All these machines that tore us away from lived experience, and made us stare into the square screens or hunch over the keyboards, covered with their arcane, petroglyph symbols. Control Dingbat That, backslash R M this. We never really understood that. Not really.
Back in 2007 I stood here. I said that blogs would be extinct by 2017. Basically, gone. There were fifty-five million blogs at the time. Twitter was just beginning to ramp up.
It was hard to believe that platforms would come to exist that were faster, and more nimble, and more useful, than blogging platforms. It’s only 2013. Did you see any panels here on blogs? Lots of blogger meet-ups? Big, hot, new blogging platforms for your personal computer? Lots of added, innovative features? Where are they?
Crickets chirping.
Now, I’m a blogger. I’m not crying in my Shiner beer about it. I’ve got a Twitter account. I’ve got a Tumblr, I know what Pinterest is.
I know that they will all last less long than the heyday of blogs. Blogs are like stone, compared to these lightweight micro-blogging platforms.
This doesn’t mean that Tumblr goes away and the blogs return. It means that those who live by disruption die by disruption.
It means that those who live by dis-intermediation die by dis-intermediation. The fire-born are at home in fire.
So I’m not going to cry about blogs perishing — they’re like stand-up comedy. If I’m going to properly mourn something, I will cry about centuries of paper-based literature being disrupted and dis-intermediated. My subculture world I loved so well: xeroxed fanzines, science fiction monthly magazines, publishing houses, independent bookstores, newspapers, magazines, libraries, novels.
I wrote ‘em. I really liked novels. You may notice I’m not wearing a sweatshirt with the name of a novel on it. I’ve got a sweatshirt from a think-and-do lab. It’s fragile, it’s full of laser holes.
As it happens, I recently wrote a new novel. Funniest novel I ever wrote. It’s an ebook, you can go and look for it if you want. It doesn’t make much difference if you do or you don’t. We just don’t live in a world where novels can be important in the way that novels used to be important.
Nobody reviews them. There are no paper periodicals that talk at great length about paper novels to people who spend their lives reading paper.
The bookstore chains have been disrupted. They are collapsing. I am a novelist. I myself don’t go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. They are stone cliff houses. They are half abandoned.
If I don’t go in there, certainly my readers are not going to go in there. I know where the readers went. They’re all on the internet, or in social media, just like me.
I am super active on Twitter. I don’t write fiction on Twitter. I scarcely refer to my novels or fiction on Twitter. My Twitter followers, they’re not fans of my fiction writing. The people who follow me on Twitter are mostly designers, developers, scientists, and activists. That’s who they are.
I follow some novelists on Twitter. I certainly wouldn’t want to follow people who were only novelists. I would never understand what was going on in real life.
Now, most of you in here aren’t novelists. I’m not complaining that novelists are disrupted and are very badly off — although we are.
What I’m telling you is that you’re more disrupted. You are worse off.
Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody. Including you.
People like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution. They put a foot wrong. What really happened is that the digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. Everybody — not just us bohemian creatives, but the military, political parties, the anchor stores in retail malls, academics subjected to massive open online courses.
It’s the same thing over and over. Basically, the only ones making money are the ones that have big, legal stone castles surrounded with all kinds of regulatory thorns. Meaning: the sickness industry, the bank gangsters, and the military contractors. Gothic High-Tech.
If more computation, and more networking, was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not. Obviously we’re living in a Depression.
I’m a cyberpunk writer. I wanted to write a kind of visionary, futuristic science-fiction that was tied into real-world tech developments. I learned how to do that. I did it. I did lots of it.
But it was one of those situations where the operation was a success and the patient died. The world’s extremely cyberpunk now, but the science-fiction genre, this particular form of a counter-culture literature with its paper support structure of fanzines and conventions and specialty bookstores, it was a casualty.
If you really want to be involved in futuristic tech development — if you’re sincerely interested in it — why don’t you just do it? Why write fiction about it? Just involve yourself in it. Network with the people who are doing it. It’s not hard.
Why write a novel about it? It’s like writing an opera about it.
So, I’m in a situation now where I have more influence on tech development than I ever did. The fact that I’m standing here proves that.
So why don’t science fiction writers write their vast, rambling trilogies about, say, Google Glass? Super interesting thing. I could write fiction about Google Glass. For a novelist I know rather a lot about it. Obviously, I’d much rather just try one on.
Of course I’d much rather try one on. Forget curling up on the couch with a book about the subject. Why? Just leave the stone box, put on the Glass, and run around outside.
It’s pretty clear. Run around with the timeline cards, and the bundles, and the system options, and the custom options, and the share entities, and the share targets, and the subscription, and the updates, on the Google Mirror API.
I understand that! Just go ahead, Larry and Sergey. You don’t scare me. I read Verge. I read Techcrunch. Rhizome. Creators Project. Hyperallergic.
Why would anybody read a novel about Google Glass? You could write one. It’s not impossible. I’ve written a lot of science fiction about head mounted displays.
But it’s clear that nobody’s going to be reading novels on Google Glass. How could you? A novel would violate the design principles: of visual images that show up on a network, get a quick, emotional, social response, and then vanish.
Google Glass is not a platform for literary expression. It’s a platform designed for shared visual experience in near real time, and verbal communication with a search engine that has voice recognition. That’s what it’s for. And those are OK things to do, but they’re just not paper-based analog media. They’re nowhere near it. They’re electronic. They’re participative.
So if someone’s wearing Glass, they’re not reading Bruce Sterling novels. They might be checking out my Tumblr. Because I started a Tumblr this year. I quite like Tumblr. It’s pleasant to see this lightweight micro-blogging platform that can just obliterate blogs — as I was saying here six years ago.
I like it that Tumblr is full of expressive young people who aren’t exploited by the sinister privacy threats poised by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. People on Tumblr are not livestock trapped in the data mines of the stacks.
Swell. That’s great, and so forth. But whenever I engage with Tumblr, there is an opportunity cost. I’m communicating with images, something I’ll probably never do very well. I’m not writing fiction, which is my profession, where I’ve had a lot of practice.
Now, I could probably go to Wolfram Alpha and have this situation put into a neat, direct equation: How many hours spent with Google Glass result in hours not spent in bookstores?
How many bookstores close, as a direct ratio of hours spent with electronic devices?
I’m sure there’s some direct relationship there. And it’s not a dark conspiracy. I happen to be quite the Google Glass fan.
In fact, I’m even becoming something of a Sergey Brin fan. I never paid much attention to Sergey before, but after Google Glass, Sergey really interests me. He’s filling the aching hole, the grievous hole in our society left by the departure of Steve Jobs. With Jobs off the stage, Sergey’s becoming very Jobsian. He wears these cool suits now. He’s got much better taste in design than he did. He’s got these Google X Moonshot things going on, they’re insanely great, and so forth.
I hope Sergey’s not taking a lot of acid and living off vegetarian applesauce. But other than that, well, now we have this American tech visionary millionaire who’s a Russian emigre. It’s fantastic! There’s something very post-Cold-War, very genuinely twenty-first century about that. It’s super. Sergey’s like my favorite out of control, one-percenter, mogul guy, right now.
Now, people might be upset about Sergey, because he’s taking this higher public profile these days. He’s got the self-driving car, the immortality projects, and the pet rocketships — whatever it is this week.
Yes, he’s very rich and powerful. Sure, he is. So was Steve Jobs, OK? And he’s dead, and he’s like a secular saint.
Imagine that Sergey Brin’s jumping out of his Vomit Comet, with his Glass on, and the chute just doesn’t open. All the way down to the ground. He impacts, he dies.
Just imagine reading the obituaries: the dead Sergey Brin. What a loss to mankind!
What a visionary! He gave us so much! A guru of organized world knowledge! What a tragedy, that we should lose Sergey Brin. A man who will never be replaced!
Yeah, you’d all be crying in your Shiner Bock beer about that. So — if you want my advice? — cut him some slack now, while he’s alive!
He’s an extraordinary guy, in an extraordinary situation, deliberately doing something extraordinary. It’s okay that it’s risky and threatening!
Now, it’s not okay that it disrupted literature. But Google already disrupted newspapers, basically destroyed ‘em single-handed. That wasn’t okay. What happened when Android disrupted Nokia, that wasn’t particularly okay.
But I’m okay with disruption. I’ve seen a lot of it, I know how it works. I’ve participated in it. I’ve personally known people who’ve benefited by it. I’ve known people who’ve suffered by it.
I have seen disruption in music, literature, the arts, entertainment publishing, the fourth estate, the military, political parties, manufacturing — pretty much everywhere except finance, health, the law, and the prison/military industry. Which is why they’ve got all the money now and the rest of us are pretty much reduced to disrupted global peons.
Computers were really, truly disruptive. Mobile devices are so radically disruptive that they even disrupted computers. They’re a bigger deal then the dead bookstores. We’ve got guys who own cell phones in this world who can’t even read.
And I’m very intimate with this spectacle. I’m very keen on all its little ins and outs.
The thing that bugs me about your attitude toward it is that you don’t recognize its tragic dimension.
This is something that literature has always been very keen on, that technology never gets around to acknowledging. The cold wind moaning through the empty stone box.
When are you gonna own up to it? Where are the Dell PC’s? This is Austin, Texas. Michael Dell is the biggest tech mogul in central Texas. Why is he not here? Why is he not at least not selling his wares?
Where are the dedicated gaming consoles you used to love? Do you remember how important those were? I could spend all day here just reciting the names of the casualities in your line of work.
It’s always the electronic frontier. Nobody ever goes back to look at the electronic forests that were cut down with chainsaws and tossed into the rivers.
And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. Like: “If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?”
Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical. Because when you say a thing like that at SouthBy: “Oh, we’re here to make the world better” — you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivete.
The world has a tragic dimension. This world does not always get better. The world has deserts. Deserts aren’t better. People don’t always get better.
You personally: once you’re over middle-age, when you’re becoming elderly, you don’t get better everyday. When you are elderly, you are in metabolic decline. Every day you get worse.
It’s the human condition. It’s a simple truth. It is fatuous to think that culture, or politics, or society, or technology always get better. It’s just not true.
And it’s certainly not true right now. Since the financial panic of 2008, things have gotten worse across the board. The Austerity is a complete policy failure. It’s even worse then the Panic. We’re not surrounded by betterness in 2013. By practically every measure, nature is worse, culture is worse, governance is worse. The infrastructure is in visible decline. Business is worse. People are living in cardboard in Silicon Valley.
We don’t have even much to boast about in our fashion. Although you have lost weight. And I praise you for that, because I know it must have been hard.
We’re living in hard times, we’re not living in jolly boom dotcom times. And that’s why guys like Evgeny Morozov, who comes from the miserable country of Belarus, gets all jittery, and even fiercely aggressive, when he hears you talking about “technological solutionism.”
“There’s an app to make that all better.” Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness?
Things do not always progress, and the successes of progress become thorny problems for the next generation. They don’t stay permanently “better.” Our value judgments about what are better are temporary. They are time-bound. When you overuse the word “better,” it’s like a head-fake, it’s a mantra.
You don’t have a better-o-meter. You can’t measure the length and breadth and duration of the “betterness.” “Better” is a metaphysical value judgement. It’s not a scientific quality like mass or velocity.
You can’t test it experimentally. We don’t know what’s “better.” We don’t even know what’s “worse.” Which is good. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Google doesn’t want to be “evil,” but they don’t have an evilometer. They don’t have an evil avoidance algorithm.
I can already tell you what an evil Google Glass looks like. Nobody mentioned it, but it’s stunningly obvious. You just take the four Glass design principles and you reverse them.
You use software that was not designed for Glass. Buggy abusive software, stuff that breaks up or jams, or just fails to display. You grab fiercely for attention. You disrupt the user’s day. You send the user stale, useless information. You do freaky coding that breaks, or hacks, or powns the device.
And why do I know these things? Because they are already present in Android right now.
You don’t have to see into the future to recognize this. That’s not a prediction. All you have to do is abandon your naive pretense that every deployment of technology is necessarily an advance. It isn’t true.
If I’m a huckster in Guana who is spamming you through Google Glass, for me that situation is “better.” I’m not your pal. I’m an adversary. I’m out to rob you.
The Russians, they used to want to blow up Stanford. They didn’t want to send us Sergey Brin. They were not our permanent enemies. They were not always “bad.” Anything that is “good” for us, is “bad” for them? That’s not true.
If you’re fixated on “betterness,” you might lose hope when “good” goes to the “bad.” You might even lose hope when “bad” goes to the “good” — because it leaves you at sea. Because you were living an illusion.
You were living an illusion.
So, back to the Southwest. Arizona State University, where we had an event called Emerge. Emerge number two, “The Future of Truth.” Love this: future of truth. Naturally, it was an event about truth, so the people at this event spent most of their time making stuff up.
I was thrilled by this approach, because they weren’t doing it in any traditional science-fictional way. It was much more of a design fictional, think-and-do lab, kind of way. Which accounts for the 3D printing and the laser holes.
It was a way that anybody in this room would have recognized. Especially if you were outside our stone box here at the convention center, and you were out in the Maker tent there. In the dirt with the foldout tables under the tent fabric.
You may have noticed the flag inside that tent had a declaration of principles. I love those. Always love declarations of principles. It’s not that I obey them. I’m just glad to see them.
So, those were principles from Joi Ito, who is the recently appointed head of MIT Media Lab. A great guy, Joi Ito. I always benefit from listening to him. I take him totally seriously.
His sister, also awesome. Mimi Ito, she is an anthropologist. An impressively wise and kindly woman. I think the world of her. I would trust her with the kids and the car keys.
So, Joi is complaining in an interview about how disrupted our world is. He gets it. Favelas everywhere, it’s chaotic. So he’s gonna media-lab his way out of the situation.
He’s invented some principles, he says: nine or so principles. He says they work in a world like this.
Number 1: Resilience instead of strength. Which means you want to yield and allow failure, and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
Principle Number 2: You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them. As opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
And number 3, you want to take risks instead of focusing on safety.
Number 4, you want to focus on the system instead of objects.
Number 5, you want to have good compasses not maps.
Number 6, you want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t know why it works, but what is important is that it is working– not that you have some theory around it.
Number 7 is disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience. We should really be celebrating disobedience.
Number 8, it’s the crowd instead of the experts.
Number 9, it’s a focus on learning instead of education.
And he concludes, “We’re still working on it, but that’s where our thinking is headed.”
So, I put that on my Tumblr, I thought it was nifty. People went nuts! The crowd loves that — even if the experts don’t love it, obviously. A super-popular set of things.
Let me point out the difficulty with this approach, although I respect it very much. I even understand it as a description of my own practice. Something I’ve been doing for a long time. What’s the problem there?
The problem is that it intensifies the churn. It doesn’t cure it or stop it or help it, it’s creating part of the problem. A world in which everybody did that would be a hundred times more disturbed than it is right now.
And the ASU Emerge event had those problems too, mostly because it was doing the same type of thing, just in a slightly different vocabulary. And it had the benefits.
What was going on there? We had a bunch of multi-disciplinary groups together. We’re, like, trying to get reality, the truth, to emerge from the shadow of futurity.
How can we make something emerge from obscurity? Well instead of describing it, or writing white papers about it, we’re gathering together and trying to personify it. We’re trying to experience it. It’s like, experiential futurity.
Public testimonies. Groups are getting up on stage. They’re faking court trials. They’re conducting fake funerals.
There are dancers. In costumes. It’s like TedX with cosplay. And I was looking around, like, why are these dancers here? Why are we surrounded by dancers?
I want more dancers now. I think we should have like lots more dancers, like a Mardi Gras of dancers. There ought to be, like, plastic beads and a lot of decolletage.
These are lawyers, philosophers, journalists, ethicists, ethnologists, humanities professors, even some musicians have shown up, God help them, I pity them. And they’re gathering together with these hardware objects, the laser scanners, the 3D printers, glass making equipment, leather making equipment. And they’re making things, they make these weird objects. They’re trying to make objects that somehow personify a future experience.
Here’s my souvenirs: my laser shredded ASU hoodie, my bolo tie that’s a 3d scan of my own body. I really learned a lot. I mean, I’m intimate with lasers now, I get them like I never did before. I understood lasers without any danger of an education. No PhD in lasers, I’m just like very hands-on with them. They’ve like emerged from the shadows of laserdom for me, I know what they smell like.
And, you know, what’s the difficulty here? Well, I’m actually very much in favor of this, I think it’s a super modern thing to do. It’s like something anybody in this room could do, and it’s something that is very typical of our times.
However, just because it’s interesting doesn’t mean it’s good. Like: this 3D figurine is actually kind of tacky. If you took it and tried to sell it, it’d be like this weird plastic gimcrack thing.
This hoodie is full of holes, so obviously it’s gonna fall apart. It’s not going to serve the purpose of an actual hoodie. It’s more like diegetic prototype. It’s literally a stage costume, and I can no longer use it for its original function. It’s been disrupted: I mean it’s just a thing with holes in it now, that looks cool, but doesn’t really work.
It’s like, well, it’s like rubbish, or it’s like a “chindogu,” a Japanese term for “unuseless objects,” objects that are conceptual jokes but lack a function. Or the crueller term, which is “crapject.”
A crapject is what happens when you give somebody access to the cheap means of production, and they just start LOLCatting with physical objects. They’re just emitting jokes as real things, you know? And they’re like crap, and they can’t be sold, and they basically have the same value as any other content on the Internet. They just happen to have been made of plastic, or birchwood, or foamcore, or concrete, or whatever you’ve managed to drag into the means of production.
In the past, people didn’t have “crapjects,” but they didn’t have LOLCats, either. we have both crapjects and LOLCats — we’ve got them in, like, enormous hordes.
At the Center for Science and the Imagination, at Arizona State University, it’s kind of a media lab without the media. Kind of a media lab for humanities guys, a very twenty-teens institution. I really wish them well. I think they’re like a new thing, they’re doing important work there. I want to help them. I’m on their side.
But I worry about the clumsy practices and the trashy aesthetics.
Why don’t we have thoughtful practices, and well considered aesthetics? I mean, we should at least aspire to that. We shouldn’t settle for the cheesy alpha rollout rubbish just because we know we can do it.
Making objects, which are objects, but they’re not useful, they’re not user friendly, they’re not easy to maintain. They’re not even cheap, because although this printout was cheap, it wasn’t cheap to fly me in and put me up at taxpayer expense in Arizona State University.
They’re conversation pieces — because I could talk about laser holes all day. They’re thought experiments — because it’s interesting to think about scanning yourself, and outputting your self. They’re absurd props in an absurdist theater — like making a lawyer confront a 3D printer and actually print something.
They’re very modish in our very gadget-centric decade. We really kinda dig it about the boxes. And it’s also in the Southwest, that’s where it happening. It was happening in the state of Arizona, the reddest of the red.
It’s like Phoenix is the center of an avant-garde, and they are really doing new things there. And Phoenix was once a dead city.
Not just cliff dweller guys, but a whole river valley of guys, like tens of thousands of people settled the Phoenix river valley. They went away, and when new people came, the other settlers, they recognized the ruins of this ancient civilization. They built another town on it, and that’s why they named it Phoenix.
It was a dead town with dead canals, that’s a new town with the same water management problems. What we’re seeing there at Arizona State, and what we were seeing in that tent, is a new method of inquiry which is rising on the disrupted ruins of older methods of inquiry.
And in conclusion: how can we get past the wow factor? How can we really inquire with this? How can we treat this with moral seriousness?
I think the first step, really the proper step, is to accept that our hands are not clean. We don’t just play and experiment: we kill.
When you disrupt the stone box, the stone box goes empty. It’s not merely irritated or disturbed, it’s dead. It’s dead media. It’s dead, it has been killed, and to be a phoenix you have to admit your complicity in the barbecue fire.
It’s your fire, it’s not somebody else’s. Yes, we killed the past. We didn’t pull the trigger on it directly, but it died for our benefit, it died through things we did.
Own up to that. Own up to that: yes, we burned it up. No one is historically innocent. Yes, we are carnivores at this barbecue. Yes, it died, we roasted it, we ate it. And the saving grace here is we eat what we kill.
Go on, eat it. No, don’t pretend to be the child bride in white lace who thinks that babies are found under the cabbages. You’re not that young, you’re twenty-six years old. You ought to be slaughtering the hog of the twentieth century, roasting it over a bonfire. Live up to it, come on.
To kill it and pretend that that was some kind of accident, that is shameful. To kill and eat it is fierce, but it’s honorable. Because you are taking the substance of the past and making it part of yourself. You are giving it new form and allowing it to take flight.
The past is ablaze, the sky is full of smoke, but the phoenix takes wing. The phoenix is a desert eagle. The phoenix is a bird of prey.
So, thanks for your attention. See you next time.
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