Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more instances.

The entries were fantastic and after a long and occasionally contentious dinner-meeting with my gracious panel of judges, it’s time to announce the results. I’d like to thank Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics and Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child for their time and insight.

Beyond the winners presented here, there were 8 short-list finalists. Rather than cram them all into a single long post that no one reads, I’ll be featuring each of the others separately over the coming weeks, along with commentary by the judges.

On to the winners.

Diversity prize: Weather Control

WEATHER CONTROL In 1845, it was suggested that a continental meridian of fire—six hundred miles of prairie burning from North to South—could settle weather over the eastern half of the continent. A few years later, Congress considered ordering a great dike built athwart the Gulf Stream in order to gentle seaboard climes. The twentieth century brought cloud-seeding cannon—used most recently in China, where the Army fired silver iodide into clouds during the 2008 Olympics. As holy grails go, this may be the supremely ironic one: while we cannot control the weather, our influence over the climate may be our downfall.

Matthew Battles is the coeditor of hilobrow.com who writes about language, literature, and technology for a variety of publications in print and online.

Ryan:
Really loved this one, and the parallel between wanting to control the weather and ending up with the climate change we’ve got today. I still hope that, one day, I’ll be able to say how it’s too bad the Post Office isn’t a efficient as the Weather Service.

Tim:
A lot of science fiction cautionary tales are about how attempts to build a controlling technology backfire and we are overwhelmed by the very thing we sought to master: I’m thinking of killer robots, Jurassic Park, and so on. In the science fiction version of the weather control story, those six hundred miles of prairie fire interact with the great dike resulting in thousands of tornados and permanent drought. As Matthew points out, the real story is much more terrifying.

Poster Child:
Further Irony: We are actually seeding clouds 24/7 as a by-product of air travel. If air travel by jet stops as a result of dwindling jet fuel – losing all that artificial man-made cloud cover may further exacerbate our climate woes.

Grand Prize: Voice Recognition

No luck Fir tree could have been more well come than voice wreck ignition. The eyed yeah that one could control their tipi, con pewter, or even author mobile with a quick Spokane commando was an inversion in futuristic dither furniture; Shirley not every séance fiction right her would-be rung. However, none cold fours sea the the faculties present in trains lathing human speech tooth next. In tend, voice recon it shunt to kits place beside other trot shuck failure soft heck anthology, whore gotten at eels to for the in mediate future.

Written by Robert Ewing of Laughing at Nothing, a group of filmmakers so vagrant that they don’t even have a website right now.

Poster Child:
This is so well written- If only my 5th grade teacher could be as accepting as I am of the absurdist styles of an essay written via voice recognition software, I’d be a much happier 5th grader. I was so sure that we have this sorted by the time I was an adult, but I’m still waiting.

Ryan:
Okay, I was the dissenting voice here, mainly because I’ve got a degree in Computational Linguistics, so I am just TOO CLOSE to the problem. The entry was really well-crafted, and the point that voice recognition isn’t really there yet is a good one! But I think it’s a little unfair because voice recognition is a new technology, and nobody is pointing to it and saying “There! FINISHED.” It’s young, it’s new, and there’s still lots of challenges left to overcome before we’ll be able to chat up our robot palls.

But then the other judges told me the entry was awesome and I was making excuses for the entire field and I thought, okay, maybe, but let’s see you analyze waveforms to statistically find word-boundaries, and then use n-gram processing to figure out the most likely series of words, using that predicatively on the candidate word form currently being processed.

And then I was like, man, I’m a cartoonist now.

Anyway, a great entry!

Tim:
As you can tell, there was some controversy over the selection of this entry. Ryan wanted to argue that the tech isn’t there yet but Dragon Naturally Speaking is at version 10 and many companies have used voice-control in their phone labyrinths for years. For a technology that Ryan wants to say is not ready for primetime it sure is widely available commercially. This is what makes it so disappointing. The tech is plainly not done, but there’s a group of people with order forms saying “There! FINISHED,” ready to take your money.

Leaving aside the squabbles of the panel, for me what put this entry over the top was the sheer excellence of the “show, don’t tell” writing.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and take this walkway. It passes over the luggage claim area and then passes over the people waiting for their loved ones to emerge. A few meters later, its own set of doors opens and you are outside in a loading area, hailing a cab. Unremarkable.

photo credit: {tribal} photography

But there is that brief moment when you are crossing above the waiting throng. You are cleared through security, vetted and behind the cordon. They are random people milling about the airport. Physically, you are within shouting distance. Legally, they are miles away. It’s not a big drop, I’ve made worse without hurting myself. Physically, it’d be a simple movement. Legally, it would be as if I’d teleported.

At some point during a 36 hour multi-flight marathon, I have this dim memory of an airport escalator that skipped a floor. There was plexiglass on either side and as we were going from floors 3 to 1, we passed an escalator that ran from 2 to 4. Who was the other escalator for? I have no idea. Probably employees sporting a special badge with chips and magnetic codes that allow them to open certain doors. Doors that I’d be arrested for loitering near, alert levels being what they are.

Years ago, in a philosophy of mind seminar, we talked about abstract reasoning skills. I’m going to mangle it but the basic idea was something like this: Water has no abstract reasoning at all. You can trap water with a bowl. From water’s perspective, the floor is infinitely far away once the bowl has collected it. Animals like dogs can get out of obstacles like a bowl, but you can mess them up with a picket fence. They can see the thing they want to get, and they’ll stay stuck right where it is, barking. They are unwilling to move “away” from the tasty bone even though the open gate down the lane is actually the shortest route from their current position to the morsel. A human is able to make that kind of higher order of reasoning, happily sauntering down the road, popping the latch and collecting the prize. On the other hand, dogs don’t get tricked by lines painted on the ground.

Jackie is smiling at the zoo security guard like she’s not terrified. The guard is yelling something or other.

“Blah blah blah,” he yells. “Blah blah blah blah.” Jackie’s classmates are crowded around him now, watching her. She looks crazy up here, but they’re the ones who think that a little fence like that can stop them.

Joey Comeau One Bloody Thing After Another

Ordinarily, legal and physical architecture work in concert. You aren’t allowed into a certain area, so they helpfully wall it off and lock the doors. They’d prefer you to be in some other area and so offer you bright lighting and wide aisles. But there are times when the two work at cross purposes, either when some architect is being clever (as in the walkway and escalators) or when the subtleties of legal distinction are too much for dumb mortar and brick to implement. I’ve started thinking of these areas as woven spaces.

We start building legal architecture when we’re young. “Don’t touch the floor, it’s made of lava!” “The big comfy chair is ’safe’!” “No boys allowed!” Chalk, debris, and language are the tools of the budding legal architect. A patch of playground morphs between uses, guided only by a few well placed rocks or backpacks, some lines scratched in the dust, and an elaborately argued consensus.

This kind of rule-making gives us a means to shape our environment when we’re otherwise powerless. We can’t get together a voting block, draw up plans, lobby for, and build a new arena for kids’ hockey, but we can cart a net into the street and declare a manhole cover centre ice.

At the same time, the most prolific legal architects of our childhood are parents and authority figures. Under their watchful eye, otherwise easily traversed spaces become mazes of prohibition and regulation. It hardly seems fair. But these are hacks, allowing layers of use in a single space. Without stern looks and sharp words, it would be impossible to have a usable kitchen that was not also a toddler deathtrap.

As kids mature, the likely uses for a given room begin to collapse into a roughly consistent set of needs. The physical and legal spaces coalesce and begin to operate in concert once more. But even as kids turn into young adults, there are plenty of exceptions. Siblings argue about each other’s bedroom use (“His stuff is on MY SIDE.”), parents and children have to negotiate privacy and access, and politeness constrains what rooms guests do and don’t enter during parties. Finally, there is always the threat of being grounded.

Restraining orders, probation, curfew, and house arrest are legal architecture is literally legal. House arrest ties you to a specific place, imprisoned by purely theoretical walls. Probation offers more freedom but turns the city into a maze customized to your particular circumstances and crime. Restraining orders create roving spheres of forbidden space, a protective bubble around those to whom you have been deemed a threat.

The current technology used for these measures is pretty primitive, relying on phonecalls, eyewitnesses, and crude ankle monitors. It’s not hard to imagine a GPS-enabled or networked monitor that translates rulings into a highly granular set of instructions. According to a schedule negotiated with the courts, virtual pathways open and close to allow you to travel to and from your community service workplace, before sealing you in at home for the night or downtown for your mandated shifts. In the case of restraining orders, the system could monitor the location of all parties, warning victim, perpetrator, and authorities in case of a breach.

If this seems at all draconian, consider that the rest of us are already pretty used to this kind of thing. We happily use theatre tickets, conference badges, time-locked access cards, metro passes, and other tokens to open and close spaces according to all sorts of schedules and regulations. It’s all tricks and hacks. It’s a cybernetic solution to an architectural problem.

Imagine instead an environment built out of some suite of smart materials able reconfigure themselves in a highly contextual manner. Guests checking in to a hotel are assigned a room and then follow a path that lights up at their feet, guiding them to rest. An ancient forest reconfigures itself, trapping and confusing enemies, while friendlies pass unmolested. Adventurers become lost in a dungeon of shifting walls and traps. The entire plot of the movie Cube.

When it comes to video games, creating enemy artificial intelligence for a stealth-action game tends to be much harder than creating the AI for a plain shooter. One reason is a more complex sensory system. Another is the sheer amount of time that you spend in their presence.

In a shooter, the AI is unlikely to spend more than a few seconds alive after they appear on screen. Even when they do, it’s in the context of bullets, rockets, and grenades flying everywhere. There’s a limited emotional and intellectual range required for those circumstances.

In a stealth game, the player is likely to spend several minutes in the presence of the AI, silently observing them. This gives the enemy plenty of opportunities to be unbelievably stupid. In stealth games, the player watches the enemy move around, talk to their friends, get nervous, and investigate sounds. The extra exposure makes it easier for the AI to fall into the uncanny valley because the player has time to get to know them. The more you are watched, the more we can tell if you are human.


photo credit: MATEUS_27:24&25

In 1939 Russia invaded Finland. Over 100 days of fighting, sharpshooter Simo Häyhä killed 505 Russian soldiers with his bold-action rifle (he’s credited with 705 kills in total). The feat earned him the nickname “White Death” and a spot on Cracked.com’s prestigious list of Real Life Soldiers Who Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy.

The crew of the Enola Gay killed 66,000 people in Hiroshima.

Here’s Vanity Fair on relations between snipers and other soldiers in World War I.

…soldiers were willing to advance suicidally against machine-gun fire, but harbored a special dread of snipers’ single shots. To dread in war is to despise. In a conflict where hatred had faded between the combatants, and most killing was impersonal and mechanized, snipers who were captured were invariably bayoneted, shot, or hanged. Summary execution was the norm during World War II as well.

…Truth is, the Allied snipers themselves — though sometimes sought after — were widely shunned by their fellow soldiers on the front lines. The snipers were indeed spooky, the way they stalked their victims, studied them through scopes, and then mercilessly took their lives. They were not wanton killers, as was often believed. But their single shots were handcrafted kills in an era of mass-produced slaughter.

William Langewiesche The Distant Executioner

After World War II, military theorists dreamed of a “push button” solution to war. With improvements in guidance systems and other feedback mechanisms, the goal was to move away from dumb explosives strapped to rockets, or high risk manned bombing runs that were either inaccurate or fatal. Here’s Time’s breathless coverage in 1947.

With enough accuracy, atomic warheads would not be necessary for all purposes. A fair charge of ordinary explosive is enough to destroy, for instance, an aerial target, e.g., an enemy bomber. When launching methods are perfected, the missiles may take off in flocks, rising like falcons from the deck of a giant submarine which has crept toward an enemy coast.

From Time Magazine Science: Push-Button War 1947

For me, “push button war” is permanently entwined with NATO’s 1999 campaign in Kosovo. It was always a pejorative, aimed by critics on the left and the right. The charge was that the U.S. military had become too risk-averse, too antiseptic, not manly enough. The feeling seems to be that if you don’t put people on the line, if you don’t have any skin in the game, then your military actions lack a moral centre. There’s a sense of a lack of fair play.

What we saw in the decision to bomb Yugoslavia was the result of combining US activism (often related to crusading moralism), a rationalist mindset, and the silicon chip. Add to this an extreme wariness of the prospect of US casualties being given the CNN treatment, a President who wants his war (like his sex) without the mess, and we arrived at a policy that rested on hope and ’smart’ weapons.

Andy Butfoy Kosovo and Western Strategic Hubris

The NATO bombing campaign was a symbol for the desensitization of technological elites. They become greek gods high in their flying fortresses, raining death from above, causing havoc in mortals’s lives without controlling or directing events on the ground to any degree of success. Like greek gods they are capricious – willing to destroy the lives of others to handle their domestic troubles. The unfortunate tendency to hit the wrong targets didn’t help.

In the years between 1947 and 1999 another cultural force had grown to give “push button” a distinctly unsettling edge. As video games became more realistic and violent, commentators worried that they were desensitizing players to killing. Recall that 1999 was also the year of the Columbine Massacre, a tragedy that was linked over and over again to violent games and movies. An abortive attempt was even made to sue video game makers for their supposed role the attack.

The fear is that as video games become more real, more like murder simulators and wars become more like video games, that we will further lose our moral compass when it comes to conflict. The enemy becomes anonymous, faceless, interchangeable, and easy to kill remorselessly. Our side becomes main characters. Each death is significant.

Depictions of events like the Black Hawk Down blunder don’t help. In the movie, we are invited to sympathize with the 7 U.S. soldiers who lose their lives and the rest who make it home. It is only as the credits roll that the toll on the other side gets mentioned. 300-1,500 Somalis killed to 7 U.S. soldiers. Those are arcade death ratios! The incident was turned into a game in 2003. Reviews were mixed.

It features some attractive visuals and a few particularly dramatic scenes. Still, Black Hawk Down is a deeply flawed shooter that has a moment of disappointment or frustration for every moment of fun.

Greg Kasavin Delta Force: Black Hawk Down Review on Gamespot

That video games are being used to train soldiers doesn’t do much to ease one’s fears. The military happily blurs the line between entertainment, training, and recruitment. Their America’s Army project is a free online shooter which features a mix of realistic training, lovingly recreated authentic weapons and, you know, respawning soldiers.

My favourite part of the increasingly cognitively dissonant gameplay is how the game handles being a multiplayer-only product. It’s a game about being in the US Army, but someone needs to be on the other end of your gun. Who plays the enemy? The US gov’t can’t be caught offering a “play as a terrorist” option on the tax payer’s dime. (Besides, they have their own game.) The solution is a technically elegant accidental comment on the relative morality of war.

No matter which side you choose, you and your teammates always look like US soldiers, while the enemy always wears ski masks or other garb that marks them as terrorists.

Scott Osborne America’s Army Review on Gamespot

In the field, it’s much more difficult to tell who is or isn’t a terrorist. And in a conflict marked by the need to appeal to the hearts and minds of a populace (as opposed to merely bringing their leaders to heel) this is an enormous problem. Every dead civilian is a recruiting tool for the enemy. In this context, handcrafted kills start to look like a very good idea. Targets need to be checked carefully, lest you mistake someone gathering firewood for someone planting an IED. Commanders need to decide whether the risk to civilians is worth continuing a firefight. Patrols must dance a line between police-work, outreach, and combat. This is a far cry from firebombing Dresden.

With the rise of UAV drones, the line between video games and war seems to have blurred past the point of any meaningful distinction. Using networking technology, US troops near Las Vegas (of course it’s near Vegas) fly drones over Afghanistan and then go home to their families. They actually use Xbox controllers to fly some of the things.

And so “push button war” has returned, with questions about the morality of drones. We have no skin in the game. We can kill indiscriminately without consequence to the pilots. It’s distant death from above. Impersonal, antiseptic, and thoroughly desensitized. But the game being played by UAV pilots isn’t a shooter. They drop bombs rarely in Afghanistan; 187 launches over 135,000 hours of flight. Mostly, they spend their time watching.

A fighter pilot deploys for a few months and learns little about the ground he flies over, save for terrain features. But Predator and Reaper crews pull three-year tours at Creech, flying combat missions most days of the week. They can more easily see changes in village activity, or traffic on a stretch of road. If they’re tracking an individual, as they often will for days or weeks, they know when he goes to work, where he stops for tea, and whom he talks to along the way. Though civilians do die in some of the missile strikes, this ability to linger can do much to limit unintended deaths. If women and children or the unlucky neighbor is nearby, the plane can wait, and wait, without losing sight.

Brian Mockenhaupt We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned for Esquire

This is a stealth action game. This is being a sniper. This is getting to know your target. Drone kills are handcrafted.

Anderson has dropped once. He centered the infrared targeting laser on a group of men that had just planted an IED, and the pilot squeezed the button and trigger, a slight movement of left thumb and right index finger. The missile raced along its invisible tether and half a minute later, the men were gone, erased in a cloud of black-and-white fire. A couple dozen people watched the strike, from operations centers in Afghanistan, Qatar, and the United States. Even a desk jockey at the Pentagon can monitor the feeds if he has the right clearance. So enticing are these voyeur views that a special term for them has arisen in military circles: Predator porn. Everybody likes to watch. But those idly watching aren’t the guys squeezing the triggers and guiding the missiles. That would be Anderson. And on the drive home that night, he kept his watch on longer than usual, replaying the moment.

Brian Mockenhaupt We’ve Seen the Future, and It’s Unmanned for Esquire

If you didn’t watch the drone criticism video I linked to above, watch it now. The deep dread and hatred of handcrafted kills raises it head here. Carefully selecting targets and aiming to remove them with a minimum of other casualties? Not OK. Combat operations with all the collateral damage to infrastructure, economy, people, and environment? Part of the cost of war.

Pay special attention to the complaint that the UN representative is levelling against the use of drones. He’s worried that the drones might be a program of targeted assassination, something which Gerald Ford banned in 1976.

No one ever signed an executive order against carpet bombing.

A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that – at first glance – seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.

One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of selection. It’s the idea that natural selection happens at a variety of levels: genes, cells, individuals, groups. When you look at ants, you don’t just look at individuals, you also look at colonies. At the colony level, there is an enormous benefit to specialization. Having thousands of sterile disposable workers lets you do all kinds of things that individually self-interested organisms mightn’t.

photo credit: sharkbait

A similar explanation has been offered for why homosexuality keeps occurring in nature. Naively, you might wonder why it hasn’t been bred out of existence; individuals who are born homosexual are unlikely to have kids. It’s possible that having a certain percentage of your family be childless has a benefit to the group. If the group persists, then the genes will be carried on.

How big do the units of selection get? Family? Tribe? Society? Nation? Civilization?

Consider Stephen Hawking. He’s one of the smartest people around. The beneficial consequences of his discoveries still haven’t been worked out. In any other period of history, he’d be long dead or incapable of communicating his ideas. In a significant portion of our world, he’d be dead. The unit of selection is something like: Stephen Hawking + technoculture capable of building a speech synthesizer and keeping him alive + technoculture capable of benefiting from his insights.

No one knows how to make a pencil, economists like to point out. We rely on a massive network of local expertise and an infrastructure of transportation to pull all the parts together. James Burke’s Connections makes the same point over and over again. The first episode especially so, beginning with a blackout in NYC and proceeding to a fantasy about the collapse of civilization and what you’d need, in order to survive.

The collapse fantasy comes up all over the place. A fear or hope that it’s all spinning plates, liable to come crashing down at any moment. So we bullshit about what we’d do if the zombies come, or we carefully put together our 72 hour survival kits, or we spend weekends in the woods learning “essential” skills.

Gun rights, gardening, anything to help in the great unknown.

From The Texas Survivalist

No one knows how to make a gun, either.

Survivalists fascinate me. They are in effect small groups of people attempting to redraw the borders of selection units. If the broader technoculture is the one by which most of us thrive or perish, serious survivalism is a bet on both the fragility of the larger system and one’s ability to continue past its end. In contrast, someone like me – perpetually connected, mildly asthmatic – won’t even make it to the wall when the revolution comes. The survivalists, meanwhile, expect to be happily ensconced in their compound, building a new authentic life while the rest of us go mad or starve.

The unit of selection is shorthand for a lot of ideas, and the edges of a unit are rarely precise. There is fluidity to definition. Civilization may collapse, but into rival tribes. A tribe might fall apart, while a family goes on. Two tribes might come together while a single loner escapes into the night.

For humans, disconnecting isn’t easy, indeed it may be impossible. In his manifesto, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) considers the problem.

118 Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

You might feel that society is going the wrong way, Kaczynski argues, but you get very little say in the direction. If a decision affects a million people, you get (on average) a millionth share. And if the decision affects 6.7 billion?

Jamais Cascio has spent a great deal of time looking at the problem of global warming and the possibility of using geo-engineering as a tool to combat the worst of its effects. He’s also considered the fallout from those kinds of actions. There’s the obvious stuff like unintended consequences or uneven effects (say saving the Midwest breadbasket means drought in Cuba). And then there’s conflict over who gets to decide where, what kind, and how much geo-engineering happens.

In this scenario, the leadership of a powerful state might come to believe that:

• The effects of decarbonization would be slow and diffuse, but
• Said powerful state was well-suited to engage in adaptation projects, while
• The rival(s) of said powerful state were more vulnerable to the impacts of anthropogenic global warming, so that
• The rival(s) would be weakened relative to said powerful state if the effects of global warming persisted and said powerful state adapted.

In short, a powerful state believing itself better-able to adapt to or withstand the effects of global warming might see a persistent advantage to its rivals being hurt by global warming, and slow its decarbonization accordingly.

If all of that sounds ludicrous to you, you’ve probably forgotten about (or never lived through) the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

Jamais Cascio A Cold War Over Warming

7 angels with trumpets aside, the Cold War is probably the first time that a truly global unit of selection existed. 40 years is a long time to spend on the hair trigger edge of global annihilation, (we may still be). Though global integration is far from comprehensive, it’s hard to deny that there are more and more causal links all over the world and that they are getting stronger. The usual suspects can parade out at this point: global warming, the Internet, the stock market crash, food security, nuclear warfare, global pandemic, Coca Cola.

What to do? With only one unit of selection, the question of humanity’s survival becomes all or nothing. If you rely on overseas shipping for your food, then even jitters in the market can cause havoc. When the Mayan civilization collapsed, it had no effect at all on events in Europe or Asia. Now, we risk drowning entire islands because of bad decisions made decades ago.

Kaczynski thinks we should tear things down sooner rather than later.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

Ted Kaczynski Industrial Society and Its Future

Hawking thinks we should establish extra-terrestrial colonies as soon as possible.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Hawking: Space exploration a necessity by Sylvia Hui, Associated Press

Both solutions are aspects of the same approach. When the unit grows in size and power such that a self-perpetrated disaster could wipe out the entire territory, we must either shrink the size, or grow the territory. Either way, the scope of consequences must be limited. Otherwise? They had a name for that in the Cold War: “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

At this point, any number of post-humanists might pop up and point out that extinction might not be the end.

On January 12th, Google announced that they’d been the target of a series of cyber attacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Their response was to stop censoring Google.cn effective immediately. In the same week, Google was granted a patent that would enable them to replace real billboards with virtual ones in Google Street View.

Leaving aside the utter surprise at finding myself on the pro-corporate side of the government v. megacorp sovereignty wars, both of these stories are about the same thing: filtering data streams to match one set of aims or another.

photo credit: Barabeke

The China story is a story of the filtration with which we are most familiar. Censorship is old, well understood and for the most part opposed by people of conscience. Though, Google hasn’t yet announced a unilateral end to their censoring practices in France and Germany and there are plenty of things that you aren’t allowed to say all over the world.

The replaceable ads feel like something else entirely. If they get implemented, it probably won’t be a wholesale replacement on a political agenda. It’s more likely to be a patchwork replacement of the real. There’s an appealing elegance to the move. They were ads anyway, now they are just different ads. (Weirdly, many of the real billboards are there illegally. There is a troubling chemistry at work when virtual advertising space is being made available on the basis of improperly placed real advertisements.)

So much for the governmental and corporate.

There is a third layer of filtration, the personal layer. By putting up a set of filters, individuals can customize their experiences; cutting away the unwanted and subbing in whatever they please.

Consider the ways that you can remake YouTube in your image: you can make videos downloadable; you can filter out all the comments that are algorithmically determined to be stupid; you can even filter out the whole site. Sites like Give me back my Google attempt to remove affiliate and other spam-type links that Google hasn’t filtered themselves.

Subtractive filtering isn’t the only approach. Add Art is a Firefox plugin that replaces online advertising with curated art shows. The shows consist of images formatted to the standard ad dimensions which replace real advertising on the fly. (I tried Add Art for awhile but had to uninstall it when a show consisting of rapidly strobing GIFs rotated in.) If Google implements Street View virtual ads, maybe Add Art can implement Street View art shows on top of that.

Having a good set of filters is crucial. We are bathed in a sea of insistent data and augmented reality is only going to make it worse. As Bruce Sterling points out, an issue with augments is that they don’t scale. If you’re looking at any given square of surface, there’s only room for so much text, video or images. Very, very quickly, too many people will be trying to get your attention at once. You’ll need heavy filters to handle it all. What if they get too powerful?

Overly powerful personal filters is a recurring fear. We worry that people watch the news, go to church and generally build communities that confirm their opinions. Self-imposed censorship is probably the hardest to fight as there isn’t curiosity or fascination with the forbidden to turn leaks into torrents.

Take the moment in John Carpenter’s They Live when Roddy Piper puts on the glasses.

Now, imagine that this guy got together the tools to make a set of glasses that highlighted occult symbols automatically. Imagine a set of glasses that filtered out objectionable images for whatever value of “objectionable images” you care to substitute.

It’s pre-augmented reality but the 2004 film Epic 2014 presents a compelling vision of a world where the filters have won in a big way. The resulting output is both the best curation of the news-you-need-to-know and the worst set of bias-confirming pablum, depending on the preferences and habits of the user.

The bias confirmation fear has been around for a long time. It was the main theme of my grade 11 “Media Literacy” class. The key has shifted from centralized media control to fears about distributed extremist groups, but the chorus is the same.

It wasn’t until this past week that I worked out the problem with the analysis. The trajectory assumed is of increasingly powerful and impregnable filters. If that trajectory holds, then one expects an increasingly balkanized culture, full of isolated groups that think they have nothing in common. But there’s a second set of actors in play, the ones being filtered out.

As the first group works harder to filter out unwanted messages, the second works harder to break through. We see it in the arms race around advertising. We see it in politicians struggling to find new ways of reaching their audience. We see it in Google’s need to constantly change and update their pagerank algorithms as black hat SEOs learn to game the system.

So long as the arms race continues, the filters will get better without becoming perfect. And in those cracks, reality (or at least an alternate viewpoint) can intrude. Insofar as we believe that people can’t know in advance what is best for them or what information they should receive, we should celebrate inefficiencies in filters.

In every successfully delivered spam message, there is a ray of hope.