Part of a series: Dematerialization

A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

While this was happening, we got stuck in traffic behind a delivery truck. We were surrounded by them, in fact, and it occurred to me that I was on one (Greyhound offers a courier service). I started thinking about the insane infrastructure required to have something like FedEx. The need to rapidly get something from one place to another. The network of planes, warehouses, barcodes, computers, scanners, trucks, garages, boxes, and people all bent to the service of moving things around on our behalf.

FedEx’s business is in serious jeopardy. I wonder if they realize this.

It begins with letters, of course. FedEx is in essence a finely tuned premium mail carrier. That email put a huge dent in regular mail is old news. It’s faster and freer. When it comes to the transmission of information – one of the main uses of mail carriers – the Internet wins in almost every situation.

This doesn’t really matter to FedEx. They were never in the regular mail business. They ARE in the authenticity business and the object business, however. Both of these are under threat.

The Authenticity Business

This is how contracts between far flung business partners get negotiated:
You have a few calls to outline the deal and then someone draws up a draft contract in Word. This gets emailed out with track-changes turned on and then it goes back and forth electronically until a final version is agreed upon. This is promptly printed off, signed and faxed with the originals to follow by Fed Ex.

I have no idea why we still have to send the “originals” by physical mail. A nod to tradition I suppose. There is nothing about a laser-printed 30 page document with signatures on the last page that’s particularly more safe from tampering than an properly secured electronic copy of the same. If eBay, Amazon, Paypal and my bank can solve the authentication problem, it can be solved for contracts. For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

The Object Business

Once the Authenticated Document portion of FedEx’s business fades away, they’ll have to retreat into the molecule moving business. Here’s a need that, at least for the immediate future, doesn’t get demolished by the Internet.

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

It’s not everything. Objects with acute sentimental value, hand crafted trinkets, mementoes, these will all be things you want to keep. But even this category is smaller than you might think. It’s not that long ago that photos were on the “must ship” list. Now they’re digital and easily reprintable, if they’re ever printed at all.

With mature 3d printing we’ve ended up with a kind of teleportation. This is the kind of thing that gives philosophers of art nightmares.

Teleportation

Need a computer at your destination? We’ll fab you one and format it from your encrypted cloud-image. It’ll be ready at the airport with your rental car and a change of clothes, which we also printed to your specifications.

Need your bike shipped? Drop it off at a reclamation facility, we’ll scan it and credit you the materials, then for less than the price of flying it across the country, we’ll rebuild it over there. For a small fee, you can fiddle with the specs.

You want to ship books? Really? Who ships books?

Because of mass-production, we’ve been living among essentially interchangeable copies for quite some time. The next step is making them utterly interchangeable. Here’s my prediction: We are less than 50 years away from the shipping of objects being as quaint and specialized a practice as shipping sheets of paper with good-wishes written them.

Whoever rises to replace FedEx? Their slogan can be: “It’s already waiting for you.”

All of: Dematerialization

13.

Wandering down a street near the government district, you see another of the familiar blue Heritage markers that denote a building of particular historical value. You stop to examine it and note that instead of the usual words about heritage and protected properties, this one tells the story of a man waking up drunk in an alley. Careful examination reveals that someone has cleverly mimicked the style of the Heritage markers, though the materials are cheaper and the ink has started to run. As you continue on your way, you can’t help but steal a glance back at the building, uncertain as to why you would have accepted it as a candidate for Heritage protection in the first place.

Part of a series: Dematerialization

A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless – I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a new one and then I went home and re-loaded all the data.

photo credit: .m for matthijs

A good back-up/restore scheme changes your relationship with your gear. It changes a computer from heirloom to container. The loss, theft or destruction of hardware is transmuted from a crisis to an expensive inconvenience.

This isn’t new. We’re used to disposable containers and windows. Glasses are only useful insofar as they hold water, TVs only insofar as they display shows. No one has ever cried because an Ikea tumbler got smashed. Dropping a plasma screen down the stairs is an costly stumble, but not a crippling one.

The new part is how much stuff and what kind of stuff is being turned into data. (Not to mention what kind of data is being turned into stuff.) I’m surrounded by people for whom the loss of a hard drive would be as burning down their house.

There’s the obvious list: music, movies, books, newspapers. The digitization of these things has provoked a crisis in every industry that’s been touched and it’s coming for more. Think music piracy was a sea change? Wait ’til you see the casual piracy of clothing, cars, plants, and animals.

Beyond the well-worn questions of intellectual property, authenticity, and how to keep creators fed, there’s a lot going on. Consider “personal data” for a second. Not insurance records and banking info, but all of the things that used to be family possessions, which have become files. Consider the twin marketing features of durable and disposable, mirror virtues that we keep cramming into single objects. Think about cloud computing, 3d printing, and nomadic restaurants.

I’d like to spend some time on these. Stay tuned.

All of: Dematerialization

12.

Crossing the lawn, you see that the parking lot is deserted and that the windows of the grocery store are dark. This surprises you, as the sign out front indicates that this is a 24 hour location. There is a small sign posted to the door. “For your shopping convenience,” it says, “we are now closed between Midnight and 7:00am.” You leave, hungry.

Taking a page from Posterchild, it’s Follow-up Friday!

photo credit: MatthewBradley

1. Sound Ecology.

Picking up on the Augmented Audio Reality post, Justin Pickard pointed me to this interview with an acoustic ecologist.

Anecdotally, there is a feeling that the increasing homogenisation of the soundscape (i.e. places all sounding the same) is speeding up, yet no one is systematically keeping tabs on this change. This is not a prompt for some kind of museum-like stance, but it begs the question, shouldn’t we be considering the soundscape as an integral part of our heritage in the same light as we do for historic building facades?

Paging Nick Sowers and Dan Hill: Imagine an app that let you walk through the city and experience how it sounded a decade ago?

2. Dubai’s Artificial Islands.

I already told you that they were drowning. Well as it turns out, no one wants to live there, either. I wonder if one of the proposed Michael Jackson memorial islands would help the situation. (No.)

3. Nurse Homes.

After finishing up the Buildings That Protest series, I came across this story about smart houses as omniscient robo-nurses. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” 2.0.

The path for the adoption of voluntary prosthetics seems to go amputees -> disabled people -> wider use? I wonder if monitoring systems for the elderly which give them MORE freedom and independence (at least, felt independence) will be the path that drives the adoption of self-surveillance technology.

4. Drones.

After I posted The Lost Drone Army, Geoff Manaugh pointed me to his piece about UAVs controlled with thoughts. Which then quickly spirals into a roving fantasy about all of the crazy things that can happen when you link machines directly to the brain.