Project Proposal

A courtyard is equipped with plant beds, planters and all sorts of spaces for greenery. It is also wired with automated systems for maintaining and changing the environment and a variety of sensors that can detect both the health of the plants and the presence of people.

This is all tied together in a robotic gardening system that both tracks which plant beds people stop near and cares for them based on the attention given. The ugly plants are allowed to die, to then be replaced by other plants. Over time, a semi-darwinian process results in the most evenly pleasing garden.

These allows for an objective community-driven decision making system that ensures that everyone has a vote and that the stakeholders who use the garden most get the most say in the final layout. It also allows for a crowd-sourced tinkerer-approach to selecting the best plants for a landscape. Lastly, it allows for an garden that shifts contents as time shifts the tastes and character of the users of the space.

Prior Art

• Precision farming
• Robot gardeners
• Talking to your plants
• Natural deselection
• Botanicalls

I’ve had a couple of great conversations today deriving from the BBC’s sensationalist First human ‘infected with computer virus’ headline.

photo credit: tozzer

Tabloid Science

Why do I say sensationalist? Adam Rothstein of the Interdome explains it best.

William Gibson used the term “Tabloid Science” the other day on Twitter, and this couldn’t be a better example (unless it also threatened to increase global warming, discover aliens, and involved robots becoming self-aware).

This story is, as I understand it, about a guy who figured out how to transmit a computer virus using RFID. And yet, we have this all-star headline, reposted everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. It’s reminiscent of the back pages of popular science magazines (“enslave ants to grow all your woman-attractive pheromones, now only $2.99!”) except this is now science reporting, on the Internet: a domain supposedly rational and free of all that “headline” crap.

Adam Rothstein, private correspondence

From the perspective of the systems being compromised, there is no difference between an RFID attacker that’s moving around the world inside someone’s skin or on top of it. There’s no benefit to doing the implant part of the procedure except that it gets you headlines. Which, I guess, is a pretty big benefit.

There’s something hilariously hair-splitting about how a variation in placement of just a few millimeters – fundamentally cosmetic – makes all the difference in coverage. Malware RFID has been around for years. Here’s the BBC covering it in 2006.

We might be better off conceiving of Dr Gasson’s move as a sort of performance art intervention in the mediasphere.

Under my skin

The tone of coverage speaks directly to the conception of the self. Because the chip is under his skin, the BBC calls it a human infected with a computer virus (though couched in scare quotes) rather than a human wearing a device infected with a computer virus. Slashdot goes further.

Why? I have a much deeper and more integrated relationship with my smartphone than Gasson has with a chip that stays in his body for a few days. It’s like saying that someone with cheap earrings is the first human to rust.

Indeed, the chip as worn by Gasson is substantially less useful than if he’d just stuffed it in his pocket (aside from the “getting media coverage” utility, which we must not dismiss). For one thing, the one in his pocket can be thrown down the sewer when security notices him.

It reminds me of the perennial prediction that cellphone implants are imminent. No they aren’t. Cellphone contracts last 2-3 years and new phones come out even more frequently. Say what you will about the stuff that’s carried on you instead of in you, but at least it’s modular.

For it to be worth accepting implants, they have to offer significant benefits that carry-able items don’t. Medical prosthetics are one obvious category of this kind of thing (though even most of these are things that you wear). Devices or interfaces that give you new senses might be another.

Kevin Warwick’s Project Cyborg 2.0 is relevant here. Implants connected to his nerves allowed him to control a robot arm remotely and to exchange sensations with his wife wirelessly through a rig she also had implanted.

Further intervention

Moving away from hard realities of the current achievement, let’s take for granted for a moment that there will be abilities and senses worth having surgery for. Let’s allow for people with networked nervous systems, reaching far out beyond themselves to a whole host of new conveniences for the modern consumer. I’m thinking about flexible ego boundaries and an artist who replicates Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, 1974 for the cyborg era.

In Rhythm 0, 2014 (2024?) the artist turns off her firewalls and publishes her personal IP and secret key. She is almost immediately compromised by the sea of ambient malware that’s just part of the background Internet. The participant/audience of the performance swoop in and begin a battle to take over and clean her system, while others attempt to reroute it for themselves.

The artist’s body goes haywire. She sometimes shouts the names of consumer pharmaceuticals along with other gibberish. She begins to develop a fever as all of her microcontrollers run at full tilt, generating dangerous amounts of heat. After an hour, her assistant intervenes. Her firmware must be wiped and restored. A great debate erupts in the art world about whether this is a success or a failure of the piece.

The debate is part of the performance.

I leave you with these words from Simon Bostock who pointed me to the BBC article in the first place.

I’m pretty sure the best depiction of flexible ego boundaries I’ve read is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which, if you can get over the fact it’s a space opera about pirates using enforced-autism as a method of slavery and a war between a race of giant spiders, shows how we’ll probably accrete layers of tech and cyborg accoutrements until we all become reefs.

If we’re going to manage our future selves we’ll all have to get a grasp on what topology means.

Simon Bostock, private correpondence

Is Tuesday becoming Microfiction Day? It might be. This is another of my nearly-award-winning pieces. This time for Icon Magazine’s Stories for the End of the Decade contest. The win went to Mimi Zeiger of Loudpaper. You can read it here.

Mine goes a little something like this:

“It’s cultural hedging,” said my guide, as we picked our way through the parking lot, “Think about survivalists in Y2K. If everything had ended, they’d have been equipped to thrive. It didn’t, so they lost out.”

“It still seems like a bad decision,” I said, pausing to aim my photo rig, “The collapse of America is hardly imminent.”

The viewfinder showed nameless meat hung to cure along a guardrail, framed by skyscraper shadows and spotlight by the setting sun. I was fiddling with the focus when someone racked a shotgun.

“This ain’t America,” said the bandit, “This is Detroit.”

Back in January, Alexis Madrigal wrote a post called What History Can Bring to (Green) Technology.

It’s a broad thoughtful discussion of the philosophy of history disguised as worries about his upcoming book. I like the way it articulates the importance of sifting through the graveyard of evidence. All the lessons to be gained from the failed attempts.

photo credit: Corey Templeton

Atemporality

On the same day that I read the post, I watched Bruce Sterling’s keynote on atemporality. Have you seen it?

He stands in front of a slideshow of the Looking Into the Past Flickr set and explains that if after seeing those images you don’t get atemporality, then you won’t get it.

He talks about his usual theme: gothic high tech, favela chic, decay, and lifeboat economics. He discusses atemporality as a serene skepticism about the historical narrative. He throws out dozens of promising avenues of artistic and humanities research, it’s really quite inspiring.

And somewhere in there, he throws away a term that stuck with me about contemporary digital culture. A lot of it, he said, is “rag picking”. It’s loops and samples and quotation and so on. He talks approvingly about steampunk, atompunk, and all the other fiction around directions things could have gone, with a slight change a missing or an added event that makes one thing work out after all.

I feel like rag-picking is a lot of my project and a lot of the projects of the best people who I’m interested in these days. Plumbing the discarded depths of the past, present, and future for clues and evidence. We learn a lot about the past by looking at their garbage. Shouldn’t we be learning about the present and future that way too?

So when I read Madrigal talking about needing to examine the detours and off ramps of history I think, “Yes! Exactly!” and then Sterling talks rag picking and it resonates.

The Fragile Timeline

Have you ever wondered how fragile history is? How contingent? Is what happened perpetually on the knife edge of one accident or another, or is it all very robust, would it have all happened anyway, give or take some statistical noise in minor events?

On the fragile hand we have all the narrowly missed assassination attempts and Back to the Future. For the case of robustness, we have the many stories of close-call duplicate patentings and parallel scientific discoveries. But hold on! Who is to say that the death of Hitler would have halted the Third Reich? And what makes us so sure that the world born of Bell’s telephone company would be in any way similar to one born of Gray’s?

This is an important question because it has a natural corollary about the fragility of the future.

Steampunk and Atompunk and all the cacophonous children of cyberpunk seem to come down squarely on the side of contingency. If only Babbage’s work had been fully funded, say the Steampunks, the information age might have been ushered in a century earlier. They see in the proto-cybernetic governors and pneumatic tubes the seeds of a future that could have germinated earlier.

But before we get too excited, consider this subtle little dig from the Steampunk entry on Wikipedia: “these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or with a presumption of functionality.”

In an article called simply Bracing for the World the National Post has assembled tips for the soon to be beleaguered residents of downtown Toronto, as we prepare for the G20 summit.

Suggestions include having 72-168 hours worth of food supplies, putting nicely painted plywood over windows, not wearing ties (really), avoiding hospital visits, and being wary of hacktivists. All told, these scenarios would work as a nice backdrop for a Strange Days-esque thriller.

I’m fascinated with this because it reads like a guide for preparing to withstand a hurricane’s landfall. The G20 becomes an Act of God, the anticipated disruptions caused not by any particular group’s actions but by the weird convergence of political and economic turbulence and pressure zones. Through the eyes of the article, the motivations of the actors are abstracted out. I keep thinking of traffic engineers who find it more effective to conceive of masses of commuters as a fluid.

There will be a conference, there will be protests, be sure to dress casually and don’t count on regular train service. Pack an umbrella and mind the tear gas in the afternoon.