When I was a kid, lasers were these unimaginably powerful devices that would one day be used to bore tunnels through mountains. Instead, we use them to watch DVDs and irritate cats.

Written by: Tree Lobsters

Poster Child:
Lasers- a way to tire your dog out in the backyard from the comfort of your living room window.

Ryan:
I really liked this one! But then I thought, we’re using lasers to adjust the shape of our freakin’ EYEBALLS, so they did end up being a little futuristic after all.

Tim:
To this day, the military has not given up on laser weapons.

What’s this all about?

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 examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 09/03/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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MiniDiscs: It has been a near-universal of science fiction for the storage media of the future to be sexy, smaller versions of our current ones. But, when miniature discs finally arrived… in fact, I don’t recall even noticing their arrival. But some guy I knew did get a MiniDisc player, right around when iPods began to take over the world. He would burn a little playlist onto each one, and carry them all in differently coloured little mini-cases. It was immediately obvious to anyone other than him what a fantastically useless piece of technology this was compared to the now-ubiquitous MP3 player.

Written by: David Rusak

Tim:
I was slow to come around to this one, but then I remembered every hacker movie from the 80s and 90s (even The Matrix).

Ryan:
I liked this one, but I thought it was maybe too precise. The future is often today made either bigger or smaller, and I’ve seen movies in which the future was either giant laserdiscs-sized CDs or tiny tiny CDs – effectively, a MiniDisc. I also knew a guy who was big into MiniDiscs! I think he has an iPod now. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

Poster Child:
As minds trapped in the present, we always make the mistake of imagining the future to be like the present refined. The future is more about game changers.

What’s this all about?

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 examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 02/03/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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Monorail Haiku

What would the world be
with no Monorail? Pretty much
like it is right now.

Written by: Lori Priebe

Ryan:
‘Cept for Disneyworld! I think? I’ve never been there but I think the monorail is kind of a big deal there. But I took off points because some maglev trains run on a single rail too and those are way futuristic. They float on a cushion of MAGNETS.

Poster Child:
Monorails are a
great visual cue of the
Future we wanted

Tim:
Aside from one entry that consisted of a brand name and nothing else, Lori had the shortest entry. This is to be admired.

Monorails. If Disneyland and assorted futuristic movies created any expectations, it was that I would glide into adulthood on these silent, electric conveyances. No one really believed in flying cars, but the monorail… it always seemed just around the corner; the way we’d all inevitably get to work in the far future of 2000. And now, the monorail is reality! Thousands of people use it every day! Electronic voices remind us to stand clear of the closing doors… as we race from our flight in Terminal A to our connection in Terminal D. I had hoped for more, somehow.

Written by MsMolly

Poster Child:
A subway is lame too, with only two stations. Clearly, we need MORE monorails!!

Tim:
My favourite monorail is the one in Seattle from the World’s Fair. Today it is so dented and beat up looking, it’s a vision of a future that came and went, but never really escaped from the unreality bubble of exibition shows.

Ryan:
This was my favourite of the monorails entries, because we can all sympathize with the AWESOMENESS of hearing that there’s a robot train at the airport, and the disappointment of getting there and it being totally weak. It would at least be something if they addressed you by name, but no, no, they don’t even do that.

What’s this all about?

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 examples.

This is a thematically-linked pair of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 24/02/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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Email lets you communicate instantly, anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Unfortunately, no. In practice, 97% of my email is Nigerians trying to sell me boner pills, and the rest is from my boss.

Ryan:
Loved the way of casting email to “talk to anyone in the world – FOR FREE!”, which is something we often forget. My first FreeNet email address (ae571@ncf.carleton.ca, baby!) (it doesn’t work anymore) was something really exciting, and I remember the thrill of getting an email message was the same as getting a real message. But email quickly became routine, and now I have so much spam coming in that I have a custom-trained neural network sort it for me before I even look at it. That’s pretty futuristic too, I think!

Tim:
I was the least enthused about this entry, in that I don’t really remember this being a big thing that being reached for. Radio and then phones had gotten us pretty used to the idea of talking to anywhere in the world. I’ve since gone on an IRC nostalgia trip and so would like to revise my opinion somewhat.

Poster Child:
True enough. But email is still pretty damn awesome in my books. It’s how I do 99% of my non-face-to-face communicating, so you get a big thumbs up from me, email!

What’s this all about?

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 examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics & Project Wonderful and street artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 16/02/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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Wristphones
The wristwatch/phone hybrid used to be the way forward. Now it’d be considered clunky or annoying to use – either a case of too much bulk or no room for buttons – and associated with all sorts of bizarre RSI. The delicious irony is that today most people use mobile phones to tell the time.

Written by: Andrey Pissantchev

Poster Child:
Exactly! I don’t think it’s so much a failure as us realizing we’d rather not have a phone strapped to our wrist. Look at it another way- a cell phone is really a pocket watch converged with a phone. And a camera. And a calendar. And a datebook. And a rolodex.

Ryan:
I’m disappointed that we don’t have these too! But, as the author points out, we have the same functionality, it’s just added to the phone rather than the wristwatch.

Tim:
I used to coach debating full time, which meant a lot of staring at a coundown to check speech length. I took my watch off so often that I started just carrying it in my pocket. Then I got a phone with a timer function. I don’t have a wristphone, but I do have a pocketwatchphone.

What’s this all about?

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 examples.

This is one of the shortlist finalists as chosen by a panel of judges consisting of myself, Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics and Project Wonderful and Street Artist Poster Child.

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 09/02/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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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

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 01/02/2010. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, memory

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photo credit: giveawayboy

1.

St. Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God is outlined in the Proslogion and goes something like this:

1. When we talk about God, we are imagining a supreme being, in fact THE supreme being.
2. We define THE supreme being as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. So for property n if you can conceive of some property m greater than n, the thing possessing property n is not God. Keep going up the chain until you can’t conceive of anything greater. That thing is a property of God.
3. Things can exist in the mind, they can contingently exist in reality, or they can necessarily exist in reality.
4. Since existing is greater than nonexisting and necessarily existing is greater than contingently existing, “that, than which nothing greater can be conceived” must have the property of necessary existence.
5. God exists.

He spends most of the rest of the Proslogion trying to work out God’s properties (hint: they turn out to be remarkably similar to those of the Christian God).

What’s the problem with the proof?

The problem is that existence is not a property. If we were going to give the prize for the best cupcake we would not go…

… and declare a tie.

Indeed, you run into a whole host of problems when you start to hand out properties to things that don’t exist. Problems which the tech-blogging industry – in wild defiance of philosophical teaching – seems mostly content to ignore.

2.

Consider this actual headline about the concept images for the OLPC XO-3

Fancy ‘OLPC XO-3′ becomes the cheapest PC in the world

Finished in semi-flexible plastic, the latest “OLPC XO-3″ similar to the original XO can optimize its display in both transmissive and reflective modes for indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. Presenting an 8.5 x 11 touchscreen, with a little folding ring in the corner for grip and a rear camera, the slim (half of an iPhone) and sleek PC makes use of Palm Pre-style induction charging to remain juiced up anytime, anywhere. The multitouch tablet is slated to be released by 2012.

From The Design Blog (emphasis mine)

The XO-3 has not become anything aside from a bunch of renderings, plans, and press-releases. It certainly isn’t the world’s cheapest PC. How do I know? Because it isn’t a PC at all. PCs can run software. Try to run software on the OLPC. Go ahead, try to buy one.

I probably shouldn’t be picking on The Design Blog’s breathless coverage of the OLPC XO-3. A more worthy target would be the entire industry’s coverage of the Apple Tablet.

More words were probably written about this nonexistent product in 2009 than about all the great hardware that every company not called Apple actually shipped. Google now lists 1.8 million documents referencing “Apple tablet”. That compares to 20,700 documents referencing “Acer Tablet PC”. One of these companies has actually shipped tablet hardware. The other has not. Can you guess from those Google figures which one is which?

From 2009: The year tech blogging died

Which has a better selection of apps? The Apple Tablet, the CrunchPad, or Infinium Labs’ Phantom Gaming Console. Which has a better battery life?

Absurd questions? Yes. But questions asked with an entirely straight face every time an “x is the yPhone killer” story appears. For example. Another. Or, you know.

It’s an endless stream of “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”s, comparing hypothetical objects with real objects. Speculative design blogs are no better (don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Yanko, I just wish that they’d distinguish more clearly between mock-ups, working prototypes, and shipping products).

3.

I recognize that I am on shaky ground here, given that the entire oeuvre of Quiet Babylon is rampant speculation. I like to think that I am doing a good job of separating fact from fiction from speculation. And I’d especially like to think that I will never engage in judging a horse-race between hypothetical objects (aside from If Batman were to fight Superman).

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 24/12/2009. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining

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Films like Tron have a lot to answer for … Children see these worlds, and the men and women they become try to build them.

Will Wiles posting on Spillway

For most of my life the videophone was telecom’s holy grail, & now? Just another of the Net’s many afterthoughts, & a B-teamer at that..

Julian Dibbell, on Twitter

photo credit: Jana Mills

Julian is right. When it was on its way video-conferencing felt very futuristic but then it got here and failed to take hold.

Which got me thinking. What other synecdoches for the future turned out to be duds on arrival? What other advances drove our imagination, only to fall short of where we thought they might lead? Two leapt to mind.

Chess-playing computers. People have been trying to make machines that play chess since 1769. Cybernetic pioneer Norbert Wiener and computer pioneer Alan Turing each devoted time to the problem. It was seen as an important branch of AI research. And then Deep Blue beat Kasparov and now Deep Fritz’ win against Kramnik is barely mentioned in Wikipedia. And we still don’t have talking robots.

Orbital space stations. The docking scene in 2001 is how the film tells you that it’s an advanced future. Well, we’ve had people in space continuously for 9 years. This has had far less impact on your life than one might have hoped.

A Contest

There are more, I know it. I’d like your help in finding them.

So I’m running a micrononfiction contest. Send in your 100-word-or-less nominations for miracles that didn’t quite make it. There are prizes and everything. Click here for all the details.

This should be fun.

Update: To be clear, don’t post your ideas here. Instead check out the details over here which tells you where to send your entry. Remember! Quality of writing also counts!

Update 2: The contest is closed and we’ve announced the results. See below!

All of: B-List Holy Grails

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 10/12/2009. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining, contest, memory

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It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees as Google’s parasitism and sees in Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch a glimmer of hope. There is so much wrong with the argument.

Hope you enjoy it. I promise that Monday will be about lanyards and augmented reality.))

((Update: Check out this much more nuanced discussion of the value of visitors to a newspaper’s site. There are circumstances where it makes sense to be searchable by engines and circumstances where it doesn’t. Steve Yelvington adds a lot to the discussion.))

All quotes from The New Good Guys by Douglas Rushkoff. Published on the Daily Beast and indexed by Google.

Suddenly Murdoch and Microsoft are on the right side against the Google[sic]. Douglas Rushkoff says the two oft-despised companies are the best hope to defeat the Evil Empire.

((Note that this is an article about two competing business models. One involves making your content as available as possible and earning an income from or around traffic. The other involves limiting availablity of your content and earning premium income from a smaller group. That Rushkoff manages to twist this into an End Times battle between good and evil is endemic to his muddled thinking.))

Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work.

((Rushkoff might be mistaking ridicule for anger. The reaction I’ve seen has been a mix of “I don’t think this will work”, “I’d like to see them try”, and “this might have something to do with the Myspace deal“. My personal favourite was Gawker’s ‘after’ shots of Google News without News Corp..))

Defying the logic that everything is more valuable the higher it climbs on Google’s search rankings, Rupert Murdoch is making good on his threat to pull out

((Rushkoff meant to say “is loudly talking about his threat to pull out”))

of Google searchability, altogether. Instead, he wants to be paid for his properties to show up in search results. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be desperate enough for a competitive advantage against Google to take Murdoch up on the deal, and offer it to other media companies with content people really want to find.

((Man, this is really gripping war-for-the-soul-of-the-Internet stuff.))

Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.

((I’d like to meet these people. They seem entertaining.))

As an early cyberpunk, I see their point—as well as the confused logic informing it. Greedy monopolists

((one of whom was Murdoch))

controlled media for a long time, and formed huge conglomerates with interests beyond providing people with the content they needed.

((Does Rushkoff think that now that Google exists, this has changed?))

Media companies moved into the business of delivering eyeballs to sponsors, instead of content to readers. Recording companies bilked the artists who created the music. Taking content for free seems justified when it is being taken from big bad companies. And making content ourselves, as well as distributing it freely to one another, is now correctly understood as a basic human right.

((Oh, there’s the problem. Rushkoff is confusing piracy and publishing. When cyberpunk Rushkoff was using Napster to complete his Metallica collection, that was piracy and a fight against the big bad evil corporations. When I read a complete article on the WSJ for free through Google it’s because they made it available. The bizarro moral code here is fantastic. Unauthorized copying from large companies was OK because it hurts someone else and they probably cheated. Authorized reading is not OK because Google…forced…what?))

But we can’t confuse our actual right to make and distribute content freely with Google’s perceived right to freely exploit the content everyone makes.

((No one, least of all Google, is claiming that Google has that right. Google has explained over and over how Murdoch could delist News Corp. properties from the search engine if he was serious.))

Google is not in this for the fun of it; they make money off their searches. By making our content available to Google, we make Google’s searches more valuable. If we don’t feel our content is being made more valuable in the exchange, then we don’t have to accept this searchability as some precondition of Internet citizenship.

((Which is why all good search engines offer a method to turn off indexability. Robots.txt – It will solve your alleged problems.™))

However much we all might like free content in the short term, it is unsustainable in the long term.

((“It isn’t free to make, you know” finger waggling is my favourite all-purpose argument. It shows up everywhere!))

When nobody is paying for content, that content stops being created.

((It must drive Rushkoff bananas to be making the same argument that the record companies were making when cyberpunk Rushkoff was loading up Limewire))

If money can’t be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can’t do it anymore.

((First they came for the music but I did not speak because I wasn’t a musician and anyway, evil corporate masters were bilking the artists. Then they came for the movies but I did not speak because Hollywood is destroying America. Then they came for the journalists…))

Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the New York Times and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.

((Home taping is killing music! VCRs will destroy movies! Napster will destroy music! The gramophone will destroy music! etc. (poor music)))

Advertising is certainly one option.

((Keeping score? Media companies delivering eyeballs to advertisers: Not OK in olden times. OK in current times, except that Google is hijacking those eyes.))

But when Google becomes the meta-frame around all the content in everyone else’s publications, then Google’s ads are the only ones that really matter. Google’s ads are the ones that show up when we are searching for content, and open to suggestion. That’s the Internet equivalent of the moment we are flipping through the magazine — not the time we are spending when we deep inside an article and oblivious to the extraneous information beckoning from beyond its borders. Once we have clicked on the article and are brought to the interior of the publication on offer, we go into content mode—reading, rather than searching for relevant information, including ads.

Since the search engine is now extracting the ad revenue that used to go to the content provider, it makes sense that the search engine should pay some of that forward.

((Sure, that’s one business model and with a little luck, we’ll get to see it in action if the Bing/News Corp. deal is more than just talk. But make no mistake, this is not a moral issue.

There’s another business model, which is to aggressively bring in as much traffic as possible, and make money from that. In that world, Google is free advertising for your publication. It’s lead generation. Guess what happens when you do a Google search for “Wall Street Journal”. You get an ad for the paper. The WSJ is paying Google for traffic while claiming that Google traffic isn’t valuable.

We’re still sorting out how to pay for good journalism and it’s not by any means clear that allowing your content to be indexed by search engines and displaying that content for free to everyone is the right answer. But regurgitating Murdoch’s argument without acknowledging that there is an easy remedy is irresponsible if not disengenuous.))

It is much too easy to look at this as two, crusty old monopolies battling against the young defender of open systems and human freedoms. I reflexively

((oh, there’s your problem))

hate to be on Murdoch or Microsoft’s side on pretty much any issue. But these waning media giants—along with Hearst, NBC, Bertelsmann, and even the New York Times—may just have enough power left between them to challenge the continuing, inexorable drive to make all content immediately open to exploitation, disconnected from its creators.

((Again, there’s that pesky piracy vs. publishing distinction. The content is available in search engines because everyone has chosen to make it available. It’s very easy to remove.))

Our labor is not free. Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what’s happening on the free Internet is more akin to the “crowdsourcing” of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them—only the search engines that parse their articles. Why must everything we create or do be presumed free for everyone to use, in any context, and open to comments

((..what?))

from anyone in the world? Searching me, and what I create, should be a privilege enjoyed by those to whom I offer it—not a right bestowed onto every person, company, and government on the planet.

((Rushkoff is silent on the issue of non-Google entities linking to his work. Presumably he thinks that Rosen owes him a dollar for the Twitter link. Given that I linked, used, and commented without checking with Rushkoff, I have no idea how much I owe.))

Openness of this sort is not freedom. It’s the forced relinquishing of everything we do to the hive, and to Google. We end up with fewer new ideas, less original content,

((Photocopiers will kill publishing!))

and more links, copies and regurgitations of yesterday’s ideas. The people and companies who index ideas end up getting the money, while the people who actually have ideas and waste their time creating content end up broke.

So until we develop peer-to-peer currencies or come up with some other idea,

((Yes, perhaps one day someone might create a list of ideas for subsidizing the news. I sure hope to live long enough to see that day.))

we must pit the corporations who would exploit us against one another. By surrendering to just one publicly held company—no matter how little evil it says it wants to do—we doom ourselves to working for free.

((This is undeniably true. No one who has their content indexed in Google has managed to find a way to make a living at it.))

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 28/11/2009. | Permalink | Posted in: collapse, complaining, criticism

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When I first heard about the Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought about Neale Stephenson’s Snow Crash. There’s this refugee raft city, cobbled together around a dead tanker that is slowly drifting counter-clockwise from Asia to the States. It’s been at sea for years, turning into this kind of Darwinian pool of only the most vicious and desperate survivors and the whole thing’s going to come ashore in California…

The second time I heard about the Gyre, I was in Montreal. A young woman had just been accepted into a graduate program and she was telling me about this continent of trash that was out there.

“It’s a whole floating island,” she said.

She wanted to do something with plastic-eating fungii for her thesis. She was going to do some research and see if she could seed the floating islands with mushrooms. See if the continent could support life, a kind of enormous artificial island. A sixth Olympic ring the size of one or more Texases.

I haven’t been in touch with her, so I don’t know what happened to her thesis project when her research inevitably discovered that her garbage island is just as fictional as Stephenson’s raft city. What’s actually out there is much, much worse.

Toxic Garbage Island

The documentary, by Vice’s VBS.tv follows a group of filmmakers who take a ride out to the Gyre on the Agalita, one of the few vessels doing research into the Gyre. It’s divided into 3 parts and at some point during the second part, I began to get impatient. When were we going to see the garbage continent?

Getting to the Gyre takes seven days by boat. For the first hour of the documentary, you are given a glimpse into each day. The crew get more and more bored and frustrated. Toward the end of part 2, the Captain explains to the filmmakers that they aren’t going get their money shot.

“Everybody says show me a picture of the Garbage. Well, it’s spread out, it’s diffuse. This is an enormous ocean. You’re not gonna find a dump, there is no trash dump down here.”

Plastic breaks down in the sun. The pieces get smaller and smaller but not nothing eats the polymers. So you end up increasingly tiny bits of plastic suspended in the water. The area the size of one or more Texases is filled with plastic garbage at various stages of breaking down. It’s plastic soup. Chunky plastic soup. Inhospitable to life, chunky, plastic soup.

Water in the Gyre is relatively stable. Before the plastic started to accumulate, biological stuff did. The micro-organisms that feed on that stuff thrived and the creatures that ate them thrived all the way up to large mammals and sea birds. A lot of creatures came to expect that the Gyre would be a buffet. They still go up there, looking for food. So you end up with this (warning: that image is disturbing as hell).

True to the captain’s word, the filmmakers never do get their money shot. But after sitting through an hour of movie voyage, when they come across a construction helmet and then a floating jar and then a tangle of net you begin to get a sense. There are bits of garbage everywhere. They are seven days out to sea, just about as far from humans and land as they can possibly be and they are picking up stuff that you’d expect to see in a poorly maintained marina. There’s a lot of it.

The Sublime

In University, talking about the sublime, we looked at Kant’s interpretation; the feeling you can get of utter smallness and powerlessness in the face of a vast universe. To experience this feeling, you need to come across events or things that reveal your weakness without threatening your existence. A safe enough distance from you that you can contemplate it but immediate enough that that you know for certain that you are powerless in the face of it.

When we used examples, we’d normally talk about stuff like watching a roaring thunderstorm from a cave. We’d compare being chased by a bear (terror, not sublime) to observing the pounding majesty of a massive waterfall (sublime). Sitting in class, ‘lo those many years ago, it never occurred to me that I’d have this feeling in the face of a floating sea of suffocating garbage.

Watching The Documentary

You can see the whole thing for free on VBS.tv.
Toxic Garbage Island Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Monsanto House of the Future

by Tim Maly for Quiet Babylon, 17/06/2009. | Permalink | Posted in: complaining

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