In May 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline attended the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine to participate in the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium. They presented a paper called “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics”. The proceedings of the symposium were published in 1961 but before that, an excerpt of Clynes & Kline’s paper appeared in the September issue of Astronautics magazine (issue 13), entitled “Cyborgs and Space”. Aside from an early mention in the New York Times, this is the first time the word appears in print.

September 1960. That’s 50 years ago.

To commemorate, I’ve organized a project called “50 Posts About Cyborgs”. Over the course of the month, a whole gaggle of people have agreed to put up work ruminating on the use and abuse of the term. We’ve got essays, fiction, links to great older material, comics, and even a song.

It’s gonna be great.

Keep an eye on http://50cyborgs.tumblr.com and try #50cyborgs on Twitter.

1.

In a recent column, CBC’s Ira Basen contrasts the protection and access granted to journalists in the past…

If I was covering a war, people were less likely to shoot at me if they knew I was a journalist. If I was captured while covering that war, the Geneva Convention stipulated that I be treated as a prisoner of war, not as a spy.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…to the confusing present…

Perhaps the best way of understanding police behaviour at this juncture is to recognize that almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.

That meant they could either give special treatment to everyone or to no one. They chose no one.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…leading to an inescapable conclusion.

But the actions of the Toronto police during the G20 summit have exposed what is perhaps an unintended consequence of this new media reality: When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

He ends there, before taking this line of reasoning all the way to its terrifying conclusion.

2.

In Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, authors Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn argue for a different approach to exploring the immediate planetary neighbourhood. Rather than following the usual approach of planning expensive high quality missions which, when they fail, fail catastrophically, Brooks and Flynn argue for a scattered approach. They propose swarms of low quality cheap redundant components. The benefit is that you can lose some – even many – of them without compromising the mission’s goals.

There are major problems with planning a space mission which relies solely on one large planetary rover. If a mission is restricted to such a single large robot, there is a tremendous cost associated with losing the rover and thus a rash of conservatism will develop among the mission planners.

Rodney Brooks & Anita Flynn Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System [PDF]

They propose a variety of models where cheap simple robots are launched – robots that mission planners can afford to lose. The first thing Brooks and Flynn consider is machines that relay back TV images.

3.

In the wake of the G20 protests and riots in Toronto, Torontoist collects The Fourteen Essential G20 Videos. They are a mix of shots by professional film crews and people with cellphones. Only one shows any kind of serious editing. For some of the videos, links to alternate shots of the same incident are included in the commentary. Many more are suggested in the comments.

4.

The Flickr search result for “Toronto G20” returns more than 29,000 results.

photo credit: wvs

5.

When it comes to surveillance, there are two basic problems. One is not having enough information. The other is having too much information – the unspoken fourth corner of Rumsfeld’s formulation.

The first problem is relatively easy to solve. If you don’t know enough, you can throw resources at your objective. You can develop new tech, hire new people, and deploy new methods. It’s also, from an intelligence gathering agency’s perspective, a pretty good problem to have. It means you get to go to the budget committee and ask for more money.

Having unknown knowns is a harder problem, politically. It means that buried somewhere in the apparatus is information that, if you had it to hand, would be extremely useful. But you don’t. Instead, this information has a bad habit of turning up after the fact, and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of explaining document titles like “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” at a hearing.

The key in this circumstance is no longer information gathering, it’s information filtering.

6.

I’ve been talking about the Toronto G20 protests because they happened recently and they’ve been on my mind. But there’s nothing special about the event. This is the mass-collaboration and content creation that we get so excited about. This is Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Lolcats, 4Chan, YTMND, Yelp, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, SETI@HOME.

This is Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus. But a cognitive surplus implies a surplus of cognition.

7.

If SETI@HOME ever succeeds, we’re going to want to know who “found” the signs. Reporters will track down which computer processed the patch of sky where the alien signals came from. They’ll compose feature stories full of little charming details about the owner of the computer, his or her family, house, and habits. It’ll start with something like, “So-and-so doesn’t seem like an ordinary such-and-such…”

The joke will be that whoever this is will have contributed exactly as much to the effort as any of the random people whose computers determined where the aliens weren’t.

8.

Think carefully about the right that Basen claims. The right to not be shot or beaten while all around you people are being shot or beaten. This is literally the status of privileged observer. Precious observer, that must be protected because there are so few of them and they are so badly needed.

The bargain was roughly thus, “We know you are going to tell a story, and we want our side of the story to be told, so if we avoid shooting at you and yours, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to tell it badly.”

That’s ending now.

photo credit: nouspique

9.

In a network of cheap ubiquitous sensors, any given node becomes disposable. At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.

This is the terrifying endpoint that Basen does not reach. When everyone is a journalist, not only do their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people being covered, their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people consuming their work.

Had any of the fourteen essential videos been prevented from making it to the Internet, understudies fifteen through five thousand were waiting in the wings.

10.

For all the cameras, no one appears to have recorded the arrest and beating of journalist Jesse Rosenfeld. For instance.

As I begin writing this, I’m sitting in a room that consists of an old mattress, some empty shelves and a closet stuffed with boxes – my bedroom on the eve of a move. I finished (and started) packing yesterday. This is a feat that probably makes me unrecognizable to friends who showed up on my doorstep 5 or 10 years ago to find me franticly dumping drawers into garbage bags on moving day.

Lately, I have this ritual when I move – I read Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note. I’m treating it like a devotional text for the comfortably mobile. It helps me refocus my attention on my material conditions, giving me the right kind of steely-eyed attitude when it comes time to ask, “Do I really want to pack this?”

photo credit: robokow

An Extended Excerpt

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbours. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Bruce Sterling The Last Viridian Note

Sterling wrote this in late 2008, which was probably exactly when I needed to hear it (I’ve moved 3 times since then which is why I can claim the re-readings are a ritual).

Accidental Simplification

In 2007, I was engaged to be married. We shared an apartment in Toronto that was brimming with stuff, most of it in boxes. After she moved up, her parents had kindly filled a truck with everything she owned and driven it from Nova Scotia. This act of kindness turned out to be a blow from which our material living conditions never recovered.

I already had a bad habit of moving unopened boxes from apartment to apartment; with her stuff added in, it became overwhelming. Both of us worked long hours, both of us meant to get around to sorting through our stuff but progress was slow to non-existent. We lived among boxes. Boxes became furniture. Boxes shaped our pathways through the space.

When we broke up, I’d just gotten back from a 2 week trip to Montreal. I had a suitcase with clothes and a backpack with my laptop and gear. She met me at the station, we went home, she explained her decision, and I walked back out the door carrying the same luggage.

I stayed on the road for 3 months, visiting friends across the country, living out of the suitcase and backpack. I could barely remember what was in the apartment. When the lease expired, I packed it all up, gave away what I could bear, and put the rest in storage. I moved to Ottawa. I was 6 months in to my 2 week trip when I read The Last Viridian Note.

It resonated.

2 Years Later

I tell you all of this not to herald a sudden shift from cyborgs to feelings on this website but to establish some context and qualifications for this next bit. I’ve tried to varying degrees of success to follow the advice that made sense in Sterling’s sermon. I’m very glad to have gone through the exercise. I’ve learned from the experience.

I found that a surprising amount of what you own is hard to get rid of, but easy to live without. I remember very clearly in 2008 agonizing over what to toss and what to put into storage. Today, I’m paying for a locker with only the dimmest memory of what’s in there. I don’t remember at all what I gave away, though I remember very clearly being wracked with indecision about whether I should get rid of whatever it was.

This condition does not seem to have a cure. On the day of the move itself, I set aside two bags of clothes to donate. Included in this pile were some very nice jackets that I had never worn (they were hand-me-overs) and could not foresee myself ever wanting to wear. Yet as we finished for the day aside from a last stop at the drop-off box, I hesitated. What if? What if one day I wanted a jacket like that? They were perfectly good jackets. It took real mental effort to stay the course. Sterling warns that the process will be painful and he’s not wrong.

The sermon focuses very much on the individual. It’s a program for how you might clean up and de-clutter your own life. One area that’s left aside is how this attitude fits into a slightly larger context (he skips straight to the largest context – the condition of the planet). It’s reasonable to ask: how might this approach scale?

Over the past two years I’ve learned over and over how much the highly mobile rely on the stationary for support. I’ve benefitted from countless roommates and hosts who already owned the things needed to maintain a working household. Dishes, for example. If I have been able to move without filling a van, it is because I have lived with people who needed a truck. If I hadn’t had friends, I’d have needed hotels.

(One of my favourite interviews of all time has Joey Comeau and Ryan North discussing this exact thing. Read it here.)

Community Goods

When I was in university, I went to a school that was walking distance from the house that we’d lived in since I was 2. The basement was full of stuff. Quite a few of my friends were from away, and my parents’ basement became this warehouse of resources for the whole community. Need something sawed? We had that. Need extension cords and a hose? We had that too. Need 16mm film of a wedding from the 50s, along with a working projector for your play? Yup.

This basement of miscellany sustained the material needs of about 20 university students for various projects. When my parents moved out and got rid of everything (to their great relief), a resource was lost. There is a value to having things to hand. I only need one of my friends to have a bike repair stand, but boy am I glad that he does.

There is a whole category of objects like this that don’t quite fit into the Beautiful things / Emotionally important things / Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function / Everything else rubric that Sterling details. One of his criteria for “everything else” is stuff that you haven’t touched in a year. These are very likely things you can toss, but some of them only make sense to toss in a certain context.

There are items that have some critical density of need that is not one per person, but one per household, one per block, or one per neighbourhood. They might be items that you use less than once per year but that your neighbourhood would use in aggregate once every few weeks. This is a coordination problem. I can give away my extension ladder, if you promise to keep yours or vice versa, but between the two of us, we do want a ladder. (This problem is extra persistent with roommates and is how I’ve managed to go 2 years without owning dishes or living room furniture. How many toasters does a household need? Probably 1. Mine has 3.)

Designing Neighbours

In tightly knit communities, these objects can get where they’re needed through informal lending networks. But how to get them into the hands of our glocally situated young professionals who have more connections across the continent then in a 5 block radius?

We might take some inspiration from the smooth rental experience of Zipcars. The cars are just around. You don’t need to plan ahead, you just need to see if one’s available (it probably is). There aren’t forms to fill out in triplicate, heck, you don’t even need to talk to anyone. You can just go and pick it up as if it was yours and put it back when you’re done.

We might also take some inspiration from DIY bike collectives such as Toronto’s Bike Pirates. They have all the tools, even the ones that you need once per bike’s lifetime. You drop in, do some work, leave a donation, and go on your way.

Toy Libraries also show some promise. Many toys expire long before they go bad. They become boring. They are grown out of. Libraries keep them in circulation and out of people’s basements.

With the rise of cheap sensors and cheap ID tags, it’s not hard to imagine lending libraries for all kinds of specialized tools and objects. Think about how much stuff you would get rid of if you felt like you could just grab another one any old time. No need to stop at simple tools, much of what was useful about my parents’ basement was dross that was occasionally extremely useful. Imagine whole emporiums of wonder and miscellany. Think about how much you’d enjoy browsing these places, every shelf stuffed with the intriguing scraps of a project idea.

Hold on! Now we’ve just outsourced the curation and maintenance of our occasionally useful junk to some hapless individual or organization. How do you make a set up like that sustainable? Is it run for profit? Can networks of data tags make the system seamless enough that the curation duties can be distributed across the userbase, much as they are in a regular neighbourhood? These are real design problems that want useable solutions.

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

Blue Monday, Abolished
In the late 19th century, laundry remained the most backbreaking household chore. Utopian feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisioned and established cooperative households where communal kitchens, daycares and laundries would free women from drudgery, leading to economic equality and the Seneca Falls goal of “true and substantial happiness.” But laundry mechanization participated in the more-work-for-mother paradox: new cheap clothes needed more and more frequent washing. Unlike cooking and childcare, which have mostly left the home, laundry remains a laborious individual responsibility. We’ve ditched the mangle and invented the self-service laundromat, but we are not liberated from laundry.

Written by: Suzanne Fischer

Poster Child:
I really like this one, as we forget how onerous a chore laundry was until rather recently- but while automated laundry hasn’t lead to the sweeping social change people from the past predicted, it’s still completely awesome. Bring someone from the past forward to today and they might not be so impressed with some of the things on this list (buggy-assed voice recognition? laser pointers?) but show them laundry machines and they’ll say “Two please!”

Ryan:
The only issue with this one is that if you showed someone 200 years ago a laundry machine from today, they’d still say “Forsooth, verily, that be rad” and want one – they’re not perfect, but they’re still a huge improvement over washboards. But yeah, laundry sucks!

Tim:
Here’s why this entry is so great: like videoconferencing, the technology is here and it operates pretty much exactly as promised. And like videoconferencing, it failed to substantially transform the society around in the way we expected. The machines didn’t make our lives easier, they made the lives of the people selling clothes easier.

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

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

A technology can be as much a gadget or gizmo as it can be a change in systemic behaviour. In that regard, I would suggest that the condensing & specialization of work resulting in push-button jobs like George Jetson’s promised an easing of the harshness of labor. Yet, they simply fill a man top-full and brimming with ennui & alienation. I have worked jobs where I did nothing more than push a button every few minutes, and it is nowhere near as pleasant as I thought it would be.

Written by: Brandon L. Keene

Ryan:
A great entry, but I couldn’t think of very many jobs that were actually push-button jobs. There’s tons of data entry jobs, and keyboards are a SERIES of buttons, but that’s not really the Jetson’s future we’re talking about. There are factory-line jobs where your only task is to be a pair of human eyes, knocking bad items off the line – that’s pretty close, I guess! It just needs a big red button and a robot maid and we are THERE.

Poster Child:
I’ve never had a “push button” job, but I can imagine that it’s not a lot of fun. Many of my crappier jobs could be described as pushing a series of buttons, in particular orders. Still not fun. How much complexity to we need for job satisfaction?

Tim:
Lest you dismiss the judges’ comments as signs that they are hopelessly out of touch with the plight of the working person, let me point out that even in the Jetsons, the push button job was played for laughs, in that George HATED his job. And who can blame him?

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