Earlier this month, Cisco’s cannily constructed marketing phraseology ignited a fire in my corner of the Internet. Dozens of friends and loved ones linked to “Cisco wires ‘city in a box’ for fast-growing Asia.”

photo credit: ricardodiaz11

Everything about the marketing of New Songdo City feels like a crazy Paleo-Future-esque throwback to the 1950s with updated stock photography. Gale International’s Google search result tagline is, no joke, “Building Tomorrow’s Communities Today”.

The very idea of a city in a box seems to have been ported whole cloth from an era of TV dinners, robot helpers, inflatable furniture, and convenience at the touch of a button. It denies a need for contextual development, or responses to local conditions. This is the machines for living and the mass manufactured utopian nightmare that we are meant to have left behind.

The city itself is explicitly a generic anyplace.

Songdo IBD boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House.

Songdo IBD A Master Plan Inspired by the World

It feels like the only place that isn’t mentioned is the country that the city will call home – South Korea.

It’s a project reminiscent of EA’s Spore, a game which culminates in you choosing a ‘civilization architecture’ and then then flying around the universe launching seed colonies that all grow up to look the same (local conditions are only respected in that if you build the city underwater or in a poisonous atmosphere, a dome covers the works).

It’s the architecture of glossy globalism, the glittering light side of Baudrillard’s patio. It’s the consistent dream of every major franchise and perfectly appropriate to the bland abstracted face of international business. It’s BLDGBLOG’s Thirteeth Room re-conceived on a massive scale.

You can picture a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel; the overstressed, underslept protagonist proceeds in a haze from city to city, complaining about how all airports and hotels look the same only to find themselves in an entire city that looks the same. Have they gone mad? They’ve never been here before, they’re certain of this. But they have been. They know every street corner, every by-way. They can direct the cab driver better than the GPS.

photo credit: lostmodern.net

What about a globe-hopping sci-fi detective novel? A case sends our hero across borders. He’s ostensibly on unfamiliar ground but he knows where the dive bar where someone very much like his regular contact will be. He can find the right chop shops and has a pretty good idea of where the dealers will be, which neighbourhood will have the right kind of corrupt cops.

The effect, useful at first, becomes maddening. Identity begins to shift and blur. He knows passwords for underworld watering holes he’s never been to. He can’t remember if the dame he’s seeing now is the same as one who hired him in the first place.

In an airport lobby, he meets someone very like himself who claims he’s investigating a crime with details that eerily match our hero’s. Is it the work of a serial killer? A copycat? They pool resources.

His GPS starts going on the fritz, and it keeps showing him in different countries. He gets into scrapes, he’s beaten to unconsciousness and when he wakes up he’s not sure what continent he’s on anymore. He stumbles through the tourist district asking if anyone can tell him. No one seems to know or care.

In a hotel he’s sure he’s been to before with staff who don’t recognize him, he confronts his partner. Who is he anyway? How does he know so much about the murders? A strange coincidence that they should just meet. His partner shows him a newspaper, another murder in another city, very much like theirs but ten years before. The first city, the pilot program. It was all hushed up.

Emma,

As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data

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.

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

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.”