Who says that Glacier Ice Storm has to end just because the week is over?

photo credit: gordontarpley

BLDGBLOG considers the strange tale of a pair of ships built to be trapped in polar ice, 112 years apart.

…what interests me here is the idea that you could build one thing—a ship—that only becomes what it’s really meant to be—a building—when the circumstances it’s surrounded by undergo a phase change (here, water turning into ice).

The Architecture of Polar Ice Floes on >BLDGBLOG

I’m thinking here of about the artificial island Geoff posted about that’s build from rocks and the husks of ships. I’m thinking about bridges and piers and other structures which are floated into place before being sunk and sealed in.

I’m thinking about floating restaurants and the gambling riverboats that never leave dock. Especially the floating casinos; they never wanted to be water-faring in the first place, were forced into mobility by laws, and are slowly reverting to their natural state.

Many of the floating palaces of fortune that cling to the Mississippi’s banks like mussels in the five states where they are legal still look like the elegant steamboats that plied the river in Twain’s time. The resemblance ends at the waterline, however, as many have no engines, and those that do rarely, if ever, fire them up and weigh anchor.

Others — the so-called “boats on moats” — don’t look anything like floating wedges of wedding cake, a description applied to the paddle-wheel steamboats of old. These “vessels” are large barges designed to float in pools adjacent to the river with casinos on their decks.

Mike Brunker Riverboat casinos going nowhere fast for MSNCB.com

I’m thinking about the concrete tents, where the phase change is in the material of the structure itself. “Add water to make this permanent.”

Lastly, I’m thinking about the many, many, many science fiction and fantasy scenarios where what was once thought to be an ancient temple turns out to be a fully operational starship/battle station/moving castle waiting for the right people to come along and bring it back to life.

Perhaps even the moon is waiting for launch codes.

In the summer of 2009, I was in San Francisco for the first time and on my way to meet Alexis Madrigal and Sarah Rich for a drink. Equipped with only a photocopied map and a dumb cellphone, I got off at the appointed BART stop with instructions to head south and no idea which way that was. Ever the intrepid explorer, I worked out the solution using the phone’s clock, the map, and the location of the sun. That’s so remarkable that it’s worth saying a second time: In 2009 in a major metropolitan area, confused and disoriented I resorted to navigation by the sun.

photo credit: teresawer

Here’s how that story goes in Edmonton, a city with which I am equally unfamiliar: I get off at the appointed stop, pull out my smartphone, put in the address, and the phone works out where I am and points me to my destination.

The difference? International roaming charges haven’t crippled me.

A fair number of future-facing writers like to call various aspects of our connected world their outboard brains. It’s a cute conceit but also an aspirational statement. It looks forward to the implanted memories and off-loaded cognition promised by cybernetics.

We already have prototypical versions of that to some degree. Just about everyone uses a calculator for simple math, many of us offload scheduling memory to a physical or digital calendar – that’s all elementary “everyone’s a cyborg” stuff. Expect this to intensify. The promise of intelligence in the cloud is that we get access to terabytes of data as needed, and that this access will make us better whatever it is we are trying to be.

Here’s how the San Francisco story goes in 2002: I get off the BART and my hosts are waiting to meet me, because they know it’s easy to get turned around OR I get off the BART and see the local landmark that I was careful to ask my hosts about, so that I could situate myself when I emerged from the station. In 2002 this is a natural part of the flow of planning. In 2009, it doesn’t enter into consideration until it’s too late. There’s an assumption by everyone involved in the planning process that getting from the exit to the bar is a solved problem, so it isn’t discussed.

Here’s why this is interesting: As knowledge and information move further and further away from being something we have towards being something we process, we become increasingly reliant on the machines that enable this relationship. Having knowledge becomes an increasingly contingent and fragile state. As this stuff advances, there comes a point when the connectivity becomes mandatory instead of optional and unconscious instead of controllable.

This is the wild extreme of the transformation of intelligence documented in Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition.

We may thus expect a thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the “knower,” at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process. The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training (Bildung) of minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so. The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume.

Jean François Lyotard The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Looking ahead to a time when these machines are more thoroughly integrated, we end up with some profoundly weird consequences. Travellers become literally less intelligent when they leave their coverage area, relative to their connected hosts. A civil emergency occurs because a brief service outage leads to a poor decision by a plant manager. Data corruption causes a segment of customers to suffer a kind of patchwork amnesia. Rumours abound of hackers able to execute man-in-the-middle attacks that allow them to lift and shift memories. Parents and school administrators spar over what constitutes fair or unfair augmentation when it comes to state testing. Augmented students stripped of their connections fare far worse than their have-not peers. When the machines are active, the scores are very different.

For a glimpse into your connected future, consider the case of Steve Mann, wearable computing pioneer. He’s been connected to various devices for the past 20 years and has become used to a computer-mediated relationship with the world. At the height of post 9/11 security paranoia, some overzealous airport guards decided they needed to see his rig removed. In the process of the inspection, some equipment was damaged and all of it torn off his body.

Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair.

By Lisa Guernsey At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged for the New York Times

If misplacing your cellphone gives rise to a panic beyond what would be reasonably expected for a few hundred dollar expenditure, you are beginning to get there. If you no longer remember addresses, you simply refer to a slip of paper, you are well on your way.

There will be outages. There will be coverage problems. There will be billing issues.

In the Pearson International Airport in Toronto, there’s a walkway that fascinates me. The walkway in question runs from where you get off the plane to the exit. If you get off the plane and have luggage, you proceed down the stairs to the carousels and the herd of humanity. If you don’t have luggage to collect, you can bypass the whole thing and take this walkway. It passes over the luggage claim area and then passes over the people waiting for their loved ones to emerge. A few meters later, its own set of doors opens and you are outside in a loading area, hailing a cab. Unremarkable.

photo credit: {tribal} photography

But there is that brief moment when you are crossing above the waiting throng. You are cleared through security, vetted and behind the cordon. They are random people milling about the airport. Physically, you are within shouting distance. Legally, they are miles away. It’s not a big drop, I’ve made worse without hurting myself. Physically, it’d be a simple movement. Legally, it would be as if I’d teleported.

At some point during a 36 hour multi-flight marathon, I have this dim memory of an airport escalator that skipped a floor. There was plexiglass on either side and as we were going from floors 3 to 1, we passed an escalator that ran from 2 to 4. Who was the other escalator for? I have no idea. Probably employees sporting a special badge with chips and magnetic codes that allow them to open certain doors. Doors that I’d be arrested for loitering near, alert levels being what they are.

Years ago, in a philosophy of mind seminar, we talked about abstract reasoning skills. I’m going to mangle it but the basic idea was something like this: Water has no abstract reasoning at all. You can trap water with a bowl. From water’s perspective, the floor is infinitely far away once the bowl has collected it. Animals like dogs can get out of obstacles like a bowl, but you can mess them up with a picket fence. They can see the thing they want to get, and they’ll stay stuck right where it is, barking. They are unwilling to move “away” from the tasty bone even though the open gate down the lane is actually the shortest route from their current position to the morsel. A human is able to make that kind of higher order of reasoning, happily sauntering down the road, popping the latch and collecting the prize. On the other hand, dogs don’t get tricked by lines painted on the ground.

Jackie is smiling at the zoo security guard like she’s not terrified. The guard is yelling something or other.

“Blah blah blah,” he yells. “Blah blah blah blah.” Jackie’s classmates are crowded around him now, watching her. She looks crazy up here, but they’re the ones who think that a little fence like that can stop them.

Joey Comeau One Bloody Thing After Another

Ordinarily, legal and physical architecture work in concert. You aren’t allowed into a certain area, so they helpfully wall it off and lock the doors. They’d prefer you to be in some other area and so offer you bright lighting and wide aisles. But there are times when the two work at cross purposes, either when some architect is being clever (as in the walkway and escalators) or when the subtleties of legal distinction are too much for dumb mortar and brick to implement. I’ve started thinking of these areas as woven spaces.

We start building legal architecture when we’re young. “Don’t touch the floor, it’s made of lava!” “The big comfy chair is ’safe’!” “No boys allowed!” Chalk, debris, and language are the tools of the budding legal architect. A patch of playground morphs between uses, guided only by a few well placed rocks or backpacks, some lines scratched in the dust, and an elaborately argued consensus.

This kind of rule-making gives us a means to shape our environment when we’re otherwise powerless. We can’t get together a voting block, draw up plans, lobby for, and build a new arena for kids’ hockey, but we can cart a net into the street and declare a manhole cover centre ice.

At the same time, the most prolific legal architects of our childhood are parents and authority figures. Under their watchful eye, otherwise easily traversed spaces become mazes of prohibition and regulation. It hardly seems fair. But these are hacks, allowing layers of use in a single space. Without stern looks and sharp words, it would be impossible to have a usable kitchen that was not also a toddler deathtrap.

As kids mature, the likely uses for a given room begin to collapse into a roughly consistent set of needs. The physical and legal spaces coalesce and begin to operate in concert once more. But even as kids turn into young adults, there are plenty of exceptions. Siblings argue about each other’s bedroom use (“His stuff is on MY SIDE.”), parents and children have to negotiate privacy and access, and politeness constrains what rooms guests do and don’t enter during parties. Finally, there is always the threat of being grounded.

Restraining orders, probation, curfew, and house arrest are legal architecture is literally legal. House arrest ties you to a specific place, imprisoned by purely theoretical walls. Probation offers more freedom but turns the city into a maze customized to your particular circumstances and crime. Restraining orders create roving spheres of forbidden space, a protective bubble around those to whom you have been deemed a threat.

The current technology used for these measures is pretty primitive, relying on phonecalls, eyewitnesses, and crude ankle monitors. It’s not hard to imagine a GPS-enabled or networked monitor that translates rulings into a highly granular set of instructions. According to a schedule negotiated with the courts, virtual pathways open and close to allow you to travel to and from your community service workplace, before sealing you in at home for the night or downtown for your mandated shifts. In the case of restraining orders, the system could monitor the location of all parties, warning victim, perpetrator, and authorities in case of a breach.

If this seems at all draconian, consider that the rest of us are already pretty used to this kind of thing. We happily use theatre tickets, conference badges, time-locked access cards, metro passes, and other tokens to open and close spaces according to all sorts of schedules and regulations. It’s all tricks and hacks. It’s a cybernetic solution to an architectural problem.

Imagine instead an environment built out of some suite of smart materials able reconfigure themselves in a highly contextual manner. Guests checking in to a hotel are assigned a room and then follow a path that lights up at their feet, guiding them to rest. An ancient forest reconfigures itself, trapping and confusing enemies, while friendlies pass unmolested. Adventurers become lost in a dungeon of shifting walls and traps. The entire plot of the movie Cube.

On January 12th, Google announced that they’d been the target of a series of cyber attacks aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Their response was to stop censoring Google.cn effective immediately. In the same week, Google was granted a patent that would enable them to replace real billboards with virtual ones in Google Street View.

Leaving aside the utter surprise at finding myself on the pro-corporate side of the government v. megacorp sovereignty wars, both of these stories are about the same thing: filtering data streams to match one set of aims or another.

photo credit: Barabeke

The China story is a story of the filtration with which we are most familiar. Censorship is old, well understood and for the most part opposed by people of conscience. Though, Google hasn’t yet announced a unilateral end to their censoring practices in France and Germany and there are plenty of things that you aren’t allowed to say all over the world.

The replaceable ads feel like something else entirely. If they get implemented, it probably won’t be a wholesale replacement on a political agenda. It’s more likely to be a patchwork replacement of the real. There’s an appealing elegance to the move. They were ads anyway, now they are just different ads. (Weirdly, many of the real billboards are there illegally. There is a troubling chemistry at work when virtual advertising space is being made available on the basis of improperly placed real advertisements.)

So much for the governmental and corporate.

There is a third layer of filtration, the personal layer. By putting up a set of filters, individuals can customize their experiences; cutting away the unwanted and subbing in whatever they please.

Consider the ways that you can remake YouTube in your image: you can make videos downloadable; you can filter out all the comments that are algorithmically determined to be stupid; you can even filter out the whole site. Sites like Give me back my Google attempt to remove affiliate and other spam-type links that Google hasn’t filtered themselves.

Subtractive filtering isn’t the only approach. Add Art is a Firefox plugin that replaces online advertising with curated art shows. The shows consist of images formatted to the standard ad dimensions which replace real advertising on the fly. (I tried Add Art for awhile but had to uninstall it when a show consisting of rapidly strobing GIFs rotated in.) If Google implements Street View virtual ads, maybe Add Art can implement Street View art shows on top of that.

Having a good set of filters is crucial. We are bathed in a sea of insistent data and augmented reality is only going to make it worse. As Bruce Sterling points out, an issue with augments is that they don’t scale. If you’re looking at any given square of surface, there’s only room for so much text, video or images. Very, very quickly, too many people will be trying to get your attention at once. You’ll need heavy filters to handle it all. What if they get too powerful?

Overly powerful personal filters is a recurring fear. We worry that people watch the news, go to church and generally build communities that confirm their opinions. Self-imposed censorship is probably the hardest to fight as there isn’t curiosity or fascination with the forbidden to turn leaks into torrents.

Take the moment in John Carpenter’s They Live when Roddy Piper puts on the glasses.

Now, imagine that this guy got together the tools to make a set of glasses that highlighted occult symbols automatically. Imagine a set of glasses that filtered out objectionable images for whatever value of “objectionable images” you care to substitute.

It’s pre-augmented reality but the 2004 film Epic 2014 presents a compelling vision of a world where the filters have won in a big way. The resulting output is both the best curation of the news-you-need-to-know and the worst set of bias-confirming pablum, depending on the preferences and habits of the user.

The bias confirmation fear has been around for a long time. It was the main theme of my grade 11 “Media Literacy” class. The key has shifted from centralized media control to fears about distributed extremist groups, but the chorus is the same.

It wasn’t until this past week that I worked out the problem with the analysis. The trajectory assumed is of increasingly powerful and impregnable filters. If that trajectory holds, then one expects an increasingly balkanized culture, full of isolated groups that think they have nothing in common. But there’s a second set of actors in play, the ones being filtered out.

As the first group works harder to filter out unwanted messages, the second works harder to break through. We see it in the arms race around advertising. We see it in politicians struggling to find new ways of reaching their audience. We see it in Google’s need to constantly change and update their pagerank algorithms as black hat SEOs learn to game the system.

So long as the arms race continues, the filters will get better without becoming perfect. And in those cracks, reality (or at least an alternate viewpoint) can intrude. Insofar as we believe that people can’t know in advance what is best for them or what information they should receive, we should celebrate inefficiencies in filters.

In every successfully delivered spam message, there is a ray of hope.

In the dream, I had managed to get invited to one the sessions of the Quarantine studio that BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography were running in New York. City of Sound’s Dan Hill (who I’ve never met, so apologies Dan, for bringing you into this) had the floor and he was engaged in a spirited discussion with Nicola Twilley about how the Internet could be an infection vector if the disease was aural.

photo credit: scragz

When I woke up, I started thinking about Pontypool and memetic infection. At around the same time, Robin Sloan posted:

What terrifies the North Korean regime? Pirated movies on DVD showing modern lifestyles in other countries. >> http://is.gd/4HCTV

Robin Sloan on Twitter

There are times when North Korea’s regime seems like someone read 1984 as a how-to manual. The building that is frequently edited out of photos. The assertion that things are worse everywhere else and that Americans are to blame for everything that goes wrong. The simulacra village with the world’s tallest flagpole. The logic of the dominant regime: control history, control what seems possible, control the future.

photo credit: superblinkymac

I’m reminded of the myth we tell ourselves about Coke and blue jeans bringing down the wall 20 years ago. MTV showed people the glamorous Western lifestyle, the story goes, and people came to demand that life for themselves. They saw what we claimed we had and they compared it to what they didn’t have.

The fascinating thing about this story is that the infection is a side-effect. In fact, it only works as a side effect. When we see the pomp and circumstance of a military parade we know that we are supposed to be impressed. We also know that someone is going out of their way to impress us, which makes us suspicious. We think they’re exaggerating or hiding something.

The reason that MTV and pirated DVDs are so much more potent than staged displays is that the wealth (ignoring rap videos) is incidental. The message is: We have these nice things and it’s so commonplace that we can’t be bothered to mention it. We made these for ourselves, and you are listening in on our cultural conversation. The stuff you learn by eavesdropping must feel more authentic and believable than the stuff they are spouting on Radio Free Europe. This isn’t wealth over here in our culture. It’s just basic living. This is like a cultural germs part of Guns, Germs and Steel. Of course, not many of the people over here actually live like the people on TV.

(An aside: There is a tension between the environmentalist rhetoric that we’d need 6 earths to live like North Americans and the story that it was conspicuous western consumption that brought down repressive regimes. As if we sold out our future selves to dangle the carrot of democratic civilization in front of everyone else.)

I’d like to know more about the (possibly exaggerated) Amish rites of passage depicted in Devil’s Playground. The story is that during adolescence, Amish youth have a period where they go a little crazy. They are released into secular North American society, and may experiment with cars, modern clothes, sexual relationships, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Most end up returning to the church.

This is an almost perfect reversal of the slow erosion of values. Instead of a long period of small doses, these kids are dropped totally unprepared into an alien culture. They arrive lacking defences, context, or tools to handle a different set of norms. Unsurprisingly, most have a terrible time and gratefully return home, no doubt convinced that the alternative is clearly inferior (and probably baffled at why the rest of us live that way). Like an inoculation, the culture preserves itself not through avoidance, but through strategic exposure to the competing options.