This is part of the week-long sprawling Glacier/Island/Storm conversation that’s happening in conjunction with BLDGBLOG’s design studio being taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The introduction and list of participants is available here.

Strange Inhabitants

Biologists have identified a pair of complementary evolutionary phenomena relating to isolated populations of island-dwelling animals. Island gigantism happens when birds or reptiles step into the apex predator niche that would normally be held by a large mammal. Because they aren’t as naturally efficient killers as their mammalian counterparts, pressure eases off their prey who can afford to grow larger than normal as well. Island dwarfism occurs when a combination of inbreeding and lacking resources forces animals to grow smaller and consume less, maintaining the balance and viability of the ecosystem.

Which is all just to say that the situation gets weird when you stick things on islands.

View in Google Maps (I highly recommend clicking through and zooming in on the circles.)

Under a Titanium Net

In the Pacific ocean, about halfway between Japan and the Philippines, there is a patch of coral called Okinotori that may or may not include a pair of islands. They might only be rocks. The status of these two possible-islands is of deep personal interest to the governments of both China and Japan. If they’re islands, the atoll grants Japan exclusive economic zone rights over an area of ocean about the size of California. If they’re rocks, then Japan loses the claim. In 2004, the Chinese started calling them rocks. There is no dispute over who owns the atoll, instead the dispute is about what the atoll is.

For those keeping score at home, according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, an island is “a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide.” Also, “rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone.” There used to be five rocks peeking over the surface of the waves, but erosion has claimed three of them. The remaining pair are barely larger than mattresses, which leaves very little room for habitation or economic life.

To preserve the alleged islands, Japan surrounded them in 60m diameter concrete sea walls (these are the circular structures you can see in the satellite images). The smaller one got a titanium net to protect it from chipping by wave-hurled debris. There are slits in the walls to ensure that the ‘naturally formed’ land remains ’surrounded by water’.

The entire preservation project is gloriously tautological. A solar-powered unmanned lighthouse, installed in 2007, provides economic life to the islands because they need economic life in order to be islands. An ongoing project to preserve the rocks and encourage new coral growth continues because it’s critical that the islands be naturally formed. A concrete barrier isn’t natural, but a reef grown from transplanted coral in the shelter of artificial structures is.

China might simply need to wait. With sea levels expected to continue to rise, Japan may not be able to grow coral fast enough.

Here’s a fun conspiracy story for you: When the Copenhagen climate talks failed to come to any real conclusion, Mark Lynas blamed it all on China. This led Jamais Cascio to wonder whether the cold war over warming he’d predicted was coming true. Could China be using delayed action on climate change as a kind of passive weather control to drown Okinotori once and for all? Surely that’s overkill.

The fight wages on.

Gothic High Tech

Here’s what fascinates me about artificial islands. They tend to be colossally impractical constructions rendered practical by some byzantine combination of laws and culture. Artificial islands contrast nicely with the woven spaces idea I wrote about last month. Instead of a physical space sub-divided by rules and norms, these are fabrications forced into existence by laws. They are architecture at the margins of the high end, the inverse of Stewart Brand’s beloved slums and Sterling’s favelas. This is real gothic high tech. Expensive, complicated, barely functional constructions that will be abandoned as soon as the winds of finance or international law shift (and they will shift).

Japan spends $600 million encasing coral in concrete and titanium because Chinese diplomats suddenly start calling them rocks. The Chinese start doing this because China is worried that the US Navy might use the surrounding ocean to ferry warships and supplies to Taiwan.

This isn’t Japan’s first foray into making artificial islands. Yesterday’s InfraNet Lab post discusses Dejima, an artificial island built in Nagasaki bay in 1634. The island serves to house Portuguese and then Dutch merchants, part of a strategy for keeping Japan culturally isolated while still allowing for some trade. When Commodore Perry forces an end to sakoku, the island is quietly absorbed into the mainland.

Real estate bubbles render beachfront property untenably valuable. A burst of construction never quite seems to reach the promise of the brochures, be they the incomplete Venetian Islands in Miami (also discussed by InfraNet Lab) or Dubai’s drowning Palm Islands.

In a more contemplative vein, BLDGBLOG points us to an island slowly growing in Montenegro’s Bay of Kotor around a rock that looks like the Virgin Mary. Over time, sailors and pilgrims add ships and stones in a process that feels more organic than the seeded coral around Okinotori but that will survive only as long as Christianity remains in the region.

(For an alcohol soaked vision of the same kind of construction, see Bacardi’s Island commercial.)

In the North Sea, the UK builds gun platforms in order to repel Axis bombers. Once the war is over, they are abandoned, only to be repopulated by pirate radio stations, driven there by broadcast laws and a thirst for pop music. One declares itself a sovereign nation and attempts to run a data haven. (Archinect’s Nick Sowers visited some of these platforms last year.)

At the Edge of the Law

Data havens are a staple of cyberpunk fiction and its offshoots. They’re a natural evolution of offshore banking and flags of convenience, both typically conducted from island nations. It’s a tenuous existence. Many rely on foreign aid and sovereignty is maintained only through the general legal goodwill of the international community. Few island nations could repel invaders so their main line of defence is not being worth invading. At the same time, what makes them attractive places to store one’s money or bits is an alternate system of laws that permit foreign nationals to skirt their own country’s rules.

photo credit: octal

These countries seem to survive on the idea of being a country. Look through their economic activities and you see a bizarre portfolio of enterprise on the edges of sovereignty. Nauru, stripped of its natural resources has tried being a tax haven, renting fishing rights, and hosting an Australian detention centre. Tonga is known for its colourful postage stamps. The Cayman Islands have 285 registered banks. It’s fitting that Tuvalu would end up with the .tv domain, a valuable property that it leases out along with its area code for 900 numbers.

Iceland, still recovering from its law-induced role as one of the epicentres of the financial crisis, seems intent on reinventing itself as real data haven. First, it began pointing out that its low temperatures and virtually unlimited supply of geothermal energy would make it a great place to put your server farms. Now it’s working on readjusting the laws to be much more media-friendly. (A move which may or may not work as intended.)

Building for Abandonment

What lessons in all this for the budding architect? If you’re going to grow your own island, understand how tenuous a construction this is. We live in an era when the natural island nations are at risk of becoming ghost states, let alone their artificial companions, many of which barely crest the waves. Artificial islands tend to be inhabited as briefly as possible, a pressure which conflicts with the relatively slow process of semi-natural growth. You need an egress-plan. What will become of your island when the legal and cultural environment that sustains it inevitably changes? Who will inhabit it after the lawyers, scientists, diplomats, bankers, and soldiers all go home?

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

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

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.

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

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

Part of a series: B-List Holy Grails

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