echovar

I remember laying on the floor and looking up into the blue glow of the small television screen. It was the late 60s and this flickering screen created an instant and visceral connection to locations all over the real and imaginary world. It was a kind of spooky action at a distance, an entanglement with events halfway across town and halfway across the world.

People criticized Marshall McLuhan for saying that television was a two-way medium, but as a viewer it was clear that the thoughts, feelings and actions of the audience exerted a strong influence on the material flowing out of the tube. The worlds opened up by this medium seemed to be infinite, and then without warning—a parent walks into the room and flicks off the switch—the sounds and visions vanish. “Go out and play. Get out of the house.”

Imagination dead, imagine.
Samuel Beckett

In the endless arguments between so-called open and closed platforms within the Network of Networks, the charge is often hurled that such-and-such a closed platform is killing the internet. The internet by its nature is thought to be an open platform—although it’s apparently closed to closed platforms. If the open Network of Networks fills up with closed networks, then we won’t have unfettered access to any node at any time. Although it can be argued that only Google has access to all nodes, everyone else must ask Google for directions on how to get from here to there.

When we engage in this kind of talk about ‘killing the internet,’ it’s really a matter of whether the Network is more the way we like it or less the way we like it. No one imagines that the internet could actually be killed. Despite the volume and passion of the argument, no networks are ever harmed in the production of the discussion. I’m always amused by the kind of maniacal laughter engendered in the geek community by any suggestion that the Internet could be switched off. Bring up Senator Lieberman’s proposal for an internet kill switch in the company of geeks and check the response.

Imagine their surprise when Egypt recently switched off their sub-network within the internet in response to riots in the streets. I understand that Jordan and Syria also had their fingers on the switch. Tunisia’s government couldn’t withstand the protests organized via the real-time network and the army may have put the switch out of reach.

One of the lessons of Tunisia was how to use the real-time network to organize protests. The other was to shut down the real-time network if you want to disrupt the protesters. Both lessons were put to use in Egypt. There’s an assumption that the Network of Networks is so deeply intertwingled with every aspect of our lives that it can no longer be shut off. It would be like depriving a fish of water. Certainly lots of business is conducted over the internet, but in a time of national emergency, revolution and general tumult, are there geeks in Cairo upset because they can’t use FourSquare to check-in to the latest demonstration or download the Anarchist’s Cookbook to their Kindle? Anything that’s really important will be transmitted over a private network. In a Network shutdown, both sides aren’t equally in the dark.

John Perry Barlow asks whether, in light of what has happened in Egypt whether access to the Network should be considered a basic human right. Faced with an unacceptable government, the Network is an indispensable tool to foment change. It should be noted that the Network is neutral with regard to the messages it carries. A fascist uprising would benefit as much as any through the use of the real-time network.

Real-time networks work as accelerants, they contribute to the general speed up. They currently have no tools for slowing things down, correcting errors or stopping things. This makes them an excellent tool for expressing general feelings of opposition and a less than optimal tool for building new institutions to replace the old. Newspapers and magazines seem capable of both kinds of action. Perhaps this is why a free press can never be fully replaced with a real-time stream.

The moral dilemma of the open network is that it must preserve the possibility of evil.

The lessons for citizens are pretty clear, but what of the lessons for governments watching all this unfold? An internet kill switch backed by a robust private network for select services sounds like a start. Another lesson might be that the kill switch should be used sooner rather than later. Of course, avoiding situations of general revolution by fostering a healthy and happy citizenry is highly recommended. But as you look around the world, there are a large number of countries thinking about how they might implement a kill switch. Some, China, for instance, may already have such a switch in place.

As we work through this thought experiment, a number of connected issues arise. In the era of the always on and accessible broadband internet, cloud-based applications and storage seem like a rational choice. If large sub-networks of the internet can be switched off, the cloud no longer works as a global solution. If segments could be switched off within a single country, it may not be a national solution. In fact, the cloud requires a certain level of political stability to be viable in any sense. Where sometimes we might consider these kingdoms of the cloud to be challengers to the laws and boundaries of nation states, here the cloud shows that it has critical dependancies on political stability.

Synchronization, local applications and file storage show themselves to have a new value in light of the possibility of the Network being switched off. Technologies like iTunes, Evernote, Microsoft’s Mesh and Dave Winer’s approach to syncing and upstreaming local files to networked locations gain new purchase. The idea of keeping everything in the cloud now has interesting political ramifications, whereas the local master file carries some new weight.

There are two approaches to a sub-network shutdown. One is the creation of an on/off switch. Presumably once things have settled down, the plan would be to switch the Network back on. Then there’s the permanent off-switch, the switch that simply destroys the capacity altogether. An on/off switch is an expensive proposition, and of course it may be very difficult to get a majority of people to agree to it. The permanent off-switch has the flaw that it’s impossible to test. If it works, then it’s game over.

The permanent off-switch is the cousin of the doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Imagine a scenario where a country is under cyber-attack, rather than have their systems destroyed, they may choose to simply switch off their network. The doomsday machine would be the other defensive approach. A country lets it be known that if it is the subject of a cyber-attack it will destroy the entire Network. This would be an interesting test of the myth that the Network is robust enough to survive any such attack.

Clearly some countries could survive the end of the Network better than others, and so could more easily employ the strategy. One could imagine a terrorist group based on the theories of the UnaBomber deciding to attempt such an action. Daniel Suarez, in his book, Daemon, imagined this kind of scenario using botnets.

The seams in the Network of Networks are beginning to show as the vast differences in people, cultures, power and politics play out around the world. These differences may signal an end to the integrated synthetic Network of Networks—the Network you were given, not the one you made. It may also be an entirely unexpected way that location, or rather place, will affect your experience of the new splintered Network. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is going to be a wickedly difficult negotiation.

Humpty Dumpty
Aimee Mann

Say you were split, you were split in fragments
And none of the pieces would talk to you
Wouldn’t you want to be who you had been
Well baby I want that too

So better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

Baby, I bet you’ve been more than patience
Saying it’s not a catastrophe
But I’m not the girl you once put your faith in
Just someone who looks like me

So better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

So get out while you can
Get out while you can
Baby I’m pouring quick sand
And sinking is all I have planned
So better just go

Oh, better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put baby together again
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put baby together againикони

There are certain animals that have survived, flourished even, through the use of camouflage (a form of crypsis). They blend into the background so well they become invisible. Predators haven’t cracked the code, camouflage works at the level of the species. Now and then it may fail in individual cases, but on the whole it’s been a successful strategy in the game of natural selection.

In the murky waters of the Network, the visibility is nil. It’s only through the hyperlink that a sense of visibility is created— although visibility is probably the wrong word. Following McLuhan, we should acknowledge the Network as an auditory/tactile space. The nodes of the Network are linked by touch. The hyperlink is activated by touch, it’s a flicking of a switch that opens a door to a hidden hallway. We feel our way through the dark until we emerge into the light on the other side. (This is another reason that the multi-touch interaction mode has spread so quickly).

Imagine a location on the Network that was completely devoid of hyperlinks to foreign sites. You’d have to imagine it, because unless you knew the precise incantation to call it into your browser, it would lay perfectly camouflaged within the darkness of the Network. Sometimes this is called security through obscurity—a kind of blending into the background.

This imaginary location might have an infinite number of internal hyperlinks between the locations within its interior. It could be a whole world, completely unknown to the rest of the Network, a veritable Shangri-La. Because this place is unknown and without hyperlinks, there would be no commerce, no trade of bits between this isolated location and the rest of the Network. Of course, if a single hyperlink was formed, this imaginary location would change forever. To stop outside influences from overwhelming this world, a barrier would have to be built and its integrity enforced.

If we adjust our angle a little bit, we’ve just described the state of the modern Corporate Enterprise with respect to the rest of the Network. The fabric of the external Network has been used as the material for the internal Network—the protocols are identical. Keeping these identical twins apart is called security. Of course, twins have a mode of communication, cryptophasia, not available to others.

Hedge funds are beginning to monitor Twitter to evaluate their portfolio holdings and trading opportunities. The public stream is analyzed in real time for sentiment and triggers to put into their trading algorithms. Enough value has accreted to the stream that there’s an advantage to be gained from taking it into account.

In addition to its presence in the public stream, the Corporate Enterprise has begun to launch private public streams meant to reside securely within the friendly confines of the firewall. The purpose of the private public stream is to create more visibility within the Enterprise—although the metaphors have become crossed again. Traditional corporate reporting provides visibility—a kind of linear numeric business intelligence. A real-time micro-message stream with hyperlinked citations transmits auditory and tactile signals. We hear what people are saying about how things are, and by following the hyperlink we can get a deeper feel.

If the public stream, outside the firewall, has enough juice to merit monitoring, the private public stream has even more. And there’s no skill or guile involved in finding it, it’s a busy public thoroughfare accessible to everyone on the inside.  If we adjust our angle a bit more, we can see the private public message stream as a series of diplomatic cables. The diplomatic corps of the United States uses these cables to update the status of the system to the Secretary of State. Private internal message streams can develop a value outside the barriers erected by the native tribe. When the value grows great enough there will be motivation to enable a leak. What at first appears to be a barrier, reveals itself as a membrane. The modern worker is a member of many tribes with many, and sometimes competing, allegiances.

Perhaps we might think it’s just a matter of stronger barriers, a matter of winning the arms race. But as Bruce Sterling notes in his assessment of the Wikileaks Affair, these kinds of cracks are going to get easier, not harder over time. Even the system that we might expect to be the strongest no longer operates on the basis that a war over barriers can be won. Here’s Deborah Plunkett, head of the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, on the state of their internal network:

“There’s no such thing as ‘secure’ any more,” she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, and confirmed that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised, and is adjusting its actions accordingly.

To preserve the availability and integrity of the systems it has the duty to protect, the NSA has turned to standardization, constant auditing, and the development and use of sensors that will be placed inside the network on specific points in hope of detecting threats as soon as they trigger them, reports Reuters.

In the end, we seem to be transported back to days of the tribe and our allegiance to it. In an age where the barriers around systems have become a Maginot Line, it’s down to what we agree to keep silent about— what we don’t share outside the circle. Our public and private faces will grow farther apart, and the innocent and authentic gestures we contributed to the public stream will now be a matter of show. The backchannel that was brought to the fore will require a backchannel of its own. Somewhere out of the glare, where we can have a private conversation— security through obscurity.

In December of 1970, Dick Cavett hosted a conversation with Al Hirt, Gayle Sayers, Truman Capote and Marshall McLuhan on his television show. It’s difficult to imagine the crosscurrents of this discussion happening on television today. McLuhan’s probes draw each of the guests into his orbit, and he demonstrates how each participates in the theme of his new book, From Cliche to Archetype.

The cyclops, the motorcycle cop…

McLuhan describes himself as an outsider in the course of his appearance on the show. One has to wonder how he broke all the way through to the medium of popular television entertainment. Howard Gossage and Tom Wolfe had something to do with it, but it’s McLuhan’s love of exploration through dialogue that really shines through. It’s perfect for television.

Once the earth was within the surround of the satellite, Planet Polluto was in need of the attention of the ecologist…

In a letter McLuhan wrote: “I am not a ‘culture critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” The jazz musician, the professional football player, the novelist, the comedian and the metaphysician find a common ground within the probes McLuhan unleashes.

McLuhan on Cavett, December 1970
McLuhan on Cavett, 1970

This year we celebrate 100 years of Marshall McLuhan. In some ways, he remains an outsider. After all this time, we haven’t consumed, commoditized, or co-opted his thought— he’s as dangerous as ever.

While infinity made appearances as early as Zeno, it was with Georg Cantor that the idea of many infinities of varying sizes began. In some ways this marked the taming of infinity. Its vastness, mystery, and inhuman scale no longer invoked terror or awe. Like the zero, it was something that could be represented with a symbol and manipulated in equations and algorithms.

Infinity recently made an appearance in a conversation between journalist, Om Malik and Evan Willams of Twitter:

Om Malik: Ev, when you look at the web of today, say compared to the days of Blogger, what do you see? You feel there is just too much stuff on the web these days?

Evan Williams: I totally agree. There’s too much stuff. It seems to me that almost all tools we rely on to manage information weren’t designed for a world of infinite info. They were designed as if you could consume whatever was out there that you were interested in.

Infinity takes the form of too much stuff. The web seems to have so much stuff, that finding your stuff amongst all the stuff is becoming a problem. The dilution of the web with stuff that’s not your stuff decreases the web’s value. Any random sample of the web will likely contain less and less of your stuff. This problem is expressed as an inadequacy in our tools. To effectively process infinity (big data), our tools will need to leap from the finite to the infinite. Om and Ev’s conversation continues:

Om: Do you think that the future of the Internet will involve machines thinking on our behalf

Ev: Yes, they’ll have to. But it’s a combination of machines and the crowd. Data collected from the crowd that is analyzed by machines. For us, at least, that’s the future. Facebook is already like that. YouTube is like that. Anything that has a lot of information has to be like that. People are obsessed with social but it’s not really “social.� It’s making better decisions because of decisions of other people. It’s algorithms based on other people to help direct your attention another way.

When considering human scales, the farthest point we can apprehend is the horizon. The line that separates earth from sky provides a limit within which a sense of human finitude is defined. When the earth was conceived as flat, the horizon defined a limit beyond which there was nothing. Once the curvature of a spherical earth entered our thinking, we understood there was something — more earth — beyond the horizon. When looking from the shore to the sea, the part of the sea closest to the horizon is called “the offing.”  It’s this area that would be scanned for ships, a ship in the offing would be expected to dock before the next tide. It’s in this way that we worked with things that crossed over to occupy the space just this side of the horizon.

What does it mean for an information space to leap from the finite to the infinite? There’s a sense in which this kind of infinity flattens the curvature of the earth. The horizon, as a line that separates earth from sky, disappears and the earth is transformed from world to planet. Contrary to Ev William’s formulation, there is no “world of infinite info.” Our figures become ungrounded, we see them as coordinates in an infinite grid, keywords in an infinite name space. The landscape loses its features and we become disoriented. There’s too much stuff, and I can’t seem to find mine in this universe of infinite info.

Are there tools that begin by working with the finite and evolve — step-by-step — to working with the infinite? In a sense, this is the problem of the desktop metaphor as an interface to computing. If a hard disk is of a finite size, its contents can be arranged in folders and put in drawers with various labels. Once the Network and the Cloud enter the equation, the desktop must make the leap from the finite to the infinite. Here we try to make a metaphorical transition from wooden desks in a workplace to a water world where everything is organized into streams, rivers and torrents. But in this vast ocean of information, we still aren’t equipped to find our stuff. We dip in to the stream and sample the flow from this moment to that. Our tools operate on finite segments, and the stuff we’re looking for still seems to be elsewhere.

The stuff we’re looking for is no longer contained within the human horizon. In the language of horizons, we leap from the perspective of humans to the viewpoint of the universe. Here we might talk about event, apparent and particle horizons:

The particle horizon of the observable universe is the boundary that represents the maximum distance at which events can currently be observed. For events beyond that distance, light has not had time to reach our location, even if it were emitted at the time the universe began. How the particle horizon changes with time depends on the nature of the expansion of the universe. If the expansion has certain characteristics, there are parts of the universe that will never be observable, no matter how long the observer waits for light from those regions to arrive. The boundary past which events cannot ever be observed is an event horizon, and it represents the maximum extent of the particle horizon.

There’s an interesting optimism at work in the idea that because we can create tools that work with the finite, we can create tools that work with the infinite— that somehow the principles involved would be similar. If we look at Evan William’s description of what such a tool might do, it jumps from the individual to the species. What successful adaptations have been adopted by other individuals of the species that I might mimic?  The dark side of this kind of mimicry is that a successful adaptation isn’t visible in the moment. A lemming, as it approaches the edge of a cliff, may view the cues it’s receiving from other lemmings as positive and successful. Rather than create the diversity that’s the engine of evolution, it may create conformity and a fragile monoculture.

The creation of infinite info seems to parallel what Timothy Morton calls a Hyperobject. He defines such objects as being massively distributed in time and space, existing far beyond the scale of an individual human, and making themselves known by intruding into human life. Morton calls climate change, global warming and the sixth mass extinction event examples of hyperobjects. Infinite info is created, not purposefully, but like the exhaust coming out of our tail pipes. It enters the environment of the Network in geometrically increasing levels with no sign of slowing or stopping. Will it expand forever without limit, or will it behave like a super nova, eventually collapsing into a black hole?

Timothy Morton on Hyperobjects: Timothy Morton: Hyperobjects 3.0: Physical Graffiti

Now we must ask: are we creating an information environment to which we are incapable of adapting? The techno-optimists among us see human evolving to cyborg. The finite tools we used to adapt will become infinite tools that will allow us to adapt again. As Om Malik puts it, the future of the Network may include “machines thinking on our behalf.” The other side of that coin is that we’re creating something more akin to global warming. It may be that even machines thinking on our behalf will not be enough to redraw the line between the sky and the earth, re-establish the ground beneath our figures and tame the overflowing character of infinity.

It’s not really a question of life or death. Perhaps it’s time to look for a metaphor that sheds a little more light. The frame that’s been most productive for me is one created by Clayton Christensen and put to work in his book, The Innovator’s Solution.

Specifically, customers—people and companies— have “jobs” that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can “hire” to get the job done. This is how customers experience life. Their thought processes originate with an awareness of needing to get something done, and then they set out to hire something or someone to do the job as effectively, conveniently and inexpensively as possible. The functional, emotional and social dimensions of the jobs that customers need to get done constitute the circumstances in which they buy. In other words, the jobs that customers are trying to get done or the outcomes that they are trying to achieve constitute a circumstance-based categorization of markets. Companies that target their products at the circumstances in which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers themselves, are those that can launch predictably successful products.

At a very basic level, people are hiring Twitter to do jobs that RSS used to get. The change in usage patterns is probably more akin to getting laid off. Of course, RSS hasn’t been just sitting around. It’s getting job training and has acquired some new skills like RSS Cloud and JSON. This may lead to some new jobs, but it’s unlikely that it’ll get its old job back.

By reviewing some of the issues with RSS, you can find a path to what is making Twitter (and Facebook) successful. While it’s relatively easy to subscribe to a particular RSS feed through an RSS reader— discovery and serendipity are problematic. You only get what you specifically subscribe to. The ping server was a solution to this problem. If, on publication of a new item, a message is sent to a central ping server, an index of new items could be built. This allows discovery to be done on the corpus of feeds to which you don’t subscribe. The highest area of value is in discovering known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. To get to real-time tracking of a high volume of new items as they occur, you need a central index. As Jeff Jonas points out, federated systems are not up to the task:

Whether the data is the query (generated by systems likely at high volumes) or the user invokes a query (by comparison likely lower volumes), there is nodifference.  In both cases, this is simply a need for — discoverability — the ability to discover if the enterprise has any related information. If discoverability across a federation of disparate systems is the goal, federated search does not scale, in any practical way, for any amount of money. Period. It is so essential that folks understand this before they run off wasting millions of dollars on fairytale stories backed up by a few math guys with a new vision who have never done it before.

Twitter works as a central index, as a ping server. Because of this, it can provide discovery services on to segments of the Network to which a user is not directly connected. Twitter also operates as a switchboard, it’s capable of opening a real-time messaging channel between any two users in its index. In addition, once a user joins Twitter (or Facebook), the division between publisher and subscriber is dissolved. In RSS, the two roles are distinct. Google also has a central index, once again, here’s Jonas:

Discovery at scale is best solved with some form of central directories or indexes. That is how Google does it (queries hit the Google indexes which return pointers). That is how the DNS works (queries hit a hierarchical set of directories which return pointers).  And this is how people locate books at the library (the card catalog is used to reveal pointers to books).

A central index can be built and updated in at least two ways. With Twitter, the participants write directly into the index or send an automated ping to register publication of a new item. Updates are in real time. For Google, the web is like a vast subscription space. Google is like a big RSS reader that polls the web every so often to find out whether there are any new items. They subscribe to everything and then optimize it, so you just have to subscribe to Google.

However, as the speed of publication to the Network increases, the quantity of items sitting in the gap between the times the poll runs continues to grow. A recent TPS Report showed that a record number, 6,939 Tweets Per Second, were published at 4 seconds past midnight on January 1, 2011. If what you’re looking for falls into that gap, you’re out of luck with the polling model. Stock exchanges are another example of a real-time central index. Wall Street has lead the way in developing systems for interpreting streaming data in real time. In high-frequency trading, time is counted in milliseconds and the only way to get an edge is to colocate servers into the same physical space as the exchange.

The exchanges themselves also are profiting from the demand for server space in physical proximity to the markets. Even on the fastest networks, it takes 7 milliseconds for data to travel between the New York markets and Chicago-based servers, and 35 milliseconds between the West and East coasts. Many broker-dealers and execution-services firms are paying premiums to place their servers inside the data centers of Nasdaq and the NYSE.

About 100 firms now colocate their servers with Nasdaq’s, says Brian Hyndman, Nasdaq’s SVP of transaction services, at a going rate of about $3,500 per rack per month. Nasdaq has seen 25 percent annual increases in colocation the past two years, according to Hyndman. Physical colocation eliminates the unavoidable time lags inherent in even the fastest wide area networks. Servers in shared data centers typically are connected via Gigabit Ethernet, with the ultrahigh-speed switching fabric called InfiniBand increasingly used for the same purpose, relates Yaron Haviv, CTO at Voltaire, a supplier of systems that Haviv contends can achieve latencies of less than 1 millionth of a second.

The model of colocation with a real-time central index is one we’ll see more of in a variety of contexts. The relationship between Facebook and Zynga has this general character. StockTwits and Twitter are another example. The real-time central index becomes a platform on which other businesses build a value-added product. We’re now seeing a push to build these kinds of indexes within specific verticals, the enterprise, the military, the government.

The web is not real time. Publishing events on the Network occur in real time, but there is no vantage point from which we can see and handle— in real time— ‘what is new’ on the web. In effect, the only place that real time exists on the web is within these hubs like Twitter and Facebook. The call to create a federated Twitter seems to ignore the laws of physics in favor of the laws of politics.

As we look around the Network, we see a small number of real-time hubs that have established any significant value (liquidity). But as we follow the trend lines radiating from these ideas, it’s clear we’ll see the attempt to create more hubs that produce valuable data streams. Connecting, blending, filtering, mixing and adding to the streams flowing through these hubs is another area that will quickly emerge. And eventually, we’ll see a Network of real-time hubs with a set of complex possibilities for connection. Contracts and treaties between the hubs will form the basis of a new politics and commerce. For those who thought the world wide web marked the end, a final state of the Network, this new landscape will appear alien. But in many ways, that future is already here.

It’s a phrase that fascinated using only three words. “Ecology without nature.” It’s the title of a book by Timothy Morton, and refers to the romantic notion of nature that infuses much of our ecological thinking. It’s nature as it appeared before the fall, before the apple was bitten by reality. Not nature as it was formed in the crucible of Darwin’s natural selection, but rather as the dream of a machine spinning along in perfect balance. Human beings, somehow standing on the outside, have upset that balance.

I’m reminded of poet Robert Haas’s story about Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Haas was organizing a benefit for some nature organization. He wanted Milosz to read and tried to play on what he thought was Milosz’s love of nature. Milosz starred blankly. “Nature? Nature terrifies me.” Confused Haas reels off a list of sunsets, forests, sparkling rivers, night skies and rolling hills. Milosz nodded. “Ah…you mean beauty. There’s a huge difference.”

For Morton, ecology must be thought through a democracy of objects. Humans, fish, plastic bags, trees, snow tires and bongos all live and work within the same flat ontology. At every scale, we’re all in this together, human being isn’t privileged, rather it is one being among many. Gary Snyder comes at the question from another direction. He engages in what he calls the practice of the wild. The poet tells us how nature calls nature:

“It would appear that the common conception of evolution is that of competing species running a sort of race through time on planet earth, all on the same running field, some dropping out, some flagging, some victoriously in front. If the background and foreground are reversed, and we look at it from the side of the ‘conditions’ and their creative possibilities, we can see these multitudes of interactions through hundreds of other eyes. We could say a food brings a form into existence. Huckleberries and salmon call for bears, the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon, and salmon call for seals and thus orcas. The Sperm Whale is sucked into existence by the pulsing, fluctuating pastures of squid, and the open niches of the Galapagos Islands sucked a diversity of bird forms and function out of one line of finch.”

Sometimes it takes a while before we can hear a poet speak. This may be the decade that we hear Gary Snyder.

Ripples on the Surface

by Gary Snyder

“Ripples on the surface of the water—
were silver salmon passing under—different
from the ripples caused by breezes”

A scudding plume on the wave—
a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring
—Nature not a book, but a performance, a
high old culture

Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, again—
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass—

The vast wild
the house, alone
The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house
Both forgotten.

No nature

Both together, one big empty house.

It’s right on the crease that the thoughts began to emerge. Like standing on the corner of a city block and looking down one side and then the other. Seeing old friends from different times in your life, paths that never crossed—now connected by the happenstance of standing on this particular node in the grid-work of the metropolis. The term standing at this crossroads is ‘realism.’

The initial rehabilitation of the word, for me, came with the discovery of John Brockman’s Edge.org. Within this oasis, Brockman unleashed the congregations of the Third Culture and The Reality Club. These closed circles of the best and the brightest engage in a correspondence on topics at the edge of technology and science. In particular, Brockman was seeking to provide an escape from the swirl of ‘commentary on commentary’ that seemed to be gobbling up much of the intellectual world as it struggled to digest the marks and traces left by Jacques Derrida. Here, conversations could gain traction because the medium was the “real” and the language was the process of science. Even the artists and philosophers included within the circle had a certain scientific bent.

However, recently I’ve begun to feel that the conversations have drifted from scientific to the scientistic. Standing at the edge of scientific discovery is a heady experience. The swirl of the unknown is trapped in the scientist’s nets, sorted out into bits of data, classified and tested. Edge.org serves as a sort of cross-scientific discipline peer review process. The shaky ground of the barely known is given its best chance to gain traction through an unstinting faith in the real. At this far outpost, anything seems to be fair game for the process. Standing on the firm ground of the scientific real, the conversations begin to stray into explanations and reconstructions of morality, thinking, consciousness and religion. Edifices are not deconstructed, they are bulldozed and rebuilt on the terra firma of scientific reality.

Even within Edge.org, the question about the ground on which they stand are starting to be asked. Jaron Lanier focuses on why there’s an assumption that computer science is the central metaphor for everything:

One of the striking things about being a computer scientist in this age is that all sorts of other people are happy to tell us that what we do is the central metaphor of everything, which is very ego-gratifying. We hear from various quarters that our work can serve as the best way of understanding – if not in the present but any minute now because of Moore’s law – of everything from biology to the economy to aesthetics, child-rearing, sex, you name it. I have found myself being critical of what I view as this overuse as the computational metaphor. My initial motivation was because I thought there was naive and poorly constructed philosophy at work. It’s as if these people had never read philosophy at all and there was no sense of epistemological or other problems.

And it’s here that faith in the scientistic ground begins to develop fissures. A signal event for me was the appropriation of the word ‘ontology‘ by the practitioners of the semantic web. The word is taken up and used in a nostalgic sense, as though plucked from a dead and long-ago superseded form of thought. The history of the word is bulldozed and its meaning reconstructed within the project of creating a query-able web of structured data.

It was the word ontology that linked me back to realism. And here we are back at the crease, looking down the other side of the block. It’s here that the fast charging world of Speculative Realism enters the fray. The scientistic thinkers on the Edge have begun to notice a certain mushiness of the ground as they reach out to gain traction in some new territories. Indeed, some may stop and ask how the ground could be mushy in some spots, but not in others?

The brand Speculative Realism was founded in April of 2007, at a conference at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The primary players were Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux. While not a cohesive school of thought, these philosophers have certain common concerns, in particular ideas about realism and a critique of correlationism. The branch of the tree of particular interest to me contains the group exploring Object-Oriented Ontology, which includes Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant among others.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

My formal introduction to the literature was through Graham Harman’s book Prince of Networks, Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. But to get a sense of the pace of thought, you need only look to the blog posts, tweets, YouTube posts, uStream broadcasts of conferences and OpenAccess publications the group seems to produce on a daily basis. The recent compendium of essays, The Speculative Turn, is available in book form through the usual channels, or as a free PDF download. The first day it was made available as download, the publisher’s web servers were overwhelmed by the demand. The velocity of these philosophical works, and the progress of thought, seems to be directly attributable to its dissemination through the capillaries of the Network.

In working with ontology, these thinkers have given the ground on which scientists—and the rest of us (objects included) stand, quite a bit of thought. This is not an extension of the swirl of commentaries on commentaries, but rather a move toward realism. And it’s when you arrive at this point that the border erected around the scientistic thought and conversations of the Edge.org begins to lose its luster. There are clearly questions of foundation that go begging within its walls. At the beginning of such a conversation, the ground they’ve taken for granted may seem to fall away and leave them suspended in air, but as they continue, a new ground will emerge. And the conversation will be fascinating.