Category: capital

The Anthropocene: Burning Down the House

Published June 2, 2013 by cgerrish

Climate is a interesting kind of thing. It’s not directly perceivable through our senses. Weather isn’t climate, rather it’s a data point used in the construction of the larger conceptual model we create to visualize climate. There’s our model of climate, and then there’s the thing-in-itself that is climate. Particular manifestations of weather are a result of climate, but the unseasonable cold, rain and snow aren’t climate.

Watch out you might get what you’re after
Cool babies strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

Hold tight wait till the party’s over
Hold tight We’re in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

Weather is what you experience, climate is the set of conditions that provide the ground for the possible weathers that might manifest at any particular moment. Equatorial climate has a range of possible weathers, as does Antarctica. Strange weather, if it occurs with enough frequency becomes climate—that is to say that it joins the set of possible weathers as a probable weather manifestation.

When we say that we must address the climate, it’s not the climate we would directly touch. For instance, reducing or eliminating carbon dioxide emissions as a negative externality from our machines is an attempt to address a specific chemical reaction in the atmosphere known as the greenhouse effect. By changing the pattern of global warming, we hope to affect the climate—meaning the range of possible temperature and weather manifestations.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The climate has an interesting political feature that is of recent vintage. Our interaction with the Internet is perhaps the best model. The Network can be addressed from any node. There is no center or edge. Monarchs, dictators, elected governments, corporations, non-profit groups, political parties, religions, scientists, artists, hobbyists and individuals can all connect their ideas to the Network. No special authority, coordination or consensus is required to publish. Tap a few keys on a keyboard, make some kind of recording, and then push a button.

As we become more pessimistic about collective action on global warming, the issue of geoengineering becomes more and more pressing. Geoengineering treats the earth, its atmosphere and biosphere, as a machine that can be hacked through large-scale interventions to operate within parameters that we specify. Generally these techniques aim to manage solar radiation or to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The key question about geoengineering is who is allowed to geoengineer? In some sense, we’re all collectively geoengineering the earth through our use of a certain class of carbon-emitting machines. But the large interventions proposed by geoengineers need not be collective actions sanctioned by governments. Geoengineering requires only the resources and access to the climate.

Bill Gates has enlisted climate scientist Ken Caldeira to co-manage a fund that invests in geoengineering research. Caldeira is not currently advocating the use of geoengineering, but he puts it this way in an article by James Temple in the San Francisco Chronicle:

“I am in favor of fire insurance,” he once said in explaining his stance. “But I am also against playing with matches while sitting on a keg of gunpowder.”

In other words, if we pass the rubicon we’ll have geoengineering in reserve as a last resort. The “fire insurance” metaphor is a little troubling. Who plays the role of the insurance company in this scenario? Who will decide when the house has burned down? What store shall we go to purchase replacements for the contents of our house? Businessman Russ George recently accepted a payment of $2.5 million to dump 100 tons of iron dust into the Pacific waterways off of western Canada. The scientific community was outraged by his actions, but should we really be surprised by this kind of hacking? The triggers for geoengineering are not as clear as a house on fire.

The residents of a small island threatened by rising oceans may well decide that the time is right to engage in geoengineering. A tech billionaire may decide it’s up to him to act in the absence of collective action to address global warming. Two enemy states may decide to engage in geoengineering as a form of warfare. A politician may decide it’s good politics. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn’t necessarily require collective action. No agreements need be reached. We only need to find the weather to be sufficiently strange.

The other appealing thing about geoengineering is it makes the invisible visible. The problem with climate change as a result of global warming is that it’s inaccessible to us. It’s what Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject. It occupies a higher dimensional phase space—it unfolds too slowly over too long a period for our eyes to perceive it. We are outscaled by it. Geoengineering allows us to take immediate concrete action. The vast geologic time scales are compacted to fit into human lifetimes. If the problem is not solved, at least it’s been cut down to size. Some may call geoengineering “playing god” with the earth, but it’s more a matter of bringing the “earth” down to earth, a human-sized earth (humiliation).

If geoengineering fails, don’t worry. We can always go back in time and repair the mistake. Just as with repairing the machinery of the biosphere and the climate, time travel and correcting the course of time is only a matter of technology advancing sufficiently. The filmmaker Chris Marker imagined what the correction of catastrophe might look like in his film La Jetée:

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A Dunbar Number for Objects

Published May 12, 2013 by cgerrish

The objects that accumulate around us remain silent and so eventually sink into the background. Once part of the background they are present but completely disappeared. Like fish in water, we swim in this sea of objects. We maintain some kind of interactive relationship with a set of these consumer objects, but due to our physical finitude we can only keep a small number of balls in the air.

The Internet of things is coming upon us faster than anyone could have imagined. From the large scale “Brilliant Machines” industrial project of General Electric to the personal clouds of SquareTags imagined by Phil Windley and others. It was in Bruce Sterling’s book called “Shaping Things” that I was first introduced to the concept. The little book seemed to call out to me from the shelves of the bookstore at the Cooper-Hewitt.

Things call to us in different ways. The Triangle Shirtwaste Factory fire called out to a generation about the role of labor conditions in the very clothing on their backs. The stitching told a story about conditions under which the stitching itself occurred. Instead of fading into the background, the threads become Brechtian actors employing the verfremdungseffekt.

The term Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange (Russian: прием остранения priyom ostraneniya), which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art. Lemon and Reis’s 1965 English translation of Shklovsky’s 1917 coinage as “defamiliarization”, combined with John Willett’s 1964 translation of Brecht’s 1935 coinage as “alienation effect”—and the canonization of both translations in Anglophone literary theory in the decades since—has served to obscure the close connections between the two terms. Not only is the root of both terms “strange” (stran- in Russian, fremd in German), but both terms are unusual in their respective languages: ostranenie is a neologism in Russian, while Verfremdung is a resuscitation of a long-obsolete term in German. In addition, according to some accounts Shklovsky’s Russian friend playwright Sergei Tretyakov taught Brecht Shklovsky’s term during Brecht’s visit to Moscow in the spring of 1935. For this reason, many scholars have recently taken to using estrangement to translate both terms: “the estrangement device” in Shklovsky, “the estrangement effect” in Brecht.

For this generation, the tragic factory collapse in Bangladesh has radically changed the clothing hanging in our closets and folded in our chest of drawers. The stitching and the labels in these clothes now call out, they make themselves strange and unfamiliar. A piece of the background pricks our attention and wants to have a conversation. “Let me tell you about myself. I was born in Bangladesh in a factory like the one you read about the other day on your iPad.”

In the Internet of things, the number of things that could be transmitting data to a central store is limited only by practicality. In other words, it’s practically unlimited. Although, as Lisa Gitelman reminds us “Raw Data is an Oxymoron.” Data is a form of rhetoric based on exclusion. Deciding what counts as data is always already a form of cooking. Drawing conclusions from big data is not making an assessment of big pile of raw, natural artifacts. Data is always pre-cooked and can benefit from an analysis of our counter-transference toward it. And while the Internet of things seems to be mostly on the side of objects helping to manufacture themselves more efficiently, there’s another side to the conversation aspect of the objects surrounding us.

Not too long ago it was our food that was calling out to us. “Ask me where I’m from. Let me tell you about how I was grown.” We’ve been through the whole cycle by now. At first we could hear the words “natural” and “organic” and know something about origins. Today highly-processed foods sport the labels natural and organic. A longer dialogue than can be printed on a container is called for. Now our clothes need to explain themselves. We need to be able to ask them about where they were stitched up, and they need to be able to tell us.

In Bruce Sterling’s “The Last Viridian Note” he makes the case for deaccessioning one’s collection. If we are all curators, defining ourselves by exhibiting our taste as consumers — what are we saying about ourselves? And in this era of the Internet of things, what will the things themselves be saying about us behind our backs?

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 neighbors. 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.

In the sphere of social networks, we talk about the Dunbar number. While electronic computerized networks theoretically allow people to connect with tens of thousands of other people, stable social relationships, according to Robin Dunbar, are limited to a much smaller number.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.[2][3] Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

The globalization of the manufacture of household objects has put us in a situation similar to that of online social networks. Theoretically we can own as many things as we can afford. And if we can’t afford them, we can wait until they make their way to the deep discount stores and outlets and then buy them for below the cost of production. These things, by making themselves strange strangers — they raise their hands and step out from the background a stranger in our midst. But once our food and clothing becomes inscribed into our social space and wants to have a conversation about origins and process, can we really keep consuming at our current pace? Will the slots available in the cognitive limit of our Dunbar number now have to include all the objects that are waking up around us in this Internet of things?

We are waking up inside a world that is waking up to find us waking up inside of it.

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The Internet of the Outernet of the Internet

Published April 7, 2013 by cgerrish

The Internet is, after all, an Outernet. The “Inter” refers to the interconnection of external networks by way of a common protocol. But there’s also a sense in which we imagine it as an external expression of our vast interior mental space. Sometimes this is called cyberspace, and it used to be described as the mental space we enter when talking on the telephone. Like our internal space, the Internet is mostly invisible to us, waiting to be uncovered through the focus of our attention. We commonly make sense of the Internet as an internal, private place. It’s a social space we project our thoughts into while in total isolation. The external digital artifacts that we produce in the course of our online activity have begun to function as an emulation of our internal space.

Recently emulation has gone meta. Starting long ago with the steam engine and continuing with the computer we have a set of tools capable of emulating the functionality of a whole range of other tools. The meta-level of emulation is emulating an operating system within a different operating system—emulating a platform in which emulated tools run. Internally we also emulate when we have an ambition to equal or surpass another and attempt to do so through a form of imitation. We internalize a platform on which to run the programs we admire.

There are two figures recently in the news who are engaged in forms of emulation. Just two guys you might see on public transit on the way to work.

The first is Sergey Brin. With his Google Glass project he begins to emulate Robert Downey Jr. In the film Iron Man.

The second is Jorge Mario Bergoglio. By taking the name Francis, as Pope he begins to emulate Saint Francis.

Each man is attempting to change the world. Brin with a wearable network computing device to augment human capability. Pope Francis by creating a poor church that is for the poor. Brin’s activities are well known, if not very well understood. Pope Francis’s project is perhaps more obscure—but it is also a technical response to the state of the world. It’s a strategy that could be viewed as the opposite of augmentation.

One way into understanding this idea of a “poor church for the poor” is to take a trip back to the 1960s and the poor theater of Jerzy Grotowski. Faced with the competition of television, the movies and broadway shows of increasing levels of technical sophistication, Grotowski attempted to isolate what was uniquely powerful in the theater. By stripping away everything, he arrived at a Poor Theater that focused on the actor-spectator relationship. He was a Saint Francis of the avant-garde theater.

From Jerzy Grotowski’s “Toward a Poor Theater”

What is theater? What is unique about it? What can it do that film and television cannot? Two concrete conceptualization crystallized: the poor theater, and performance as an act of transgression.

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theater can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, “live” communion. This is an ancient theoretical truth, of course, but when rigorously tested in practice it undermines most of our usual ideas about theatre. It challenges the notion of theatre as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines — literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur-en-scene). This “synthetic theatre” is a contemporary theatre, which we readily call the “Rich Theater” — rich in flaws.

The Rich Theatre depends on artistic kleptomania, drawing from other disciplines, constructing hybrid-spectacles, conglomerates without backbone or integrity, yet presented as an organic artwork. By multiplying assimilated elements, the Rich Theatre tries to escape the impasse presented by movies and television. Since film and TV excel in the area of mechanical functions (montage, instantaneous change of place, etc.), the Rich Theatre countered with a blatantly compensatory call of “total theatre.” The integration of borrowed mechanism (movie screens onstage, for example) means a sophisticated technical plant, permitting great mobility and dynamism. And if the stage and/or auditorium were mobile, constantly changing perspective would be possible. This is all nonsense.

No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in theatre.

Pope Francis employs a similar strategy when he envisions a poor church that is for the poor. Ever escalating levels of finery, technology, capital and broadcast platforms don’t get him closer to his goal. It’s only through emulating the poverty of Saint Francis that he can reach the connection he’s after. Even in an era of streaming high-definition 3D video with 5.1 six channel surround sound to any screen anywhere, for the message he’s sending, the signal is stronger from a poor church.

For Brin, the Google Glasses he wears wirelessly connect to a network of industrial cloud computing installations around the world. These external data sources are able to feed information as multiple media types into the local context to provide a highest level of personal augmentation. For the moment, Brin is one of the few who can take advantage of this new technology. The connection he’s after requires strong wireless broadband coverage and connection to a series of algorithms that send him information based on his particular personal, social and location data.

If we assume that every moment of life can be optimized when we are fed the appropriate sets of contextual information on which to base our moment-to-moment decisions, then the Google Glass will deliver us to a life lead to its fullest. Confronted with a shelf in a supermarket aisle filled with hundreds of brands and formulations of shampoo, we will finally be able to select just the right brand given our hair type. At last we will be able to make the right decision when choosing between Coke, Pepsi and some fancy new gourmet cola-flavored soda. The fit between Sergey’s consumption of the world and what is available to be consumed will be perfectly optimized given the existing data set. In fact, were it to reach perfection, his participation would hardly be required at all–achieving frictionless consumption.

Both Sergey and Francis have taken steps to become jacked in to the present moment. Each set of steps has an ethical underpinning—much in the way Schumacher discusses the operation of “value” in his essay on Buddhist Economics. What we accept as valuable sets the terms of the economy we live within. The same thing is true of a path to the now.

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“I’ve seen incredible things. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

Published February 7, 2013 by cgerrish

The GE commercial played in the background, but something about those first lines resonated. Where had I heard them before? Turns out the lines are part of an advertising campaign called “Brilliant Machines”. In a promotional piece called “Pushing the Boundaries of Minds + Machines” they say:

The world is on the threshold of a new era of innovation and change with the rise of the Industrial Internet. It is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing and new levels of connectivity permitted by the Internet. The deeper meshing of the digital world with the world of machines holds the potential to bring about profound transformation to global industry, and in turn to many aspects of daily life, including the way many of us do our jobs. These innovations promise to bring greater speed and efficiency to industries as diverse as aviation, rail transportation, power generation, oil and gas development, and health care delivery. It holds the promise of stronger economic growth, better and more jobs and rising living standards, whether in the US or in China, in a megacity in Africa or in a rural area in Kazakhstan.

Who’s speaking? Who’s saying those things? Who is the “I” who has “seen things”? It’s a non-human, an android–a non-human machine that is meant to simulate a human machine.

I’ve seen things. I have a past, a memory. This thing I’m seeing now I’ve put into the context of all the things I’ve seen during my life. I’ve seen things that aren’t me. These things are separate from me; they coexist with me inside some larger ecological space. That thing we used to call the world. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen incredible things. Things so rare. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

I wonder if GE, in telling the beginning of the story of ‘Brilliant Machines’, wanted to foreshadow the end of these same brilliant machines? It finally came to me, the line from the commercial resonated with Roy’s “Tears in the Rain” speech from Bladerunner.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.

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