Category: network

Standing On The Corner: Reality Bites

Published January 2, 2011 by cgerrish

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.

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Network as Media: Notes on Convergence

Published December 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Each strand of professional media was originally segregated by virtue of the physical properties of the medium and their particular economics of production. Newspapers, radio, television— each expanded on previous media models without completely replacing its predecessors.

The economics of professional media require that the cheapest delivery channel be utilized. This is why newspapers, for instance, are printed on newsprint. When you put the Network into the equation, it immediately becomes the cheapest delivery channel for the content of every other medium.

When a medium like the newspaper directs its productive output (news reporting, etc) to the Network, instead of to the printing press— it loses many of the qualities that define and differentiate it as a unique form of media. The technical requirements and opportunities of the new media are now in play.

It’s like white light hitting a prism, once a legacy medium is redirected at the Network, it is splintered into a rainbow of colors. Radio becomes print and video—each now has all the capabilities of the others. The physical properties of the media are no longer a limitation. There’s no sense in publishing a newspaper on the Network. The Network is a multiple-media media. In the context of the Network, each individual legacy media type must raid the others to supplement their stable of talent so it can publish text, audio and video into the Network.

The economic difficulty of newspapers and other media that have treated the Network as additional delivery option is that their production methods and costs can never be reduced beyond the requirements of their home physical media. When this kind of media organization competes with an organization structured to produce for the Network first, and anything else second— they will inevitably lose. The only question is whether they’ll able to withstand the wrenching transition of their infrastructure to a Network-first media organization. You can see some of this drama played out with The Daily Beast/Newsweek and the Huffington Post’s hiring of Peter Goodman and Timothy O’Brien from the New York Times. Once a Network-based media organization has established a sufficient economic base, it begins to poach talent from legacy media.

A fairly advanced form of this media reconstitution can be found in the sports news world. Comcast Sports Bay Area covers Bay Area sports. They have a cable station where they broadcast pre- and post-game shows, and in many cases the games themselves. They have former print journalists writing analysis of teams and games for their web site and appearing as guest analysts on their television shows. These analysts also appear on local sports radio. They run regular online chat rooms, and Twitter feeds. All of the “on-air” (read on-Network) talent write a blog. They’ll run both full-dress studio television shows and shows based mostly on ad-hoc video shot with a Flip cam. While they don’t broadcast all of the local professional team live press conferences over their cable station, they do make them available in a live stream on their web site. They blend text, photography, audio and video into in-depth, almost 24-hour, coverage of a set of sports teams. One can easily see this model working for coverage of music, entertainment, politics, business, financial and technology news or green energy.

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The Center Of A Multitude

Published December 19, 2010 by cgerrish

One of the difficulties with the idea of user-centric identity on the Network is that it simply reverses the polarity on a binary opposition, accepting all assumptions. Internet identity is system-centric, or rather it is systems-centric— well, let’s reverse that and move the power over identity from the systems to the user. Of course, the user has no computing infrastructure with which to manage and exercise this new power over her identity. A new set of systems, which we will not call systems, will be created to allow the user to wield this new-found authority.

However, it’s the reductionism of the word “centric” that may be at the root of the problem. The word “identity” implies a singular subject. Much of the user-centric identity vision is the use and re-use of a single identity in multiple contexts. An identity that can remain mostly hidden, with only the bits sticking out that are required for any particular transaction. Of course, this also creates a single point of failure. An identity that fails, or is intentionally corrupted, removes one from the Network. But in the end, it may simply turn out that the user isn’t “centric” at all.

It’s perhaps in the American experiment that the fluidity of the individual reaches a new historical state. What I might be, is undetermined. What I am, is a multitude. Poets might understand this by reading Walt Whitman. Scientists might understand it by considering the metaphor of quantum superposition. We are simultaneously and contradictorily many different selves. These are not masks, or personas, we put on one after another— the new mask a clean replacement of the previous one. The multitude is created because each mask remains when the next one is assumed. One can easily become lost while looking for a single center.

Song of Myself

Walt Whitman
Stanza 51

The past and present wilt–I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

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The Thing That The Copy Misses

Published December 19, 2010 by cgerrish

The Network is, we are told, a landscape operating under an economy of abundance. Only the digital traverses the pathways of the Network, and the digital is infinitely copyable without any prior authorization. Kevin Kelly has called the Network a big copy machine. The copy of the digital thing is note for note, bit for bit. It’s a perfect copy. Except for the location of the bits and the timestamp, there’s no discernable difference between this copy and that one. The Network fills itself with some number of copies commensurate with the sum total of human desire for that thing.

One imagines that if you follow the path of timestamps back far enough, you’d find the earliest copy. The copy that is the origin of all subsequent copies. We might call this the master copy, and attribute some sense of originality to it. Yet, it has no practical difference from any of the copies that follow. Imperfect copies are unplayable, and are eventually deleted.

The economy of abundance is based on a modulation of the model of industrial production. The assembly line in a factory produces thousands upon thousands of new widgets with improved features at a lower cost. Everyone can now afford a widget. Once the floppy and compact disk became obsolete, the multiplication of digital product approached zero cost. The production of the next copy, within the context of the Network’s infrastructure, requires no skilled labor and hardly any capital. (This difference is at the heart of the economic turmoil in journalism and other print media. Newsprint is no longer the cheapest target medium for news writing.)

In the midst of this sea of abundant copies I began to wonder what escaped the capture of the copy. It was while reading an article by Alex Ross in The New Yorker on the composer Georg Friederich Haas that some of the missing pieces began to fall in to place. The article, called Darkness Audible, describes a performance of Haas’s music:

A September performance of Haas’s “In iij Noct.�? by the JACK Quartet—a youthful group that routinely fills halls for performances of Haas’ Third String Quartet—took place in a blacked-out theatre. The effect was akin to bats using echolocation to navigate a lightless cave, sending out “invitations,�? whereby the players sitting at opposite ends of the room signalled one another that they were ready to proceed from one passage to the next.

As in a number of contemporary musical compositions, the duration of some of Haas’s music is variable. The score contains a set of instructions, a recipe, but not a tick-by-tick requirement for their unfolding. In a footnote to his article on Haas, Ross relates a discussion with violinist, Ari Striesfelf, about performing the work:

We’ve played the piece seven times, with three more performances scheduled in January, at New Music New College in Sarasota, Florida. The first time we played it was in March, 2008, in Chicago, at a venue called the Renaissance Society, a contemporary art gallery at the University of Chicago. Nobody that I know of has had an adverse reaction to the piece or to the darkness. Most people are completely enthralled by the experience and don’t even realize that an hour or more has passed. Haas states that the performance needs to be at least thirty-five minutes but that it can be much longer. He was rather surprised that our performance went on for as long as it did! But the length was never something we discussed. It was merely the time we needed to fully realize his musical material.

The music coupled with the darkness has this incredible ability to make you completely lose track of time. We don’t even realize how much time has gone by. Our longest performance was eighty minutes, in Pasadena, and when we had finished I felt we had only begun to realize the possibilities embedded within the musical parameters. Every performance seems to invite new ideas and possibilities. In the performance you heard of ours back in September there were some moments that I couldn’t believe what we had accomplished. Moments where we were passing material around the ensemble in such a fluid fashion you would think we had planned it out, but it was totally improvised in the moment. The more we perform the piece, the more in tune with each other’s minds we become.

When we return to the question: what’s the thing that’s missing from the copy, we find that in the music of Georg Friederich Haas, almost everything is missing. The performance, by design, cannot be copied in the sense that the Network understands a copy. Its variation is part of its essence. A note for note recording misses the point.

So, while the Network can abundantly fill up with copies of a snapshot of a particular performance of Haas’s work, it misses the work entirely. The work, in its fullness, unfolds in front of an audience and disappears into memory just as quickly as each note sounds. Imagine in this day and age, a work that slips through the net of the digital. A new instance of the work requires a new performance by an ensemble of highly skilled artists. Without this assembly of artists, the work remains silent.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending a performance of Charpentier’s Midnight Mass by Magnificat Baroque in an old church in San Francisco. While variation isn’t built in to the structure of the piece, all performance exists to showcase variation. How will this piece sound, in this old church with these particular musicians on a Sunday afternoon? Even if I were to record the concert from my seat and release it to the Network, those bits would barely scratch the surface of the experience.

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