Category: simplicity

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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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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The Uncanny Valley of News

Published January 6, 2013 by cgerrish

The digital, they say, has a cost that approaches zero. Once the digital copying mechanism becomes a sunk cost, the cost per copy asymptotically swoops toward zero. This does a strange thing to value and price. The ink-on-paper media has had to come to terms with the fact that the Network is a vastly less expensive surface on which to inscribe their messages. The digital, in its short history, has yet to find its own level. It’s largely been priced as a discount to its analog counterpart. The news media is starting to understand that its identity lies in the ink rather than the paper.

The digital media can only feed on the corpse of the analog media for so long. We seem to have finally arrived at the point where digital media is beginning to establish its value, and therefore its price. Paywalls are starting to work, some digital editions are starting generate significant advertising revenue, and independent blogs are able to survive by subscription. We pay, not for more, but for less. Fewer things, better quality.

The banks of the river of news have overflowed, the medium has overheated and begun a McLuhanesque reversal. No one wants ‘all the news’. At a certain level of quantity the news can no longer be consumed and processed, it just flows through at the level of headlines. Marshal McLuhan noticed that information overload forces the information consumer into mode of pattern recognition. We now try to employ machines to process the torrent and pick out the patterns for us. But now even this pattern recognition mode has overheated. This happens the moment we aren’t satisfied by knowing something ‘like’ the news, but have no familiarity with the actual news itself. We’ve arrived at the uncanny valley of news.

In the era of so-called ‘Big Data’ even your Network identity is a pattern. You aren’t you, you’re someone ‘like’ you. The formula breaks when the pattern no longer predicts the future. The non-conformist breaks into the conversation and says just doing what the pattern predicts is behaving like a machine—and that’s boring. Take a look at this instead…

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Close Shave: How Objects Go Time Out of Mind

Published February 5, 2012 by cgerrish

At first it just seemed to be missing. Missing in the way that you’d say a person or a thing isn’t really gone, but just misplaced for the moment. But I’m finally convinced it’s not coming back. The systems that furnish and replenish my local environment with objects have written this product out of the distribution algorithms.

When I first started shaving my face as a young man, I decided to use a shaving brush and a cake of shaving soap. I’m a fan of simple solutions. Shaving soap seemed to solve the problem of shaving lather. The product innovations in this area haven’t seemed much like real improvements. The exotic flavors, textures and delivery methods of lather and foam seem more like narratives of advertising than a solution to the problem of shaving one’s face.

Fancy shaving soaps are available in all the places you’d expect. But the one that’s gone missing is called “Williams Shaving Soap.” It’s a serviceable shave soap, you might even call it ordinary. But “Williams” was available everywhere, at all the local grocery and drug stores. It was the remaining shaving soap, it held down a humble spot on the store shelves. Its disappearance from the local stores marks a significant event in the arc of this product’s existence. The soap was created in 1840 by James B. Williams. It was the first shaving soap created for use in mugs.

It’s clearly the case that “Williams” is available for order on the Network, and it may still be available on store shelves in other parts of the country. But in San Francisco, it’s vanished. A young man today, about to make some decisions about how he might want to go about shaving his face, peering at the shelves of the supermarket, won’t notice what’s missing. If that young man were to come across a cake of “Williams”, it would be in the context of a nostalgic experience. Its circulation would have no currency, it would float on the alternate currents of wet shaving “traditionalism.” We tend to think that physical presence has become less important in the era of the Network, but if you’ve never seen something, how will you know to submit a query to look for it?

Once another generation passes and this object shifts just over the horizon, it’s only a brief distance to becoming time out of mind. Even now I only experience it as an absence on a store shelf. Wet shaving and getting up a lather has its adherents, but in the era of the shave gel and the five-blade razor, will we ever recognize how the shaving technology industry is over-serving our whiskers?

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