photo credit: justinpickard

Following last week’s introduction to Project Cascadia (and accompanying reading list), I thought I’d share a couple of passages that have been firmly lodged in my brain this week.

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First, the very beginning of Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, an extraordinary novel-slash-history of Soviet cybernetics. In this extract, the author grapples with some of the peculiarities and nuance of his writing:

‘This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved. The idea is the hero. It is the idea that sets forth, into a world of hazards and illusions, monsters and transformations, helped by some of those it meets along the way and hindred by others.’

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (2010), p. 3.

(‘The idea is the hero.‘ How do you approach a biography of an idea? An idea of a region; a utopia; shared – at some vague, subconscious level – by millions of people? Approached obliquely … glimpsed through gaps, and attacked from strange angles? Ambushed with some strange hybrid of fact and fiction? Hmm.)

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Secondly, a couple of lines from Wild Bill Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum‘; a meditation on legacy futures in the form of a short story:

‘She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.’

– William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Burning Chrome (1988), pp. 38-39.

(‘Segments of a dreamworld.’ Hunting traces … gathering evidence … detective work, pinning down the imaginary and the nebulous in something tangible. The process of documenting the imaginary drives Gibson’s photojournalist protagonist to the brink of madness, as he begins to slip sideways into the obsolete retro-future he’s been sent to document. It’s an excellent short story, and a key insipiration for some of my earliest work on this project.)

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photo credit: justinpickard

And, finally, the opening lines from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, a strange, tangential, and exhaustively-referenced biography of Los Angeles:

‘The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llana del Rio – Open Shop Los Angeles’s utopian antipode – you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake.’

– Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 3.

(‘From the ruins of its alternative future.‘ If you want to understand the ways things will turn out, you have to understand what’s already failed, and why? These are words that echo (rhyme with?) Sterling’s oft-repeated aphorism: ‘The ruins of the unsustainable are the twenty-first century’s frontier.’ The mission, then, is to locate sites where the past and future collide with an unexpected ferocity, bringing long-buried cultural detritus to the surface. Atemporality, located in space.)

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More to follow, in time.

‘Also, does anyone else keep thinking of that textual analysis algorithm they used on Agatha Christie’s books, that was meant to identify when she started to lose it?

If there’s an open source implementation, would it be cruel to integrate it with [They Work For You]?’

– Alex, on ‘Did somebody just try to buy the British government?’, Charlie’s Diary, 03/11/2010

UPDATE (04/11): Here we go.

“… I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was …”

An interesting discussion of the way an audience can rapidly become a mob, in all it’s pitchfork-waving, windmill-burning glory – full kudos to danah for being so open and honest about the whole thing. There’s also something interesting (and faintly disturbing) about the journalistic/political side of this.

See: Trafigura & Carter-Ruck, Stephen Fry.

And then there’s this from Chairman Bruce, in conversation with Dunne & Raby (and courtesy of of Icon 078) :

“If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they’d be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.”

At this point, some appropriate footage from the BBC Digital Revolution rushes, from (the newly en-PhDed) Aleks Krotoski‘s ‘virtual communities’ interview with Howard Rheingold:

I’m (always) on Twitter, and – as a medium – it’s made my experience of the world a lot ‘thinner’, for want of a better word. It’s given me partial access to lots of people and areas of interest that would have otherwise remained strictly off-limits. This might be because I got in early, at the point where a relatively small, tech-literate user base were more willing to engage with strangers, and the ‘thinness’ phenomena is something I’ve also experienced (though to a far lesser extent) with other media and social networks – bulletin boards, newsgroups, email, Facebook.

But is Twitter a Rheingoldian (?) ‘virtual community‘ in the same way as something like the WELL or a World of Warcraft guild? I’m not really sure – the affordances of the technology seem to favour the individual at the expense of any kind of inchoate collective. It’s lots of relationships happening simultaneously in the same space, but there’s no real distinct group identity. Here, a logic of radical individualism combines with a sense of transience to encourage behaviours that – as with the boyd case – simply wouldn’t wash elsewhere. There’s an acceleration of discourse; a qualitative, structural change which Sterling sees as a major challenge to science fiction authors attempting to evoke a sense of wonder from an audience of readers who will have read the same things, and may even be able to reverse-engineer the initial ingredients from the final published work. And that’s after the writing (authoring?) process is complete!

See: Node Magazine, a hypertext annotation of William Gibson’s 2007 novel Spook Country.

As a Twitter user, it’s easy to feel abstracted from your words: words which either fade to dust or take on a life of their own, re-tweeted by others. A slip of the tongue, an impulsive comment, and – like Fry – you find yourself as the prisoner of your own (digitised) tongue.

© image credit: the conde nast publications ltd.

Now that it’s safely in print, I feel comfortable pointing you to a copy of the email interview I conducted with Swedish doctoral student Jonas Anderson. There’s some seriously interesting stuff in there, very little (unfortunately) of which made it into the final 250 words.

Oh, and with the apparent ratification of Lisbon, it’ll be interesting to see the reception Amelia Andersdotter gets from the European Parliament (and the media) when taking her seat at the start of December. Researching the Wired piece, I spent fifteen minutes transfixed by her interview with Andrew Keen for (of all things) The Daily Telegraph:

Setting aside my own nascent megalomania for a moment (if we must), the December issue also contains Mic Wright‘s fantastic feature on photographic miracle the Impossible Project – mentioned briefly in my delirious (and slightly incoherent) economic analysis of Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Makers. Also: heaps of nifty infographics, airfix hacking, and Warren Ellis’ spirited defence of phonic curmudgeon Paul Morley.

Now, most of this is probably available online, but – admit it – you need the tactility of print. Underneath it all is the realisation that it’s just not practical to take your laptop to the toilet with you. Netbook, maybe, but not your laptop …

They’ve given me a platform to rant and rail against Baroness Susan Greenfield; made their interview rushes available for people to download, embed, and remix; and actually seem to be listening to the comments and suggestions they’ve recieved.

This clip – in which web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee turns the camera on his interviewer, Aleks Krotoski – is one of my favorite videos of the year:

Two people sharing a passion – it’s intimate, authentic, and utterly of-the-moment. So zeitgeisty it hurts your teeth. And I love it.

(Admittedly, this video is an off-the-cuff clip from Tim, rather than an official output of the documentary, but the BBC enabled this meeting of minds – so my point on the BBC being awesome stands.)

(Via Digital Urban)

I’d argue that this is what the internet does better than traditional broadcast media – empowers those with the skills to bypass the gatekeepers, plugging their output straight into an audience. As ever, the watchword is authenticity. Admittedly, I may be carrying a certain nostalgia for my own 6th form-era travel documentary exploits, but from the look of it, these guys deserve an audience.