Justin Pickard

Network Dystopias

Architecture student Keiichi Matsuda’s AR concept video triggered memories of a short vignette posted on a forum by a pseudonymous stranger, back in 2008. Taken together, we get something like Bladerunner with a 2000s sensibility -

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Goldsmiths: Autumn’s Final Fortnight

Really need to get this post finished before heading back up to London for the ice-encrusted start of Spring Term. So, here’s a compressed summary of Weeks Eleven (30/11 – 4/12) and Twelve (7/12 – 11/12).

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Peer production, no hippy lovefest

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)

Goldsmiths: ‘Virtuality and the Mouse’

So, here’s the first (diagnostic) essay from my Goldsmiths MA. Submitted unfinished, it stands as an attempt to bend my head round literary critic Katherine Hayles‘ work on virtuality, focusing in on (1) a piece of video footage taken up by the mainstream scientific press, and (2) the Virtual Boy – Nintendo’s ill-fated attempt at consumer VR.

Gobbledegook or genius? There are some minor spelling and referencing issues, sure, and – in her comments – my course tutor suggested that the writings of biologist/cyborg feminist Donna Haraway might have filled the gaps in my argument. Since submitting, I’ve devoured a book-length interview with the woman, and got my hands of a copy of When Species Meet as part of the Christmas loot, which is high on my dead-tree reading list for 2010.

In the meantime, any comments or questions?

Cybernetics, the ambiguous heart

“The 1946 Macy Conference is kind an aleph moment. In attendance were people intrinsically involved in computers and prosthesis (the collaboration of man and machine), modern anthropology and modern neuroscience (what it means to be human), game theory (the Cold War and the conversion of people into cogs). We can trace direct paths through counterculture and social organisation, decentralisation and the Web, and to a socialist Chilean internet. There are connections to cults, advertising, social software and games, rocketry, suburbia, complexity theory and ecology. Historical roots lie in golems and pneumatic tubes, science fiction and weaving, pataphysics and the telegraph. The language of our information society was created, often knowingly, by these people. Cybernetics is the beautiful and ugly and ambiguous heart of our information society.”

- Matt Webb, ‘Cybernetics: Researcher Wanted‘ (BERG)

Backchat, some thoughts

Having penned a short definition of ‘the backchannel’ for December’s Wired UK (see subsequent celebratory arm-flailing), it was with a tightening stomach that I read this blog post from web researcher danah boyd:

“… 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.

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We dwell in possibility

“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”

- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’

A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.

Wearable Computing, Circa 1996

© photo credit: Steve Mann

We Live in Public (2009)

Ondi Timoner’s video documentary of the last days of Rome, where Rome is the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Rolls along like something out of Coupland, all the more absurd and disturbing for the fact that it actually happened.

“It took me a beat to realize that what Josh Harris created in 1999 was a physical metaphor for where the Internet would take us,” she said. “It was his way of saying, ‘No matter what I put together, no matter how fascistic it may appear; whether you have to wear uniforms or you have to be interrogated, or the fact that you can’t leave — people won’t care about that. They won’t bother with the details.’ He knew they would pour through the doors for the promise of 110 surveillance cameras and being part of what, right then, was the place to be.”

- Timoner, quoted in The Washington Post

More Accurate

“We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassains patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

- Randall Munroe, xkcd