Crikey, that sun eh? Did you forget what it felt like too? I forgot how shadows worked at full power until yesterday.
I really went back and forth on this week’s render. I was trying to achieve something with particles and/or liquid that I really didn’t. Fluids are that last frontier where there’s a real diminishing of returns for power. You can keep cranking up the simulation resolution and detail but it’s really hard to get anything that feels believable at scale. I also find that Blender it’s designed for certain types of simulation, usually fluid flowing and filling things so doing eg. drips are really hard. Thinking about it now I bet there’s some tutorials on rain out there I could have looked at. Anyway, ran a massive particle simulation in the end and … meh. Not so jazzed. Oh well, we live and learn.
Stories that stick
The problem with saying about how we ‘should’ be talking about NFT’s as part of a larger, rather abstract and hard to bend-your-head-around narrative on decentralisation or a move to post-capitalism is an assumption that crypto technologies have some sort of teleology – some sort of preordained role in an inevitable story of humanity. The rate at which I’ve been spammed statements like ‘blockchain was never about individual profit n00b!’ on Twitter dot com indicates a sort of blind faith that the recent bubbles in crypto and their attachment to get-rich-quick schemes is just a temporary blip in a grand historical arc. But we’ve seen this story arc play out before; it’s in the uncomfortable spot of technological development where it’s released to the world (well really over the last five or ten years but obviously accelerating now) and the world just does whatever the hell it likes, no matter what you think it should be.
I remember having this problem with shoulds as a child; my Dad telling me that grass wasn’t for riding bikes on. Grass isn’t for anything. It doesn’t have any inherent purpose. It’s just grass and you can turn it into a lawn, a football pitch or let it grow wild. Technologies aren’t for anything. They emerge and are socially constructed as a mix of opportunity, problem solving and chance not some inevitable building block in the myth of progress. There are all sorts of things that don’t exist.
What crypto should be and how it should operate is something which I think we can all broadly agree on. But those ideas are complex, they require time and technical understanding to grasp not to mention a critical competency in institutional structures and their failings as is. Stabilisation is achieved when a problem appears to have been solved and the ‘make a load of money really fast DON’TLOOKTOOCLOSEATHOW!’ is louder, more obvious and easier to understand than decentralised institutional structures and distributed leadership. Of course, the next part of stabilisation is the encoding of that technology in policy so how governments and central banks chose to respond is going to cement (or ‘concretise’ a la Simondon) crypto.
I know a lot of folks are hoping that the sudden interest in NFTs translates into a broader understanding of the conceptual opportunity of crypto but that’s going to require some grounded concrete examples about how decentralisation and distributed responsibility make an individual’s life better and those stories seem to be few and far between. There really is no reason to engage with NFTs except for money. They really have no other apparent social affordances than to move money around and you now, money talks.
Ok, I know I’m cynical and falling into the trap of assuming that change isn’t possible but it always feels like the same story: Some folks with extensive critical and technical understanding spend years, decades even designing and devising a technology then release it into the world only to see it subverted by the same forces they thought they were going to challenge. Remember the Internet? Hell it goes both ways, think about Uber struggling to understand why the rest of the world doesn’t behave like Silicon Valley.
Honestly I don’t know enough about crypto to see through the current hysteria to what lies beyond. People with … strange names… on Twitter have sent me technical papers with recommendations like ‘ACTUALLY’ but that sort of just reinforces the point. If I, a snivelling liberal academic who at least claims a slightly above average degree of understanding of emerging technology don’t have the time or comprehension to read technical papers from the last twenty years to change my mind, what chance anyone else?
I guess it’s worth examining my own hypocrisy here. I mean, I will bang on to anyone who sits still for ten minutes about the imaginative potential of AI and CGI and yet can’t see past my own nose on crypto. So why do I get the right to say another world is out there if we seize these technologies? I guess they have bigger, better social stories. AI’s isn’t great but it’s real and can be pointed at and CGI is, well, everywhere making worlds in video games, cinema and on your screen. Some of these worlds force you to confront our own too, even in small ways.
Crypto still doesn’t have it’s shibboleth, it’s narrative monument, it’s imaginary that you can point at and say ‘that’s what it is’ – and if it does have one now it’s probably, unfortunately, Beeple.
Short Stuff
The EU is building a new virtual Earth simulator called ‘DestinE’ – they’re going to use 20,000 graphics cards to do it. Think what you want about it but I just like PC Gamer telling the EU to ‘get to the back of the line bois.’
Still not much stuff, I’ve fallen into bad habits. I need to write and record another lecture this week so I’m about to get down to that. Love you, speak to you later.
DS019: Cycles: Glorious reflections, accurate lighting, 5 minutes per frame rendering time. Tried to set this up in Eevee originally but the lighting got too complex.
The grey-blue is shattered by the streaks and beads of water, like the sky is coming apart in layers.
Don’t worry, it’s a brief one this week.
For some reason I’ve been listening to the soundtrack of my early twenties the last few weeks. Bloody loving it too, though a part of me is concerned that this is the beginning of the road to ‘they don’t make music like they used to anymore’ as a I clutch a copy of Panic at The Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out and my eyes glaze over. I genuinely haven’t listened to new music in so long, I don’t know where I’d start. I need some new music without words to work to. I’ve rinsed the chilled cow stuff and I think jazz and blues are too important to be background music. Anything in the Zombie Zombie, Waveshaper, Ratatat part of the world? Wavy synths, whiny guitars and crispy drums pls?
I was doing a lecture the other day for some students and was talking about when I started turning away from doing futures stuff and more towards now stuff – I usually say ‘critical technical practice’ after Philip Agre. This is also connected with last week’s moan about the same version of the future being tramped out over and over again – this vague and unprovable notion that the future has basically been suffocated by its own hubris. That ‘futures’ are a sort of runaway out-of-control Fantasia scene of glossy interfaces and sincere utterances of ’empathy.’ That it’s bought into its own hype and is just reproducing – almost robotically – the same visions based on a toxic concoction of imagined nostalgia dressed up as ‘authenticity’ and the never-ending, pointless quest for power and control through the salami-slicing of the world into thinner slivers of ‘data.’ A sort of #developmentaesthetics for technology in general.
So I read some Alfred Nordmann as recommended by Jack Stilgoe. Nordmann was instrumental in a lot of discussion about speculative ethics around nanotechnology and the brunt of his research was his contention that speculating on future ethical conundrums not only distracts from current ethical conundrums but also constructs imaginaries and expectations of the technology that may be unfeasible. This is exactly the stuff I’m writing about at the moment so it was delicious. So by saying ‘what if a rogue nanotechnology got really into pineapples and then converted all of the planet into a giant pineapple farm?’ you create a rhetorical expectation of a pineapple-obsessed nano-goo.
So why are people drawn to speculating on these future pineapple or non-pineapple conundrums? Well, because the future, as presented from the present is an apparently cost-less enterprise. It isn’t ‘real’ and so is a playground for imagining things in at their extremes. This, I suppose, is the basis of speculative anything – ethics, design, philosophy etc. But, as Barbara Adam points out this makes speculators somewhat ‘trespassers in the future present of others’ because by setting up expectations and imaginaries, even extreme ones, we are foreclosing futures for others; ‘we are inescapably illegal immigrants in their worlds; and that they have not given their consent.’
To go back to Nordmann, speculating also doesn’t necessarily tackle un-seen ethical issues that are emergent in the present such as exploitative labour practices in laboratories or shady nanotech funding, it just gets everyone very chin-strokey about pineapples. This is hardly a radical insight and many have had it before – long-time friends Changeist call it flatpack futures, for example. Futures can be like getting an earring at school; you’re cool for a 14-year-old, perhaps you manage to convey a sense of worldly cultured-ness on the playground but you still have to do the same exams everyone else does. I did anyway. I was definitely cool, everyone thought so.
Perhaps in times of crisis our imagination gets more and more foreclosed and so you listen in on chats between talented young folks and just think ‘hang on, isn’t this just Microsoft’s 2013 product vision thing?’ when they talk about future tech.
Where are you going with this Tobias? I don’t know! It’s a blog, I just throw words at it and sometimes something sticks, ok?
Short Stuff
I feel like Short Stuff should have a theme tune. Like it would if this was a show. Add your own theme tune, go back, read it again, sing it in that voice. Record it. That was fun.
An estimated 1.35 million people die a year in road traffic accidents, 153,158 of those are in the UK. That doesn’t even count the contribution cars make to the 7 million people a year who die of air pollution. Of those 1.35 million, 154 were in Teslas. Numbers of people killed by ‘AI’ is tricky to find; not only because AI is such a nebulous concept but also those effects might not be experienced for years. Directly, robots killed 33 people in the US in 2017 but that doens’t even necessarily mean AI. What I’m getting at is the best way to avoid being killed directly by an AI is to ride a bicycle. Cars are still arguably the biggest direct technological threat to human lives. (I have the bucket of caveats under my desk if you need them.)
I’m un-fussed by pineapples. You know, in a fruit salad I’ll take it but I don’t think I’d ever just buy a pineapple.
I started listening toHow To Save a Planet after having it backed up for a while. It’s brilliant.
What’s So Great About That? is a new YouTube channel I’m really into. It’s basically another cultural commentary one but it’s really well produced by Grace Lee. ‘Be Gay; Do Crimes. Untitled Goose Game: Is it Good or Bad?‘ was a joy. Particularly the Twitter furore over the paradox of the goose as both a leftist and rightist icon while the developers continue to insist that it is, in fact, just a goose.
God I’m almost rid of Evernote.
Ok, there’s probably going to be another one next week. Don’t worry I won’t do one of those tiresome year-end recaps. I can’t remember further back than Wednesday anyway. My memory is shot to pieces, always has been, I wonder if it’s a by-product of my compartmentalising – I only cling on to information that is functionally useful rather than associate it with any particular time or place. That’s why so many things I say start with ‘someone said’ or ‘I remember hearing that.’ Not very good at referencing. Look, I will shut up now. I love you, have a bloody smashing week if you’re taking it easy and an easy one if you’re taking it hard.
DS018: Playing around with forces and a particle sim. Turned out to be complex mostly because I was being stupid.
It’s dark outside and it appears to be making its way inside, like a fog seeping through the minuscule cracks and gaps in the window and attempting to fill the room.
This week’s render was a total pain to do. It’s actually technically quite simple; I was reminding myself of how to work with force fields a bit but for some reason bits of my brain failed to work and I had to re-render twice. The first time I forgot to put the simulation on so nothing came back. Then I tried again and for some reason the collisions weren’t working. Anyway, that’s why I’m late. Sorry. Meanwhile Matthew Plummer Fernandez has been messing around with some Mœbius shaders that looks super amazing.
It’s also been a bit much this week. In my hubris I decided to start a lot of projects this year thinking it would be fun and now I’m trying to juggle them all and get as much done as I can before people slink off for Christmas. That and making some steaming progress with the PhD means I’m at this desk 15 hours most days and honestly I had a bit of a head blank trying to remember what I read or did this week. I’m mostly catching up on more dated academic stuff at the moment to bolster some contextual work, it’s all amazing but not very hip and modern. For instance, I’ve been reading some interesting things about how experts selectively intuit the world from Karin Knorr Cetina and Charles Goodwin. It’s one of those things that just makes you go ‘of course!’ on every page and firms up some vague notions you, a minor bureaucrat, might have held.
Of Bicycles, Bakelites, Beeps and Boops.
Speaking of things that you read that suddenly make sense of stuff; I was devouring Wiebe Bijker’s work the week before about how rhetorics emerge around new technologies to ‘stabilise’ them in society. In the Social Construction of Artefacts, he and Trevor Pinch suggest that technological artefacts have a flexible definition through their development until they are ‘stabilised’ where they become coherent and normalised amongst social actors and groups. They, and others who have used this framework say that stabilisation is fought out in rhetorics – the way the technology is discussed and described in the media, press and reporting and that it occurs in two ways: Firstly, ‘rhetorical closure‘ or a general consensus on the terms and concepts used when talking about the technology and secondly, ‘problem redefinition‘ which often happens when a technology has it’s application and role changed in the process of stabilisation.
In Bijker and Pinch’s work they use the bicycle as an example, particularly to John Boyd Dunlop’s invention of air-filled tyres in 1887 which were invented by Dunlop for his son to make cycling more comfortable. Up to this point wheels were made of wood or metal and there wasn’t much in the way of smooth roads. Engineers and bicycle manufacturers struggled to convince people (mostly men) that tyres were better. They were perceived as being unsafe by creating instability and ‘un-manly’ by cushioning the rigour of cycling. So, two parallel things happened; firstly a sustained advertising campaign in the press espousing their safety and secondly, Dunlop paid to have his wheel entered into races where, of course, they proved to be significantly faster. In the first instance is rhetorical closure, creating a media environment where air-filled tyres are associated with safety and in the second is problem redefinition; tyres were created for comfort but they are presented as aids to speed.
Madeiline Akrich goes further and suggests that this process of stabilisation also creates (or fails to create) the users that have been imagined by the developers. The users of the air-filled tyre were imagined to be women and children who weren’t ‘manly’ enough to use metal or wooden wheels, but Dunlop created and expanded the entire user base by redefining tyres as a solution to speed.
There’s lots more great stuff in there about the form-factor as well, how the Penny-farthing and similar models that were seen as the de-facto form of the bicycle came to be overtaken by the ‘safety bicycle‘ – a form originally invented (again) for women and children to learn how to cycle but is now standard.
This is the bit where I go ‘All this is to say that…’
All this is to say that I was listening in on a Clubhouse chat the other day about the future of interfaces and was a little disappointed and quite angry. I’ve written and talked before about how I often find that conversations of future technology have been blunted by the relentless torrent of futurity in the world such that there is a real paucity of imagination. There’s so much future around that people seem to struggle to see anything else. So it all ends up looking the same and new people parrot the things the people before them said. The folks present at this future of interfaces thing tended to divert into one of two sets of cliches: Either a nostalgia for a past they never experienced and consequently idealised of the ‘remember when you knew the name of everyone in the local shop? What if that but an app?’ type. Or continuing down the marginal-capital-gains route of closer and closer scrutiny of people’s behaviours in further flawed attempts to divine their needs and intervene to sell them things. Chuck in terms like ‘behaviour’, ’empathy’ and ‘AI’ and you’ve got a pitch that would probably do pretty ok at a UX event or whatever.
A lot of the stuff I bang on about comes down to this idea of what would technology be like if it wasn’t just about being faster, stronger, more consumptive and productive? Now it’s arguable, as Alfred Gell suggests, that’s where art lives and I’ve also banged on about that. But this thing on future UI either trying to replicate misremembered pasts (The Holodeck paradox as N. Katherine Hayles calls it) or just fuelling the fire of data-fying humans and calling it ’empathy’ made me think about what precedents there are.
Which is where my thought returns to the bicycle. (I know I’m predictable and frankly my thoughts always return to the bicycle which may be helpful in this instance ok). You see, in 1887(!) they were arguing about whether air tyres were ok or not and I bet if you look outside or even around your abode right now you will find a trace of a bicycle. Either an actual one, parking for one or bits of one. Both of those interface futures assume that whatever interface we have now is not good enough – either not giving us some ‘authentic’ experience or not providing enough data. If the logics of these future interfacers prevailed and the general logics of technological futurity worked, then we wouldn’t even have bicycles! The ‘inevitable’ path of progress would have seen them supplanted by the car. In the teleological way in which people involved in these things talk about technology; the bicycle is slower, has less carrying capacity, produces less capital and contributes to the economy signifcantly less than the car. So why have bicycles not only remained but remained the world’s most popular form of transport relatively unchanged for 150 years? (Although sticking batteries in them is amazing and I’m excited for everyone who gets into cycling now. Please get a bike you cool dude, you.)
Because people do not think transactionally and teleologically. Bicycles are fun. They’re fun to ride and they make you feel good – they rarely fulfil primary drives for efficiency, speed, power, consumption and production. There are, of course, enormous exceptions and I will happily rattle on about the efficiencies of cycling in a place like London but precisely the things that draw people to cars (comfort, ease of use, safety) turn them off bicycles. Cue my ‘fast, fun, free’ routine. Of course, interface designers are aware of fun. It is referred to as ‘playful interaction’ which is the slightly nicer version of gamification which is still about leading someone towards buying something or giving up some information.
So then the question is what the bicycle of interfaces is? What’s the thing that the teleology of progress just can’t outrun that will just stick around defying either rhetorical closure or problem redefinition or come to encompass them all. I suspect it may be in video games – because again, the primary drive is fun and where it’s been twisted into money-making scams it hasn’t gone well. Not that I’m calling interface design a money-making scam.
Video games are still a strangely stigmatised sore-thumb amongst design folks. Despite being the world’s most popular media they are nervously talked about, seen as a lesser media and it can take me a while to tease out of people that they enjoy them and I suspect (this is for another post) that this is because unlike reading, thinking, making etc. they don’t fulfil the performance of self-improvement that concerns most design and creative folks. They don’t appear to be for anything and yet are enormously popular which is why, like the bicycle, I imagine they’ll have significant longevity. Anyway, you really want Nicolas Nova for this stuff not me.
Perhaps this is also a flaw in Bijker’s thinking – that technology has to be teleological, it has to be for for something; to fulfil some need. I always return to Alfred Gell’s technology definition that it is first; a tool, second; the knowledge on how to use the tool and third; the social necessity for the use of the tool. My work is on how that social necessity is formed or invented. The bicycle is of course a primary means of transport for many without access to cars or the supporting infrastructure and its resurgence in the urban centres of Europe and the US could be seen as a result of climate conscience and cost efficiencies but this again assumes that people make decisions out of economic self-interest and not because it’s fun and cool and you look awesome.
Anyway, think on it; what interface will still be around in 150 years, relatively unchanged, just cracking on because people enjoy it?
Small Stuff
Look how easily I got out of that half-formed diatribe by just jumping to the next section. I have no editor and I can do whatever the hell I like and if you read this far you may as well finish.
Silicon Valley tech has started to realise that Europe is the biggest threat to monopolisation, tax avoidance and unethical data practices so the big four invested $23 million this year in lobbying policy makers. This is like the thing that we need to keep reminding ourselves. I know people who work at these places, and they’re lovely and smart and care but the other side of them is a bunch of lawyers and PR people who are paid inordinate amounts to try and keep the grey areas of the business by which they profit in the grey. That is as real as all the people talking about ’empathy’ at UX events: the people taking policy makers out for expensive dinners to try and get court cases dismissed. It’s the same ship ok.
You know, corollary to that these same people also fund climate change denial. I’m in a cranky mood today. Again, people at Google, Apple etc. are lovely but their business model is predicated on keeping policy scrutiny away and if that involves funding fringe right-wing climate conspiracies they’ll bloody do it because the ends always justify the means.
I guess I’m just fed up of people who work for Google saying ’empathy’ which appears to have become devoid of meaning (problem redefinition)
NVIDIA have launched a DIY AI kit because why not, they’re NVIDIA, they can do whatever they like. You don’t see much on ‘Citizen AI’ as much as citizen space, science and data. Is there a kind of co-op AI culture out there? Feels very cyberpunk and cool if there is.
God I can’t wait to see the back of Evernote.
I have decided, I am going to replay Disco Elysium this Christmas, I have never replayed a game before. I might try streaming bits of it on Instagram. Video games are great, reading is boring and you would admit it if no one was around.
Right, that’s it, particularly cranky this week but hearing young, caring, thoughtful people parrot the same lines that have been repeated for the past decade without a dose of self-reflectivity makes me sad. Look. I love you. Thank you for reading this again. Let me know if you want to talk as you know I love hearing from you. What day is it? Bye.