Box064: The Consumerists are Persistent

21.02.2221.02.22

DS064: Four rocks, closely arranged with flower-like arrangements of black oil gravitating towards them.

No posts the last two weeks. I won’t make excuses. I’m in the last few weeks of my break from work and I want to spend it with my head buried in the sand hiding from the nightmare that people are willingly building, shipping and advertising. So this is a bit longer because it’s two weeks of emails to myself and unread tabs but also has no coherent narrative.

DS064

My very first, long-delayed foray into geometry nodes. Usually when a new feature is packed in to Blender or I find a new plugin I’ll find an excuse to play with it in a render. However, geometry nodes isn’t just a new feature, it’s an entirely new underlying logic and system for making things with dozens, if not hundreds of new features and an entire new language of nodes and procedures to learn. I’ve been putting it off because it would either require dutifully following along some tutorials or finding an excuse to dive right in. This week I finally found something (representing magnetic fields sort of) where I could start to dive in and play with it, fumbling along as I go.

I really prefer to learn this way – through trial and error by solving a concrete problem rather than abstractly exploring wildly or being introduced. There’s always a way to achieve anything, even if it takes a lot of force, so it’s always worth persevering. I knew exactly the effect I wanted to achieve so it was just a case of going towards it.

What if ethics aren’t immutable?

I’m paraphrasing massively but I remember someone giving a lecture, possibly George, and saying that; ‘Everyone has ethics. Elon Musk has ethics, it’s just that we might not agree with them.’ The point being that possession of ethics does not make an immutable goodness or badness, it’s just a state of being.

I’ve been background-wathcing Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D while on the turbo trainer. These types of shows are perfect for training: Two episodes neatly fit in a 90 minute session, you never feel like you’re missing anything or need to really think and they have a predictable beat. I’m in the fourth season now and I’ve just struck a curious seam of narrative in which protagonists are being replaced by perfect android replicas to fulfil this season’s villain’s plot of something or other blah blah blah. The plot itself isn’t particularly interesting, what’s interesting is the ethical stance and lack thereof of the villain and protagonists.

The process works likes this: The villain kidnaps the person they want to replicate and then ‘uploads’ their memories, experiences, thoughts and feelings into an android replica who is then sent back to replace the real person. It’s revealed early on that these androids, full of the experiences and memories of their ‘true’ selves, fully believe themselves to be the original person; they don’t know that they’re ‘fake.’ They experience, fear, hope and desire and, when finding out they’re androids; existential horror.

For the villain it is crucial that the original people are kept alive and in stasis and he actually goes to great pains of building a simulation in which they can be happy while kidnapped. He is adamant that he is not a monster and doesn’t want to kill or cause pain in the pursuit of his goals. He doesn’t need to do this, in other aspects he demonstrates a psychopathic commitment to his goals and disregard for life where you might expect him to think of the people he’s kidnapping as disposable; but he doesn’t. He is adamant that he is not a monster and won’t cross the line of killing or even causing pain.

On the other hand, the good guys have absolutely no qualms about killing and burning androids they find amongst their ranks. There’s not even a debate. In one episode, it’s just a smash cut from ‘you’re an android’ to a literal furnace with the android in, even though, through lengthy exposition they’ve described how the androids have the full experience of being human and believe they are the people they are replicating.

It’s just an interesting piece of writing that the villain, despite having no real narrative need, goes to great lengths to protect and ensure the wellbeing of his captives for purely ethical reasons while the ‘good guys’ just completely eschew any ethical debate about the life or not-lifeness of the people/machines they are mercilessly executing. Maybe I’m speaking too soon and a plot will emerge in which these ethical decisions have meaning but at the moment it seems the writers have just taken the decision to avoid any AI ethics debates by having the protagonists behave monstrously.

In a series that traces some of the underlying quandaries of the Marvel universe and (in simplistic terms) the politics of superheroes, power and identity it feels complacent but I guess it also made me think about the ethical debates that aren’t happening in the real world. The protagonists do not consider the execution of the androids worthy of debate or even worthy of consideration of consideration of debate. Are there things like that that we’re just completely missing in a sort of ethical blindspot?

We underestimated the persistence of consumerists.

Someone on Twitter told me to do my own research when I asked them for good examples of positive impacts of NFTs. So I did actually do a bit but it’s still all things that will happen either once something is launched or at a later stage. They’re going to revolutionise x or disrupt y so get in now on launch day for a low fee. Maybe I’ll have egg on my face and all there’ll be some great liberation. For now, as with AI, self-driving cars etc, the promises are able to be promises because they can be offset forever because unlike Fyre Festival, you haven’t actually promised a date where you have to deliver.

I did hear (I can’t remember where) that the point isn’t to accelerate ownership, but that NFTs for artists/musicians is an actual end to ownership: In theory (isn’t it always?) everyone will be able to access the image, the song or digital asset for free and the artist is fine with that as one person gets to ‘own’ it (not literally obviously) but in doing so enables everyone else to use it. So, if some wealthy collector wants to pay £££ for an NFT of a song which pays for the production and distribution of that song and income for the musician the result is everyone else gets it for free. I mean put like that, I’m all for it even if it just basically a culture 1.0 patronage model straight out of the renaissance.

The remaining problem is the assumption that investors have good taste in mind. In this theory, I’d have acces to amazing music from a diverse range of artists who haven’t been served by labels or streaming services. However, the track record is terrible. It’s undeniable that the market is completely flooded with really bad art and scams. And maybe. Maybe. Maybe the earnest pro-sayers are right, and this is just ‘teething issues.’ However, short of evidence (which again, I’d love to see but just keep being told to find myself) it still looks like the worst excesses of Web 2 accelerated:

This one to me feels like the fag-end of the boosterism of the last ten to fifteen years… it’s an attempt to say ‘we’re just going to scale this up to a point it’s as scaled up as it can be, we’re not shifting to a new mode of how we understand technology might impact on our lives.’ It is still just smartphones, virtual reality, machine learning joined together and then captured by two or three corporations…’ / ‘…unfortunately human beings are susceptible to this kind of nonsense.’
David Runciman and John Naughton on ‘the metaverse’, The Next Big Thing

Runciman and Naughton’s point in their discussion on Talking Politics is that Web 3.0, the metaverse and crypto are all symptoms of a chronic lack of imagination in the western world about what the Internet could be:

‘…the use of the technology isn’t innovative. It’s basically just doing tricks with old technology, like the web… There’s an opportunity cost for that. It’s sucking all that talent into big tech companies when the talent should be working on real underlying technology… It’s a radical change from what happens now. We’re not bothered that every smart PhD in computer science wants to work for Facebook… The critical bit of the geopolitical rivalry around tech now is: Which states will have the next generation of the underlying technology in the way that the Internet is our underlying technology, what’s the next one? And it isn’t smart startups doing tricks on the web, whether 2 or 3. It isn’t the continued hyper-gamification of the world.’
David Runciman and John Naughton on ‘the metaverse’, The Next Big Thing

I just thought I’d quote big chunks of this conversation since it was at once astute and depressing. Naughton ends his point with saying that; at every turn ‘we underestimate the persistance of consumerists.’

There is a version of the web which is better. Wordle, (which I don’t play) is like that. It doesn’t advertise, push or occupy attention. It just makes use of a mechanic to bring a little joy each day. But there’s no big bucks to be made and – ultimately – the consumerists are persistent.

Recent

I spoke to MFA Transdisciplinary Design students at Parsons the other week. Radha and Elliot were kind enough to invite me to talk about imagination. I have to be honest; it wasn’t one of my best. I was a bit rushed and rambly but I’ve uploaded the slides for you here.

I also joined Rob, Radha, Erica and Valdis for an episode of From Later to talk about that story about Canon removing chips from cartridges and how it was perhaps a turning point of some significance.

Upcoming

Natalie and I have been invited by the wonderful Kara Chin to give a talk as part of her show at Humber Street Gallery. We’ll be talking about what is simulation and what we choose to simulate and are working on some interesting technical gimmicks to make it a bit more fun. It’s online and free so grab a ticket here.

Short Stuff

An Open AI engineer decided to throw some hype fuel on the bonfire by claiming that some networks may already be conscious. Folks were quick to point out that this was just hype and an annoying thing to say. This is a shame in a year in which measured, calm and thoughtful advances in AI seemed to be on the cards. Well, we got to February.
Interesting thread on the most crucial design methods to know which features a pleasing absence of speculative design in contrast to the uproarious claims of LinkedIn. (I have started a bookmarks folder of medium posts and blogs of UX, marketing and design companies laying claim to ‘speculative design.’ It’s called ‘I’m spartacus’ at the moment.)
Matt wrote a little about rules, boardgames and Excel which reminded me of Conway’s Law: That any system built by an organisation will mirror the communication structure of the organisation. I wonder if the same applies to games, that games will mirror the sort of internal structure of their designers?
NVIDIA didn’t buy Arm in the end. Basically too many regulatory hurdles. There’s not too much more to say but when they put together the origin story for World War 3: The Chip Wars, it might be an interesting little sidebar.
Facebook can’t sell its botched cryptocurrency, Libra. Nor can it do anything with it.
Check out Hugo Pilate and Makan Fofana’s virtual banlieue project. They’ve developed a pretty rigorous methodology to prototype democratic virtual worlds.

Thanks Oleg for pointing out an errant 4% padding bit of CSS which was giving this janky website a horrid horizontal scroll. All fixed now. It is held together with glue and spit though. I still love you.

BOX041: Running Downhill

23.06.21

DS039: Tried to a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation but you would never guess that it kept crashing. So I just froze it and pretended that was what I wanted all along. Still, got to figure out the difference between hash and blend for transparency in Eevee. Always learning.

Everything is happening at once. Sometimes people ask – as if it’s remarkable in any way – ‘how do you do it?’ and the truth is it may look very well held together but I’m only ten minutes away from a catastrophic collapse; of everything going out of balance; of dropping the ball on something that slips my mind which has a cascade effect on everything else. I spend time between things pacing back and forth in the living room trying to think of what could go wrong. And these weeks have been particularly frenetic, with a dozen things all running in parallel, all – by their own account – full-time commitments and all gleefully ignorant of each other.

I once described it as like running down hill with plastic bags full of stuff. You’re driven entirely by momentum and if you stop or think, you’ll trip and fall. And, to the plastic bag’s inertial frame, everything seems normal. It’s all teetering on the verge of chaos just awaiting a single misstep.

So yes, I know, it’s been three weeks since I wrote to you and that’s been the longest time for many years. And this is another stupidly quick one. I wrote a whole introspective bit which I deleted because I suspect you don’t read this for the introspection. I’m still coming out of the tunnel at the moment so I haven’t had time to sit down and think about any one thing in particular for a while, besides which I have two or three writing engagements I should be putting writing time into. However, as you might expect, three weeks has spawned a dragon’s trove of notes, tabs and half-considered thoughts so we shall just jump straight into the short stuff. However, I am keeping some in reserve as part of my Content Strategy™️.

Short stuff:

Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ is on the Internet now for free. You can just stop reading now and go watch it, it’s amazing. I think I’ve expressed my admiration for it pretty well on all the websites.
Natalie Kane tells me this blog is broken and the layout is messed up but since she’s the only person who ever tells me that I’m hardly going to engage in a development project on the feedback of a user group of one person so can you tell me if it’s also broken for you?
Andrew Sempre has a great blog/newsletter that I just discovered out of his Feral Research outfit which this week includes the great line: ‘Social media as a cursed shittiness-amplifier: playing back to us.’ It’s like how I want this to be, and how blogs should be; a range of unconnected stuff that’s interesting.
Here’s a somewhat disappointing and technical interview with Blitter who I talked about a few weeks back.
Fred Scharmen found a cool rocket picture. I don’t know what else to say, that guy knows his space stuff. He’s doing this on Saturday and I’m going to be going, if you go you’ll see how much space onions he knows.
My colleague JP Hartnett wrote this great top-level summary of ontological design taking in the work of Arturo Escobar, Sasha Constanza-Chock and Tony Fry. It’s a really good introduction to contextualising the ‘totality of design as a kind of meta-discipline, better able to encompass the relational complexity of how it operates.’
Le Tour starts on Saturday. Look forward to that on the socials.

I have a podcast interview coming out soon and I expect I leant to much on the candid side of the brand rather than the pseudo-intellectual but also I’m not particularly interesting so at least I can be disarming in honesty. Anyway, it’s keeping me guessing about the reception, if there is any. I’m led to believe some people hate-read this blog so perhaps there’s some joy to be found in my idiocy for you good folks there. You know what actually there’s quite a few things out there I’ve done recently and coming up (including two, count them two, books) so I will update you on those next week.

Ok, I love you and I’m sorry I haven’t told you recently. Byeee.

BOX040: BURY YOUR MONEY

26.05.21

DS038: More key framing. No simulations. Blender has had some new Boolean tools (suing one shape to cut another shape) but it’s still janky. Cutting this cone took my computer a good 45 minutes of churning over. It isn’t actually black and white, it’s just that there’s no colour in the scene. Which I guess is black and white.

Sun, light and not enough time to use it.

There have always been whole areas of the Internet where you just shouldn’t go; the comments on YouTube videos and some Reddit threads (I really like Reddit for finding interesting and weird stuff by the way but I keep it at arms length) but it seems like you’re now only two clicks away from someone with a bio like ‘crypto theologian’ on Irish microblog Twitter dot com. I read a sentence just now from one of these people (with hundreds of thousands of followers) ‘Wokeness is a mind virus optimized for propagation on the English internet‘ and just sort of stared at it while trying to untangle the thinking behind such a statement. It sat there, innocuous amidst a variety of bombastic predictions about markets and meek conspiracy theories and the assertion that ‘the market’ should moderate the ‘consensus on history.’ It’s all sort of mawkishly grotesque; like watching street mime and it’s all written to seduce people exactly like me.

It promises white men control, power, wealth and escape: In a talk to a San Francisco startup event, this person encouraged me to save, leave the city, conceal my identity, diversify my holdings. I may as well have been told to buy gold and bury it in a forest, such was the sentiment with which wealth and society was treated. It tells me that social justice is just identity politics playing out in the media; something being done to me against my will by ‘woke corporations’ for profit and promises that if I follow it, I won’t have to change, learn, make any concessions or confront my complicity.

It’s the very slightly less bad version of 4chan trolls but legitimised because they’ve read James C. Scott and get invited to speak at tech conferences. They use memes and laser eyes and are hooked on the inevitability of their vindication; this curiously masculine trait of just believing that if you can convince yourself that something is real, everyone else will believe you, and many men my age do. I don’t often encounter these people in real life and although I’m clearly bang on the demographic, I don’t have the qualities of a good mark; I’m not that interested in accruing wealth or in any way angry or bitter about the opportunities I’ve had in life.

Why have I written this? I don’t know. I suppose it’s just worth remembering that the Internet has created this place for angry white men to try and bait each other into their schemes for violence and hoarding and that probably accounts for most of it now. To be honest I also didn’t have much to say this week. I’m taking a coffee break (second breakfast) between a bunch of things and spent that time gawping at Twitter like a 2013 wastrel with nothing to do but refresh my menshies.

Short Stuff

Great sounding retrospective of the work of Matrix on at Barbican. I wasn’t aware of their work before coming across the article.
Claire Evans has written about Hic et Nunc, highlighting how it supports emerging artists in Brazil who might otherwise struggle to pursue their practice with lack of social nets and gallery support that we enjoy in Europe.
On the other side of the… coin. Big hedge funds have now started to take the opportunity to reopen fossil fuel plants to mine bitcoin.

Ok, Giro’s back today. I love Bernal, was really excited to see him again after his struggled at the Tour last year so I really hope he wins. I’ve watched this rocket take over like twenty times; just the most amazing climb, overtaking everyone and putting in a ten second lead. Listen, don’t look at the hateful Irish microblog, everyone is very angry. I love you of course, but you know that, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth saying. Speak to you next week.