I’m spending this week trying to clear some of the reading backlog. I have a lot of PDFs and papers in Zotero that need me to at least take a run at. Although who am I kidding? They don’t need me any more than I need them, we’re all just performing intellectuality as a way to alleviate the guilt. Either way, I’m going to read at least some of them. Much like the twenty minute meeting rule and the three week task rule, I have a 10% rule with reading. If I’m 10% of the way through something, not enjoying it, finding it hard or get the sense that the author is being intentionally obtuse, I stop. I’ve written about this before; as someone who is regrettably asked to write quite often, I see it as my job to be generous with my flimsy ideas and make them as accessible as possible, not to show off how many words I know or how long I can make a sentence. Nothing is worth hurting yourself over.

Reading

It’s the beginning of the year, if you’re an academic. This is when New Year’s resolutions have a lot more hold. I’m going to get back to my reading properly.

Part of this reading has been going into etymology and philology which may just be a waste of time. I re-read Flusser’s ‘On the Word Design‘ where he does all that work connecting the word ‘design’ with trickery and manipulation. I got this notion from Benedict Singleton’s evergreen ‘Maximum Jailbreak‘ years ago and have continually rehashed it but never actually got round to reading it. Secondly was Willard McCarty’s ‘Modelling: A Study in Words and Meanings‘ which does what it says on the tin. McCarty breaks models down into ‘for’ and ‘of’ – ‘a “model” I take to be either a representation of something for purposes of study, or a design for realizing something new.‘ In other words, a model can be a representation of something that already exists or a proposal of something new. Or both.

McCarty does brush up against simulation but the paper is quite dated now compared to what we might consider to be contemporary simulation technology. Simulations, I think, have a more complex relationship with modelling – aspiring to recreate physical phenomena and/or project future behaviours of that phenomena. I was crawling back over this Ethical Futures newsletter from a while back where they also shared some thoughts on rights and simulation (‘Will we see Do Not Simulate directives soon to protect one’s identity after death?’) including the use of GAN-generated faces to train other GANS to be more diverse. This was brought up in Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ and ties into some stuff I’ve been writing about recently, where models become self-reinforcing. In the case of, for instance, images of bathrooms generated to teach robots about bathrooms you can see the models/images being both ‘of’ existing bathrooms but also being ‘for’ modelling future robotic behaviour.

The for/of qualities of simulation technology do tend to work in this feedback loop where one informs and is informed by the other. Really I read and write so much about this stuff and it always comes back to this loop between the imagination, simulation, reality and so on.

I also read Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang this week and it’s as good and engrossing as everyone raves about. Wang has a great way of transgressing the artificial divides between their lives in San Francisco and China. Written in the later years of the Trump presidency, they’re most obviously interested in countering the liberal geopolitical narrative of an East vs. West cold war by telling the story of people on the ground in rural China and they’re engagement with emerging technology who are very distanced from the news or government: We meet the eponymous blockchain chicken farmer, people using object recognition and AI to predict pork yields, drop-shipping costume manufacturers and agricultural drone operators. Against these grittier, complex characters, the characters of VCs and tech gurus are interchangeable between Shanghai and Silicon Valley while a golden thread of cynicism weaves across the whole book, drawing people together and exposing their contradictions.

Wang’s writing is also really vivid. Going back to earlier statements, they’re not trying to blind you with knowledge. They just describe people going about their lives, jobs and thoughts all contextualised in Chinese government policy and history. They also brilliantly describe the villages, towns and fields the book is situated in, making places I’ve never been feel real and alive.

The balance of travelogue, tech and history book all presented from this personal perspective is something hard to come by these days, what with so little travelling and something I’d like to integrate more into my own writing, though I rarely have cause to leave this desk.

Short Stuff

• Short piece here from Ben Zotto, also from the Ethical Futures newsletter, on the way we’ve stuck with dated computer metaphors. It’s not hugely surprising or new, we even wrote about it in our book. I suppose like lots of folks have done in AI research, there’s a question to be dug into deeper about why we find it hard to move on from those metaphors. Ben Zotto repeatedly refers to ‘fragments’ as the way we use computers as opposed to files or documents. I totally agree but, even archaeologically we try and imagine fragments in a bigger logic. Fragments of papyrus that form part of a codex or fragments of stele etc. I don’t know if we’re able to build our information environments on rhizomatically connected fragments. I’ve been using Are.na more which I suppose is some of that (though it still has a low-level hierarchy) and Moving Castles proposes this a bit too.
• Cassie Robinson on helping things end – the beginning of what she calls a ‘Farewell Fund’
• Brilliant piece on Futuress – The Last Shift from Maya Ober which (and this may seem boring) describes an examination at FADU in Buenos Aires. For some of the stuff I’ve got starting next week, this is incredibly useful.
• Ted Kim presenting Anti-Racist Graphics Research at SIGGRAPH. Ted Kim is brilliant. Natalie and I interviewed him for a stalled restart of Scrycasts and it was a super useful conversation that hopefully one day we’ll be able to get out there.

I need to find a way to make this blog more searchable. If even I can’t find anything I don’t know how you’re supposed to. Something for another time I guess. [Edit: Immediately after writing that sentence I thought ‘it can’t be that hard’ then spent the entire morning integrating a search bar over there ←. So there you go.]

Ok I love you and also we haven’t spoke in ages. Get in touch.