The earliest blog I could find is one sharing a video on relative simultaneity from October 2008. I was early in my final year of undergrad at that point. I was definitely writing a blog at least three years before that but I can’t remember where, it might have been MySpace and then killed. Other than a gap of a few months now and then I’ve been near-constantly writing these. Who knows the combined word count over more than 15 years.

I was looking this up because I read on Samutaro’s Instagram (which is mostly how I keep up with fashion and popular trends) that ‘Indie Sleaze’ has become cool again. Makes sense I suppose, it’s been roughly ten or fifteen years, it was interesting seeing pictures of acquaintances, events and parties I remember very fondly being dug up from MySpace as style inspiration. About that time, the only serious thing I was doing was writing blogs between come downs and hangovers so I went looking for it out of curiosity.

DS063

I’m trying to find a way to accelerate production of these each week. At the moment I can afford the luxury of 4-8 hours on them over the week but that won’t be the case much longer so I want to find ways to make components generative, reuse consistent aspects and overall reduce the labour. This started out that way but didn’t pan out right. I’m going to explore some addons to see what generative things can be brought in to future sketches.

Oh, this week was Eevee too. Don’t know why. Just felt like a change.

It reaches out

Everyone leaves unfinished business. That’s what dying is.

Amos Burton

The Expanse is over. You may know because you loved The Expanse or because you followed people who did. Though receiving great reviews, The Expanse never quite garnered mainstream hit status. I watched the first episode with my parents recently and though it was still as beautiful, intricate and clever as the day it was born, it does require some attention to detail and grasping of space geography that some people might find hard to get on board with. In fact, the most common complaint I have heard is ‘I’ve watched the first few episodes but…’ (Apart from Wes who just doesn’t like the sound editing) I suppose they didn’t pull any punches on dumping you into the fragility of interplanetary space politics and that’s a tough mental leap.

I’ve written before about the smart and accurate representation of physics, the way that issues of physical mechanics become enormous plot points and the way in which the realities of space travel, communication and exploration are made slow and hard. Its politics aren’t particularly radical or challenging as the outer edges of other big pieces like Dune or Foundation are; it’s essentially a sort of West Wing in space (the ‘but in space’ title is liberally applied in reporting, it’s anything you like ‘but in space’) with tightly choreographed space battles every few episodes.

So the end came in the form of a stunted sixth series; six episodes rather than ten or twelve that rushed which through the endgame of the plot and were counter-intuitively used to introduce a whole new secondary plot that never even reached a climax. We’re left to assume that the writers introduced the whole secondary plot purely with a view to more Expanse universe further down the line; as has been noted, the next part of the books happens thirty years later. The ending is ‘neat.’ I’m not sure there is a good way to end a beloved and epic TV series really. The only good one that springs to mind is Battlestar Galactica where they used a clever gimmick to tie it all together and actually round it all off having answered any lingering questions (other than Starbuck’s apparent deification) and lay out the future of the characters. For The Expanse they did manage to resolve the major plot as well have some sort of denouement. There are some sweet scenes and great set-piece CGI, though the production quality did feel a little rushed and janky when compared to the heights of seasons 3 and 4 when it first got big.

The Expanse’s ending could never be satisfactory: The show presents us humanity as a struggling, unequal, bickering and broken people on the edge of our own extinction whether from war, dehydration, suffocation or economic collapse and ends (with several near-misses, horrifying brutality and a genocide) with us moving onto whatever comes after. That might be the benign colonialism (if there is such a thing) of space opera or it might be a decent into further hubristic wars of exploitation. Either way The Expanse shows us a transition not a complete arc and so it is only natural to be left with more questions.

Profit, uh, profit finds a way.

I listened to the Reith Lectures this week with Stuart Russell. Overall I thought it was a useful and balanced breakdown of the state, risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence though there were some questionable ideas and embedded assumptions I was really interested in, especially because Russell is a self-confessed naysayer.

The positive spin on AI was predicated on the notion that the advent of general artificial intelligence was firstly, inevitable and secondly would be a source of limitless wealth. Russell’s argument continues that becuause general artificial intelligence would be worth some quadrillion of dollars, it would end conflict and competition. He suggested it would be like arguing over ‘who has a digital copy of the Telegraph.’

He used this refrain of limitless wealth creation several times. The obvious point here is that AI is not a costless exercise; building and maintaining such a machine would require enormous resources which would be limited to what we could extract (probably still from the planet) and which would make it a scarce resource. And as an incredibly valuable and scarce resource would probably become a point of conflict between people, states and organisations rather than present the unifying, post-scarcity force of abundance that Russell implies throughout the lectures.

These critiques aren’t addressed because the claim of limitless wealth is not really supported. An audience member does ask why a nation or company wouldn’t hoard the technology of general AI like with nuclear power to which Russell vaguely responds that there would be no point but without really saying why it would eliminate competition.

He does make a great point in the lecture about power which I hadn’t really considered before: That our entire computational infrastructure and all of IT is really badly designed and that it allowed for the rise of social networks will ing to exploit people by design. He suggests it’s a fundamental flaw that we don’t really question – that corporations would have access to all our data and that there would be so many scams and exploits. It’s interesting to think about this and the suggestion that Web 3.0 is basically Web 2 with all the very worst aspects accelerated.

Worth a listen basically, don’t get too wound up about it.

Short Stuff

• Curious Futures have produced a flow diagram of megatrends to 2030 that you can get in a big print for your wall. Seems a bit high-stakes to get eight-year predictions in print but it’s quite an interesting visualisation and highlights the lack of diversity amongst those studying the future. It reminds me somewhat of my own diagram done in a similar vein. Though that was a provocation rather than a prediction.
• A brief history of Dunne and Raby’s teaching practice from a student currently on Designed Realities including some thoughts on the application and position in the current world of design with a particular Japanese focus.
• Interesting piece via Ethical Futures on a new book – Stolen Attention – about the crisis of attention driven by social media etc. The author approaches it as a systemic rather than individual problem and acknowledges some of the shakiness in the science and potential for hysteria. I’m not convinced that there will be a general popular push back on social media companies occupying attention. The author parallels the ‘movement to reclaim attention’ to crises in women’s reproductive rights or obesity which seems a bit much. Though attention is something that designers are perhaps keen on tackling, like dark patterns, it is not necessarily apparent to the average user. Also the author’s lament at returning to ‘four hours screen time a day’ felt a bit on the nose as I do more like 16.
• Molly White (who was also responsible for analysing and breaking down the CryptoLand pitch) has a great piece on more paradoxes and hypocrisies in crypto and the massive potential for abuse and harassment as well as the significant impracticalities.
• Check out Cybertruck’s wiper.
• Meanwhile SpaceX is dumping some more space trash with an out of control rocket chaotically zigzagging to the moon.
• While their satellites are obscuring potential asteroids.

Alrighty, love you. Speak next week.