Okay, not exactly, but he does argue for the potential of the cognitive collective. So, Wot’s… Uh, the deal?

Is Clay Shirky the new Seth Godin? I’d yet to read anything written by him that didn’t echo things I’d read David Weinberger or Howard Rheingold (or Marshall McLuhan, of course), and I hoped Cognitive Surplus would finally break the streak. Well, it does, and it doesn’t. As Shirky put it in his previous book, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2008), “society doesn’t change when people adopt new tools; it changes when people adopt new behaviors.” This time around he argues that we adopt new behaviors when provided with new opportunities, which, by my estimate, are provided by new tools — especially online.

Steve Jobs once said that the computer and the television would never converge because we choose one when we want to engage and the other when we want to turn off. The problem with Shirky’s claims is that he never mentions this disparity of desire. A large percentage of people, given the opportunity or not, do not want to post things online, create a Facebook profile, or any of a number of other web-enabled sharing activities. For example, I do not like baseball. I don’t like watching it, much less playing it. If all of the sudden baseballs, gloves, and bats were free, and every home were equipped with a baseball diamond, my desire to play baseball would not increase. Most people do not want to comment on blog posts, video clips, or news stories, much less create their own, regardless of the tools or opportunities made available to them. Cognitive surplus or not, its potential is just that without the collective desire to put it into action.

Shirky’s incessant lolcat bashing and his insistence that we care more about “public and civic value” instead comes off as “net” elitism at its worse. The wisdom of crowds, in James Surowieki’s phrase, doesn’t necessarily lead to the greater good, whatever that is. You can’t argue for bringing brains together and then expect them to “do right.” Are lolcats stupid? Probably, but they’re certainly not ushering in the end of Western civilization. It’s still less popular to be smart than it is to be a smartass, but that’s not the end of the world, online or off-. The crowd is as wise as the crowd does. Glorifying it as such, as Jaron Lanier points out in You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf, 2010), is just plain wrong-headed.

The last chapter, “Looking for the Mouse,” is where Shirky shines though. [Although its namesake echoes a story by Jaron Lanier from a 1998 Wired article about children being smarter and expecting more from technology. Lanier wrote, "My favorite anecdote concerns a three-year-old girl who complained that the TV was broken because all she could do was change channels." Shirky's version involves a four-year-old girl digging in the cables behind a TV, "looking for the mouse."] His ability to condense vast swaths of knowledge into a set of tactics for new media development in this last chapter is stunning compared to the previous 180 pages. Perhaps he is the new Seth Godin afterall.

References:

Lanier, J. (1998, January). “Taking Stock.” Wired, 6.01.

Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

Surowieki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor.

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young & The Digital. New York: Beacon.

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
– Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

The meta-idea of planting an idea in someone’s mind, known to some as memetic engineering,  is not new; however, conceptualizing the particulars of doing it undetected is. Subconscious cat-burglar Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializes in extracting information from slumbering vaults. After a dream-within-a-dream heist-gone-wrong, he’s offered a gig planting something in one: and idea that will grow to “transform the world and rewrite all the rules.” Cobb reminds me of Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) in the 1984 movie Dreamscape. Gardner is able to enter the dreams of others and alter their outcomes and thereby the outcomes of “real” situations. Cobb and his team do the same by creating and sharing dreams with others. The ability to share dreams — or to enter other worlds together via dreams, computer networks, hallucinations, mirrors, lions, witches, wardrobes, what-have-you — seems to be a persistent human fantasy. Overall, Nolan does a fine job adding to that canon of stories.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff gets theory-checked mid-film when Cobb’s partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt — standing in for Heath Ledger?) explains inception with the “don’t think of an elephant” ploy. What are you thinking about right now? Exactly. The problem is that you know why you’re thinking that right now. Successful inception requires that you think you thought of the idea yourself, independent of outside influence. It’s the artificial insemination of an original thought, “pure inspiration” in Cobb’s terms.

For better or worse, this concept (which takes the entire first act to establish), its mechanics (designer sedatives to sleep, primitive “kicks” to wake up), and the “big job” (a Lacanian catharsis culminating in the dismantling of a global empire) are just the devices that might enable the estranged Cobb to return home to his children. His late wife Mal (Marion Cotillard — standing in for Brittany Murphy?), or rather his projection thereof, haunts his dreams, jeopardizing his every job. Mal is a standout strong character and performance in a cast of (mostly; see below) strong characters and performances. She is beautiful, scary, and maintains an emotional gravity intermittently missing in this often weightless world. She is the strange attractor that tugs the chaos along. Whenever the oneiric ontology of Inception feels a bit too free-floating, Mal can always be counted on to anchor it in anger and affect.

The first time through, I thought that over-explaining the “idea” idea was the movie’s one flaw, finding myself thinking, “Okay, I get it” over and over. The second time through though, I honed in on it: The one thing preventing the concept from fully taking hold in the holiest of holies in my head was Ellen Page. Sure, she ably carried the considerable weight of Hard Candy (2005) and manhandled the tomboyish Juno (2007) to breakout success (admittedly with Michael Cera’s help), but her character and performance in Inception is the splitting seam that unstitches the dream into so many threads of sober consciousness. She’s supposed to be a brilliant architect yet simultaneously unaware of the ins-and-outs of inception and extraction, but she only believably excels at the latter. Where Keanu Reaves’ bumbling and understated Neo made The Matrix (1999) work by asking questions and pulling the viewer into the second world, Page’s clueless Ariadne drags us, the pace, and the other actors down. With the inexperienced patron Saito’s (Ken Watanabe) cues and clues to guide us through the intricacies of dream-theft, Ariadne is rendered all but unnecessary. She’s mostly redundant.

The seed of every story is a conceit, an unrealistic event or idea that the rest of the story sets out to explain. The survivors of a loved one who has committed suicide can never really know why he or she did so. The living can always see another option. If nothing else, Inception succeeds in explaining the suicide of a completely rational person, but I think it succeeds at much more than that.

Note: This post greatly benefited from discussions with and thoughts from Jessy Helms, Cynthia Usery, and Matt Morris.

Sometimes these assessments are stiflingly negative and sometimes they are uselessly celebratory. Jaron Lanier’s recent book flirts with the former, while other current thinkers lean toward the latter. For instance, where Clay Shirky sees the book as an inconvenience borne by an era characterized by a lack of access, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010) laments the attempt to shred their pages into bits and scatter them all over the internet, decontextualizing great paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words. Apparently Shirky would rather read War and Pieces than War and Peace.

For all of its astute observations and well-argued points, The Shallows sometimes exhibits a strange disparity between what Carr hesitates to claim and what he writes as common knowledge. For example, he states outright that language is not a technology (p. 51) – a claim with which I not only disagree but feel is rather bold – yet hedges when saying that the book is the medium most resistant to the influence of the internet (p. 99) – a claim that seems pretty obvious to me. Books, as a medium and as an organizing principle, just do not lend themselves to the changes the digital revolution hath wrought on other media. Their form nor their fragmentation makes near as much sense.

When we do research, we rarely read an entire book. We scour indices and tables of contents for the relevant bits. As Howard Bloom gleefully explains in his contribution to this year’s summer reading list:

…if you prefer playing video games to plowing through a thousand pages of Joyce’s Odesseus and falling out of your beach chair with periodic bouts of sleep, I highly recommend the Google Book Search e-approach, deep dives into the minds of philosophers you would normally never think of sampling between games of badminton.

As much as I’d love to be able to run a digitally enabled quick-search on all the books on my bookshelf, that doesn’t mean I don’t want the option of pulling one down in its entirety once in a while. The same could be said for the fragmentation of the album as the organizing principle for music. It doesn’t take a 19th century librarian to see that preferring the excerpts and snippets of research is not the same thing as never wanting a book to read. This is the thick thicket, as Matt Schulte would call it, of digitizing books.

Carr’s point though, is not just the dissolution of our books, but the dissolution of our minds. He claims that the manifold fragments and features of the web are preventing us from concentrating for a book-length spell, much less wanting one. As clear as his argument reads and as solid as his research seems (Carr assembled a firm foundation of writing history and media ecology on which to build), it’s difficult not to take the very point of it as so much pining for a previous era. He’s careful to blunt that point by praising the web’s usefulness and to self-analyze his own tech-habits just enough to soften the prickly parts of his argument. It’s a seductive read in spite of itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed all of The Shallows, but the last chapter, “A Thing Like Me,” is one of the more frustrating twenty-odd pages I’ve read in some time. Not because it was bad, but because it was so dead-on in-tune with my recent thoughts on media and minds. It was a lengthy and weighty I-wish-I’d-written-that experience. Damn you, Nicholas Carr!

Speaking of things I wish I’d written, Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (Pantheon, 2010) is a prefect model of how to write about something totally geeky, maintain the things that make it geeky, and still make it accessible to anyone. When I was a gamer, a self-identification I wouldn’t feel comfortable using even in jest today, there wasn’t such a category. Playing video games was a subset of the larger “nerd” label. Given my hiatus from said world, I should’ve been outmoded by Bissell’s admittedly narrow focus on recent console games, a focus he admits runs the “danger of seeming, in only a few years, as relevant as a biology textbook devoted to Lamarckism.” Thankfully, what this book’s subject matter lacks in breadth, Bissell’s intelligence, insight, writing, and wit make up for in spades.

Adult indulgence in video games begs questions of maturity and responsibility in the adult, but it also begs questions of the games as well. Bissell explores some of both, but mostly the latter. He thoroughly refutes Roger Ebert’s recent claim that video games can never be art (Ebert has since retracted his statements), snags insider insights via interviews with several top game designers, makes fun of Resident Evil‘s deplorable dialog, and descends into the depths of addiction and abuse — on the screen and IRL — with Grand Theft Auto IV. It’s a thumb-blistering journey through the screen and into the machine, and, in spite of its candor and seriousness, it’s damn funny.

What I can say for very few recent books, I can say for The Shallows and Extra Lives: They are as entertaining and funny as they are provocative and informative. Simply put, they are good reads. Carr and Bissell should be proud.

I need to get in on this…

With thanks to Andy Jenkins and The Skateboard Mag.

McGoo McGruther, no stranger to the small but influential world of BMX, recently interviewed Osborn for Chop Cult, and I’m happy to report that his spirit is as free as ever, and he’s still rolling tough on two wheels.

As always the book links on this page will take you to the selected title in Powell’s Bookstore. Enjoy, and leave your own reading recommendations in the comments below.

Andy Jenkins

Jason Turbow with Michael Duca The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing & Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime (Pantheon, 2010): Summertime is baseball time. Over the last decade I’ve become a real baseball nerd and any book that delves into the intricate folds of this game will usually get  my attention — The Baseball Codes being no exception. It’s an in-depth look into the unwritten rules of the game (even though that’s exactly what Turbow and Duca have done here — written them down), the stories usually told by the players themselves. The abundance of names and places and times can become a little overwhelming, but if you sit and read one or two anecdotes at a time, this is a good read for any baseball fan.

Steven Johnson The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How it Changes Science, Cities and the Modern World (Riverhead Books, 2006): You’d think a book about the London cholera epidemic in the summer of 1854 would be a pretty depressing read, but The Ghost Map is quite the contrary. Johnson interweaves the battle to control the microbial war with the minds of the men doing most of the thinking and the future repercussions of their ideas. Take a look around you, breathe deeply, be thankful for running water and give your garbage man a high five… if you don’t really feel like doing that right now, after you read this book you will.

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad (Knopf, 2010): Goon Squad caught me right in the first couple of pages as the main character, Sasha, is conferring with her therapist — something I  just recently started doing myself. Sasha is a compulsive thief, I’m a depressed self-inflicted recluse. The honesty she shares with her therapist is something I’m striving for. Guess I’ll keep reading…

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (Ballantine Books, 1964): I recently caught a TV show called Iconoclasts with Maya Angelou and Dave Chappelle. Strange match-up on some levels, but the thing I was most impressed with was Angelou’s past and the people in it. She was a personal friend to Malcolm X. Hearing that and seeing Malcolm’s iconic portrait on a wall in her house made me pull this book out again. I’d recommend this for anyone’s summer reading list. The path this man’s life took is an interesting and inspiring one.

Jordan Crane The Clouds Above (Extra Fancy Edition) (Fantagraphics Books, 2005) and How to Speak Zombie: A Guide for the Living by Steve Mockus, illustrated by Travis Millard (Chronicle Books, 2010): Both of these are picture books. And both of these are illustrated by two of my favorite line artists, Jordan Crane and Travis Millard. Crane’s book is a beautifully illustrated and made, hard-bound piece of art with very little dialog — it’s almost exclusively a visual narrative that recount the “Terribly Terrific and Tremendously True Travels of Simon Jack.” Jack, a cat, talks, of course, as do the zombies in Millard’s drawings — literally: Press the buttons on the lower right and you’ll here them “speak.” Handy translations are given by Steve Mockus. Both hilarious and possibly helpful depending on what you view of our future looks like.

Kenyatta Cheese

I have but two books that I’m reading this summer.

The first one is a collection of essays called Deleuze and New Technology edited by David Savat and Mark Poster (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). While Gilles Deleuze didn’t live long enough to see the particular web of digital and biotech that we live among today, his theory and writing clearly anticipates it. Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) concept of the rhizome as an organizational theory has a surface analogue in our Internet, and the Society of Control can be seen as Web 2.0 with a dark cape. Deleuze was critical of the “machines” that he thought about but he never bothered thinking of them as evil. He seemed to be much more interested in the forms that emerged out of our machine-assisted living. These essays are an attempt to extrapolate what some of those thoughts might have been. While Poster is the headliner in this collection, I’m looking forward to the essays by William Bogard, Verena Conley, and Eugene Thacker, whom I consider fantastic theorists in their own right.

The other book that I’m reading is Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball (Ballantine/ESPN Books, 2009), 700-page sandbag of a book that includes his history of the National Basketball Association, his take on race in the league, and an endless supply of digg-bait style listicles of the Best Players, Best Teams, and other barely quantifiable attributes. I love basketball but I cringe when reading Simmons’ column for ESPN. His pop culture references read like SportsCenter channeled through an episode of Family Guy. His tangents are legendary for their pointlessness. A friend described this book to me as an overlong blog post written by a juvenile frat boy who watches too much porn. I expect that I’ll enjoy this book immensely.

Nancy Baym

My summer reading is all about music!

Scott Kirsner Fans, Friends and Followers (CreateSpace, 2009): Building an audience and a creative career in the digital age. This is a how-to book aimed at musicians and artists looking to build an online following. It’s got excerpts from about thirty interviews and is a pretty interesting read.

Greg Kot Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, 2009): This one’s also about music and the internet and has gotten great reviews. Kot’s a music writer for The Chicago Tribune and a smart guy, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how he frames the issues around music and the net.

Daniel Levitin This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Plume, 2007): I’ve taken this book with me on several vacations. Every time I hear him interviewed I’m mesmerized by his insights into why music affects us, and I’m eager to finally read it.

David Suisman Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009): This is an historic academic tome about how music came to be a big business. I’m always eager to situate current trends in their historical context so I’m hoping this one helps with that.

Aram Sinnreich: Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010): Sinnreich is one of the smartest people thinking about contemporary digital music practices, and this book, due out in August, is likely to have a big influence on how people understand what Lessig called “remix culture.”

Philip Auslander Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 2008): Okay, this one isn’t just about music. It’s a fairly short inquiry into the boundaries between recording and live performance and the differential status and meanings of the (increasingly blurred) two.

Two books that are not about music, but which I’ve read recently and plan to reread soon are Matt Beaumont’s e (Plume 2000) and e Squared (Plume, 2010). They’re hilarious, ribald novels set in a London ad agency. The first is written entirely in emails, the second is written in emails, blog posts, and text messages. Excellent summer reading if you don’t mind bad words and want to laugh hard.

Alex Burns

Jaron Lanier You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010): Remember the internet’s promise in the pre-dotcom era? Lanier brilliantly derails four shibboleths—‘cybernetic totalism’, ‘digital maoism’, and populist views of the Cloud, and the Singularity—that shape the ‘ecologies of mind’ in Open Source and Web 2.0 communities. Rather than big-n crowds, You Are Not A Gadget is a spirited defense of individual creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and ‘moral rights’: the necessary ingredients for deeper meaning-making. It also conveys Lanier’s strategies for the ‘ideation’ and ‘fast prototyping’ phases of the innovation cycle.

David H. Ucko The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2009): U.S. General David Petraeus and Australian strategist David Kilcullen are often credited with shaping the renewed interest in counterinsurgency (COIN) and the 2007 ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq. Ucko’s doctoral dissertation focuses instead on the U.S. military as a ‘learning organization’ and how it has facilitated and adapted to COIN. Ucko conveys the dynamic inter-relationship between how many different processes—doctrine formulation, leadership development, defense budget, technology acquisition, and stability operations—have reshaped the U.S. military as an institution for ‘military operations other than war’ like counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and stability operations.

Sarah Ellison War at the Wall Street Journal: How Rupert Murdoch Bought an American Icon (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010): During a 2002 interview, the award-winning Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth gave me a jaw-dropping insight into Murdoch: He uses game theory in mergers and acquisitions, and has at least three levels of games during a bid. Ellison’s fly-on-the-wall case study shows how, and is thus less like the fawning biographies of William Shawcross (Murdoch) and Michael Wolff (The Man Who Owns The News) and closer to the 1976-1983 period of authors like Michael Leapman (Barefaced Cheek). Authors in this earlier period contended Murdoch’s ‘apotheosis’ was due to his acquisitions of News of the World, The Sun, and The Times, and Ellison shows how he has not lost his touch. Whilst you were busy updating your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts, Murdoch bought and revamped a financial news empire.

William D. Cohan House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism (Doubleday, 2009): There’s now easily an entire bookshelf on the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Cohan’s House of Cards on Bear Stearns’ collapse stands out as a model of investigative journalism, and a worthy successor to the 1988-92 period: Michael Lewis (Liars’ Poker), James B. Martin (Den of Thieves), Connie Bruck (The Predator’s Ball) and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (Barbarians at the Gate). Two reasons why: Cohan is a former investment banker, and he got access to ‘insiders’. House of Cards may still be read in 10-to-15 years for its lessons on dysfunction culture, power politics and status hierarchies.

Charles D. Ellis The Partnership: A History of Goldman Sachs (Penguin, 2008): For decades Goldman Sachs has been the pre-eminent ‘bulge bracket’ investment bank. On April 16th, 2010, the U.S. Securities and Investments Commission charged Goldman Sachs with fraud over the structuring of a collateralized debt obligation deal for hedge fund maven Henry Paulson. To understand Paulson’s strategy read Gregory Zuckerman (The Greatest Trade Ever) and Michael Lewis (The Big Short). To understand Goldman Sachs read this detailed institutional history on how its processes for culture, leadership development, and financial services innovation mean the holding company will continue to attract the ‘best and brightest’, despite the SEC case and other GFC-related lawsuits from international regulatory and supervisory agencies. If Cohan’s House of Cards conveys why institutions fail, Ellis shows how despite crises they can adapt and cultivate resilience.

Jeremy Bernstein Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society (Springer, 2008): ‘Quants’ — or mathematicians and physicists who designed complex financial products such as derivatives, swaps and option pricing models — are widely blamed for the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Bernstein’s academic monograph is an anecdote and detailed rich study of how and why ‘quants’ became popular on Wall Street in the 1980s and 1990s, and the parallels of developing a knowledge base in other fields and disciplines. In doing so, Bernstein builds on Emmanuel Derman’s biography (My Life As A Quant), which captured the transition from Bell Laboratories’ isolative research culture to Goldman Sachs’ team-based, deal-flow approach. Amongst the many details and side-glances here are the Cold War’s geopolitical influence on immigrant ‘quants’, A.Q. Khan’s covert nuclear network, the linguist Michael Ventris who deciphered Etruscan B; the emergence of author Michel Houellebecq and his interest in the gothic horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft; and the role of Poisson mathematics in Nazi Germany’s V-2 rocket program. My personal ‘aha!’ moment was Bernstein’s final essay, ‘Beating the System’, a guide to academic survival in Los Alamos, Livermore, and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Bernstein’s book has an intriguing synchrony to the other books on my 2010 list: how individual and collaborative research, innovation, and creativity may thrive in a well-designed and facilitative institutional context.

David Silver

For as long as I can remember, Nixon-related books have occupied the highest shelf on my parents’ book collection — book’s like John Dean’s Blind Ambition and Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men and The Final Days. A few weeks ago, while visiting my mom, I reached up to the top shelf and plucked down The Final Days (Simon & Schuster, 1976). It’s the story of a criminal, crooked, crazed, paranoid, and totally incompetent president and the final months, weeks, and days of his reign. Great summer reading!

A few months ago, at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, I traded three brand new academic books about digital media for one used copy of Edward Espe Brown’s The Complete Tassajara Cookbook: Recipes, Techniques, and Reflections from the Famed Zen Kitchen (Shambhala, 2009). What a great deal! I started reading and cooking from this book in late spring and will continue through summer and beyond.

As its title suggests, Pam Peirce’s Golden Gate Gardening: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Food Gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area and Coastal California (Sasquatch Books, 2010) tells Northern Californians what to plant, why, how, and when. It’s my bible — especially in summer. I’m also reading Gayla Trail’s Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces (Clarkson Potter, 2010) for some wonderful and creative tricks and techniques.

This summer, I’m working on a new freshmen seminar called “Golden Gate Park” which, if approved, will run next spring. To generate ideas and stimulate the old noggin, I’m reading, skimming, and scanning all kinds of wonderful books like Raymond H. Clary’s Making of Golden Gate Park: The Early Years: 1865-1906 (Don’t Call It Frisco Press, 1984); Chris Pollock and Erica Katz’s San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park: A Thousand and Seventeen Acres of Stories (Westwinds Press, 2001); Sally B. Woodbridge, John M. Woodbridge, and Chuck Byrne’s San Francisco Architecture: An Illustrated Guide to the Outstanding Buildings, Public Art Works, and Parks in the Bay Area of California (Ten Speed Press, 2005); Christopher Pollock’s Golden Gate Park: San Francisco’s Urban Oasis in Vintage Postcards (Arcadia Publishing, 2003); and Hosea and Nellie A. Blair’s Monuments and Memories of San Francisco: Golden Gate Park (Calmar Printing Company, 1955).

Most of my summer reading, I suspect, will be read out loud, to Siena, our eleven-month old daughter, and revolve around stories about clever animals, being kind and curious, and going to sleep.

Ashley Crawford

Eugene Marten Firework (Tyrant Books): I was sent this reader’s copy of Firework by Eugene Marten by the publisher of Tyrant Books, Giancarlo DiTrapano. DiTrapano had, not so long ago, published a limited edition of Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg, so there was good reason to pause. Baby Leg is a masterpiece and Tyrant’s edition a work of art. And Evenson had blurbed Marten’s previous book, Waste, with something bordering on awe. I trust Evenson’s blurbs.

But then I opened to DiTrapano’s brief introduction in which he describes being told by Gordon Lish that Eugene Martin was one of three great living American male authors alongside Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. Right, I thought. There’s hype and then there’s real hype, the kind that makes you raise eyebrows, reconsider Lish’s standing in the literary community, and think that this Giancarlo DiTrapano was simply full of it.

DiTrapano starts his publisher letter by stating that he smoked ten cigarettes during the last sixty pages of Firework. Well, sorry to tell you Mr DiTrapano, and my doctor, I smoked ten clove cigarettes in the first twenty pages and was up to almost one a page by the time this book incinerated in my hands.

And sorry Mr. Lish, he’s no McCarthy or DeLillo, as flattering as those comparisons are. He’s Marten through and through. To be sure there are hints of the harsh language and linguistics of those more senior figures, but Marten’s narrative takes us down another road altogether. This is bleak, bleak material and captivating beyond belief.

It’s a road trip of sorts through an America blasted by economic Armageddon and racial slurs. The main character, one Jelonnek, seems to fight inertia to the end. We never seem to get inside him. We are hapless witnesses to sometimes inexplicable acts, moments of kindness and violence that erupt from the page like smoldering matches.

Given this is a reader’s copy I shan’t quote directly from the text, but apart from the occasional line-break I swear if DiTrapano touches a word I’ll strangle him. A masterwork? I’m very tempted to say so.

Michael Schandorf

First of all, I don’t have a “summer reading list.” I have precarious stacks, overflowing shelves, reading material on every flat surface, and some flat surfaces comprised entirely of reading material. Books as furniture. This doesn’t count all that stuff in my Kindle I’ll never get to. But I’ll do my best to contribute here by grabbing things within arm’s reach of my recliner without toppling any essential supports.

First up, to my left, is John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press). (Thanks to Roy C. for pointing me to this one.) Peters is a professor of communication at the University of Iowa, and this, his first book, published in 1999, lays out the theoretical grounds of the study of communication going from Socrates and the roots of rhetoric to information theory, passing through theology, philosophy and psychology along the way. Peters sets up the book with a contrast between Socrates view of dialectic based in eros and the early Christian rhetoric of dissemination. Don’t tell me how it ends!

Underneath Speaking into the Air are Régis Debray’s Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (Verso, 1996) and Transmitting Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997). Debray coined the term “mediology” for his combination of semiotics and medium theory, which develops a theory of cultural “transmission” that seems to cover ground similar to James Carey’s “ritual” view of communication (which Carey lifted from Kenneth Burke) – but reversing the terms (I guess because he’s French and likes to make things difficult) and being less pessimistic (apparently rebelling against his French-academic-ness). Debray covers all the media theory with its critical theory bases that we get here in US graduate communication school, but I’ve never heard him mentioned. Hope to soon find out why that it is.

I came across Debray in Michael Cronin’s Translation and Globalization (Routledge, 2003). Cronin is the Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. Translation and Globalization and the more recent Translation and Identity (Routledge, 2006) examine the role of translation in the contemporary world, drawing on communication and medium theory as well as critical theory and cultural studies. Translators and the act of the translation (in business, politics and culture) serve as a medium of interconnection in a globalized world, occupying a liminal position between cultures and the worldviews generated by the fluid structures of language. Haunting these discussions (at least in my head) is Paul Ricouer’s On Translation (Routledge, 2006), which argues that all communication – even intrapersonal communication involves the act of translation: the meeting and negotiation of different webs of knowledge and conflicting motivations.

The first of the two closest books on my right is Siegfried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media (The MIT Press, 2006). Zielinski is the Founding Director of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, and this book covers more media theory, but with a decidedly different take using decidedly different sources and examples: “a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tale-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others.” Zielinski examines the “historical-media archeological record” and “illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old,” and presumably vice versa. Next to Zielinski is Fredric Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2009): spoiler alert – it was Karl in the study with a kitchen knife.

Cynthia Connolly

Ruth Reichl Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (Penguin, 2006).

Patrick Barber

Things I’m reading:

Eula Biss Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Greywolf, 2009): I’m about halfway through this book of essays. Biss is a young (white) woman who writes about her experiences wtih race in America, using a blunt instrument for a pen. A brilliant, infuriating book. Probably not the best for the beach — you’ll get all worked up, and someone will ask you what you’re reading, and you’ll get into a conversation that might not end so well. But read it.

Kyle Gann No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s “4’33″” (Yale University Press, 2010): A fun, easygoing bio of Cage that pretends to be an indepth analysis of his most notorious piece. Possibly the only book about John Cage that could really qualify as “light reading.” If you’re curious about Cage, this is an ideal book to start with; then again, I’ve read almost all the Cage literature out there and I’m enjoying it too.

Terry Teachout Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009): A thoroughly enjoyable biography of Louis Armstrong. One of those bios that is as much about the time and place as it is about the person. Teachout’s an excellent writer; he keeps the story moving along at a pleasant clip, and he’s talented at describing music as well.

In the pile to read this summer:

Robin D.G. Kelley Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, 2009).

Wendell Berry Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food (Counterpoint Press, 2009).

Stieg Larsson The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Knopf, 2010).

Things not to read this summer:

Michael Davis Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street (Penguin, 2009): How could a book about Sesame Street be dead boring? I guess in that way it’s something of an accomplishment. I gave up at about page 50, exasperated by yet another immigration tale of another Sesame Street founder’s great-great-grandfather. Seriously.

Juliana Hatfield When I Grow Up: A Memoir (Wiley, 2008): Ms. Hatfield provided some ’90s nostalgia and some inner-sanctum insight into the indie-rock world of that time, but mostly this book is like listening to your self-deprecating roommate talk shit on herself ad nauseam.

Jon McGregor Even the Dogs (Bloomsbury USA): An experimental novel, with the results of the experiment being not very good. One of those books that makes you wonder what was so wrong with the story that the author couldn’t just fucking tell it. Because it seemed like a good story; at least, what I could see of it.

Dave Allen

Paul Auster Invisible (Picador, 2010).
David Lipsky Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (Broadway, 2010).
Roberto Bolaño Antwerp (New Directions, 2010).

Howard Bloom

No light reading this summer. I’m following up the current Bloom book, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism (Prometheus, 2009), with a book that asks a simple question: How does the cosmos create?

So, in addition to reading books with too many incomprehensible words and too few worthwhile insights (books that purport to pursue big thoughts, but do it in the standard manner of academic self-deception), I’m resorting to another way of reading.  I’m plundering the original works of people like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Dreisch, von Baer, Herbert Spencer, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Chomsky, and a mess of others.  Doing it using Google book search to see what these guys have said about roughly three dozen core problems in cosmic creativity.

The delight of this hunt has turned out to be Paul Davies, the only one who actually poses the problem of how an inanimate cosmos pulls off what we used to think only gods could do–inventing everything from time and space to pornography and cigarettes. Try Davies’ The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature’s Creative Ability to Order (Templeton Foundation Press, 2004) and The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? (Mariner Books, 2008).

And try a book that both Paul and I are in, along with Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Seth Shostak, and James Gardner, NASA’s Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context (NASA, 2010; also available as a free download) Hey, for reading that goes fast, is sweet and tasty, but delivers a big wallop, a creamola of insights, try my Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, and let me know what you think of it.

However if you prefer playing video games to plowing through a thousand pages of Joyce’s Odesseus and falling out of your beach chair with periodic bouts of sleep, I highly recommend the Google Book Search e-approach, deep dives into the minds of philosophers you would normally never think of sampling between games of badminton.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky

John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (Centipede Press, 2010).

Philip K. Dick (Author), Tony Parker (Illustrator), and Bill Sienkiewicz (Illustrator) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Comic) (Boom! Studios, 2009).

Cory Doctorow For The Win (Tor Teen, 2010).

Bruce Mau and David Rockwell Spectacle (Phaidon, 2006).

Jeff Chang Total Chaos (Basic Civitas, 2007).

Ian Bogost

Claude S. Fischer Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (University of Chicago Press, 2010): I’ve already finished this one by UC Berkeley sociologist Fischer, whose earlier book America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1994), I very much enjoyed. Fischer mounts a simple argument with broad consequences: the fundamental character of America, he argues, is not individualism but voluntarism. A good read, and don’t be scared off by its size: literally half of its 560 pages are notes and references.

David Okuefuna The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Princeton University Press, 2008): I suppose this isn’t a book one reads, but so be it. Albert Kahn was a 19th century business magnate who became a fan of autochrome, an early method of color plate photography invented before 1910. Kahn traveled the world taking color photographs of scenes that appear deeply unfamiliar when rendered in color.

Alastair Gordon Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure (University of Chicago Press, 2008): As someone who travels a lot, I’ve become obsessed with air travel, and I enjoy the occasional book on the subject. This one isn’t new, but it’s new to me. In a see of architectural picture books, Gordon’s promises a real history, not just a set of nostalgic images.

Isabelle Stengers Cosmopolitics I (University of Minnesota Press, 2010): Stengers’s Cosmopolitiques is finally appearing in English this summer. It’s an expansion of her argument in The Invention of Modern Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), in which she continues to develop a de-objectivization of science while still treating it with a respect that many cultural theorists haven’t done. This is one of those situations in which I shouldn’t admit not having read it yet in French, but indeed I haven’t. Anyway, the “I” refers to the fact that the 650-page French edition was published in two volumes, and apparently the English will be too.

Roberto Bolaño The Return (Harper, 2010): Another summer release, this is Chris Andrews’s translation of the short stories that didn’t appear in his rendition of Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions, 2007). While I’ve read The Savage Detectives (Picador, 2008), I’ll admit that I still haven’t tackled 2666, and this summer won’t be the season for it, once again.

Iain Thomson Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge University Press, 2005): Partway through, I can say with some certainty that this is a book anyone reading Heidegger’s famous essay on “The Question Concerning Technology” for the first time or the fiftieth should also read.

Timothy Morton The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010): I’m looking forward to Morton’s short book on the interconnectedness of life. Here’s the key sentence from the blurb: “This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement.” I suspect I’ll be annoyed that only “life” gets interconnection.

Peter Lunenfeld

For me, summer always means the chance to read fiction, and I’ve got a few in hand that I’m really looking forward to.

The first is Dan Clowes’ graphic novel, Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010). Clowes is one of the great storytellers of our age, in any medium. Ghost World (Fantagraphics, 2001) and David Boring (Pantheon, 2002) were serialized in his comic Eightball, but Wilson is his first to be published in book form first. The main character — Wilson, natch — is one of the most repellent figures to emerge from Clowes’ misanthropic imagination in years, but the intricacy of the story’s construction, and the deft intertwining of its visual styles, is such that the book becomes a meditation on aging, and the unworthiness of keeping self apart from others.

Another episodic read comes from first time novelist Tom Rachman. Drawing on his experiences as a foreign correspondent in Italy for the Associated Press, and editor at the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, Rachman has written The Imperfectionists (The Dial Press, 2010) about an English-language newspaper based in Rome, and the decidedly motley collection of expat writers, editors, freelancers investors, and even readers it attracts over a half century’s run.

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010) also investigates what happens to the imagination when it becomes expatriated, but from the vantage point of leaving the Philippines for New York City. A saga covering family and dynastic aspirations over four generations and nearly a century and a half of Philippine history, Ilustrado won the 2008 Man Asian Literary prize before it was even published. We’ll see if it lives up to the hype.

As ever, I pick one big book for the summer. It’s usually non-fiction, but this year it will be Europe Central by William T. Vollman (Penguin, 2005). I suppose I am like every other writer in America, and perhaps the whole world, in my mix of stunned envy and blank incomprehension at how Vollman manages to publish so much and across such a range of genres. Illustrated travelogues like Imperial (Viking Adult, 2009), a seven volume history of violence, essays on femininity and Noh theater in Japan, a series of interviews with poor people about “poor people,” a memoir about hopping trains, the list just goes on and on and on. To be honest I’ve dipped in and out of his books overt the years and never really caught the bug. I’m hoping Europe Central, his twelfth novel – twelfth novel for god’s sake – will be the one to do it for me, with its weaving of personages real and imaginary splaying out from a literary exegesis of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ill-fated and fantastically cruel invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Switching over to non-fiction, I’ll be finishing Optical Media (Polity, 2010) by Friedrich Kittler. I started it early this Spring when it came out from Polity, but then teaching and editing and everything else hit, keeping me from finishing this flawed but interesting record of Kittler’s thoughts about media captured a decade ago in his public lectures at Humboldt University in Berlin. Kittler is brilliant as ever about the technical aspects of media, but his fixation on the materialities of production and consumption, and diminutions of the “so-called humans” who actually make and consume photography, film, television, and digital media makes this a theory that’s too much apparatus and not enough dispositif.

No worries about that in Graham Robb’s Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010), because people are at the heart of this book. Robb, a renowned biographer of figures like Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, has written a series of intersecting portraits of the famous, infamous, and forgotten residents of a great city over the past two centuries. I’m embarking on an alternative, connectionist history of Los Angeles’s art and cultural life, and so I’m hoping that Robb’s book can offer some hints about how to bring the urban scene to life in all its idiosyncrasies.

Erik Davis

Robert Love The Great Oom: the Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (Viking, 2010): Today I just dipped my toes into this recent biography of one of our greatest unsung American flim-flam saints: Pierre Bernard, a Midwest-by-San Fran-by-New York yoga entrepreneur whose dalliances and popularity made him a familiar figure on the scandal pages of the 1920s. Though a lover of the benjamins, Bernard also knew his mystical shit, and did more than anyone at the time to found an American ethos of hatha yoga as well as a kind of pragmatic and glamorous western “Tantra.” I can’t wait to dive into the deep end of this juicy and meticulously researched record of hedonic trickster spirituality, Yankee-style.

Steve Goodman Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear (The MIT Press, 2010): My favorite book of Deleuzian technocultural criticism since Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Zone Books, 1991), Goodman’s dense, imaginative, and incredibly carefully written book presents a kind of psycho-geography of sound in our era of claustrophobic militaristic chaos and affect control. Without ever straying into theory bullshit, Goodman thinks hard and—thankfully for the reader—pares his posthuman forays into Whitehead, Kittler, and Spinoza with concrete details about specific sonic arts and technologies—dub, Muzak, noise weapons, the “planet of drums” that accompanies Mike Davis’s “planet of slums.” By approaching music in terms of actual vibration, Goodman leapfrogs beyond cultural criticism and enters a disturbing but deeply illuminating space of posthuman psycho-physiological dynamics.

Jeffrey Kripal Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press, 2010): Though one of America’s best scholars of contemporary religion, Kripal writes from his own passion and experience as well as his considerable knowledge. In this very readable and—especially for an academic—daring book, he looks at four writers who demonstrate how the modern experience of the paranormal—from prophetic dreams to UFOs—overlap the more traditional domains of the sacred. Reading this I discovered a great deal about the undersung Frederic Myers, a fascinating Brit who cofounded the Society for Psychical Research; Charles Fort and Jacques Vallee were well-known to me, and delightful to read about in a serious (but playful) scholarly context. But Bertrand Méheust, an outsider intellect whose many works of Ufology and related studies remain largely untranslated, was a revelation.

Dale Pendell The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse (North Atlantic Books, 2010): I wasn’t sure Pendell could take his considerable skills as a poet and entheogenic scholar-shaman in the direction of fiction, but The Great Bay is a wonderful addition to the subgenre of post-apocalyptic novels set in California. Covering thousands of years with excerpts from diaries, letters, and encyclopedic overviews, Pendell manages to communicate a wry earth wisdom and pragmatic DIY optimism about the big bummer that may very well lie ahead. Moreover, by covering millennia rather than follow the same characters from start to finish, he reframes the novel as a “long now” experiment that widens our perspective beyond the confines of contemporary human identity and reminds us that whatever happens, the earth and its creatures will keep spinning along.

Steven Shaviro

Bret Easton Ellis Imperial Bedrooms (Knopf, 2010): Ellis is one of the most talked-about of all contemporary American novelists, yet also paradoxically one of the most underrated. He’s notorious (for the violence in his books, and for his apparent partying lifestyle) rather than respected as a writer. Nonetheless, I think that Ellis is a master: a brilliantly literary novelist, and a dark visionary of the American nightmare. All of his books are amazingly strange concoctions of elements that shouldn’t be able to mesh together, and yet somehow do: minimalism, horror, deadpan humor, social satire, and anomie. His new book — just published — takes a look at the characters of his very first book, Less Than Zero. twenty-five years later. What will become of these vapid, cynical, spoiled, and obscenely rich drifters, now that they are approaching middle age?

China Miéville Kraken (Del Rey, 2010): With his brilliantly inventive, richly packed novels, China Miéville is our foremost practitioner of “dark urban fantasy,” or of what has come to be called the New Weird. His books deliciously indulge in the fantastic, while at the same time criticizing the cliches and rightwing ideologies that are all-too-frequently endemic to the genre. Think of Miéville as the anti-Toliken, or as H. P. Lovecraft updated for the new century. His new novel (to be published at the end of June) is apparently set in contemporary London, rather than in the entirely fantastic landscapes of much of his earlier work; but it promises urban underworlds, dueling magical factions, and tentacle horror.

Matt Fraction Casanova (Image Comics, 2010): Matt Fraction is one of the most interesting and inventive comics writers working today. He’s best known for his work for Marvel Comics (Iron Man, X-Men, and soon Thor as well); but his best work comes in Casanova, a creator-owned title. This is a reboot for the series, combining previously-published material (but now in full color instead of monochrome) with entirely new stories. Imagine a 1960s spy-movie hero (James Bond, Matt Helm, Derek Flint) as reimagined by some crazed combination of Jorge Luis Borges, Groucho Marx, and Quentin Tarantino. Great illustrations, too, by Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon.

Jane Bennett Vibrant Matter (Duke University Press, 2010): Political theorist Bennett asks us to reject our standard oppositions between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, subjects and objects, people and things. For even worms, plastic bottles, and scraps of metal are “strangely vital,” active and assertive, possessing their own degrees of agency and force. Rejecting the idea that mere matter is passive and inert, Bennett calls instead for a “vital materialism,” an outlook that recognizes how human beings are not separate from nature, but intertwined with nonhuman beings and with “vibrant materials of all sorts.” Bennett’s book is at once philosophically profound, and written in an open, engaging, and highly accessible style. This is new thought for the new millennium.

Deborah M. Gordon Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton University Press, 2010): This short book, by a leading entomologist, summarizes much of what we know about ants, and how they live and work. The ants and other social insects are among the most successful organisms in the world today. Ant colonies do not have hierarchies or chains of command, and yet they engage in extremely sophisticated emergent behavior. Gordon’s beautiful presentation is fascinating on its own account, as a description the sheer weirdness and beauty of ant life and behavior. But it is also exemplary, and of broader interest, for anybody who wants to know more about emergence and self-organizing systems.

Roy Christopher

The three most subtle and interesting books I’ve read lately are Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994), Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2002), and John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air. These, which continue to give me hours of inspiration, comprise my trio of strong recommendations for the summer.

Like Nancy above, I’m also eager to read Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music, as well as some recent releases like Richard Florida’s The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (Harper, 2010), and Daniel Pink‘s Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (Riverhead, 2010). I’m also eager to get into the current debate on neuroplasticity and the web. To that end, I’m reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010) and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin, 2010), the latter of which I hope is more insightful than everything I’ve read about it so far.

Then there are these ones:

Hillel Schwartz The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (Zone Books, 1996): In light of our culture’s shift from bits to atoms, the concept of a “copy” is shifting as well. The 600+ pages of Schwartz’s book explore the history of the idea from every angle imaginable.

Linda Hutcheon A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006): Adaptation is not only the name of the trainwreck Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman film, but also the process problematized by that film. Hutcheon illustrates its uniqueness from and its place among other constructs of intertextuality (e.g., allusion, paraphrase, parody, etc.), as well as how pervasive it is in our current culture.

Régis Debray Media Manifestos (Verso, 1996): Michael Schandorf, whose own list is above, sent me the tip on this one. I’ve only perused it so far, but I can tell that Debray’s “mediology” will worm its way into my own writing in the area. The same goes for Herman Rapaport’s Between the Sign and the Gaze (Cornell University Press, 1994), especially his last chapter on Laurie Anderson’s United States.

N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 1999): I’ve been rereading all of Kate Hayles’ books (e.g., My Mother Was a Computer, Writing Machines, Chaos and Order, Chaos Bound, etc.), and this one is well worth revisiting if you haven’t in a while or reading if you haven’t. The title is a bit misleading: Hayles uses the word “posthuman” to refer to what I’ve called the externalization of human knowledge. Her book follows this externalization from early computer history through cybernetics and autopoiesis to literature. It’s a ride as enlightening as it is wild.

“We keep waiting for the robots to crush us from the sky
They sneak in through our finger-tips and bleed our fingers dry.”
– Milemarker, “Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth”

Echos of Bill Joy‘s decade-old concerns of a robot-run, dystopian future reverberate through several books of late, but none more disconcerting as Jaron Lanier’s. Disconcerting not because Lanier is one of the smartest, most insightful people on the planet, not because he understands the subtleties in the sentiment in the Milemarker lyric above, and not because he’s right about the future of the Web. You are not a gadget, but thinking about yourself through the most complex of your devices doesn’t mean that you are.

We’ve used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Thinking theorists over the years have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer. The latter of which has been the most useful and generative, but unlike Lanier, I don’t believe that many people really think the human brain is just a big mass of microprocessors. It’s a metaphor, and it’s true only in the Nietzschean sense of being a “useful fiction.”

Same goes for the avatar maintenance of social networking (what I referred to a couple of years ago as “ambient identity“) and the influence of those sites on the concept of friendship. No one actually believes everyone on their “friends list” is their friend. As often as the idea is overheard in conversation, “Oh, we’re just Facebook Friends,” there’s no question that the distinction is understood. Lanier doesn’t give the young users of social media enough credit. This, I believe, is a huge mistake and indicative of a much larger sense of contempt bubbling under the surface of You Are Not a Gadget. It smacks of a “father knows best” brand of elitism.

Lanier gets a lot of things right though. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be the looming figure that he is in the digital world, and his book wouldn’t be worth discussing in the first place, but the general distrust of users in these essays makes the book read like a new line drawn between orders Old and New.

It wouldn’t be quite right to compare Jaron Lanier to Ted Kaczynski, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to compare the ideas in their books. Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski a.k.a. “The Unabomber” (Feral House, 2010) is as sober an account of the perils of technology as one is likely to find since Jacques Ellul lambasted our modern age half a century ago (to wit, Kaczynski cites Ellul as a major influence on his thought and writing).

Anyone discussing this book has to qualify it by saying that they don’t condone Kaczynski’s actions, but one has to understand those actions to see the full scope of his disdain for technology. He believed in eradicating what he saw as the oppressive structure of our technologically enabled society. His revolution required violence and subsequent human casualties.

Condoning his actions or not, you have to respect someone who practices what they preach. Kaczynski tried to return to what he saw as a more natural state, living as self-sufficiently as possible in a shack in bucolic Montana. Encroached upon there by the oppressive powers of technological society, he began fighting back with both mail bombs and strong words. The writing collected in Technological Slavery is passionate, serious, and without exaggeration. He argues against technology with as much intelligence and insight as he does with logic and focus. The only real madness here seems to reside in the introduction by philosophy professor and Kaczynski’s frequent correspondent, David Skrbina.

For better or worse, there’s no going back. Technology is not taking over our lives. It already took over our lives before any of us were born. Luddites, fogeys, and other haters of technology often draw a line across which we shouldn’t or shouldn’t have crossed, typically the latter – as if we could go back to some previous place in history and forget what we’ve invented. It’s not a Heideggerian all-or-nothing, but the line is arbitrarily drawn wherever one feels most comfortable, as if Kaczynski’s clothes, shack, and typewriter aren’t technology. We are different when different inventions exist in our world. There’s no going back. The only way out is through. As William Gibson pointed out,

I think what I’m most aware of is the extent to which people are unaware of the extent to which they’ve been interpenetrated and co-opted by their technology. And I take it for granted that I’ve been… I think a lot of people today have as this sort of a Rousseau-esque idea that it’s possible for humans to return to ‘The Natural State.’ But, in fact, I think it’s not, and if it were, they really wouldn’t like it. I mean, I’m immune to a number of really, really terrible diseases because I was inoculated against them as a child. That’s technology. I’m a male human in my 50s, and I still have most of my teeth. That’s technology. I’m myopic, to the point of near-blindness, and yet I can see. And that’s technology. It’s too close to us to be very aware of it. If we could be stripped of it – which we can’t be, because it’s actually altered our physical being – we’d be pretty unhappy, you know?

There’s no returning to a previous state of any sort. We have to proceed with what we have. So, if you wish to believe in the power of humanity over the power of technology (as I believe both of these authors do), then you have to trust the next generation to do well with the tools that we leave them.

References:

Ellul, J. (1964). The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books.

Heidegger, M. (1969). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Kaczynski, T. J. (2010). Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski a.k.a. “The Unabomber.” Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alred A. Knopf.

Milemarker. (2002). “Frigid Forms Sell You Warmth,” from Frigid Forms Sell. Jade Tree Records.

Neale, M. (director). William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories. London: Docurama.

How did you get started in academic writing and what interested you the most? Is research a large part of this career?

RC: Well, academic writing, strictly speaking, is done for academic journals and is mostly written by scholars for other scholars. What I do and want to do is either called “para-academic” writing or “public intellectualism.” I’m not really interested in writing strictly for an academic audience. I want to write about smart stuff, but to write about it for everyone.

How I got into this is probably a longer story than we have room for, but I’ll try to make it brief. After several years of doing music journalism, writing for magazines about bands and records, I read a book by James Gleick called Chaos. It blew my head wide open. I suddenly realized I wanted to do so much more. From there I read tons of “sciencey” books until I zeroed in on what interested me most (which turns out to be human communication and technology), and I went back to school to study it, which is where I still am.

Research is a huge part of this. As I mentioned above, following my interests turns almost everything I do into research, but good, old-fashioned reading and note-taking are also a big part of it. Fortunately, I love that stuff!

The full interview is here.

Many thanks to Jenna for the thoughtful interview and to Mike Schandorf for inviting me up to UIC.