The Technium

Next Phase of Commercials

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:43:59 -0800

Superbowl commercials often foreshadow the norm in everyday TV commercials later. I noticed several things about this year's crop of commercials.

1) They are definitely getting weirder, more whimsical, trying harder to catch your attention -- while you check your email. They are no longer competing against the possibility of you leaving for the bathroom; they are competing with you re-watching the previous commercial on your Tivo or your iPad.

2) They are also more self-reflective, self-parodying, and complex. They "quote" not only cultural references, but specific other commercials. They often work only if you've seen other commercials, usually predecessors in the same line. In this way, each commercial must be "read" as part of a larger, longer work. Those Bud commercials go way back. The more commercials you've seen, the more you get out of the new one.

3) These are not primarily advertising products or service. They are advertising the commercial itself.

4) The commercials run during this 46th Superbowl are only one stage in a multi-stage organism. A fair proportion of the commercials debuting on the Superbowl were released earlier in teasers on the internet. You can think of these early clips as trailers for the commercial. They were, per point #3 above, commercials for the commercial. Or think of them as eggs for the hatchling. Then after the Superbowl, the advertisers released the extended forms of the commercial, also on the internet. I am aware of at least three ads which did that this year: Chevrolet/OK Go, Ferris Bueller, The Avengers. Which means the early clips were commercials for the commercials of the commercials. Or these are three stages of ads: egg, larva, adult. But this year, it seemed a good quarter of the commercials shown were for movies, which are themselves often hours-long product placement vehicles. So that makes a fourth stage, a further extension of whatever story is trying to be told. Since movies are sequeled if successful, the idea can grow to a fifth size, dozens of hours long.

5) All this suggests that the "natural habitat" of a commercial is on the internet. That's where it is born, develops, matures and dies. Its brief, mayfly-length appearance on the Superbowl is primarily an ad to get you to watch it grow on the internet.

6) I predict that in a few years from now we'll start to see 4.5-minute length commercial shorts that come after the extended-play version. Or maybe even "directors' cut" versions. These outright unabashed commercials will run as long as a pop hit tune, and in format resemble a music video. We'll see YouTube-ish channels that will charge you to watch them. I make this forecast based on the fact that this prime attention-niche is just one adjacent-possible step away.

Fixity vs Fluidity

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:05:23 -0800

On his blog Nick Carr spells out the typographic fixity of the classical paper book. It's a great exposition of all the attractive parts of the big fat heavy paper books. [The image below is of book tombstones.]

I summarize his list of Four Fixities:

Fixity of the page -- The page stays the same. Whenever you pick it up, its' the same. You can count on it, and refer and cite it with certainty.

Fixity of the edition -- No matter which copy of the book you pick up, anywhere, it will be the same, so the fixed content is shared, and within an edition, the same always.

Fixity of the object -- Paper books last a very long time, and their text doesn't change as they age.

Sense of completeness -- A sense of finality and closure that became part of the attraction of literature.

These are very real, and very attractive qualities. And Carr is absolutely correct that they are some of the qualities that will disappear in ebooks, at least in the versions of ebooks we can see now. He is correct to point out that we will miss them, and that we should be aware of this loss as we chose what kind of books we buy or write.

However, Carr did not list the corresponding downside/upside of ebooks, but there are Four Fluidities of the ebook:

Fluidity of the page — Can flow to fit any space, any where, any time.

Fluidity of the edition — Can be corrected or improved incrementally.

Fludity of the item — Can be kept in the cloud at such low cost that it is "free" to keep and constantly slipped to new "movage" platforms.

Sense of growth — The never-done-ness of an ebook (at least in the ideal) resembles a life more than a stone, animating us as creators and readers.

These are some of the things we gain. Will these fluidities be enough to outweigh the fixities we lose?

Finally, both of these character sets, of fixity and the fluidity, are driven by technology, of paper and electrons. Paper favors fixity, electrons favor fluidity. There is nothing to prevent us from inventing another technology of text, a third way, that might be "in-between" paper and electrons, or might have some of the qualities of the first set and some of the second. I am not convinced that these are binary qualities, nor do they have to only be extremes. It may be possible to invent fixed electronic books, or rigid ebooks, or sticky text in between.

The Next Transitions in the Technium

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:30:49 -0800

What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as in electricity) for long-distant communications is significant as well, enabling all kinds of other achievements. Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect -- no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to? Most of these thresholds are gradual, so we can't assign dates, but each of these structures seem to be a natural transition that any civilization must reach sooner or later.

* AI - There are many varieties of artificial intelligence, and no formal definition for any of them. By whatever measure, a civilization capable of producing synthetic minds similar to its own, or superior in some facets, has reached an important threshold, not the least which is a great compounding acceleration of its progress.

* A-life -- Likewise there are many types of artificial life possible, from derivatives of natural biological life, to a-life running on an alternative chemical base-pairs, to self-reproducing dry life more akin to nano-bots. Sustainable self-reproducing, self-evolving creations enable huge innovations and bring huge problems. It is a major transition.

* Methuselarity - Health care and science keep extending the average longevity of humans, and increasing the rate at which it is improving. Right now science is extending the expected lifespan of humans in the developing world a few days per year. If this rate keeps accelerating, at some point scientific progress will increase expected longevity from one day per year, to one year per year. When longevity increases at one year per year, that effectively creates immortality, or Methuselarity, for anyone who reaches that threshold. They become like the biblical Methuselah and live for a thousand years, on average.

* GlobeNet -- Over time we keep adding sensors and monitors every few kilometers on land and on the sea until we form a dense grid of sensors covering the globe. There will be thermometers, wind speed jigs, rainfall meters, sunlight sensors, air pollution particle detectors, radiation meters, earthquake probes, climatic gas sensors, animal motion detectors, sea level and wave detectors, traffic sensors, DNA sensors, and little things that measure anything we can think of place on a regular basis on the surface (and deeper) of the planet. All of these form a blanket of sensitivity providing the planetary mind (us and machines) a real-time awareness. For the first time we'll have a quantifiable globe.

* Global Superorganism -- The stage at which several billion sentient beings spread over a planet and several quadrillion smart machines merge into a unified system that is always on. This global system of interacting smart agents exhibits emergent behavior and degrees of autonomy that is not present in its constituent parts. On some planets the global superorganism will reach artificial intelligence before a stand-alone AI does. It's not clear which way Earth is headed.

* Memorex -- Every bit of writing, music, photography, painting in civilization is digitized and recorded in a machine-readable way. All knowledge, in all languages, from all ages, in all media is stored in a way that is universally accessible to all people and machines. In other words, the universal library becomes real, but not just books, but everything created, past and present, and it is available anytime. This threshold of civilization-scale knowledge becomes both a global memory and a global awareness.

* Borg -- Another threshold is crossed when any individual can import the global Memorex onto their own minds. Civilization-scale memory available to, or within, all individuals.

* Mirror World -- A one-to-one mapping of both the natural and built worlds onto a full-scale simulation of those worlds. This huge global model runs in parallel to the observed worlds. At first the functions of large organizations are mirrored in a simulation, then entire cities will be reflected in a real-time city simulation. Eventually every major node, sensor-net, agent, or variable on Earth is simulated in real time in this global model. Sort of like Google Earth but with every process, and every ecosystem, as well as every building. The mirror world is used both as an experimental test bed for science and predictions, and as an entertainment medium, as in a second life.

* Class I Energy -- The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed three major levels of energy production for galactic civilizations, which he called Class I, II, and III. Class I was the maximization of energy from the entire planet, Class II was maximizing the available energy from its star, and Class III was exploiting energy from its galaxy. Humans have not yet reached Class I, so that threshold is still in front of us.

* Universal Family Tree -- Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. We will clearly see exactly how I am related to you. We'll also see how everyone is related at some point to everyone else no matter where they were born. The big surprise will be the short hops between us. This common tree of descent will aid health care, medicine, and science, but will also aid peace. Greeks and Turks, Jews and Arabs, Koreans and Japanese will see they are far more related than not.

* Knowledge of All Species -- At some point a civilization wakes up and takes a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all the other living species on its planet. This step is similar to mapping all the elements of matter. It realizes that in order to model and manage its ecosystems it must know all the ingredients and all the interacting parts, just as it takes knowing all the elements in order to do chemistry. This threshold of the knowledge of all species includes sequencing the DNA of every species as well -- a huge asset that also enables it to recover and resurrect known extinct species.

* TransHumanity -- When beings gain control of their biological evolution they begin to mess with it. But not everyone will be eager to do so. At the point that humans begin to engineer their own genomes, there will be a significant number of individuals, families and groups who will refuse to do so. For every person who says "Over my dead body will I or my child be engineered," there will be someone else who says, "Bring on the mutants!" Thus there will inevitably be a forking of the gene line. The threshold is not engineering genes since we have been doing that slowly and ignorantly all along, but a clear splitting off of a subgroup. Whether or not each becomes a non-breeding separate species doesn't matter. Transhumanity means at least one fork of the species is deliberately self-engineered.

* Singularity -- As commonly defined, a singularity means an infinite pace of change. We don't know what that looks like because, as commonly defined, it is inherently unknowable. For this reason I don't find this transition useful in prospect, only in retrospect. We have been through one singularity so far -- the invention of language. A few of the above might be also initiate singularity but we'll only know after the fact.

There are a bunch of other transitions such as Downloadability, Time Travel, Telepathy, etc., -- well mined by science fiction -- that would qualify as important information/energy thresholds, but which do not seem inevitable to me at the moment.

Are there other near-future stages that you think any civilization on the galaxy must pass through if it survives long enough?

Life at the Edge of Space

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:02:33 -0800

Life is very pervasive. How high into space does earthly life exist? The Clotho Project aims to find out.

How far off the earth’s surface does life exist, and what is the nature of the organisms that live there? The Clotho Project is a collaboration between the Mavericks Foundation, civilian space explorers, and several of the worlds leading scientific, academic and research institutions. The main mission is to carry out the first general survey of life in the upper atmosphere, including the upper portions of the stratosphere and mesosphere, as well as exploring areas of particular interest such as the biology of clouds and the airborne extent of algal blooms.

Not stated is the fact that the Mavericks Foundation is a co-op of amateur rocketeers. Folks who very carefully and scientifically make huge homemade rockets and launch them to the edge of space. They do it for fun, for the challenge, and for science.

The quest for the limits to earthly life is a good one. So is furthering the catalog of life on Earth. The search for species at the edge of space aligns with the All Species Inventory, which I co-founded.

I will bet that there are far more species of life up there than any biologist would dare predict right now. Probably tens of thousands. Some of these stratospheric species probably have curious adaptions for living in near vacuum and drastic temperatures. Useful genes.

Undetectable Technology

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:31:42 -0800

Karl Schroeder, science fiction author of the novel Permanence, writes about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox says that if there is an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of civilizations at advance stages that would emit evidence of their presence, but as far as we see in any direction, there are none. The skies should be full of aliens, but are not. Why not?

Schroeder's explanation is a re-phrasing of Arthur C. Clarke's famous declaration that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Schroeder's declares:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

That is interesting and a very plausible answer. Basically, we can't detect really advance civilizations because their technology is so advanced that is operates in harmony with a planet, and it uses some kind of communication that looks like natural radiation, etc., to such an extant that it appears to not be there. The civilization acquires a sort of natural technological camouflage. Think Pandora in Avatar.

[Green Planet image by Ivan Raposo]

But what Schroeder says afterwards is even more profound in terms of the technium.

If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

His theory suggest that what technology wants is to be "natural," not just biologically natural, but geologically natural, or like self-regulating Gaia, natural on a planetary scale. I didn't quite reach that far in my book, so I am glad to have been pushed even further by Schroeder.

We Are Stardust

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:11:42 -0800

Every year at year's end the intellectual impresario (and my literary agent) John Brockman asks his clients and friends a Question. For 2012 the question was WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? About 200 of us answered, compiled here. The collection is a good read.

My answer:

We Are Stardust

Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?

[Image from C. Smith at Curtis Schmidt Telescope]

A Whole Lot of Nothing

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 23:51:44 -0800

I live about 2 km from the ocean. I rode down on my bike today and just hung out on the shore to watch the waves crashing over each other. This is what it looked like on our beach in Pacifica. As I sat on some rocks watching the waves roll in and the wind whipping the foam at the top, and the sun shinning through the crest of the wave, I was overcome with the certainty that everything I was seeing was immaterial. It was real, but it was not solid. Despite the hard rocks I was sitting on, despite the gritty sand on my feet, despite the pounding water in the surf, despite the force of wind on my cheeks, despite my knowledge of how fatal the ocean can be to life, despite all these clear and unmistakeable signals, it was (and still is) clearer yet, that at their essences, all these things are really made of something intangible, without weight, something close to what we think of as information.

Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. What is a oxygen atom made of? Not oxygen, but of smaller particles, like protons and electrons. And what are they made of? Mostly space. In a lecture I just watched, Brian Cox gave a figure for how empty an atom is. It is 99.9999999999999% space. And what is that remaining 0.000000000000001% non-space made of? Nothing that we would call hard, or material. It is some wavicle, some quantum superposition, some intangible force. Maybe it is simply information. We actually don't know what matter is at the bottom, but we do know it is fungible into energy and information.

So in a very real sense, the drops of water splashed up by waves thundering on the beach before me, and the sand churned up from the beach, are just patterns of the immaterial. Water and sand are real patterns just as the waves are real patterns; but they are patterns of a kind of nothingness.

I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can't use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is. Wavicles don't mean anything. Neither does the concept of a quantum particle being in two places at once. All we have is the language of mathematics, which few can speak. And what the maths say is that the tons of water rolling in under the light of a sun 93 millions miles away and pounding the sand in front of me is all really mostly nothing, and the little that is not nothing, is really just another kind of nothing.

This is hard to see at sunset on the beach along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. But this afternoon I could see it.

Making Holes in Our Heart

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:36:23 -0800

[CES Image by Jaymi Heimbuch]

I know the feeling. You are wandering around a huge harshly-lit hall full of tables displaying electronic stuff, new devices that all look the same but claim to be different. It is the CES show, the largest consumer electronic show in the world. The hall is overwhelmingly vast. You very quickly don't care to see any more stuff. It is not different. You despair. The whole scheme of more stuff begins to look trivial, meaningless. You start to think just like this reporter from the floor of CES:

There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.
They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. And in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled.

Yes, this is what technology does to us. Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continuous discontentment. I agree that it is the source. New technology forces us to be always chasing the new, which is always disappearing under the next new, a salvation always receding from our grasp.

But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that the technium brings. Most of what we like about being human is invented. We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches which we have to scratch, digging extra holes that we have to fill, creating new desires we've never had before.

I understand why we feel ashamed at how easily we can make ourselves envious and discontent, but I offer this comfort during our despair: It is worth it.

We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart. We are stretching our boundaries, and stretching the small container that holds our identity. Of course there will be rips and tears. Late-nite informercials, and cavernous CES halls of unsellable gizmos, are hardly uplifting techniques, but the path to our enlargement is very prosaic, humdrum, and everyday. The only real progress that sticks is boring.

Sourced Quotes, 12

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 23:52:15 -0800

People who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly. -- Steven Johnson, Anatomy of an Idea, December 14, 2011

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. -- Jeff Bezos, Wired, Jeff Bezos Owns the Web, December, 2011

Why aren't all movies available through all [online] channels? The movie companies these days must have some irrational fear of giving the customers what they want. -- David Pogue, State of the Art, New York Times, December 29, 2011.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. -- Karl Schroeder, The Deepening Paradox, November, 2011

There's something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak. - Bruce Sterling, A Statement of Principle, 1994,

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up. -- Seth Godin, Seth Godin's Blog, December 11, 2011

Getting a job is really dumb because then you'll only get paid when you’re working. -- Steve Pavlina, Personal Development for Smart People, July 21, 2006.

Anything you say before "but" in a political statement doesn't count. - Rick Falkvinge. TechDirt, January 5, 2012

If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again. -- Penn Jillette, God No, p. 129,

It's true: never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade. -- Merlin Mann, Twitter, April 20, 2010

Computers -- the gizmos themselves -- have far less to do with techie enthusiasm than some half-understood resonance to The Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating the Planetary Mind. Teilhard do Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder to his Omega Point might be built by engineers and not mystics." -- John Perry Barlow, in email cited in Out of Control, 1994

[Cartoon by Roz Chast, New Yorker, March 22, 2010]

What the Public Commons Is Missing

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0800

The natural home for ideas and creations is in the commonwealth, the public domain. We cleverly give the creators of ideas and art and inventions a temporary monopoly for their creations outside of the commonwealth in order to encourage them to make more new things. That is good. For a while that temporary period in the US was 58 years after the work was created for copyright and 17 years for patents.

Unfortunately, as creators became corporations, they have lobbied for laws (and financially supported the elections of lawmakers) that have extended the "temporary" period till it is in effect, unlimited for copyright.

That means that many works of film, literature, and music that ordinarily would have gone into the public domain this year (ones finished by 1955) will not. This page lists some of the 1955 works that are not going public: Lady and the Tramp; To Catch a Thief, The End of Eternity, etc.

It is in the interest of culture to have a large and dynamic public domain. The greatest classics of Disney were all based on stories in the public domain, and Walt Disney showed how public domain ideas and characters could be leveraged by others to bring enjoyment and money. But ironically, after Walt died, the Disney corporation became the major backer of the extended copyright laws, in order to keep the very few original ideas they had — like Mickey Mouse — from going into the public domain. Also ironically, just as Disney was smothering the public domain, their own great fortunes waned because they were strangling the main source of their own creativity, which was public domain material. They were unable to generate their own new material, so they had to buy Pixar.

A tragedy of the commons occurs when members behave selfishly and deny the commons what is due. As Disney shows, when members keep their creations out of the common pool for others to exploit, their gain is only short lived. Mickey Mouse, Superman, and eventually Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker all belong in the commons. The world will be a better place when they are.

We should repeal unreasonable intellectual property laws, to keep the incentives for a period no longer than the life of its creators (how can you be invented if you are dead?). But in the meantime, imagine what the creative public could do with these works, and weep — because nothing like that will happen for a very long time.

Beyond the Uncanny Valley

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:42:18 -0800

I saw the Tin Tin movie last night, which was super. I think we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the hyperreal.

What's the uncanny valley? As we make robots and animations more human-like, we increase our emotional attachment to them, but only up to a point. As they become nearly human, that very tiny remaining difference of inhumanness can creep us out. That's the theory of the "Uncanny Valley," which supposedly explains why audiences found the animated humans in the movie Polar Express, or the baby in the Pixar's first short movie, so repulsive. They were too human to dismiss, but not human enough to embrace. Computer artists long ago passed the test for 100% realism in artificial beings, such as the Navi in Avatar, or Golum in Lord of the Rings. Now they have passed the test for humans (at least for me) in Tin Tin.

In the first few minutes of the Tin Tin, there is a momentary hesitation when you first see the face of the characters; a feeling they are just a bit shy of something. But that moment passes quickly and thereafter the humans (and animals) seem totally real. Their movements, skin texture, hair, expressions, eyes, everything says they are real -- even though they are only simulations. It helps that the environments are also 100% believable, including the elements of water, weather, atmosphere, sand, and city.

In fact, I believe that we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality.

One of the great charms of the Tin Tin movie (besides its solid story, and uplifting sensibility) is the incredible degree of detail, texture, lighting, and drama that infuses every scene. Because the whole movie is synthetic, every scene can be composed perfectly, lit perfectly, arranged perfectly, and captured perfectly. There is a painterly perfection that the original Tin Tin comics had that this movie captures. This means that the stupendous detail found in say TinTin's room, or in a back alley, or on the ship's deck can be highlighted beyond what it could in reality. You SEE EVERYTHING. When TinTin's motorcycle is chasing the bad guy and begins to fall apart, nothing is obscured. Every realistic mechanical part is illuminated realistically. This technique gives a heightened sense of reality because every corner of the entire scene is heightened realistically, which cannot happen in real life, yet you only see real-looking things. This trick lends the movie a hyperreality. Its artificial world looks realer than real.

Now that we have passed throughout the uncanny valley, and audiences will accept totally synthetic actors, filmmakers will begin to explore the limits of the hyperreal. Yes, we'll have more realistic aliens and alien environments in science fiction films, but we'll also have hyperreal suburbs and hyperreal urban cities with hyper real ordinary people in the present tense. I'm expecting that for the next ten years or so, directors will create more and greater hyperreal films, until we tire of it (like we have with hyperreal high dynamic range still photography). And then we'll see shaky, gritty, unfocused, hand held camcorder type totally synthetic worlds as well. And every variety of in-between hybrid worlds.

In 20 years we will simply stop asking the question of whether this or that part was real.

Supercut Genre

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:44:00 -0800

Technology continues to create new genres of media. A short list of new media genres in the past few decades would have to include:

The 18 minute PowerPoint presentation (a la TED)
LOL Cats
100-Plus-Hour Serial Dramas (Lost, the Wire, Sopranos)
1-page Blog Post
Fan-Fic Novels
Remixed Movie Trailers
40-Hour Video Game
Bad Lipsyncs
3 Minute Funny Clips (You Tube)
140-Character Tweets
A Book of Tweets
Video Supercuts

The last of these, Video Supercuts, is still an embryonic art form. A supercut is a video montage cut and sequenced from existing movies and TV and commercials. It creates a rapid-fire medley of shots representing a theme of some sort. Supercuts highlight cliches in movies, or repetitions by a director, actor, or character, or in their most creative use, a supercut will reveal unseen patterns in our visual record. As an example, imagine the US President's State of the Union speech without the speech -- only the bits where no one is talking. Or image every entrance of Kramer in Seinfeld in chronological order. Or every nickname uttered by Sawyer in Lost.

Palin's Breath from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo.

Why? Because technology makes it easy. But also because there are patterns to be found. Three technologies make supercuts possible: The large reservoir of videos and audiences on YouTube; ubiquitous easy video editing software; transcripts for searching for key words and ideas. The supercuts genre has found its curator in Andy Baio who has posted every supercut he has found on a new site supercut.org. There are currently 160 different supercuts.

Baio has also written up a fantastic short history of this emerging genre, or what he calls "An Anatomy of a Meme." He says:

Brooklyn-based critic Tom McCormack wrote the definitive history of the supercut, tracing its origins back to found-footage cinema, like Bruce Conner's A MOVIE from 1958.
But it wasn't until the 1990s that clear descendants of the genre emerged. Matthias Müller's Home Stories (1990) reused scenes from 1950s- and 1960s-era Hollywood melodramas, filmed directly from the TV set, to show actresses in near-identical states of distress.

He used Amazon Turk researches to help him classify and analyze attributes of the new genre. For instance he discovered the average supercut consists of 82 cuts.

As super cuts become more common -- and become part of the cultural vocabulary -- I think they will help keep cliches from getting old, and will help creators and the audience perceive recurring patterns in rapid turnaround. They will act as keen proofreaders and critics. At the same time a few super cutters will employ existing footage to create entirely new feature-length works. A few classic experimental films have already been cut from found footage, but we can expect more of these, and better ones.

Sourced Quotes, 11

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:17:45 -0800

I'm curious about everything. Even subjects that don't interest me. -- Alex Trebek, What I've Learned, Esquire, March 2003.

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while. -- William Gibson, The Art of Fiction, Paris Review, No. 211.

The cynic has a shorter to-do list than the optimist. -- Anne Herbert, Peace and Love, September 22, 2011

If you aren't having to apologize every now and then you aren't being interesting enough. -- Robert Scoble. My Apology to Tim Cook, Google+, Octber 6, 2011

Without a big picture we are very small people. — Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack, The New Universe and the Human Future, Introduction p. xii, 2011.

A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. -- Charles Fort, Lo!, 1931, p. 34

Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network. -- Steve Yegge, Google+, Oct 12, 2011

Few people are suited to running a startup, and it's very hard to predict beforehand which are, so lots of people starting startups who shouldn't is probably the optimal state of affairs. As long as you're at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find out if you're suited to running a startup is to try it. -- Paul Graham, Why Startup Hubs Work, October 2011

On the Origin of Technological Species

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:28:36 -0800

Astute readers should notice the origins of this famous passage, altered and paraphrased by Kirk Holden, and tweaked by me.

"If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of instrumentation, technical tools vary at all in the several parts of their organization, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each kind of instrument, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for market share, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all instantiated artifacts of technology to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each technical artifact's own duration, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to nature. But if variations useful to any technical artifact do occur, assuredly individual tools thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for product life; and from the strong principle of inheritance of specific technical solutions in hardware and software, they will tend to produce divergent forms similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Technological Progress. Technological Progress, on the principle of qualities being inherited at corresponding ages, can modify the IP, improved feature set, or new models, as easily as the earlier form."

Of course in the original passage Darwin argued the converse: that natural selection paralleled the same kind of selection we see in tools. The dynamics of evolution within nature and technology have many parallels, I argue, because they are driven by the same forces of exotropy and self-organization.

Steam-Engine-Time

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:16:35 -0800

This long revealing interview with William Gibson is a gold mine. In addition to being a gifted writer, Gibson is one of the best conversationalists I've encountered. I could listen to him all day. (This interview in The Paris Review reminds me how great interviews can be when you allow them to meander and go deep and long. The way Rolling Stone, Playboy, Interview and even Wired (briefly) used to do.) Among other things Gibson tells the story of how he came up with the concept of cyberspace while writing his novel on a manual typewriter. He also explains why he writes in the present versus the future these days. [Image by Michael O'Shea]

A few excerpts:

*
If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Fossil fuels have been discovered to be destabilizing the planet’s climate, with possibly drastic consequences. There’s an epidemic, highly contagious, lethal sexual disease that destroys the human immune system, raging virtually uncontrolled throughout much of Africa. New York has been attacked by Islamist fundamentalists, who have destroyed the two tallest buildings in the city, and the United States in response has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. By the time you were telling about the Internet, they’d be showing you the door. It’s just too much science fiction.

*

We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.

*

I’ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian. I suspect that the people who say I’m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions. If you’re living in most places in Africa, you’d jump on a plane to the Sprawl in two seconds. Many people in Rio have worse lives than the inhabitants of the Sprawl.

*

That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.

And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn’t know, your parents didn’t know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.

*

I was walking around Vancouver, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.

*

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.

The actual phrase was first coined by the collector of weird, Charles Fort, in 1931, who wrote in his early fantasy novel Lo!: "A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time."

Steam-engine-time is another name for technological determinism, which is another way to say simultaneous independent invention, Turns out simultaneous parallel discovery and invention are the norm in science and technology rather than the exception (see my previous post).

When it is steam-engine-time, steam engines will occur everywhere. But not before. Because all the precursor and supporting ideas and inventions need to be present. The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it. No idea - even steam engines -- are solitary. A new idea rests on a web of related previous ideas. When all the precursor ideas to cyberspace are knitted together, cyberspace erupts everywhere. When it is robot-car-time, robot cars will come. When it is steam-engine-time, you can't stop steam engines.

Right now it is social-media-time.