Futurism, gender, fiction, technology, the hidden and everything else of interest.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
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How Target Knows You’re Pregnant
Writing for The New York Times, Charles Duhigg examines how retailers collect your data and, using the science of habit formation, analyze it to make a profit:
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Whoa. Whoa. WHOA.
If you have any interest in data privacy, being informed about the ways your end-user capitalists track your buying preferences is hugely important. A highly recommended read.
#Riot: Self-Organized, Hypernetworked Revolts- Coming Soon to a City Near You
Wired has an excellent article on the psychology of crowds and riots, and how identity formation is fast-forwarded by the use of social media.
As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.
The Devil's Trumpet: Jimsonweed and the Salem Witch Trials
An interesting theory on the Salem witch hysteria: perhaps caused by the accusing girls’ ingestion of jimson weed? Intriguing for me in particular since I grew up in Appalachia, where every year we’d hear news stories of someone who didn’t listen to their grandmother, and would eat jimson weed. If they were unlucky, they died. If they were lucky, they ended up having the worst delirium experience imaginable, in a coma for a few days and possibly permanently blind. It does, however, have a history of sacred use as a deliriant when absorbed through the skin.
“It began 20 years ago,” she started. She was in a bookstore gathering ideas for a screenplay when she found a book about Salem. Seeing the potential that we all do in Puritans muddling with witchcraft, she pitched a screenplay that would feature the “afflicted girls.” (This wouldn’t be the first movie about Salem. A movie edition of Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible had been released in 1957.) There was interest from an executive, so she started researching and compiling notes on all the girls’ symptoms: Their bodies were contorting, their eyes were bulging, and their mouths were snapping open. They were going on all fours, shrieking uncontrollably, barking like dogs, bellowing like cows, and hallucinating strange visitors.
Wired: The Fractal Dimensions of Zip Codes
Samuel Arbesman for Wired blows my mind a bit with an exploration of how zip-code mapping creates fractal patterns.
And it turns out that branching structures, whether circulatory systems or not, are fractals. Essentially, that means that that they have fractal (or fractional) dimensions, since they fill space or a surface, but are built up using lines. The circulatory system fills a three-dimensional space using tubes (which are essentially two-dimensional), and the Peano Curve fills a plane while only being a long and snaking one-dimensional line. These objects, that don’t quite obey regular shapes, all have fractal dimensions.
The Atlantic: The Psychology of "Ruin Porn" (SFW)
The Atlantic on why we love photographs of abandoned urban spaces so much.
Critics accuse photographers like him of objectifying empty buildings as pretty stage sets filled with juxtapositions, fading colors and dramatic light. Those who are driven by the frisson of scampering around abandoned places, on the other hand, are often lambasted as criminal trespassers. Edensor thinks such invectives give these intrepid romance-seekers short shrift. “In the best photography, there’s a silent comment on economic disinvestment through an attempt to capture the sensations and memories that remain,” he says. “The conscientious explorer, on the other hand, seeks to create a relationship with the past, to produce a history that’s not been museumized or curated by experts.”
The Night The Sky Crashed
On a foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, an electronic billboard ERROR’d, resulting in what appeared to be a floating malfunction window in the sky. Later that night, God rebooted his XP machine and the billboard returned to normal.
(Source: ianbrooks)
BBC: The Inner Life of Snipers
The BBC has an interesting piece on the psychological condition of snipers, who on the whole seem to fare slightly better than their front-line soldier counterparts. Particularly fascinating is their resistance to dehumanizing their targets.
What she found was that while many Israeli soldiers would refer to Palestinian militants as “terrorists”, snipers generally referred to them as human beings.
“The Hebrew word for human being is Son of Adam and this was the word they used by far more than any other when they talked about the people that they killed,” she says.
Snipers almost never referred to the men they killed as targets, or used animal or machine metaphors. Some interviewees even said that their victims were legitimate warriors.
Statistical Analysis of Serial Killers (TW: Murder)
From MSNBC, a not-in-depth-enough-for-my-tastes-but-interesting article on mathematical modeling of serial killer behavior:
When the number of days between Chikatilo’s murders is plotted against the number of times he waited that number of days, the relationship forms a near-straight line on a type of graph called a log-log plot. It’s the same result scientists get when they plot the magnitude of earthquakes against the number of times each magnitude has occurred — and the same goes for a variety of natural phenomena. The power law outcome suggests that there was an underlying natural process driving the serial killer’s behavior.
I’d like to see a more complete explanation of the statistical model used for this. And, of course, their sample size was n=1 so it’s hardly valid. Still, intriguing.
While We Were Sleeping: Is cyberpunk dead? Does the zombie shamble on?
At some point in the past 10 years, while we were sleeping in our pleasant cocoons of ground-breaking fiction, screamingly fast bandwidth and massive political turmoil, cyberpunk moved in with us and we didn’t even notice. To extend the metaphor further, it wasn’t even like that one guy who lived in someone’s attic for a bit without them noticing. No, cyberpunk bump-keyed our front door, waltzed into the house, laid down in our bed and stole all the covers without us noticing. And, yet, somehow, we’ve still not realized it.
First off, it might be helpful to have a working (although probably incorrect) definition of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is futuristic fiction with an emphasis on an increased technology of information and connectivity: connectivity to data, knowledge, and each other. The implications of this accessibility vary widely, of course, as do the forms which it takes: but the core of the genre is concerned with this spreading connectivity at some point in either the near- or far-future. Cyberpunk is, therefore, usually about the Internet, or a system similar to it, and how it impacts our lives.
William Gibson (may have) famously once said, “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”* The aphorism holds true for a lot of technologically-related fields. Medical techniques and tools, for instance, are advancing so rapidly the gap between what the best can afford to try and what the poorest have access to threatens to become a yawning abyss. But for internet-based technologies, that’s not true, and hasn’t been for some time. It’s impossible to claim that technological distribution is even, of course; yet it’s equally unwise to deny that everyone, everywhere, is increasingly plugged in— from cellphone-wielding hunters in the African Bush to Tibetan monks vlogging for friends and family abroad. In many ways, what we saw 20 years ago as our technological future is now more evenly distributed at a faster rate than any other innovation has ever been.** Yet we rarely consider the fact we’re already living in the world cyberpunk has envisioned, and we don’t discuss what that means for the genre.
Recognizing cyberpunk’s ubiquity has become something of a tricky business. It’s a niche dominated (like most things) by brilliant, white, male authors, which makes recognizing the inherent cyberpunkitude of modern life, with its huge color palette of human skins and cultures, harder. Most of us don’t look or act like the protagonists in an early William Gibson novel, so the netbook we’re holding can’t be cyberpunk, right?
I’m not accusing Gibson, or any of the other authors I’ll name, of anything even approaching elitism. In fact, Gibson himself— with his usual visionary approach— appears to understand what the rest of us have failed to see. In transitioning from the far-future wire-riding infojockey of 1984’s Neuromancer to the ordinary crew of Spook Country, Gibson reflects the intersectionality of technology, ethnicity, corporatism and culture in semi-modern times. But the rest of us have failed to follow along: we’re not recognizing that the Age of Cyberpunk is upon us, because we are still trailing in Gibson’s wake, attached to the idea that “cyberpunk” means high-octane whites-only male-centered narratives encased in black rubber and leather. Our iPhones are blowing up with Tweets from Trans-Asian celebrities we idolize and friends from halfway round the world whom we’ve never actually met even as we slaver over day-glo dreads and black nylon jackets in underground fashion spreads, saying to ourselves, “Someday.”***
It’s not that we’re totally blind. We’re just not programmed to see it. No one looks at the working-class Mexican shop-girl on the bus with last year’s phone and says, “Aha! Cyberpunk is upon us!” But that’s because we’re conditioned to expect a certain feel, a certain aesthetic. Cyberpunk means small technologies used by the masses for convenience, and large technologies used by talented main characters for nefarious or heroic ends, because that’s how narrative works. It doesn’t usually mean a failed defense experiment transformed into a cross-cultural platform for reblogging NPR announcers reading, “I’m Sexy and I Know It” (yes, you want to click that link, you really, really do.) As always, humans have made the future messier and sillier and more wonderful than anyone could have predicted, and as usual, when we were envisioning that same future, we largely forgot to add the persons of color, the women, the transgender people and every other non-normative individual to the equation. Small wonder we aren’t recognizing it now. As a society, we’re allergic to fat people in latex.
What does that mean for the genre? Does it have a future? Part of the problem seems to be that cyberpunk, thus far at least, is an inherently limited genre, tied to a very specific point in time and space. If you push cyberpunk too far in one direction or another, it becomes either a sub-genre or a different genre altogether. Write a story about human neurological enhancement and you may have crossed the line to biopunk. Push the implications of information technology far enough and you might end up with a fabulous, gritty space opera like the Takeshi Kovacs novels. Cyberpunk’s place within fiction rides on a precarious edge: far enough in the future that connectivity and infotech has advanced, but not so far that it’s pushed us beyond our recognizable social structures and normal patterns of life. And since it seems likely that we’re already poised on the brink, overlooking the dramatic restructuring of social life in the face of technology, it may be that cyberpunk has lost its relevance as speculative fiction and instead is fascinating only because of its resemblance to reality.
That’s not to say there isn’t hope for cyberpunk fiction yet. Cory Doctorow, for one, seems to be having a truly grand time pushing things just a little bit further. Gibson, through what appears to be a staggering amount of prescience, remains a step ahead of all of us. The closer we get to an American election, the more I feel like Matt Ruff probably got it all right. Yet the gap appears to be narrowing. In 1984, it was possible to imagine a future of almost unimaginable connectivity and portability, a world fueled by the almost instantaneous process of information. Now, the cyberpunk vision has materialized so completely that its flagship authors appear to be confined within a time span of the next 10 years. Go any farther, and we move away from pure connectivity to the peripheral applications of such— how will our world change when we use the newest information technology in other fields, like health or space travel or art or warfare? And while interesting and worthwhile, those novels may not be cyberpunk at all. I suppose it’s impossible to write something and live it at the same time.
* In a strange moment that probably pleases Gibson more than anyone, no one on the Internet appears to be totally sure when he said this— if, in fact, he ever did.
** As far as I know, which is roughly less far than I can throw myself.
*** Not that there’s anything wrong with cyberpunk fashion. But when you’ve suddenly become a stock character in the genre, you have to recognize that fact whether you’re wearing Neo’s Matrix coat or not.
[DISCLAIMER: I am by no means an expert on cyberpunk. I haven’t even read the whole canon. Therefore there may be texts which refute these musings, or enormous erroneous leaps of logic. If I’m wrong, you should tell me why!]
Jamais Cascio on Futurism & The Elephant in the Hypothetical Room
There hasn’t been a ground-breaking new vision of technological futures in at least 10 years, probably closer to 15; nearly all of the technological scenarios talked about at present derive in an incremental, evolutionary way from the scenarios of more than a decade ago. The closest thing to an emerging paradigm of technological futures concerns the role of sensors and mobile cameras in terms of privacy, surveillance, and power. It’s still fairly evolutionary (again, I could cite examples from Transhuman Space), but more importantly, it’s much more about the social uses of technologies than about the technologies themselves.
For me, that’s an interesting signal. In many ways, we can argue that the major drivers of The Future, over the past decade and very likely to continue for some time, are primarily socio-cultural…
Lastly, there’s a strong argument to be made that futurism as practiced (both the the West and, from what I’ve seen, in Asia) has a strong connection to the topics of interest to politically-dominant males. It would be too easy to caricature this as “boys with toys,” but we have to recognize that much of mainstream futures work over the past fifty years (certainly since Herman Kahn’s “thinking the unthinkable”) has focused on tools of expressing power, and has been performed by men.
