Monthly Archives: October 2010

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#50cyborgs postmortem

I hope you’ll indulge me as I link to this postmortem interview with Tim Maly about his #50cyborgs project; yes, both Maly and interviewer Matthew Battles say nice things about my own contribution to it, but it’s also an interesting discussion for anyone curious about the future of “positioning for niche intelligentsia eyeballs in the modern post-blogosphere”, as Bruce Sterling puts it… or, to put it another way, content creation targeting select narrow verticals of the geek market.

MB: A striking aspect of the reaction to 50 Cyborgs was its seriousness. I mean, often when mainstream media outlets cover Internet culture, they talk about how wacky or geeky it is. And yet here was a project wholly of the Internet, which could be treated in venues like the Atlantic or on Nora Young’s CBC show as a serious project full-stop.

TM: It’s interesting that you find this striking. It never occurred to me that it was anything other than a good idea that they should cover it. The Atlantic comes out of me knowing Alexis through Twitter. When I first started talking about the 50th anniversary, he was at Wired and we’d talked about how it might be structured. When he moved over to The Atlantic, the idea moved with him.

As for CBC, I just sent them an email. Spark has always been very open to and about taking the Internet seriously. Right there on the homepage, it says, “Spark is a blog, radio show, podcast and an ongoing conversation about technology and culture. Spark is an online collaboration. Leave your thoughts, stories, and ideas here, and together we’ll make a radio show.” How could I not get in touch?

There is a power in boldness, it seems… though connections sure are helpful, too. But #50cyborgs spread as wide as it did in a fairly organic way:

MB: Beyond the handcrafted mediasphere of rss and podcast, though, an Internet culture project that isn’t about privacy, piracy, or kittens can be hard to find on the mainstream radar screen. How did you court the attention of the wider media?

TM: I didn’t. I reached out to sites that I thought would be interested in the project. The thing about mainstream media is that a lot of it moves too slowly. The gap between me being some weirdo with a Tumblr account and a good idea and the successful completion of the project is shorter than the lead time of most magazines.

I thought about approaching the New York Times about it as they are the first mention of the word (cyborg), as far as I can tell. I ended up not finding the time. The coverage in the Guardian came off of the author, Caspar Llewellyn Smith, hearing the Spark podcast.

I was more interested in hitting the big aggregators. I didn’t have as much success there as I’d hoped, though hitting Slashdot, Reddit and io9 felt pretty good. io9 was especially thrilling because I was in the midst of trying to work out how best to pitch to them and Annalee contacted me asking if there was room for one more contributor. And then she pitched “cyborgs in love”, which was on my unclaimed coverage wishlist. I hadn’t yet sent anything in and here’s the editor in chief getting in touch with me!

Lots of food for thought in there… and, for me, memories of a proud moment and a fun project. 🙂

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Amazon’s “Kindle Singles”: saviour of the genre short fiction scene?

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Hard to say for sure, really, given that it hasn’t even launched yet, but Amazon’s plans for the “Kindle Singles” service – which in essence appears to be ebooks of the long short-story to novella length – certainly has the potential to put money in the pockets of genre fiction’s clade of short story writers. The shrinking circulations of the Dead-Tree Big Three aren’t looking like a long-term prospect for the short form’s survival, and hell knows that recent experiences right here have demonstrated that making the free-to-read webzine model sustainable is no picnic, either (though I hold hope for better-funded projects such as Lightspeed and Tor.com going the distance, alongside established non-profit outfits like Strange Horizons).

The real (and as yet unanswered) question is whether people would read (and pay for) short stories if they knew where to find them; the search-term browsability of a platform like Amazon certainly offers the potential to put short stories by known names in front of potential readers who might otherwise be ignorant of the form, and there’s plenty of good (albeit as yet entirely theoretical) arguments that short stories are better suited to the when-you-get-a-moment reading habits of the modern reader. I suspect the most important factor will be pricing, with a splash of gatekeepering and/or curating to filter for quality; if a writer hits the right price point and has a bit of luck with word-of-mouth, the potential is there to cut out the magazine middle-men and reach an untapped audience.

My concern (as a fussy reader and a critic) is that the market’s definition of quality will probably differ wildly from my own; the success of Dan Brown is a clear indication that this is inevitable. But if big digital sales of awful literature support an ecosystem that lets the little guys make a living, well, I think I’ll be able to live with it. Plus ça change, non?

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Fractal levels of simulated reality, forsooth!

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I’m sure I ran a story similar to this a while back, but I’m damned if I can find it in the Futurismic archives, so I’m gonna mention it anyway: it’s the one about the folk building logic-based processors within the virtual spaces of computer games, the latest example being the insanely popular (and rather lucrative) Minecraft. Find blocks of material with the right in-game properties, chain ’em together, and hey presto, you’ve got a simulated arithmetic processor made of non-existent lumps of an entirely fictional substance. Whole lotta meta, right there.

I think the reason I love these stories is because of the extrapolatory end-point: the implication is that given simulated spaces of sufficient size and complexity (and sufficient player-hours, or clever macros to obviate the need for such), one could build a computing device within that simulation which was itself capable of running a simulation within which another computing device could be simulated. Sort of like Nick Bostrom rewriting Lavie Tidhar’s “In Pacmandu”… it’s simulated turtles all the way down! Now, where’s the door back to my origin reality, please?

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The left-wing genes

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Which genes are left-wing? All of them! At least that’s the interpretation Oliver James puts forward in this piece at The Guardian, as he points out that the mapping of the human genome hasn’t delivered evidence for the genetic determinism of mental health and social status that conservative politics – not to mention the pharmacology industries – hoped it would:

This result had been predicted by Craig Venter, one of the key researchers on the project. When the map was published, he said that because we only have about 25,000 genes psychological differences could not be much determined by them. “Our environments are critical,” he concluded. And, after only a few years of extensive genome searching, even the most convinced geneticists began to publicly admit that there are no individual genes for the vast majority of mental health problems. In 2009 Professor Robert Plomin, a leading behavioural geneticist, wrote that the evidence had proved that “genetic effects are much smaller than previously considered: the largest effects account for only 1% of quantitative traits”. However, he believed that all was not lost. Complex combinations of genes might hold the key. So far, this has not been shown, nor is it likely to be.

[…]

Another theory was that genes create vulnerabilities. For example, it was thought that people with a particular gene variant were more likely to become depressed if they were maltreated as children. This also now looks unlikely. An analysis of 14,250 people showed that those with the variant were not at greater risk of depression. Nor were they more likely to be depressed when the variant was combined with childhood maltreatment.

In developed nations, women and those on a low income are twice as likely to be depressed as men and the wealthy. When DNA is tested in large samples, neither women nor the poor are more likely to have the variant. Worldwide, depression is least common in south-east Asia. Yet a study of 29 nations found the variant to be commonest there – the degree to which a society is collectivist rather than individualistic partly explains depression rates, not genes.

Politics may be the reason why the media has so far failed to report the small role of genes. The political right believes that genes largely explain why the poor are poor, as well as twice as likely as the rich to be mentally ill. To them, the poor are genetic mud, sinking to the bottom of the genetic pool.

It’s a rather generalised and sweeping statement, but I think there’s a core of truth to it. Is this why there’s been such a right-wing push-back against genetic science in recent years, perhaps?

[ That said, James is narrativising genetic science in a very similar way, albeit on behalf of the other side of the debating chamber. The political polarisation of science worries me regardless of who’s doing it, because it puts the primacy onto agenda-driven interpretation rather than evidence; nowhere is this more clear than in climate science, where progressive/left-wing attempts to counter the right’s conspiracy theories with their own rhetoric have obscured the facts of the matter even further. ]

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Rejoinders to Coupland’s pessimism

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Another guest-article in list format from Gen-X prophet of gloom Douglas Coupland has appeared, this one at The Globe & Mail; cue the sort of bleak “it’s all uphill from here” head-shaking that appear to be the man’s stock in trade of late. Some samples:

1) It’s going to get worse

No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

Gee, thanks, Doug. I needed that. We all needed that. More coffee, anyone?

14) Something smarter than us is going to emerge

Thank you, algorithms and cloud computing.

The transhumanist lobby see that one as a net positive, provided we’re steering things in the right direction; on days less fraught than this one, I’m usually inclined to do the same.

20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989

Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.

Old news, whether you listen to sf authors or sociopolitical pundits. Or both.

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.

Harder? I think it’ll become easier, because our definition of “story” will shift; indeed, it has already started. At this point I’ll bring in a guest rejoinder from Jeremiah Tolbert’s own responses, which are well worth a read:

Narrative struc­ture didn’t invent itself, you know.  We’ve been struc­tur­ing our expe­ri­ences as story since we could paint on cave walls, or even before.  The idea that our life will instead be how­ever many friends we have online, I just don’t buy it.  It sounds like some­thing Facebook would pitch to ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, not a real futur­ist pre­dic­tion.  Yes, your social net­work will be impor­tant.  But we’ll define our sense of self by it?  Is there going to be a fun­da­men­tal alter­ation of our brain chem­istry at the same time?

I’d add that Coupland seems to be buying into the persistent but poorly-argued riff about how online ‘friendships’ are devaluing the meaning of friendship itself; again, I think we’re just moving to a point where the spectrum of friendship is becoming wider, more granular. I think we’ll have a similar number of friends to what we’ve always had; ‘friends’ in the Facebook sense are something different entirely, something that people under the age of thirty seem to understand quite instinctively. Don’t let the kids freak you out, Doug.

Back to Coupland:

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

Again, I’m with Jeremy – I already miss the nineties a whole lot, and pining for the rootless and jagged freedoms of one’s adolescence is hardly a new development. One suspects Mister Coupland is projecting somewhat. He closes with:

45) We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

And here, Jeremy hits it out of the park:

I thought this was sup­posed to be a pessimist’s guide?  That’s the most opti­mistic pre­dic­tion about a fun­da­men­tal change in human nature I’ve read yet!

Exactly; if there’s one thing that could really pull our civilisational arse out of the fire, that’s it. It won’t be pleasant while it’s happening, granted, but I’ve long suspected that it’s the key to surviving the crescendo end-phase of the planet-bound stage for intelligent lifeforms.

This is probably old news to people who’ve followed Coupland’s output for longer than I have, but man, he really likes to wallow in that existential angst thing, doesn’t he? Which isn’t to claim that I’m not prone to moping myself (again, the nineties are never far away in this household), but this list is saturated with the same “everything sucks, not least of all being aware of how much everything sucks, and so there’s nothing to do but constantly remind ourselves of how much everything sucks” attitude that so repelled me while reading JPod. In my most secret of hearts* I pride myself on being more cynical and both-sides-of-the-story than most people, but there’s an odd relief in finding that I’m not actually the biggest pessimist on the planet. Perhaps it’s the easing sensation of realising I never had a crown to cling on to?

And just to complete the spectrum, BoingBoing has a guest-post counter-list to Coupland from one Jim Leftwich, whose treacly animated gif of an outlook makes me feel like I’m inhabiting the rational and considered middle-ground for the first time in my life to date.

3) Memes are going mainstream Every day new memes will appear, others will be repeated, remixed, and amplified, and others will fade. Cultural in-jokes will abound. Your grandma will send you image macros for the lulz.

My mother already does; sadly, spending twelve hours a day connected to the internet hive-mind means that I’m about five years ahead of her comprehension thereof. She’s just discovered LOLcats; I now understand how I managed to piss so many people off with them back in 2005**.

5) It’s going to get fresher and tastier The growth in farmers’ markets will make locally grown fresh produce more accessible to more people all the time. Neighborhood and backyard gardens and greenhouses, with heirloom varieties, chickens, and beekeeping combined with a more fun cooking culture will increasingly supplement and in some cases replace processed and commercially prepared foods.

Actually, I’d much rather this worked out than Coupland’s requiem for lettuce. Fingers crossed.

10) You’ll get by and make the best of it Because after all, that’s what most of us do. You can help by connecting to and sharing with the people around you, both locally and in your virtual common interest circles. The stronger we are socially and otherwise interconnected, the more effectively we’ll take on and respond to challenges. Shit happens, but remember to reach out to help when you’re able and receive when it’s necessary. We really are all in this together, regardless of how they slice us up into groups and categories.

Again, agree with the basic premise (“we’ll get by”, I mean – it’s what we do as a species), but I suspect the global village will have to get a lot more fragmented before we reach the point that we realise we’re all the same (ref. item 45, above). But maybe Leftwich is spot on when he says we can make things better if we reach out and help when we’re able to. So, let’s start right now: let’s all think happy thoughts in Doug Coupland’s direction before bundling the poor guy into the office hug machine.

[ * Well, that’s that cover blown, I guess. ]

[ ** Only kidding, Mum, you know I love you. But seriously, forwarding chain emails; not wise. ]