All posts by Paul Raven

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Which came first: the humans or the tools?

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It’s very nearly the fiftieth anniversary* of a word well-used here at Futurismic: cyborg. So what better time for an anthropologist/archaeologist to advance his theory that homo sapiens sapiens is in fact the first cyborg species, evolved more in response to the facilitations of its own technology than to the environment it inhabits? [via ScienceNotFiction]. Take it away, Timothy Taylor:

Darwin is one of my heroes, but I believe he was wrong in seeing human evolution as a result of the same processes that account for other evolution in the biological world – especially when it comes to the size of our cranium.

Darwin had to put large cranial size down to sexual selection, arguing that women found brainy men sexy. But biomechanical factors make this untenable. I call this the smart biped paradox: once you are an upright ape, all natural selection pressures should be in favour of retaining a small cranium. That’s because walking upright means having a narrower pelvis, capping babies’ head size, and a shorter digestive tract, making it harder to support big, energy-hungry brains. Clearly our big brains did evolve, but I think Darwin had the wrong mechanism. I believe it was technology. We were never fully biological entities. We are and always have been artificial apes.

[…]

Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual dexterity and made males and females more similar. Biological deficits continue today. For example, modern human eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.

Unlike other animals, we don’t adapt to environments – we adapt environments to us. We just passed a point where more people on the planet live in cities than not. We are extended through our technology. We now know that Neanderthals were symbolic thinkers, probably made art, had exquisite tools and bigger brains. Does that mean they were smarter?

Evidence shows that over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That’s because we can outsource our intelligence. I don’t need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a computer. I don’t need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.

Interesting… and could be taken as a vindication for the hand-wringing of Nick Carr et al over how teh intarwubz be makin uz dumb.

But change is neither good or bad; it just is. Should we lament this outsourcing of our intelligence (I’d prefer the word outboarding, myself, but it’s not so trendy and probably makes people think of motorboats)? Is biological intelligence necessarily more desirable (or even “right” or “good”) than our cybernetic symbiosis? Taylor, thankfully, is not advocating a return to hairshirt primitivism in response to his theory… but I’d bet good money that a whole bunch of folk will do.

[ * There’s a reason I’m aware of this anniversary, and it’s not that I’m obsessed with the etymological history of neologisms**. You’ll find out how and why I possess that nugget of knowledge in the near future. ]

[ ** Actually, I am obsessed with the etymology of neologisms. It’s like butterfly collecting for the altermodern age. ]

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Brazilian farming methods could feed a hungry planet

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There’s few things I enjoy more during my daily feed-reader trawl than a headline with two potential meanings… and here’s a classic case from The Big Think: “Brazilian Model Could Feed The World“. Wow – has he/she started a gene-mod crops business with his/her superstar income? Or perhaps he/she is just very very large, and thus could be sliced up and distributed to the world’s most needy?

As you’ve probably guessed from my own headline, it’s nothing at all to do with a monstrous fifty-foot Brazilian catwalk star (which is slightly disappointing for the B-movie fans in the audience, I guess). As the target article at The Economist explains, the model in question is Brazil’s agricultural policies:

Even more striking than the fact of its success has been the manner of it. Brazil has followed more or less the opposite of the agro-pessimists’ prescription. For them, sustainability is the greatest virtue and is best achieved by encouraging small farms and organic practices. They frown on monocultures and chemical fertilisers. They like agricultural research but loathe genetically modified (GM) plants. They think it is more important for food to be sold on local than on international markets. Brazil’s farms are sustainable, too, thanks to abundant land and water. But they are many times the size even of American ones. Farmers buy inputs and sell crops on a scale that makes sense only if there are world markets for them. And they depend critically on new technology. As the briefing explains, Brazil’s progress has been underpinned by the state agricultural-research company and pushed forward by GM crops. Brazil represents a clear alternative to the growing belief that, in farming, small and organic are beautiful.

That alternative commands respect for three reasons. First, it is magnificently productive. It is not too much to talk about a miracle, and one that has been achieved without the huge state subsidies that prop up farmers in Europe and America. Second, the Brazilian way of farming is more likely to do good in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia. Brazil’s climate is tropical, like theirs. Its success was built partly on improving grasses from Africa and cattle from India. Of course there are myriad reasons why its way of farming will not translate easily, notably that its success was achieved at a time when the climate was relatively stable whereas now uncertainty looms. Still, the basic ingredients of Brazil’s success—agricultural research, capital-intensive large farms, openness to trade and to new farming techniques—should work elsewhere.

Nothing new about people giving the big-ups to sustainable farming, of course… but to see it lauded in a venue like The Economist (alongside an admission that there’s a food crisis on the way, and that the Demographic Formerly Known As The First World is in the firing line too) is a new one, at least to me. Are we seeing a shift in attitude in business and government – a recognition that the long game is the only one in town, if you want there to still be a town when the game is over?

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Friday philosophy: mind/body dualism

Thinking caps on, folks. Using a science fictional premise as a framing device, philosopher Daniel Dennett ponders the question “if your mind and body were separated, which one would be ‘you’?” [via MetaFilter]

“Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain.  The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’”  So here we all are:  Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett.  Now, where am I?  And when I think “where am I?”, where’s that thought tokened?  Is it tokened in my brain, lounging about in the vat, or right here between my ears where it seems to be tokened?  Or nowhere?  Its temporal coordinates give me no trouble; must it not have spatial coordinates as well?  I began making a list of the alternatives.

It’s a seventies-vintage essay, so the frame plot is a bit hokey, but the philosophical conundrum still packs a mean punch. Don’t read it if you’ve got anything complicated you’re meant to think about for the rest of the day. 🙂

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Hiding in plain sight: social steganography

There’s always room for another compound neologism! Via Bruce Schneier, Danah Boyd on social steganography:

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

And in doing so, make Google CEOs look surprisingly clueless.

(Incidentally, Schneier does this, too; most people who aren’t sf fans don’t know that Schneier’s an sf fan, but he leaves little Easter Eggs from time to time if you know what to look for.)

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Unbranding and the hipster backlash

I have an awkward but passionate relationship with academic discussions of popular culture. Expansion: I’ve always found popular culture more interesting as an observer than as a participant, but I think the line between those two states is becoming thinner and fuzzier (if, indeed, it ever existed at all beyond my own desperate, continuous and largely futile attempts to see myself as separate from any form of cultural majority in my current social environment*).

You see, I had a minor revelation on the way to Tesco the other evening, in which I realised that part of the difficulty with, say, writing reviews of books or music in a networked world, is that you can’t isolate any one cultural artefact from the world in which it exists, or from its creator (not entirely), or from its consumers and detractors. To review effectively – to critique – is an act of comparative cultural anthropology, performed in a room lit only by a Maglite velcroed to one’s own forehead. Context is everything. The character and intellectual history of the critic is crucial to your understanding their understanding of the subject of their critique. The critic’s greatest insights (and, by the same token, greatest blindspots) are necessarily invisible to her. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the critic can’t see her biases for the same reason that a tourist stood in Trafalgar Square can’t see England.

And so much for rambling pseudophilosophical cultural discourse. (Hey, it was a fun paragraph to write. I may even have meant most of it.) But back to the point: culture, fashion, trends, memes. Cyclic shifts. The mainstream’s need to reappropriate marginal culture (because, based as it is on a pattern of consumerism, it cannot create, only refine and reiterate); marginal culture’s parasitic defiance, goading and mockery/pastiche/satire of the mainstream’s current obsessions (because the urge to create is almost indistinguishable from the urge to destroy).

What am I going on about?

Like, hipsters, y’know? Right. Wired UK piece, academics and psychology types talking about the pivot point where a self-identified outsider culture reaches a critical mass and becomes a self-parody, attacks its own body-politic like cancer or some sort of immune system failure; Pop Will Eat Itself (dos dedos, mis amigos). Swarms of Johnny-come-latelys displace the boys and girls from back-in-the-day to the sound of chorused mutterings of “sell-outs and cash-ins”,  “we-were-here-first”, “the-early-albums-were-waaaaay-better”. In-group identifiers become terms of disparagement outside the group; inside the group, further divisions of nomenclature attempt to reposition the speaker in relation to the recent immigrant influx invading their cultural space (“he’s no hipster, he’s a scenester; sooooo bogus”). Meanwhile, businesses spring up and rot away in parallel with the swells and breakers of cultures rising and falling, happy remoras (remorae?) on the big dumb whale-shark of Youth. (RIP, American Apparel; couldn’t happen to a more horrifying homogeniser of urban try-hards.)

Whoa, check myself – still waffling b*llocks! Cut to the chase with academic concision:

In order to distance themselves from the hipster caricature, true indie consumers** use a number of techniques.

The first is “aesthetic discrimination”, whereby you tell those who accuse you of being hipsters as uninformed outsiders who don’t have sophisticated enough tastes to be able to discriminate between the hipster caricature and the authentic indie consumer.

The second technique is “symbolic demarcation”. Those indie consumers who engage in aesthetic discrimination tend to have an intellectual command of indie culture and are socially recognised as people who are in the know. Because of this status, they can afford to dismiss any resemblances to the hipster icon as irrelevant.

They might also rename the hipster caricature as something else, eg “scenester”, thus placing the worst traits associated with a “hipster” into a new, distinct definition. Creating a new category helps solidify the contrast between legitimate indie consumers and those who simply want to be part of a fashionable scene.

The third technique is “proclaiming (mythologised) consumer sovereignty”. This sees the person consciously reframe their interests in the indie field to show their autonomy from the dictates of fashion.

“Our findings suggest how backlash against identity categories such as hipster or metrosexual could generate complex and nuanced identity strategies that enable consumers to retain their tastes and interests while protecting these tastes from trivializing mythologies,” the authors conclude.

(Before you feel too smug, we all do this. Granted, most of us reading this site don’t do it while wearing ironic Rayban knockoffs or penny loafers under rolled-up drainpipe jeans, but we all do it. Genre fandom especially is full of this stuff, though it moves more slowly. Hell, even the transhumanists do it, though they use even bigger words than anyone else in the process. Othering is a hard-wired human thing, goes way back to pre-speech phases of socialisation. Them-and-us; hard habit to quit.)

But so what? Well, say you’re a marketer for fashion brands (or for a new author, or an advocate for a new school of transcendent philosophy). Making your own brand/author/philosophy look good is incredibly hard to achieve reliably… even more so nowadays, with the memetic flux swirling so fast. Yesterday’s viral sensation is today’s lingering and sniffly common cold. So what to do? Instead of giving your brand to cultural icons that reflect the aspirations of your target subculture, you give your rival brands to cultural icons who embody the opposite of those aspirations [via BoingBoing]. Couture-marketing psy-ops. Sounds ridiculous, a possible indicator of the end of civilisation (wring hands, mutter about the Romans, miss point entirely). But with clarity born of hindsight, this morning’s revelation, triggered by the two articles linked above and prompting the rapid-fire unedited writing of this little screed:

William Gibson’s been writing this stuff for years.

How does he keep doing that?

Related: Slate “interviews” Kanye West by slicing up his Twitter output. The Village Voice claims this as the chiselled headstone of the music magazine: who needs the middleman to broadcast their personal brand, if all they’ll do is distort it? The Village Voice fails to recognise that pop culture consumers are like fuzz-rock guitarists: distortion always sounds better than clean signal. Boutique stomp-boxes all round!

[ * So, yes, science fiction fandom was a pretty inevitable landing-spot, I suppose. But which came first, the estrangement or my enjoyment of the literature thereof?*** Answers on the back of an Urban Outfitters till receipt… ]

[ ** Not entirely sure about these notional “true indie consumers”. Neophiliacs would probably be a fairer word, albeit an arguably less flattering one. ]

[ *** And so much for pathos. ]