Poised Between Commodity and Chaos

"In my grand vision, there's a history of the relationship of objects and human beings. It goes like this. Up to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had, and made, four different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products and Gizmos.

The lines between Artifacts, Machines, Products and Gizmos aren't mechanical. They're historical. The differences between them are found in the material cultures they make possible. The kind of society they produce, and the kind of human being that is necessary to make them and use them.

Artifacts are made and used by hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.

Machines are made and used by customers. in an industrial society.

Products are made and used by consumers, in a military-industrial complex.

While Gizmos are made and used by end-users, in whatever today is == a "New World Disorder," a "Terrorism-Entertainment Complex," our own brief interregnum.

A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project.

In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.

A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre, baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I'm carrying here, this is a classic Gizmo: It's a cellphone, a web browser, an SMS platform, an MMS platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It's not a Machine or a Product, because it's not a stand-alone device. It is a platform, a playground for other developers. It's a dessert topping, and it's a floor wax.

Now, I could redesign this Gizmo to make it into a simple Product.

But then this Gizmo would become a commodity.

There would be little profit in that; in an end-user society like ours, Products come in bubblepak or shrinkwrap in big heaps, like pencils. There is no money in them.

So there are good reasons why a Gizmo is almost impossible to use.

It's because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos.

It is trying to cram as much impossible complexity as it can, into an almost usable state. It is leaning forward into the future.
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In the future, an object's life begins on a graphics screen. It is born digital. Its design specs accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital blueprint, which rules the material world. This object is going to tell you -- if you ask -- everything that an expert would tell you about it. Because it WANTS you to become an expert.
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The upshot is that the object's nature has become transparent. It is an opened object. 

In a world with this kind of object, you care little about the object per se; that physical object is just a material billboard for tomorrow's vast, digital, interactive, postindustrial support system. This is where people like you, your evolved successors, rule the earth. This is a world where the Web has ceased to be a varnish on barbarism, and where the world is now varnish all the way down.
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[These objects] will change everything, because everything needs to change. Things need to change quickly and radically, because the industrial system we have today cannot persist. It cannot find enough energy and raw materials.
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We need to leap into another way of life. The technical impetus is here. We are changing, but to what end? The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. We should want to expand the options of those who will follow us. We don't need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills. We need more options."

Bruce Sterling

"When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

SIGGGRAPH, 2004