Bruce Sterling: "ware" is everything?

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

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

The Seduction of Technical Arrogance

Over the years, I've found my greatest inspirations come from two places: art and science. This isn't surprising as both disciplines, though seemingly different, have dovetailed from a common seed. 

The ancients recognized seven activities as arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance and Astronomy. Each were activities for understanding and communicating, in their own fashion, the mysteries of existence. In fact, science was, in Galileo's time, more like what we know as philosophy today. It wasn't until the Enlightenment with the likes of Bacon that there become "hard" and "soft" ways of understanding the world. But more recently, many thinkers such as mythologist Joseph Campbell, physicist Fritjof Capra, and sociologist Etienne Wenger have pulled these separated tails closer together. They argue that even "hard" science is still not 'true' in any absolute sense. It, like any story or piece of art, is a working hypothesis of the way the world works. 

That said, I love the stories and perspective of scientists because, to make a point, they either push their ideas to the extreme or deal with ideas at the extreme. For example, I read an article today about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson:

Dyson’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was complicated. Like many physicists, Dyson has always loved explosions, and, of course, uncovering the secrets of nature is the first motivation of science. When he was interviewed for the 1980 documentary “The Day After Trinity,” Dyson addressed the seduction: “I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

For me, Freeman's perspective of his fellow scientists' relationships with their creations offers an important moral for our industry (as well as any other industry). After all, in the recent Art & Copy trailer, one interviewed advertiser says:

“I think what you do is manufacture any feeling that you want people to have…I was born, as a number of people in advertising, with the gift for sensing what it is that will turn you on.”

A Beautiful Solution

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

Buckminster Fuller

Tweenbot

Jacob Braude brought this great idea - called Tweenbot - to my attention. 

The concept, which came from NYU's Tisch ITP, made me think of a post I wrote a while back. In it, I argue that planners/strategists can learn more about the world if they choose to think and do like artists. I can't help but believe that a planner can generate more and more useful learnings about people if they used their downtime to do projects like Tweenbot (as opposed to traditional research projects like implementing large scale surveys and analyses of consumer groups.) 

A Brilliant Metaphor

“ 'Teleporting an Unknown State' is the title of my biotelelmatic instillation…[which] combined biological growth with Internet activity…The installation created the experience of the Internet as a life-supporting system…The poetics of this piece’s network topology operated a dramatic reversal of the regulated unidirectional model imposed by broadcasting standards and the communications industry. Rather than transmitting a specific message from one point to many passive receivers, [the instillation] created a new situation in which several individuals in remote countries transmitted light to a single point in the [museum]. The ethics of Internet ecology and network community were made evident in a distributed and collaborative effort. During the show, photosynthesis depended on remote collective action from anonymous participants. Birth, growth and death on the Internet formed a horizon of possibilities that unfolded as participants dramatically contributed to the work."

Eduardo Kac

Telepresence and Bio Art

Know How is Not a Prerequisite

"There has always been a notion among men that it takes a big fancy thing to make a simple thing. You never seen a horseshoe make a blacksmith…Darwin’s theories were so dangerous because it inverted reasoning. It suggests that we could have a bottom up theory of creative genius. And that to make a perfect machine, there is no prerequisite to know how to make it."

Daniel Dennett

PBS, "A Brief History of Disbelief"