Future Now
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More on Shaping Things
Notes of the rest of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things, written as a FAQ.
So what's the rest of the book about?
Metahistory, sustainability, spimes, and saving the world.
Let's take those out of order. What's a spime again?
A spime is a thing, plus a lot of information about that things: its design, manufacture, shipping history, provenance, use, and ultimate death. A spime is "a set of relationships first and always, and an object now and then." (77) The information about the spime is more important, and more valuable, than the spime itself.
We don't have spimes today, but we have relationships with things that give a hint of what living with spimes would be like. Think of a book or CD that you love. Your relationship with it began in somewhere: maybe you found that book on a rainy day in a musty little bookstore in Cambridge when you were a bright-eyed, naive exchange student, or the CD in a basement music store in the East Village a few shell-shocked months after 9/11. You've developed a relationship with that artifact-- the cover is scratched, the pages are underlined and marked with post-its and coffee stains-- and you've taken it with you on trips to Rome, Kwangju, Curitiba, and Ithaca. Right now, that history is only recorded in the material record of the object itself, or maybe in your blog.
Now imagine every object you own having a history like that. Imagine that that history is recorded in a manner that makes it searchable. And imagine that every experience everyone has with other copies of their spimes is likewise recordable and retrievable.
So a spime is at once a faint expression of an ideal design, a throwaway expression in atoms of the real object living in the Platonic plane of bits, and it's a unique object.
What's a metahistory?
Every civilization has a metahistory, a kind of internal cultural logic. One great flaw is that metahistories tend of see themselves as permanent; a contingent metahistory that allowed for the possibility of its own end-- and was more thoughtful about how to avoid that end-- would work better.
Our own current metahistory is damaging in its short-sigtedness and have yielded "slow crises cheerfully generated by people rationally pursuing their short-term interests." (41) As Sterling puts it,
The 20th century's industrial infrastructure has run out of time. It can't go on; it's antiquated, dangerous and not sustainable. it's based on a finite amount of ice in our ice caps, of air in our atmosphere, of free room for highways and transmission lines, of room in the dumps, and of combustible filth underground. This is a gathering crisis gloomily manifesting itself int he realm of bad weather and resource warfare. It is the legacy we received from world'shaping industrial titans such as Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller-- basically, the three 20th century guys who guys us into the Greenhouse Effect. (131)
Its no use starting from the top by ideologically re-educating the consumer to become some bizarre kind of rigid, hairshirt Green.... The only sane way out of a technosociety is through it, in to a newer one that knows everything the older one knew.... That means revolutionizing the interplay of human and object. It means bringing more attention and analysis to bear on objects than they have undergone. It also means engaging with the human body and our affordances. (131-132)
The fact that we can insulate ourselves from the histories and consequences of our decisions, and that markets can assist us in that process (by reducing our relationships to things to price, and treating everything from the social consequences of abusive labor practices to the environmental costs of disposal of packaging as an "externality" that neither you nor the manufacturer has to think about), means that we can live in a state of blissful, deadly innocence.
Ironically, in the artifact era, when most humans grew their own food and made their own things-- or were related to those who did-- we knew a lot more about where stuff came from, and the consequences of making things poorly (of using unsustainable farming practices or building a shoddy furnace); but there were also few enough of us so that anything we did was likely to have very little impact on the world.
Our ability to change the world, intentionally or unintentionally, has far outstripped our ability to make sense of those changes. (Will history regard the internal combustion engine, and not nuclear weapons, as the greatest technological terror of the 20th century?)
To deal with this, "[w]e need a designed metahistory," (42) and Sterling thinks it will
combine the computational power of an INFORMATION SOCIETY with the stark interventionist need for a SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY. The one is happening anyway; the other has to happen. (42)
What would that look like?
It would be a synchronic society. Such a society
- Has a temporalist perspective: it seeks to generate more time and greater opportunity, both at the micro-scale, and the level of civilizations. (To this society, burning fossil fuels is the height of folly.)
- Sees sustainability as a process, not a fixed state;
- Seeks the knowledge to deal with the inevitable unknowns;
- Uses rapid prototyping-like methods to generate potentially vast inventories of solutions to copy and failures to avoid;
- Treats objects as expressions of and generators of information, interesting not just for their obvious physical properties.
If we design that metahistory to exploit the power of spimes, which are "information melded with sustainability," (43) we can create a dynamic by which we can preserve and learn from our history, thus giving us the chance to evolve our way out of the current mess. Spimes are especially important because they exist at
the intersection of two vectors of technosocial development. They have the capacity to change the human relationship of time and material processes, by making those processors blatant and generalization. Every spime is a little metahistorical generator.
History is this technoculture's primary source of wealth. As it transits through time, due to the principles of its organization, it will increase in knowledge, capability, wealth, and power
How will spimes save the world?
The fact that objects are divorced from information about them encourages us to focus on and take responsibility for only a tiny part of any object's life, and makes it far harder to perceive the consequences of our encouraging the creation of that object, our consumption of it, or our disposal.
Consider a bottle of wine (see chap. 9). Today, our interactions with it are reduced to consulting the price tag, drinking the wine, then throwing away the bottle. But
there must be a mountain of externalities, currently obscured and invisible to me, that involved this object. That growing and fermenting of grapes... topsoil loss, chemical fertilizer, insecticide sprays, the fuels involved in heating and distilling all that liquid.... [Were the workers] suntanned Italian peasantry in the full healthful glow of EU agricultural regulations... [or] illegal African or Abanian immigrants? If that's the case, then I've been invegled into oppressing these people under a veil of my own ignorance.... Why do I collaborate with someone who forces me, through obscurantism, to do that against my will?...
This bottle sure came a long way. How'd it get here to me? How much carbon dioxide got spewed into the planet's air ino order to to ship this object into my hands?...
I'm not supposed to worry my head about all of that, but you know something? I know I am paying for it somehow....
What goes around, comes around. If I ignore distant consequences merely because they seem distant, then distant people will similarly inflict their consequences on me. That's a beggar-your-neighbor situation, a race to the bottom.
But suppose I show them how the object came to be, and I link that information to the object. That would be "transparent production."
So a spime is a moral entanglement with a built-in decoder ring. It's no less a savior or destroyer of worlds than any manufactured object that came before; but by making it laying bare its composition, history, and real costs, you can make better decisions about whether buying and using it will be good for you-- by which you mean, good for you, the world, and the future.
Right now, if these externalities are dealt with at all, they're handled by markets or governments: the price might include a ltitle extra for better labor practices (or it might not), and our taxes cover the costs of disposal and environmental cleanup (or they might not). Our capacity to deal with them independently is pretty limited: knowledge about what companies are socially or environmentally responsible is separated from the point of sale, while detailed information about the composition and history of things is often simply unavailable. Today, how do you know you're making the consumption choice you'd make if you were fully informed? You don't.
This bottle arrived in my possession seemingly stripped of consequences, but those consequences exist.... My relationship to this bottle of wine is a parable of my human relationship to all objects....
My own single-handed effort is entirely unequal to that challenge of discovering all those relationships]. I can't simply know enough... but I can't Wrangle all the world's technosocial issues all the time.
It follows this much of this activity should be done for me by other people.
Who would do that? "Designers."
Just as John Markoff argued that the idea of personal computing was invented before the personal computer itself-- that the PC embodied an already-extant notion of how people and computers should relate-- so too does Sterling suggest that fifty years from now, we'll see concepts like the triple bottom line, environmentally aware consumption, and social investing as anticipating the things we'd be able to do, easily and with greater consequence, with spimes.
Anything come after this?
You bet. At the end of Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling lays out what the post-spime world might look like.
The step after the Spime Wrangler-- tomorrow's tomorrow-- is neither an object nor a person. It's a Biot, which we can define as an entity which is both object and person.
A Biot would be the logical intermeshing, the blurring of the boundary between Wrangler and spime. This is happening now, but we can't perceive and measure it.
Today, every human being... carries a load of industrial effluent.... A human body can be understood as a sponge of warm salt water within a shell of skin; so everything we emit [or manufacture or consume] ends up partially within ourselves.
Some artificial substances are bioaccumulative; our metabolisms preferentially suck them out of the biosphere and try to make structure out of them. These processes are involuntary and take place beneath our awareness. (134)
A Biot is somebody who knows about this and can deal with the consequences. He's in a position to micromanage and design the processes that shape his own anatomy. (135)
When will be get to the Biot Age? Sterling guesses around 2070. What kinds of technologies will a Biot technosociety create?
In a Biot world, the leading industries are not artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, or spimes, but technologies for shaping human beings.... The driving technologies of a Biot technosociety would be cybernetics, biotechnology, and cognition. (135)
Because some of the most advanced, valuable technologies will be incorporated into the body, or lived with every day (with full awareness of the biological impacts of that contact), and because of the need for more environmentally sustainable design and manufacturing, a Biot technosociety would prefer
technology that can eventually rot and go away all by itself. Its materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's an auto-recycling technology.... It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxins. (143)
But there will still exist two other kinds of technologies. One will be
artifacts deliberately built to outlast the passage of time. This is very hard to do and much over-estimated. Many objects we consider timeless monuments, such as the Great Pyramid and the Roman Colosseum, are in fact ruins. (143-4)
The other will be
the kind [of technololgy] I have tried to haltingly describe here. It's a fully documented, trackable, searchable technology. This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It's a toybox for inventive, meddlesome humankind that can puts its own toys neatly and safely away. (144-5)
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