Future Now
The IFTF Blog
"Reading ""Shaping Things"""
I recently read Bruce Sterling's new book, Shaping Things. It's one of a cluster of books on smart things, pervasive computing, and the design and social challenges they'll present. (I'd definitely include Adam Greenfield's Everyware and John Thackara's In the Bubble in the genre; I'd also toss in Kim Vicente's The Human Factor, and Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop.)
I alternately impressed and exasperated by the book, as I tend to be with all Sterling's work. Sterling as always has some great ideas, and he's never dull; while I might occasionally be driven nuts by throwaway lines like the claim that the commingling of objects, computing and information "enables a deeper, more intimate, more multiplex interaction between humans and objects"-- the sort of thing that's not essential to his argument, yet too broad-brush for someone with an historian's instincts to let pass without a sigh-- I won't be driven to distraction.
And Sterling's basic vision is intriguing:
The world of organized artifice is transforming in ways that are poorly understood and little explored. There are two reasons why this is happening.
First, new forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent.... Second, the production methods currently used are not sustainable....
So the challenge at hand is to creatively guide the tremendous vectors of the first reason, so as to finesse the horrific consequecnes of the second reason. Then we can enjoy some futurity. (7)
Sterling begins by defining some terms for different kinds of things, organized by fundamentals regarding their production, relations to humans, and level of intelligence:
Artifacts are "simple artificial objects, made by hand, used by hand, and powered by muscle." (9)
Machines are "complex, precisely proportioned artifacts with many integral moving parts that have tapped some non-human, non-animal power source." (9) Machines are used by customers.
Products are "widely distributed, commercially available objects, anonymously and uniformly manufactured in massive quantities." (10) Products have consumers.
Gizmos "are highly unstable, user-alterable, baroquely multifeatured objects, commonly programmable, with a brief lifespan." (11) Gizmos have End-Users, though "the older roles of buyer, seller, producer [and] developer are all melted down in the informational stew." (20)
Spimes are "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system." (11) Spimes have Wranglers. Spimes aren't prevalent yet, but they're coming. They'll pose challenges, but we can design around them; "the future can be yours to make." (13)
These aren't hard and fast categories: a bottle of wine, for example, combines elements of an artifact (the wine and vineyard), a machine (the technologies used to ferment and wine), a product (the bottle), and a gizmo (the label, bar code, and related Web site).
Every one of these transitions-- Artifact to Machine to Product to Gizmo-- involves an expansion of information. It enables a deeper, more intimate, more multiplex interaction between humans and artifacts.*
Like all gizmos, this wine has a short lifespan; lots of built-in functionality; an interface to a lot of information; and it presents consumers with potential problems of cognitive overload and opportunity costs.
More on Spimes
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.
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)
Sustainable society, Synchronic society
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
Spimes and society
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 wo"