Ricocheting from such subjects as The Matrix to James Joyce, Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press) is a dazzlingly ambitious compendium. As in any collection of essays, it is a mixed affair, however, given its scope, and despite the occasional lapse into impenetrable jargon, it is an important addition to the burgeoning world of cyber-theory. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture”
Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink
Have you ever been to a party where every conversation was of interest? Didn’t think so, but as host, Geert Lovink, the founder of Nettime, might just pull it off.
Lovink’s latest book, Uncanny Networks (MIT Press), is a roller-coaster ride of discussion that ranges from art to politics, techno-tribes to dot.com IPOs, radical politics to futuristic fantasy. Continue reading “Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink”
Howard Rheingold: Virtual Cartographer
My friend and colleague Brandon Pierce let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Culture is driven by technology. Contemplate, for a moment, all of the devices that have changed your life in profound ways; or attempt a regress to your mental and physical state of being before the birth of the World Wide Web. Undoubtedly, you will notice your life is now inextricably linked to and tangled within technologies that pervade our daily experience (technophobes excluded). Our relationships, interests, and attitudes have all been cultivated by technological innovations made within our lifetime. Depending on the individual results of these developments, one can view the changes as mind-amplifying progress or a march toward a synthetic, controlled existence.
All of the above notwithstanding, Howard Rheingold is trying to give us a compass and a map, to help us navigate these times of speedy techno-social change and begin to understand where we’re headed. There are people in this world who live in the future. They envision, design, and play with unheard-of devices; they organize physical communities that reflect their virtual connectivity; they live in a world that integrates technology and reality in novel ways. Rheingold knows these people. Hunting out the territories where technology meets human relationships is his business.
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus Books, 2002) is Howard’s latest attempt to shine a flashlight into the future. This future is home to inhabitants that navigate daily life with devices that are literally remote controls for the physical world, devices that are electronically integrated into our everyday environment. Radio chips, reputation systems, wireless internet nodes, Global Positioning Systems, person-to-person texting, and wearable computers all contribute to a vision of commerce and communication at hyperspeed. How these developments will be handled, by government, corporations, and everyday people, is yet to be determined, and how these technologies will manifest themselves in society is yet to be clearly conceived.
In times where technological innovation is in overdrive, it is difficult to predict or prepare for the future. Governmental regulation cannot keep up with technological advances (you can’t tame an animal that you can’t catch). Smart Mobs wants to make us conscious of potential changes. Extrapolating trends into an uncertain future, Howard Rheingold is attempting to help shape it with socially conscious dialog.
Brandon Pierce: Smart Mobs deals with the convergence, or overlapping, of multiple technologies. You argue that this new synthesis will manifest “emergent properties” that will be profound and unpredictable. Can you articulate this idea for our readers (i.e., why is the future of pervasive media and technology so much more than merely obtaining wireless internet access in the park or receiving baseball scores on your mobile phone?)?
Howard Rheingold: We’ve seen, at least twice before in the past two or three decades, the way the convergence of information and communication technologies have created new media that have had profound, widespread, and largely unpredictable effects. The television screen and the microprocessor made possible the personal computer as we know it. The personal computer is something that amplifies the ability of people to communicate, create, and do their work. It’s not just a television screen and a microprocessor. It’s an entirely new medium. In fact, it was regarded as a toy in its early days. The effect it has had on the way we do business and in the pursuit of knowledge, in academia, science, and medicine, have all been profoundly changed by the personal computer in ways that were not predicted. With PCs merging with communication networks (originally the telephone network with modems, but then over to cables and wireless networks) you get something that’s not just a computer connected to a telephone; you get an emergent network, like the internet, which spawned the web and digital communication and all sorts of other phenomena which were not predicted beforehand. So we’ve learned something from this, but can we apply what we’ve learned to the future? We look at the internet, and it’s been limited to the desktop, whether in a home or an office, but now, as we move on to devices we can carry, today there’s mobile phones, maybe tomorrow there will be wearable computers and, for some, PDAs (personal digital assistants). That’s not going to be just carrying the internet around; it’s going to be an entirely different phenomenon.
BP: You have participated in the dialogs that have cultivated consciousness and management of the consequences of techno-social revolutions. Despite our limited knowledge of the complex dynamics of change, are there any unifying themes or concepts that underlie revolutions such as these?
HR: I think that it’s not just our blind inability to forecast. In fact, if you look at what drove the internet’s social communication, email was the killer app, along with newsgroups, mailing lists, chat rooms, instant messaging. These were just a huge driver of the internet. And with telephones, well, people like to communicate . . . socially. That’s obvious. And we’re seeing with the early use of the new media, the text messaging and SMS messaging (20 to 30 billion messages annually, worldwide), that social communications are something that people value. If you look at what people have done with these various forms of social communications, the kinds of communication that technology can afford, the telephone allowed one to communicate with someone far away, in real time. The internet makes it possible to communicate with people you’ve never met, but with whom you share some mutual interest. Mobile communication is used mostly by people who already know each other, to coordinate their activities in real time, and although that seems fairly simple, that can lead to profound changes, because the way people organize their activities is really what drives the evolution of civilization.
BP: In the U.S., wireless nodes are sprouting up quite quickly, accompanied by rapidly growing networks, while text messaging and G3 devices have yet to show their faces. Is there room in the U.S. market for both the G3 devices and wi-fi laptops to be successful?
HR: The fact that text messaging has not taken off in America — the way it has in Europe, Asia, Africa, and starting in South America — has a lot to do with the failure of the American operators to market it properly. Unlike Europe and Asia, there were many competing standards, so you could not send a text message (or could not until very recently) from your phone to your friend’s phone, if your friend had a different operator than yours. In Europe they had a standard, so you could send a message no matter who your friend’s operator was. Secondly, in places where it has taken off, texting is cheaper than making a voice call, and the receiver does not have to pay anything, only the sender. Again, the American operators did not market it that way. The third thing is that in most places, texting first took off among teenagers. Again, American operators did not begin by marketing it to teenagers. They’re changing that, but they started by marketing it to thirty-ish executive geeks. There may be other cultural reasons, but there’s no way of finding out what those are while these major marketing obstacles are in the way.
G3 is how the phone companies refer to third-generation cellular phones, which have music and video capabilities. The infrastructure for doing that, centrally, requires buying expensive portions of the spectrum and installing a top-down infrastructure that’s very expensive, and it takes a long time to install and to make it work. At the same time, other technologies are being utilized by armatures. People are using low-power devices to connect to the internet, and make small networks in their neighborhoods. These devices are selling at a million and a half per month. Telephone companies are laboring to build expensive infrastructures that might be too expensive for people to use, while people spontaneously build networks themselves, the way the internet was done. Wireless nodes are beginning to provide high-speed access to people in cites. The advantages are found in using the spectrum in ways that are not known or allowed.
BP: The evolution of virtual reality technology has not mapped directly onto the path that you plotted for it. Do you feel that any aspects of that particular phenomenon are evolutionary dead ends?
HR: I think clearly that VR has not taken off. I did say in my book that it would take 10 to 15 years for the processing power alone to be sufficient to provide an experience that could compete with what we’re used to on television. So we’re about 10 years into that period, and it’s getting there. But clearly other things have happened in the world that have been much more important, bigger, and unforeseen. Once again, nobody predicted the web when I wrote Virtual Reality (MIT Press) in 1990. So I think it remains to be seen whether the technology will be able to provide a compelling experience, but I think the compelling use of the internet has come along that has been more significant.
BP: Web theorists have suggested that the internet challenges many of our fundamental notions about time, space, self, etc. They exist differently in the virtual world. Web time has been called “sliceable” or “shapeable,” custom fit for each individual (or possibly containing a myriad of distractions). How does your “softening of time” theory relate to, change, or enhance these previous theories?
HR: There’s some indication that the use of mobile phones to coordinate activities has changed those properties. People don’t have set appointments; time has been “softened.” It’s not “I’ll meet you at 1:00 P.M. wherever,” it’s “I’ll send you a message once I get downtown this afternoon,” and then people negotiate actually when and where they’ll end up. Another change was pointed out by an urban planner by the name of Anthony Townsend. People are using their telephones and PDAs to get work done while in their car, walking down the street, or sitting in the park. These are times when they would not have been accomplishing tasks, business-related or social tasks, before. That means that people are doing more things than they were previously, and that speeds up the metabolism of the city. That might lead to good results for some people and bad for other people. We don’t really know, but it’s important to note that those changes are occurring.
BP: Some opponents of wireless networks and virtual communities argue that we will emerge from the “age of instant access” as isolationists with underdeveloped physical and social skills. They talk of cities whose denizens devalue public spaces and natural communication and are totally dependent upon and useless without their mobile devices. What is wrong with this mentality? Can these mind-expanding gizmos enhance human interactions or enhance public spaces?
HR: First of all, I don’t know that I would argue that, in general, that people are becoming more civil to one another. Look at interactions that people have in traffic, or listen to talk radio. I think people are as impolite to each other as they have always been, but they seem to be more in a hurry, in general. But does that have to with technology, or the automobile, or skyscrapers, or capitalism, or suburbia? I think it’s simplistic to try to nail it down to one cause. I think, however, that the problem is in generalizations. It’s clear that while for some people, the internet, like many other things, can be a way of distancing oneself from other people. It’s clear that, for many people, using online communication, just as their grandparents had used the telephone, is a way to connect with other people.
BP: Dialectics are central to your work and your treatment of them is usually quite balanced. For example, “The bottom-up, grassroots forces of innovation and community clash and with and dodge the punches of the top-down control of the corporate world.” Describe the sort of interaction that will need to take place or for these two opposing forces to work in some form of symbiosis.”
HR: There are a lot of different forces of conflict. There are existing industries and emerging industries. There are old business problems and new business problems. There are old ways of regulating public goods, and there are new ideas about regulating public goods. I think what I’m trying to drill here about virtual communication, using technology to communicate (as we did with the telephone, or the internet), is that people did not use it in ways that society had planned. So, we can see that telephone operators and cable operators . . . they have certain plans for what they would like to see with populations in the future, how they would like to see the populations of the future behave with regards to communication and technology. In general, I think we can see that Hollywood studios, the recording industry, electronics manufacturers, television industry would like to go back to the days of broadcasting, where people were consumers of content that was broadcast to them. The only choice you really had was changing the channel, never really creating content, unless you worked for one of the major studios. Now, when we look at the internet, we see that many people created it. Yet, the telephone companies created an infrastructure that was useful, computer manufactures created computers, but the internet was some “thing,” like a shopping center that was built by a bunch of contractors. But it emerged from the cooperative effort of everybody, acting in their own self-interest. So, the PC revolution consisted of users. Bill Gates was one. The internet consisted of users. In the future, the user could become consumer.
I think what we need is not one side or the other, but a balance between the large scale infrastructure that can only be built by major corporations or regulated by national government, and the bottom-up stuff. I think citizens should be allowed more leeway, and new technology should be given an opportunity by better serving the people that use it, rather than the companies that sell it.
BP: …And for another example, “The liberating, creative, and opportunistic dimensions of the ‘instant access’ age are shadowed by the Orwellian image of a ‘panopticon’ of psychological imprisonment and privacy invasion. What factors are important in driving this dichotomy toward a healthy, humane solution? Will the tradeoffs (privacy for convenience) be worth it?”
HR: This is a complex issue, but there is one simple way of looking at it: Who has control over information? The person who owns the information, such as whose medical histories it is, record of transactions it is . . . or others. People want to sell their products, and there could be a healthy market in this. All the merchants want to do is find people who are more likely to be their customers. Provided a method for doing this, that is what commercial interests want. People do not want to be bombarded with spam and junk mail. They see it as some form of identity theft, and they don’t want people to spy on them any more than the constitution allows. So I think the question of future technology is who has control of these. Is there an off switch where you can turn off the information being broadcast about you, and if so, is the default mode on or off?
It’s very difficult right now in California to pass legislation preventing banks from selling, not just your account information, but all the transactions that you make on your credit card (which is a big issue) to hundreds of thousands of other institutions. The California legislature has failed twice in the past two years to pass a bill about that because the banks spend a lot of money on lobbying. They spend a lot of money on politicians who then owe them something. So, although individuals say they care about privacy, the political process is tilted in favor of institutions that profit from having control of information.
BP: Tell us about any new projects you have in the works.
HR: In a couple of weeks I’m going to launch the smartmobs.com website, a resource center of all the resources that I did put in my bibliography, and a community blog of new developments related to the chapters in the book.
Peter Lunenfeld: Critic as Curator
Peter Lunenfeld is the director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA) and teaches in the graduate Media Design program at Art Center College of Design. He is considered one of the preeminent critics and theorists of the intersections of art, design, and technology. Afterimage referred to his edited collection, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press, 1999) as “the first printed book you read about the virtual world that does not merely describe it, but puts you there.” Continue reading “Peter Lunenfeld: Critic as Curator”
Erik Davis: Mysticism in the Machine
Surveying the overlapping regions of mysticism, religion, media theory, postmodernism, and cyber-critique, Erik Davis makes maps of new mental territory. His book, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony, 1998), is a journey through the varying and plentiful connections between old-world religions and New Age technology — connections few noticed before Erik pointed them out. As Peter Lunenfeld puts it, “Davis performs alchemy, fusing disparate strands of techno-hype, mystical speculation, and hard-nosed reporting into a Philosopher’s Stone, unlocking secrets our culture doesn’t even know it has.” Continue reading “Erik Davis: Mysticism in the Machine”
Gareth Branwyn: Media Jam
Gareth Branwyn has been media hacking for nearly three decades. His book, Jamming the Media (Chronicle Books, 1997), is the media hacker’s bible, an invaluable sourcebook of resources, how-tos and examples written with evident working-knowledge, exhaustive research, and fearless wit. He’s also the “Jargon Watch” guy at Wired, runs the tech-review site, Street Tech, and has written several other books and countless articles on the web, technology, jargon, and alternative media. Continue reading “Gareth Branwyn: Media Jam”
Paul Levinson: Digital McLuhan
Paul Levinson is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University and also writes writes Science Fiction, popular and scholarly non-fiction. His novel The Silk Code won the Locus award for Best First Novel of 1999. His Digital McLuhan updates a great deal of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory in the context of the new wired world. As Kevin Kelly says, “Paul Levinson completes McLuhan’s pioneering work. Read this book if you want to decipher life on the screen.”
Roy Christopher: Your book Digital McLuhan applies a great many of McLuhan’s more forward-thinking ideas to the digital age of the internet. Is there anything he missed by a long shot?
Paul Levinson: McLuhan didn’t miss much. He certainly got the decentralization (log on from anywhere in the world) and integration (prior media become the new content) of the Internet completely right.
If he missed anything, it’s the unevenness with which these technological revolutions occur. Even today, there are millions of Americans — and, of course, many more throughout the world — who do not log on, who are not part of the digital age. In McLuhan’s highly charged, condensed view of history and progress, the electronic age simply remakes the world into a global village. In reality, the “re-making” can take a long time.
RC: What, in your experience or conjecture, could be considered “post-McLuhan”?
PL: As I discuss at the end of Digital McLuhan, the reversal of media determinism — the increasing human control over our technologies — can be considered “post-McLuhan.”
Actually, this was with us all along. We have always been in control, more or less, But in the age of mass media in which McLuhan wrote, we had less control over our communication than, say, in the manuscript age. After all, the average person even today has little or no imput into radio and TV.
But the Internet empowers individuals. The notion of technology being in the driver’s seat becomes absurd when we can drive the Internet any time we want, by uploading a new page to our Web site.
RC: Science Fiction authors are often considered by scholarly types as the true beacons of the next age. What are your aims as a Sci-Fi author?
PL: My aims as a science fiction author are to inspire, entertain, explore, and inform. I want to inspire my readers to do what they can to help us get further out into space (hence my novel, Borrowed Tides), to think about how we came about as a species (hence my novel, The Silk Code), to contemplate the paradoxes of time travel (thus, my “Loose Ends” stories). I’d like this to also be entertaining for them — I want my readers to smile, get excited, have tears in their eyes, sigh with contentment, as they get caught up in my characters and stories. (I’m always delighted to hear that one of my novels kept someone up all night.) And I also want to explore new areas of science — and philosophy — in my fiction. For example, do bacteria help make us intelligent (I explore this in The Consciousness Plague, to be published by Tor in 2002 — my next Phil D’Amato novel). Or, is our DNA all the result of natural selection, or has it been deliberately manipulated in the past (I explore this in The Silk Code). Finally, I hope my science fiction informs. I try to pack lots of scientific and historical detail into my novels (for example, The Consciousness Plague has a section on Lindisfarne). If this helps convey a little information, arcane or otherwise, to my readers, I’m happy.
RC: Can you give a brief overview of what your next book, RealSpace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet will entail?
PL: RealSpace begins with a critique of cyberspace, and the need for physical navigation of the real world (what we call transportation). Our flesh and our science require full face-to-face interaction for many things – ranging from walking hand in hand along the shore, to physically testing a new environment. RealSpace then segues into the special need we have to physically move off this planet and out into space. This part of the book entails an analysis of what didn’t go right with space programs thus far, and how to get it right in the future, and why. Briefly, the most profound reasons are as much philosophic, even spiritual, as scientific: we’ll never know truly who we are, until we better understand our place in the universe. And we can’t know that from just down here on Earth.
RC: Anything else you’re working on that you’d like to mention?
PL: Well, I already mentioned The Consciousness Plague, due out from Tor in March 2002.
New novels I’m now writing include a time travel story involving Socrates, and a new Phil D’Amato novel in which privacy — endangering of — is one of the main issues.
Nonfiction: after RealSpace, I expect to be writing a book on the cellphone, pros and cons. Among its not often mentioned values is that it gets us out into the world — that is, away from our desks. This coincides with what I say about the importance of actually walking through the world, in RealSpace. And one more little treat (at least, for me — and I hope for my readers): I just finished a little essay, “Naked Bodies, Three Showings A Week, No Commercials: The Sopranos as a Nuts-and-Bolts Triumph over non-Network TV” for a new anthology (This Thing of Ours: Investigating the Sopranos) edited by David Lavery and to be published by Wallflower/Columbia University Press in 2002.
Jay David Bolter: FutureText
Brian Eno calls him, “The New Gutenberg.” His work tip-toes through the same conceptual gardens as Marshall McLuhan, Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart, and yes, even Johannes Gutenberg himself. Hypertext (he is one of the principle developers of Storyspace — a standalone Hypertext authoring environment), media evolution and the computer’s role in the writing process as well as education are a few of his points of interest. Continue reading “Jay David Bolter: FutureText”
Mark Dery: Post-Future Shock
Mark Dery synthesizes the newest fringes of our culture into a united media interrogation of postmodernity. His books and countless articles place cyberculture, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, underground music, science fiction, etc. under a shrewd lens of inquiry and he returns adept insights and new ideas.
Overlooked and underrated, Mark Dery should be added to the short list of valid modern visionaries.
Roy Christopher: Many of the subjects in your analyses of cyberculture tend to have a “pro” or “con” view of the exponential progress of technology. What’s your personal take on our current overdrive technological progress?
Mark Dery: Well, if by “overdrive” you mean the runaway speedup of techno-evolution, I think we need to learn to philosophize in a wind tunnel. We tend to mime our speed culture rather than make sense of it. The smeared graphics and train wreck typography of designers like David Carson, formerly of RayGun magazine, are one example of this mimesis; “blipcore” techno that buzzes by at heart-attack tempos is another. We live in the age of blur; to understand who we are and where we’re going as a wired society, we need to be able to sketch an exploded view of the cultural bullet train as it streaks past at full throttle. The dug-in, hunkered-down stance of cyberpundits like David Shenk, who fulminates against “life at hyper-speed” and keeps his TV in his closet, is a bunker mentality. No one’s going to stop the world so we can get off. The info-vertigo we’re suffering from, the unrelieved sense of personal disorientation and social dislocation, is going to be a fact of life from now on — deal with it. Obviously, I’m not saying that we should throw out our moral compasses just because there’s no one true magnetic north, culturally speaking, anymore. My personal take on the breathless hyperacceleration of technological change and the social upheaval it’s causing is that, rather than consign unfashionably “humanist” notions of social justice and political change to the recycle bin of history, we have to learn how to be moral animals in a world where all the old, comforting bedtime stories about God and progress and the providential hand of the free market are deforming and disintegrating as our culture, our increasingly posthuman technology, accelerates away from our nature — human psychology, which is still bounded and shaped by those evolutionary artifacts we call bodies. That’s what a lot of my writing and thinking is about.
RC: With the enthusiasm for externalization and “leaving the flesh behind” that has come along with advances in technology, do you foresee a renaissance of the “Human Factor” coming as the next wave?
MD: We have to ask what “The Human” is? That’s the vexed question. When I interviewed David Cronenberg (in my parallel-dimension life as a journalist), he professed bafflement about the very notion that we’re becoming posthuman. To him, the media’s colonization of our inner landscapes and the cyborgian offloading — into ever-smarter, increasingly lively machines — of more and more of our mental and physical functions is all too human. Humans are tool-using apes — signifying monkeys — and technology is part of us, at this late date. Even so, there’s a spontaneous recoil from the suggestion that the alien in the mirror is us. That’s the parable of the Unabomber, who inveighed against technology while hacking together nasty little pieces of exploding hardware and writing apocalyptic manifestos on a rattletrap typewriter. Where does nature (what you call the “Human Factor”) end and culture (technology) begin? The Unabomber didn’t include the typewriter in his technological demonology, which is a curious sin of omission. According to the SF novelist J.G. Ballard, the typewriter is a cyborg incubator: it encodes us, stamping the linear bias of the assembly line, and all of industrial modernity, across our imaginations. The distinction between ourselves and our tools is becoming increasingly arbitrary — more and more of a reassuring fiction — and the anxiety provoked by the blurring of this once clear-cut distinction manifests itself in the fetishizing of the “Human Factor.” The “renaissance” you’re talking about is already upon us. Mail-order catalogues from Smith & Hawken and Pottery Barn and other merchandisers of gracious living abound in “distressed” faux antiques and pseudo-Shaker furniture and ersatz Arts & Crafts housewares — mass-produced talismans of a time before mass production, when the human touch left its traces on everyday objects. To be sure, these sorts of commodities are partly about shoring up one’s social standing with icons of timeless good taste, but they’re also about the veneration of the handmade, i.e., the human touch, and of objects “humanized” by the passage of time, transformed from generic things into weathered, worn, one-of-a-kind treasures with pedigrees and personalities.
RC: What are some of the newer areas of technological advancement and the sociological ramifications thereof (that you haven’t already researched) that have sparked your interest?
MD: The new plastics that have enabled the current renaissance in industrial design, emblematized by the soft, biomorphic, translucent “blobjects” spawned by the iMac. Quantum computing. Xenotransplantation and the engineering of transgenic animals. The far fringes of comparative ethology, where researchers are exploring the no man’s land between human and animal intelligence.
RC: For those who haven’t yet read it, what can you tell our readers about your newest book, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (Grove Press, 1999)?
MD: Like many, I feel as if contemporary America is an infernal carnival, equal parts funhouse and madhouse — a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” to borrow a turn-of-the-century nickname for Coney Island. In The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, I wonder: Are social forces such as the yawning chasm between rich and poor tearing the fabric of American society to shreds? Or are our premonitions of cultural chaos just a toxic cocktail of turn-of-the-millennium fever and media-fueled hysteria? I find the answers in Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh ‘s visions of black helicopters and the Heaven’s Gate cultists’ fantasies of alien saviors; in Disney’s planned town, Celebration; and Nike’s dreams of global domination. Along the way, I puzzle over the popularity of blow-up dolls of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and wonder what, exactly, Jim Carrey’s talking butt is trying to tell us. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park “dark ride” through contemporary America, a culture torn between angels and aliens, the smiley face and The Scream. Keep your hands inside the moving vehicle at all times!
RC: Who do you admire doing science right now? Who do you consider to be truly forging new paths? And who do you like that’s reporting these paths?
MD: Truth to tell, I’m not much of a disciple of science. I read social histories and cultural critiques of science; my “hard” scientific reading is strictly Homer Simpson fare — magazines like The Sciences and Smithsonian, the science page of The New York Times (despite the unabashedly pro-business flackery of Times science reporter Gina Kolata, recently exposed in an excoriating cover story in The Nation). I’m a great fan of Stephen Jay Gould, a luminous scientific mind who has the political virtue of being on the side of the angels — that is, whatever side the unreconstructed sociobiologist Richard Dawkins isn’t on. And he’s ferociously funny — a vanishingly rare trait among popularizers of science. Also, the popular science writer Timothy Ferris is always enlightening and entertaining. But my favorite writer on science and technology remains J.G. Ballard, the SF visionary and postmodern philosopher par excellence, whose ruminations on our over-lit media landscape, stalked by “the specters of sinister technologies,” are an inexhaustible mother lode of brilliant insights and mordant bon mots.
RC: Do you have any projects in the works you’d like to mention?
MD: I just signed on as editor of ArtByte, a magazine of digital culture — formerly a magazine of digital art, as its name suggests — whose roll call of contributing writers includes Bruce Sterling, Erik Davis, and other SF/cybercrit writers familiar to your readers. I’ve been charged with radically reconceptualizing the magazine as a smart, snarky meme-splice of I.D. (the American design magazine, not the British youthstyle mag), The Baffler, and the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine, 21C, with a dash of Suck.com at its best. It will feature coverage and criticism of e-culture, targeting the terminally wired, and the incurably informed: readers who feel at home in what Alvin Toffler called “blip culture,” readers with rapacious media appetites who thrive on information overload but want to engage critically with the ever more mediated world around them. I’m frantically brainstorming a plan for global domination.
At the same time, I’m juggling several book ideas, one about the insect as cultural icon, another a social history of irony. Then, too, there’s “My Dinner With Hannibal,” the mash note to Hannibal Lecter I’ve always wanted to write — a literary dissection of the haute-couture cannibal in the age of Martha Stewart. With the return of ’80s-style greed-is-good meanness and conspicuous consumption (symbolized by the grotesque hypertrophy of the American car into the gargantuan SUV), it seems like an idea whose time has come.
Douglas Rushkoff: The Thing That I Call “Doug”
John Brockman let me publish the following lengthy talk he had with Doug Rushkoff in my book, Follow for Now. As much fertile ground is covered and many prescient ideas are discussed, I’m reposting it here.
Until recently, media and technology guru Douglas Rushkoff believed that we should let technology develop at its own pace and in its own way. “I thought that this rapid acceleration of culture would allow us to achieve the kind of turbulence necessary to initiate a dynamical system,” he says. “And I saw everyone who called for us to put on the brakes, or to put new governors on the development of culture, as the enemy to our evolution forward. Their vigilance would prevent us from reaching the next level of complexity.” Continue reading “Douglas Rushkoff: The Thing That I Call “Doug””