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”
In short, that contradictions must be accepted. — David Jones
To unify the thing that is postmodernism might sound futile at the outset, but Lawrence Cahoone’s anthology From Modernism to Postmodernism (Blackwell) sets out to do just that. The very term “postmodernism” is fraught with misconception, misuse, and implies an adherence to fragmentation over unity. Cahoone’s selections combat this by demonstrating postmodernism’s origins, its disparate applications and definitions in different fields, and the ongoing debates about what exactly it all means. From Descartes and Hume to Nietzche and Sartre, and from the post-structuralists (e.g., Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guittari, etc.) to the architects (e.g., Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi), Cahoone’s anthology provides an excellent overview of an inherently fractured lens on the world. Continue reading “From Modernism to Postmodernism and Philosophy of Technology”
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.
My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
When I last spoke with Rudy Rucker, his nonfiction collection Seek! and science-fiction novel Saucer Wisdom were just finding their way into bookstores. Since that time, Rucker has been hacking on a video game programming toolkit called the Pop Framework and keeping a low profile on the science-fiction scene. After bouncing a few emails with him, it was obvious that we needed to do another interview and shed some light on his latest projects. Continue reading “Rudy Rucker [Part Two]: Game Theory”
We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we’re all coming to realize that it’s becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity? Continue reading “Albert-László Barabási: Think Networks”
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”
With ninety-five theses that redefined online markets and their prospective web consumers, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Perseus Books, 2000) dropped a virtual bomb on the virtual world. David Weinberger was one of its four authors. Therein he stated, “The web is viral. It infects everything it touches and, because it is an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn’t. The web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joining themselves unpredictably.” With his new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Books, 2002), Weinberger expounds on this idea. With insight and authority, he claims — among other things — that the web hasn’t been hyped enough. Continue reading “David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined”
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”
The collective known as Milemarker has a vast and prolific output that encompasses much more than the average independent band: Dave Laney puts out a printed alternative media quarterly called MediaReader, Al Burian self-publishes a ’zine of his travels and views therefrom called Burn Collector (the first nine of which are collected into a book) and Roby Newton does traveling puppet shows and animations.
Milemarker songs cover many sociological topics, including many derived from living in our technology-driven culture. They liken their early records to video-game soundtracks when compared to their live sound at the time, but the aggression shows through. You see, in the studio, Milemarker preferred to experiment with sounds and samples (playing with the irony of using technology against itself), whereas live they’re more forthcoming. These two approaches finally meshed on Frigid Forms Sell (Lovitt, 2000) and grew on the recently released Anaesthetic (Jade Tree, 2001). The most important thing about Milemarker is that they will force you to think about things — even if you’re already thinking about things. They stir the corporeal, the angst, the spiritual core, and the cerebrum simultaneously. As a collective, they represent the epitome of the new paradigm of artist: one with fingers that run deep in many pies.
The Clash once called themselves “The Only Band That Matters” and Rolling Stone once called Fugazi the same. Milemarker has earned the title through years of hard work, expansive vision, and downright challenging music.
Roy Christopher: As a collective of individuals with a steady, varied, and prolific output outside of the band, what is it that drives you to do so much?
Al Burian: I feel like I do the band because there is this abstract entity of a band and it wants to be realized somehow — it wants to be a band. And then I feel like I do other things outside of the band because there are things I feel like expressing which don’t necessarily fit into the agenda of what the band is expressing.
Dave Laney: I’ve tried to tailor my life in a fashion that allows me to spend more time on the things that I actually want to be doing. I love to play music and travel, so I play in a band. I am also horribly 
obsessive/compulsive, so I started a magazine which requires tons of time to be spent doing horribly mundane things. At this point, I’m actually forced to be spending my time doing these things instead of working a normal job — the mail keeps piling up and someone has to write back. Actually, I started MediaReader because I felt like the average DIY music magazine was ignoring a large part of the “community” that they advertised as covering. The idea with MR was to serve as a less specific type of magazine: not always political, not always musical, but always trying to be critical with a constructive edge to the criticism. There comes a time when you can’t complain about things anymore and you just have to force yourself to pick up your own complaints and create that new thing.
RC: Tell me about the new record, Anaesthetic. Is there a theme or specific issues addressed as there was with Frigid Forms Sell?
AB: Well, it’s sort of a secret theme. All of the lyrics and recording information are hidden in the packaging, so the idea is that the record initially seems to be about nothing, just a pretty object, all aesthetics. The idea is to make people pay a little more attention, sort of to involve the listener a little more actively in the process of figuring out what the record is about.
DL: The themes contained in the songs vary more, compared to FFS. I actually think that the new one is the most political and socially relevant album that we have released. That was part of the idea with hiding the lyrics, as well. I think that the music is more accessible on the new album, enough so that we knew we would get hell from old friends that knew the band from the get-go. To go along with what we felt would probably be the first instinct from these people, we decided to try to double their reaction and make them second guess themselves later on. That was the idea anyway: have people come up and say, “new label, new sound, lyrics about love — what gives? What are you guys doing!?” When in reality I feel like we bumped it up a notch. At least on a personal level it feels like that. Whereas the overwhelming theme of FFS was commodification and the dumbed-down way that we are taught to relate to others through the way that we relate to products, Anaesthetic contains songs about gentrification, the atrocities of textile sweat shops, modern disconnection, terminal illness, and so on. I feel like throwing yourself into the mix is a big part of relating to other people, and of being able to step past sheer social commentary from the position of an untouchable critic.
RC: There seems to be a lot of Michel Foucault’s influence on Frigid Forms.
AB: You are making some pretty grand assumptions there, young man. In fact, I have never read Michel Foucault. I was assigned some of his writing in college but I did not do the reading that day. My housemate claims that her entire college cultural studies major was essentially majoring in Michel Foucault, but I only remember her doing various video projects which involved wrapping herself in tin-foil. And considering that, perhaps I should investigate this Foucault fellow.
DL: Ha ha. I, myself, years ago, had read some short thesis of Mr. Foucault, but to be honest, I can not even begin to tell you what it was about. Maybe I should, as well, do some investigating.
RC: Richard Metzger once said that the most subversive thing one can do is to become popular. In the spirit of this quote, I have often argued in defense of bands like Rage Against the Machine, stating that — in spite of the fact that they create revenue for evil companies such as Epic/Sony — they reach and influence more kids than any activist-minded indie band (and probably lead kids to those bands eventually anyway) can. What do you (as an activist-minded indie band) think of the “mainstream vs. underground” debate and said point of view.
AB: I assure you that neither Rage Against the Machine, our band, nor any other band that has ever or will ever exist has subversion in mind when seeking popularity. The pursuit of popularity has to do with deep-seated feelings of personal inadequacy, usually left over from traumatic experiences such as being chosen last for the kickball team in grade school or something like that. Now me, personally, I don’t have any quibbles with the political platform of Rage Against the Machine, the Foo Fighters, the post-Buddhist Beastie Boys, or any of that type of music. My main concern is, when you examine the average mosh pit at one of these events, sure, those guys are all wearing Zapatista T-shirts, they all signed the Mumia petition, but take a closer look: aren’t those pretty much the same guys who were picking you last for kickball back in the olden days? Everyone has a right to enjoy music, and if Rage Against the Machine is willing to handle this demographic, so be it, but the point is that I don’t want to be around those people. I’m not into hanging out with those guys, they weren’t nice to me in grade school, I’m still bitter about the whole thing. That is the difference between “mainstream” and “underground” to me: do you want to convert the maximum number of people to cause X or T-shirt slogan Y, or do you want to help build a culture where people who feel alienated can find some commonality.
DL: That’s a difficult, ongoing debate. I do mostly agree with what Al said, but also think that there is some break point to the oversimplification. A lot of what I spend time doing is trying to build and support the community that I consider myself part of. There are limitations and compromises to everything, and I think it’s important to distinguish between the differences of building a community and solely maintaining a community. In order to build something, you have to broaden awareness about things and reach people that already don’t have the exact same political platform or ethics as yourself. This is the argument that I assume RATM would use as justification to touring with the Wu-Tang Clan and going the route that they did. RATM is really a weird phenomenon case study in the history of this argument, which is another reason why people use them all the time. There is also Fugazi, who went a completely different route, built what they have by themselves, and still hit an enormous audience. Even they have to deal with a huge contingency of football player jock types at their shows, buying their records, misinterpreting their lyrics, etc., but I do believe that when you look at the greater picture of the examples that both bands have set, it comes into focus very quickly that Fugazi did all this stuff with much more integrity in tact than RATM. Both of these bands are seemingly flukes of the modern rock industry, and both are hard to compare to the average indie rock band.
The overbearingly truth is that major label ethics can be very, very sleazy. From the little bit that I’ve seen from friends of mine that have signed on to the major game, everything changes completely. Even in a strict financial sense, history has proven that it works out for very few bands, and even when it does, I’m not into an economy that (to quote from Steve Albini’s article in the ages-old Maximum RocknRoll issue on major labels) makes the label $710,000, the producer $90,000, the manager $51,000, and, finally, the band $16,000. The real atrocity here is that the label made forty-five times more than the band, and the guys getting the kickbacks off the band probably know little to nothing about the band. There have been countless articles written on this, and there have been major-label bands that superceded the law, bands like Beck. But still, and keep in mind that this paragraph is only in reference to the finances and not the “artist shall have all control over her art” type thing, to go into one of these deals is a gamble that is usually lost by the band. It has, sadly, been proven over time. Which is to say that to encourage someone to be the next RATM is to encourage someone to shoot themselves in both feet.
Lately I’ve been almost obsessing over the idea of other people making money off of me working. I quit my job and got a job at a nonprofit, where there are no kickbacks to dudes in suits or higher-up positions. Of course, I recently got fired when I left for three months of touring, but I liked the place. There was no attitude, barely any superiors, and I felt good about what I was doing. In response to your question “do you think that getting famous is the ultimate act of subversion?” I say, no: getting famous on your own terms is the ultimate act of subversion.
RC: Whom do you read and respect?
AB: Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being (Harper & Row, 1984) is a good book; I also like Don DeLillo a lot, particularly White Noise (Viking, 1985). Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (William Morrow, 1978) is a good nonfiction choice. Orwell, Camus, Kafka, Salinger are good classics. Recently I’ve been getting really into the author John Fante.
DL: I’ve always been into the old Russian writers. Dostoevsky is my favorite. Tolstoy and the like, Camus (though French), Mark Twain. I know, I know, all this stuff is as old as rocks, but fantastic nonetheless.
RC: What made technology such a major theme in Milemarker songs?
AB: People occasionally misinterpret our band as very sci-fi and future-obsessive, when this is actually not the case at all. For instance, the opening line of Frigid Forms Sell:
We keep waiting for the robots to crush us from the sky
They sneak in through our fingertips and bleed our fingers dry.
Sounds like the press kit to The Matrix, but the giant robot has been a popular allegorical symbol since World War II, particularly in Japanese cartoons and movies, I would say clearly representing anxiety over nuclear war. So the point there is that we’re all looking for the big, instantaneous Armageddon ending (witness people’s susceptibility to Y2K panic), while the actual dangers are right under our fingers, in the small and mundane encroachments technology makes into our daily lives. An example: I was talking to my co-worker the other day and she mentioned how she has to get a stronger prescription for her glasses. She said that the eye doctor had told her that her eyesight would continue to deteriorate unless she stopped working with computers. “But in this day and age I don’t really see how I can do that,” she said. It struck me as really crazy that this person was literally making the choice to give up her eyesight so as not to go against the status quo of technological advancement. That’s a totally fucked-up world to be living in, and this is the sort of thing that people deal with right now on a daily basis. So I think the root of any technological obsession or phobia you might pick up on just comes from being freaked out about the contemporary state of things.
DL: Al is the real technology freak. He has written most of the songs that are about such things. I’ve always thought that his best subjects come from observing the world around him, figuring out what makes him feel uncomfortable or alienated, and writing about that discomfort.
RC: Anything else you guys are working on that you would like to bring up here?
AB: Dave and I are always working on some printed matter or other; the new MediaReader should be out soon enough, and my ’zine Burn Collector should have a new issue out, oh, who knows when, probably not for a while. You can contact PO Box 641544, Chicago, IL 60644 for more info about these publications. Roby continues to make things at such a furious pace that anything I could mention would be outdated before I even finished typing. She’s been contemplating putting together a video compilation of her puppet shows, which I wish she would do some day, as the world would be a kinder and more palatable place if such an object existed.
DL: The new issue of MediaReader, issue #5, should be completed by mid-January and set to go on tour with MM (U.S. tour Jan/Feb). Should be pretty exciting this time around. A bit bigger, a lot fancier, and still free.
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.
