Whoa – Paul Raven in “actually got out of the house with a camera recently” shocker!

Not the most exciting of photographs, I’ll grant you, but better than me digging in the archives or showing you some other dust-coated relic from my hovel.

The weather’s been good enough for me to do some supplementary cycling, and yesterday evening I was quite taken by the bank of cloud looming over South Parade Pier – so that’s what you have above. Mmmm – moody.

Writing about music

The one major upside of having a frantically busy week is that a normal week seems easy by comparison, so this week’s mere five reviews have been a relative breeze to cope with after last week’s bedlam.

As hinted at last week, the initial enthusiasm of potential reviewers has yet to coalesce into concrete samples of writing, so I need to do some prodding forthwith.

Album of the week

Got to be Station by Russian Circles. It’s not prog, it’s not post-rock, it’s not post-metal … but it’s all brilliant.

Neither obtained nor reviewed this week, but an extra mention goes to Vantage Point by dEUS, which has been on my stereo or headphones at pretty much every point I’ve had free in the last week. It’s a great album, people; SRSLY.

Writing about books

Well, look at that – I actually got some material out of the door and published, here and elsewhere, as noted earlier in the week.

Nearly finished reading Love And Sex With Robots, which I plan to review on the train tomorrow; after that it’s a binge to try to cover as much of the Masterclass reading list as possible before the damned thing actually starts*.

Futurismic

Well, just look at those new bloggers go! A few teething problems with formatting, but that’s down to my fussiness more than their skills, and we’re getting pretty close to sorted – especially considering they’ve come up with more interesting stuff in a week than I usually find in a month.

Who knows – we may soon reach a point where I can miss a day blogging at Futurismic and (gasp!) not get all panicked about it!

And hey – what did you think of Kristin Janz’s story, “Veritas Nos Liberabit“?

Interzone

As noted yesterday, I’m stepping down from my editorial post at Interzone. As far as FPB is concerned, the most obvious result of this will be to slightly reduce the number of times I go on about being hideously busy**; that said, I’m going to miss it. End of an era, folks … but the start of a new one, too.

Freelance

I’m rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, as Fred Durst once jabbered. Looks like I’ve got a website project tentatively booked to be done by the end of the month. Just waiting for confirmation and a few access passwords, and I’m good to go.

And how good a feeling was it to have my first proper invoice to PS Publishing paid off last weekend? Awesome, frankly. Onwards and upwards, wot?

Books and magazines seen

Would you believe nothing again? Most unusual to go a few weeks without anything more than a trio of vampire-shagger paperbacks from Orbit.

Then again, the music industry seems to slow down come mid-June, so maybe publishing works the same way. So much to learn! Not like I’m short of stuff to read, anyway. Selah.

Out and about: BSFA & SFF AGMs

OK, so I’ve determined I’m definitely going to the AGMs tomorrow – having even taken the drastic measure of dropping off my laundry for a service wash one day early***.

Hope to see some of you there – if we’ve not met before, come and say hello. I may look like some ludicrous caricature of a sysadmin crossed with a failed hippie-biker, but I’m told I’m moderately charming in spite of it****.

Coda

Well, there’s something to be said for actually getting a bit of home-turf blogging done during the week, in that there’s less need to say things here in the FPB Coda. This is good for me, as it frees up some Friday evening time, and good for you, as you have less irrelevant guff to scroll through. Bilateral result – a career in the diplomatic service surely beckons!

So, in the spirit of moving fast and staying light – like a hobo on a skateboard, maybe – I’ll bid you all a good weekend before heading out for The Friday Curry Which Is Verily Regulated By Ritual And Tradition. Hasta luego, amigos.

[ * Seeing that's in about two week's time, good luck to me - though if I read any of it, I'll be more prepared than last year, and I've already read one of the non-fic titles on the list of my own accord. ]

[ ** Yeah, like I'm ever going to stop saying that, until the day I have a gorgeous Mexican professor of literature and philosophy paid a CEO's salary to bring me nachos and Coronas with lime as I write, in between her own research into the intersection of indigenous culture and modern urban mythology. Not that I'm planning ahead or anything. ]

[ *** Rock'n'f*ckin'roll, huh? Yawp. ]

[ **** By my mother, since you asked. ]

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr – W. W. Norton & Co, Feb 2008; ISBN 978-0393062281

The Big Switch is tech journalist Nicholas Carr’s attempt to peer a very short way into the future where, instead of a World Wide Web, we will have a World Wide Computer.

It’s a brisk and engaging book, ideal for anyone interested in technology and its interactions with our culture, society and economics.

But in addition to that, it’s written in an almost science fictional mode. Carr is playing the classic game of science fiction writing – the game of “what if this carries on?”

Hence The Big Switch is a great read for sf writers, especially those interested in Mundane SF* and the near-future scenarios familiar to readers of Stross and Doctorow, among many others.

Carr is a respected journalist, but unpopular among the computer industry for making claims that they don’t like. His previous book Does IT Matter? postulated that perhaps the modern business focus on “IT first, everything else second” isn’t the essential path it is often made out to be – probably not the best way to endear yourself to the tech evangelists.

Like its predecessor, The Big Switch turns a critic and skeptical eye on the development of this World Wide Computer, or “The Cloud” as Carr refers to it (a name I would like to claim to have been the first fiction writer to steal and use in context**). The Cloud is the ultimate end-point of web-based applications like GMail, Picnik and so on: software as service; a ubiquitous cloud of computation.

Carr’s central thesis is that computing is becoming a utility. Like electricity before it, computing is a technology that completely revolutionises economic paradigms on a global scale, and Carr samples liberally from the history of electrification to lay the foundations for his arguments in the first third of the book – the whole of which is soundly rooted in simple economic principles.

The idea that we are approaching a world of ubiquitous software-as-service is not what Carr is out to challenge, however. Indeed, he seems to consider it a given, as do most of the detractors he quotes later on. What they and Carr are questioning is whether it will produce McLuhanville, the shiny happy global electronic village that the blue-sky thinkers would have us believe awaits us just around the next corner.

For change is inevitable, but comes with consequences. The increasing penetration of electricity into daily life – both at work and at home – brought greater convenience and a reduction of drudgery, but it also reduced workforce sizes at the same time while replacing many skilled jobs with more menial tasks in service to the more efficient (and tireless) machines, not to mention producing a whole slew of new household tasks that were never considered essential before.

Carr argues that computing-as-utility is already having a similar effect and will continue to do so, and it’s hard to claim he’s wrong. That said, I think he’s overstating some of the problems.

For instance, he worries about the shift among younger consumers to online news sources, where every page has to be monetised on a pay-per-impression basis, leading to an increase in sensationalist stories that may have little relation to neutrality and objectivity, especially in the case of local media.

Which leads me to assume that local media in the US must have been of an infinitely higher standard than ours here in the UK – which has always been exactly the sort of hype-laden fact-free eyeball saccharine that Carr seems worried web media will make ubiquitous. I suspect (and quite understand) that Carr may be unconsciously repeating the fears of an industry he has long been a part of.

The death of investigative reporting is of far greater concern. But it seems curious to me that Carr – a man who uses economics as the engine of his arguments – doesn’t believe that the desire for investigative reporting will create a market for it.

Sure, the old business model of the newspaper ads paying for the bold scribe to head off to the warzones or poke around in the soiled innards of evil corporations and governments is probably finished.

But there is still a significant section of society that wants to learn those things, as well as a section who will want to be the people who find the story and spill the beans. The payment channels will emerge somehow; the market will find a way … though I’m not so ignorant of economic principles as to suggest that there won’t be any blood on the carpet in the process.

But what if the web, instead of bringing us into the global village of mutual communication, actually enhances the societal rifts that already exist? Carr cites studies of political bloggers (left and right) in the US that suggest the vast majority of them read and link strictly within their own spheres of belief, rarely linking to dissenting views. Which is almost certainly true – but there’s wiggle room in that interpretation.

It doesn’t seem to take into account that people blogging on politics are generally the sort of obsessive axe-grinders who had no interest in dissenting views before the internet arrived***. It also skips the fact that the hypothetical “clean slate” reader (if such a person can even exist) can get both sides of the picture if they so choose, from the same screen using the same search engine**** – something that no newspaper has ever enabled before.

Carr’s concerns are justified – but overemphasised, perhaps. Only time will tell. But enough of my opinions – I’m no economist, nor a politician. The point of the above paragraphs is to indicate that this is the sort of book that gets your brain working overtime. By suggesting potential futures, Carr makes you test them, examine them, poke them with metaphorical sticks – and come up with your own in response.

And as such, The Big Switch is a great book for science fiction writers and readers who like to adventure beyond the stories and into the technology from time to time.

I mean, come on – if even ten years ago you had suggested that one of the world’s most respected technology journalists would write a book in which he not only declares that the CEOs of the world’s biggest computing company are obsessed with turning that company’s infrastructure into a huge artificial intelligence, but also claims that he thinks they have a good chance of achieving it***** … well, you’d have filed it under sf straight away, wouldn’t you?

Times change, quickly – The Big Switch lets us look at what might be around the next hairpin.

Meanwhile, there’s a brief interview with Carr at Wired, and his blog Rough Type is a good addition to the RSS collection of any genuinely open-minded futurist.

[* If it's not an oxymoron to be interested in Mundane SF, as some people claim.]

[** Though some bugger has doubtless beaten me to it decades ago in a story I've never read.]

[*** Political blogs generally tend to horrify me, regardless of the side of the spectrum they are written from. And if the writers are scary, the commenters often make me ashamed to be human.]

[**** Although here the spectre of search engines voluntarily self-censoring for oppressive regimes does raise its head, but that's a very complicated issue.]

[***** Not quite the way we think of AI, granted, but close enough.]

# Full disclosure – received my ARC of The Big Switch from Nicholas Carr’s publicist after applying for one in a giveaway at Rough Type (Carr’s blog). I was under no obligation to review it, and have only done so because I genuinely believe it will be of interest to my readers here at VCTB. #