“The work is never finished. The work will never be finished. There will never be a nice, comfortable utopia where we can rest on our laurels and sip strawberry daiquiris by the pool and trust that now things are Fine and we can all relax. Utopia is not a stable system. It doesn’t last. The best we can hope for is five minutes, an hour.”
All aboard the night train…
Against the asymptote
“For Singularity to have a positive outcome requires a belief that, given enough power, the system will somehow figure out how to regulate itself. The final outcome would be so complex that while we humans couldn’t understand it now, “it” would understand and “solve” itself. Some believe in something that looks a bit like the former Soviet Union’s master planning but with full information and unlimited power. Others have a more sophisticated view of a distributed system, but at some level, all Singularitarians believe that with enough power and control, the world is “tamable.” Not all who believe in Singularity worship it as a positive transcendence bringing immortality and abundance, but they do believe that a judgment day is coming when all curves go vertical.
Whether you are on an S-curve or a bell curve, the beginning of the slope looks a lot like an exponential curve. An exponential curve to systems dynamics people shows self-reinforcement, i.e., a positive feedback curve without limits. Maybe this is what excites Singularitarians and scares systems people. Most people outside the Singularity bubble believe in S-curves: nature adapts and self-regulates, and, for example, when a pandemic has run its course, growth slows and things adapt. They may not be in the same state, and a phase change could occur, but the notion of Singularity—especially as some sort of savior or judgment day that will allow us to transcend the messy, mortal suffering of our human existence—is fundamentally a flawed one.“
“Staunch”, as read for radio
Through an agreeably unlikely chain of events that started with a chat at the bar of my favourite pub, one of my stories has been recorded and broadcast on Sheffield Live!, a community radio station.
For those of you keeping track, “Staunch” was originally written for Jason Heller’s CyberWorld anthology, and repubbed in Newcon Press’s Best of British SF 2016*. And now it’s been read by Joy Wright and produced by Andrew Tildesley for the Write Radio show, and uploaded to Y*uTube for posterity:
I sat in on the recording, mostly to reassure Joy on some of the word choices and emphases; in contrast to my poetry, my stories aren’t necessarily written with audio performance in mind, and there were definitely some spots in this one where my rather prolix and terminology-dense approach to prose doesn’t make for easy reading-aloud. (Something to watch out for in future works, I think.) Nonetheless, I was pleased to find I liked the story better than I remembered.
Now my doctoral research is done, I’m working to reestablish my fiction-writing practice; it’s pretty rusty from neglect, and I’m arguably busier now than I have been in the last five years, but nonetheless a couple of things are starting to take shape. Watch this space, wot?
[ * – I was initially disconcerted to find there were no VCTB posts about “Staunch”, until I recalled that it was published around the time I was experimenting with using Known as a blogging platform at my canonical website… and then Known went the way of so many FOSS projects, and I needed to revamp that site, and so I pulled it down and junked the blogging there, because I couldn’t find an easy way to import the material to WordPress. So there’s a hole in my personal history for web historians to ponder over, I guess… though it seems likely they’ll find more important things to worry about. ]
“Man-made, artificial, mutable” — Dunne (2005), (In)human Factors
Chapter 2: (In)Human Factors (pp. 21-42)
from Dunne, A. (2005). Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. MIT Press.
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Paradigm of user-friendly design generates “enslavement […] to the conceptual models, values and systems of thought the machines embody” (p21)
“By poeticizing the distance between people and electronic objects, sensitive skepticism must be encouraged, rather than unthinking assimilation of the values and conceptual models embedded in [electronic objects]. I am not arguing for a way of designing that is free of ideological content but, rather, for one that draws attention to the fact that design is always ideological. User-friendliness helps conceal this fact” (p22); values and ideals in designed objects not natural, objective or fixed, but “man-made, artificial, mutable” (ibid; emphases mine)
“poeticization” can be generated via “estrangement” and “alienation” [note Suvinean / sf-nal connotations of those terms – critical design as related to the cognitively estranging “novum”?]
“Once the computer became a successful mass-produced object, innovation in interactivity shifted from hardware to software…” (p23) [in terms of trialectic model, hardware becomes infrastructural, software layer seizes the interface layer almost completely]
“To use the existing patterns of knowledge to define a new technology’s possibilities for conveying meaning is not far from the Victorian use of Corinthian columns to support beam engines; design holds back the potential of electronics to provide new aesthetic meanings …” (pp29-30) [relation to skeumorphism? Think also of perpetuation of old and established service models in infrastructural systems; through consistent service design, novelty and power of supporting infrastructure is effaced; persistence of magicality]
“The easy communication and transparency striven for by champions of user-friendliness simply make our seduction by machines more comfortable.” (p30) [equivalence to patter and misdirection of the illusionist? complicity of design in the Spectacle; comfort of familiar metaphors]
domesticity, “pet” technologies; at the other extreme, “alien” technologies
“constructive user-unfriendliness”, NOT user-hostility (p35) [analogy made to foregrounding of language in poetry and literature; poetic function brings an opacity, a playfulness, a drawing-attention-to-itself-ness…]
Design-as-text: “Similarly [to the text as defined by Barthes], in the case of the design object as text, designer and viewer [and user?] play equal roles.” (p36)
Weil’s 1980s radios as “objects about objects in the age of electronics” (p37)
Functional estrangement: “… a form of strangeness that lends the object a purposefulness […] found in the category of ‘gadget’ that includes antique scientific instruments [Newton’s cradle?] and philosophical toys […] objects that self-consciously embody theories and ideas” (p42)
“The fit between ideas and things, particularly where an abstract idea dominates practicality, allows design to be a form of discourse, resulting in poetic inventions that, by challenging laws (physical, social or political) rather than affirming them, take on a critical function.” (p42)