How To Break Anything

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29 Nov 2011

Why we're consistently surprised by the consistently unsurprising future (ft. Little Printer)
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But why paper? Isn't that so 20th century? ...My first knee-jerk reaction to Little Printer was bemused bewilderment--really? this?--but it's hard to deny Webb's point. He cited Bret Victor's recent rant against the "pictures under glass" interaction paradigm, in which all our media is sequestered beyond our reach, divorced from the physical world that we actually live in. Little Printer may seem like a throwback at first, but it's actually a disruptive, weird, but undeniably innovative way to liberate digital content from its screen-based prison. It's about making "the cloud" tangible and intimate again, by bringing it into the home in a physical way.

via fastcodesign.com

The above from a reaction to BERG's new product "Little Printer." A fascinating object in itself, but the excerpts above reminds me of something more important: The surprising part about the future isn't that it turns out to be an exciting, unknown world. It is surprising precisely because it's so much like the present while we think it's supposed to be an exciting, unknown world.

This is a natural consequence of the difference between the past and the future. I can explain.

We can be surprised by the past, because the past we can look back far enough and see that it was a completely different place. The surprise we're looking for is in contrast, and that contrast really exists in the past. We're not surprised when we're shocked by the past.

We can in fact imagine far into the future. But in the sense that the contrast of the past "really" exists the further you go back, the future only "really" exists one day at a time. So we are surprised when we aren't shocked by the future, because a day from now looks a lot like today.

(This may seem trivial, but I find this of importance and of interest because this is a human limitation, not a limitation of the future. The lack of contrast only matters to humans, who are remarkably susceptible to change blindness of the "slow change" sort. You may continue to think it's trivial, but my experience in studying both humans and the future has lead me to feel that understanding human limitation is much more important than understanding the future. The short version of my argument might be something like: "If you can design for humans, then you can design the [unsurprising] future.")
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6 Apr 2011

A story about the shifting ways meaning is found through narrative and text
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Over on Beyond The Beyond, Bruce Sterling tells a story about the changing state of semantics in a reaction to Self-Publishing Review's post "Bad Writing Doesn't Matter Anymore."

He's a much better storyteller than I. But I would rearrange the comments and tell the story this way:

from Self-Publishing Review:

It used to be the refrain about self-publishing that to do it right you needed to hire a professional book-cover designer and a professional editor. While there is no doubt that self-publishers should do this, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that this entirely matters anymore. Plainly, we’re entering a new phase where people approach writing differently. People will forgive problems for a cheap read.

So gatekeepers are good because they separate the wheat from the chaff, etc. etc. There is a major point missing from this argument: readers don’t care. Bad, “unpublishable” books are finding an audience. I cannot claim to have read many of the books on the Kindle self-published bestseller list, but without a doubt there are many books that some people would find totally inept, but are finding an audience with many honest 5-star reviews.

In other words, people will love bad stuff, hate good stuff, and everything in between. Certainly, there are self-published books that are abysmally terrible and unreadable, but don’t deny the possibility of virtually anything finding an audience. And if that’s the case, there’s really no reason for a gatekeeper.

We are living in an age where it doesn’t matter if you’re bad – you can still find an audience. Rebecca Black is the latest example.

Bruce's commentary (is actually part of another - equally interesting - narrative):

*Grammatical spellchecking and “autotuning” of texts may change the literary landscape, too. “Bad” writing may be pursued and silently extinguished by the operating-system, much like a self-focussing camera. The Web will be supporting more and more of the scutwork of semantics.

*The unseen literary player here is machine translation. It’s getting “better” fast, and we may soon be in a world where on-demand machine-translated texts become major literary influences. The real web-semantic breakthrough would be a machine-assisted ability to painlessly read texts outside one’s own language. At that point we’ll have entered an unheard-of state of linguistic globalized electro-pidgin.

*This is the harbinger of a dominant electronic vernacular language. “Bad” is the wrong word for a major transition of this kind. It’s too big and powerful to be stigmatized. People are inputting and reading much, much more texts from screens than they ever see from a printed page, and the majority standard of textual expression, by a tremendous margin, is the SMS.

The story I pull from both is one of the near invisibility of cultural change. The narratives above may worry you, in the oft-cited way that Socrates worried about the impact of books on the memory. Or they may not. In any case, I think it's nice that we'll always have something to worry about when it comes to shifting modes of communication.

(see also: from "i think Apple is affecting children's grammar")
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3 Jul 2010

Algorithmically generated city environments
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A city is a complicated thing. With districts becoming neighborhoods, neighborhoods becoming streets, streets becoming homes, homes becoming rooms, and so on, there's a near-fractal level of every-increasing detail. So how do you build one in a videogame?

Grand Theft Auto has long been associated with the creation of realistic, living cities, with Liberty City in GTA IV arguably the peak of that art. Every corner is stuffed full of interesting things to see. But the problem with that approach is that it's very labour-intensive -- creating so much content by hand requires huge teams of designers, modellers and artists, and therefore you have to make compromises, like not allowing the player inside the majority of a city's buildings.

Introversion Software, the independent games studio behind cult titles Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia doesn't have the resources to hire legions of artists and designers, so it's taking a different strategy -- procedural generation. Procedural generation is a programming technique where pseudorandom number generators are fed into an algorithm, and that then cranks out a near-infinite amount of content. Streets, lamp-posts, rooms, buildings, and anything else that a city needs can be assembled in a relatively short space of time just from a string of numbers.

via wired.co.uk

Cities aren't just villages, but bigger - cities represent an evolution of progressively complex relationships, as humans trying to more efficiently access, control, and share resources. The design of complex and networked environments in which humans interact with resources and other humans trying to access resources is actually very fascinating.

The above is a signal of an interesting concept - that our understanding of how these networks operate is becoming sophisticated enough that we can think about how to generate them automatically. In the above, the only thing being algorithmically generated is the details - "lamp-posts, rooms, and buildings," but it reminds me of how we are also beginning to generate and recreate complex networked infrastructures like rail systems, as illustrated below in Slime Mould Simulates Tokyo Rail Network:
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7 Jun 2010

Nineteen Eighty-Four/Brave New World, in short
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via feralsean.tumblr.com
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2 May 2010

"The wave of the future," historical context, China, etc
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The above from Anatomy of Wonder.
It never fails to amaze me how much critical perspective any bit of historical context immediately provides, no matter how small. The "wave of the future" line in the above reminds me very much of the conversations about China I run into often.
I imagine I'll be reminded in some way 30 years from now as well.
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29 Apr 2010

Nostalgia For A Past Future
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What does Nostalgia for a past future mean to you?
This question comes about via OFFF, the International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture.
via spacecollective.org

A bit of perspective on how to think of time, nostalgia, future, etc
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25 Apr 2010

"The future has no place to come from but the past, hence the past has predictive value."
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More thoughts on "the future is in the past," this time from Neustadt and May of Thinking in Time: The Uses of History For Decision Makers.

The above appeared in the notes section of Tyack & Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia.
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20 Apr 2010

" What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," and some thoughts on dystopia, progress, future
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via amazon.com

@calebkramer pointed me to this book; as you might expect I find the subject matter fascinating, neuroscience/perception/culture and all. I'll be reading it.

I'm mostly just curious to see how he solves the problem of "not making the same Socrates-esque case that's been made for centuries, that '[insert new media here] is ruining humanity'."

"The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Net is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds"

If you've been following you may have discovered that I'm not too keen on dystopian/doomsday scenarios. I'll say again that if the future is going to be a scary place, well, it's been happening for centuries.

In fact, I watched this incredibly compelling video a few hours ago on scientific progress; perhaps not directly related to the above, but something along the lines of the goodness of progress:
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21 Mar 2010

Homo Modernus - some deeply metaphorical/metaphysical thoughts on the future of humanity
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via socialhallucinations.com

An entirely fascinating set of thoughts on the future of humanity. Being deeply metaphorical it takes some time to really get what is going on, but before too long you can probably start to reflect on some of the statements and relate in some way.

Although:

I'm never much for doomsday scenarios; were it the case that the future is a scary place, well, it's been happening for centuries.

In other words, we presently live in the scary future that past generations predicted.

In other words, the scary future we're predicting now will feel exactly the same as the "scary present" feels today.

In other words, everything's going to be OK.

In other words, if there is some point along the timeline of humanity at which the threshold from absolute metaphysical "goodness" can be crossed into absolute metaphysical "tragedy," then either 1) it has already happened or 2) we won't notice when it does happen.

In other words, everything is going to be OK

(There is a valid counterpoint here, and it is to say that the present absolutely is scary, and things are not OK today. I just find that to be a sad way to live life.)
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10 Mar 2010

Artists change the world, not technology
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via psfk.com

If you look at all the interesting concepts for how the iPad will fundamentally shift how we think about content, each one is the result of clever writers integrating creative narration into their work. Artists change the world, not technology.

Addendum: The above was inspired by the comment conversation on the PSFK post linked above:

Michael Kowalski: Hm, so the iPad could be a good platform for multimedia, games and augmented reality. Not much of a surprise there. I expect the textbook industry in particular will be utterly transformed in short order. But what about, you know, *real* books? I would have liked to have seen how, say, the next Martin Amis will be “enhanced” on the iPad.

Kyle Studstill: @Michael I tend to think of this about a variety of media/story content in general as well. Movies, for example. Everything about a movie, promotion and all, is about getting you into the theater, and once you’ve seen the film you’re done. I’d be fascinated to see a movie written such that the experience of “watching the movie” continued in some way outside of the theatre. Perhaps something is written into the script such that some common event occurs that everyone can be a part of (and anticipate) months after people have seen the film opening week. I don’t know. But I do think that the kind of “enhanced” you’re talking about comes from within the work itself, not necessarily the iPad that holds it. I think you’re right if you’re saying the iPad gives storytellers a fantastic opportunity to create something with the ability to be “enhanced,” and I hope they do.

To which I was referencing a thought that occurred to me once upon a time:

From the future: The evolution of movie-based entertainment

'why so serious?' via socialhallucinations.tumblr.com

It occurs to me that every movie-based campaign focuses entirely on getting consumers into the theatre to watch the film. There have been more and more interesting ways of doing this, through events leading up to launch day, but everything culminates in seeing the film in theatre and then the experience is over.

Seeing this today got me thinking: 'what if the Batman: Dark Knight experience were still something ongoing?' Something we were still excited about today. What if inherent in the plot and script of a movie there was something that made the story much more than a 2-hour experience? Something in the script that took the movie into real life, an event that could be held months after opening day, once everyone has had a chance to see it and understand how the event is an extension of the plot.
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4 Mar 2010

At some point, we'll stop thinking of phones as devouring other devices
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"Sony prepping new line of handhelds, including PSP phone" via engadget.com

At some point, we'll stop thinking of phones as devouring other devices; soon enough, we'll start thinking of it as devices that happen to be able to make calls as well. Kinda like how we had computers that just happened to have a solitare game on them too.
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11 Feb 2010

When we finally figure out quantum mechanics, humanity will look back on the Newtonian era like we were a bunch of Neanderthals.
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Classical Physics
According to classical physics, an electron will pass through a potential barrier if it possesses enough kinetic energy to overcome the barrier.If it has less kinetic energy than the height of the potential barrier then it will be unable to pass through the barrier under any conditions.

Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics shows that electrons can be described as waves under certain conditions, and a finite probability exists of an electron tunnelling through a classically forbidden barrier due to its wavelike properties.When a wave meets a potential barrier, the wave does not instantly go to zero, but starts to decay exponentially within the potential barrier. If the wave has not reached zero by the time it has reached the other side of the barrier then there is a finite probability that it will be found on the other side of the barrier - the wave has effectively "tunnelled" through the non-conductive barrier.

"Principles of Quantum Tunnelling: Classical physics and Quantum mechanics" via QTC Science

(Which of course means our current perceptions of the world, down to their very fundamental assumptions - they're all so utterly silly.)
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10 Feb 2010

"Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy"
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via rumplo.com

This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case in the future. Today is not special.

(this is pretty much just a reiteration of my last post re "the future is scary." How appropriate.)

UPDATE: @linneamc passed along this clip that I got a good laugh out of. I'd ultimately say that we'll always be able to laugh at our ridiculous expectations; again, the present is no exception.
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10 Feb 2010

It genuinely bothers me when people say "the future is scary." (re: human shortsightedness, Google Buzz)
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You're waking up to an Internet a-Buzz with talk about Google's new social sharing experiment. Opinions are mixed, but mainly concern the current version of Buzz. So here's our thought experiment about its future. It's scary.

via fastcompany.com - "Google Buzz: 'Are you at work? How about a Big Mac from McDonalds?'"

No, the future is not scary.

Human shortsightedness is scary.

But that's always been the case. It's something that exists today. The future is just another iteration of that.

The future isn't scary, the present is scary. Also, the past is scary. I wouldn't be so bothered if people accepted that and instead said "the world is scary and I'm scared of it."
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