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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Sterling Silver
A demongin.org serial on how recent debates over information systems illuminate a difficult question facing the study of the history of human consciousness. To wit: to what extent is any belief in the Supernatural compatible with a humanitarian agenda?
Tuesday, 2009-03-03 | On the Internet
| Inter arma enim silent leges. |
I.
Wellington, New Zealand recently played host to a convention for futurists and technologists called Webstock.
"Futurists", in this case, means "people who speculate about what might happen in the immediate and long term future of mankind". These people, by logical necessity, tend to be a fairly iconoclastic bunch: one simply cannot devote his time to extrapolating possible futures from current events and not also be subject to whatever impulse it is that drives men to overturn traditional ideas and beliefs. The keynote speaker of their convention, Webstock, was one Bruce Sterling.
If you don't read science fiction and you're not interested in technology journalism, you might not have any idea who Bruce Sterling is or what he does. If the name is totally unfamiliar to you, you should probably look him up: he's exceptionally bright, prolific and has been integral to the contemporary history of consciousness in his own quiet way. At the very least, you should be aware that one of his most well-known works is called The Hacker Crackdown and that THC a journalistic accounting of the alternately exhilarating and sickening rise of hacker and cracker culture from the obscurity of the American social and cultural subaltern to a prominent position within our collective media culture.
You should also know that he co-authored a novel with no lesser a personage than William Gibson himself and that in this novel, The Difference Engine, Sterling and Gibson re-imagined the invention of history's first computer as a sort of steam-punk murder mystery thriller that relies upon Gibson to conjure the sweet, hot cobblestone grit and sweaty, trembling delirium of the world's first true cosmopolis as it stood on the brink of social and political collapse and upon Sterling to justify that vision with copious research.
And, incidentally, if "William Gibson" is a name that sounds totally unfamiliar to you, you probably shouldn't even be reading my blog, as you obviously haven't the faintest idea about what the fuck is even going on with life, the universe and everything.*
At any rate, Bruce Sterling has distinguished himself as an exceptionally perspicacious and imaginative dude among dudes who prize perspicacity and imagination above most other attributes; ones whose relaxed contempt for non-intellectual pursuits has caused New York advertising agencies and Hollywood movie studios alike to consider them the hardest sell in the business. So it should come as no surprise that Bruce Sterling, in his capacity as keynote speaker for a gathering of futurists, was not merely an iconoclast among iconoclasts, perfunctorily swinging at the usual pinatas and throwing an irreverent arm over the shoulders of the accepted set of cultural caryatids to the smiling approval of his peers.
Rather, when Sterling took the podium at Webstock, he decided to run roughshod over the self-congratulatory attitude that has characterized the otaku crowd in recent times by declaring the phenomena we generally refer to as "Web 2.0" a whole lot of hooey.
After deriding those who would exalt what began as a communications network with the modest goal of allowing people to communicate freely and easily over vast distances and has become, thanks to the Mega Corps and their nefarious influence, a Ponzi scheme in which free-wheeling venture capitalists and wunderkind developers conspire to generate "revenue streams" by selling advertising space that is "value added" according to the dubious logic that even as an element of the neon-confetti-gestalt of most monitors a banner or button seen among Google results or embedded within a Facebook menu will have some sort of impact on its millions of viewers, Sterling went on to further abuse his audience by disabusing them of the idiotic belief that the "arrival of" (i.e. mainstream participation in) Web 2.0 represents the advent of some novel communication or data propagation network. He then challenged them to think long and hard about the work of their hands and invent some better "jargon" for it. Which, coming from a guy who probably saw a version of the original Jargon File that wasn't even a whole kilobyte's worth of data.
Bruce Sterling thus:The original sin of geekdom is to think that just because you can think algorithmically and impose it on a machine that this is disembodied intelligence. That is just rules-based machine behavior. Just code being executed. Sure it's an art and science. Calling it intelligence is dehumanizing. It makes you look delusional, sad and pathetic. It's like being an old woman whose only friends are cats. Also, collective intelligence is not your friend. Just as markets aren't your friend. They'll jerk you around.
I'd like to see some better jargon for collective intelligence. A little less metaphysical. Maybe something like "primeval meme ooze." Or "semi-autonomous data propagation." Or "neo-biological out of control emergent architectures," Kevin Kelly style.
His point, in a small number of polysyllabic words, is that we should demystify and demythologize on the grounds the mystification and mythologizing are dehumanizing. So he's a humanitarian, this guy.
And, as we shall see in the next installment of this demongin.org serial, humanitarianism and mysticism--the belief in the efficacy of forces and beings not subject to the natural and physical laws to which we humans are subject--have come to be at very strange odds in these troubled times of ours.
* i.e. forty two.
See my similar remarks here.
