Over at Yahoomblr!, Rob Walker asks some folks, including me, “What is your most outdated device?” Here’s my reply:

“The ‘device’ that feels most outdated to me is my blog,” says Carr. “When I started the thing, in 2005, the personal blog was the iconic expression of ‘new media’; having one put you in the oxymoronic category of journalist-hipster. But the action has moved away from blogs, to the more conversational social networks like Twitter and their bite-sized bulletins. To be a blogger today makes you feel a little like Norma Desmond after silent movies were replaced by talkies: ‘I’m still big; it’s the internet that got small!’”

Here’s Kevin Kelly:

“I have a Panasonic land-line telephone from the ’80s right here on my desk I still use every day,” Kelly says, adding: “I don’t have a handset for the phone, I use a headset and a glass globe to hold down the off button.”

That’s the phone in the picture above. The orb is priceless.

Those, I hear, are the official names of the colors that Google Glass will come in when the head-mounted computer is released, sometime in the next year or so, into what Larry Page this week called “the normal world.” Let me repeat those color names, because they’re beautiful and earthy and soothing:

Charcoal

Shale

Cotton

Tangerine

Sky

“More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, and more delicate still are the marketers’.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the palette of the third generation of iMacs, released back in 2000:

Graphite

Indigo

Ruby

Sage

Snow

The Glass palette strikes me as even better, even more evocative. It may even surpass Simon & Garfunkel’s great herbal palette:

Parsley

Sage

Rosemary

Thyme

That’s a little too green-centric for a product line, anyway.

It does worry me just a little bit, though, that the Glass palette eschews green altogether. Is that a political statement? In fact, now that I think about it, the Glass palette places a disconcerting emphasis on fossil fuels. Charcoal? Shale? One can almost smell the carbon dioxide rising into Sky, almost see Cotton and Tangerine wilting in the heat. Maybe they should have included Tar Sands as a color option.

No, that would have been a downer. “Charcoal” has a much nicer lilt to it. Its emotional connotations diverge from its real-world denotations, in a way that nicely underscores both the semiotic and the marketing possibilities of reality augmentation.

What would be really cool is if the color of your Glass also determined the way the device augmented your reality. So if you wore Charcoal, you’d get this dark, goth view of the world, but if you sported Tangerine it would be like seeing existence through the eyes of a high-school cheerleader on game day. Cotton would put you into a super-mellow, slightly catatonic state of mind. Sky would give you a New Age perspective — all crystalline and feathery. Shale would be totally businesslike, the Joe Friday reality.

As for me, I’m going to hold out for Mushroom.

After the article appeared, I tracked some of the reactions to it here. Many of the links, alas, have gone dead over the last 10 years, but the rundown still provides a sense of where IT stood back then, between the dot-com bust and the arrival of the cloud.

The Glass Cage

2014

My favorite part is when I burn in videogame hell.

Slashdot notes that Google has filed for a patent on what it calls a “policy violation checker,” which comprises “methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document, such as an e-mail.” Here’s how it works:

A context of an electronic document may be detected. A textual phrase entered by a user is captured. The textual phrase is compared against a database of phrases previously identified as being problematic phrases. If the textual phrase matches a phrase in the database, the user is alerted via an in-line notification, based on the detected context of the electronic document.

“Problematic phrases,” Google explains, “include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.”

The patent application, which was published last week, sketches out various ways the service might work. For instance, the “in-line notification” could take the form of the immediate “underlining or highlighting” of the problematic or troublesome word or phrase as it’s typed. The notification could also be accompanied by “a hyperlink to a webpage.” The system could also use “machine learning techniques to identify problematic phrases without human intervention.” Most interesting of all, the system could be programmed “to alert a third party to a match between a textual phrase and a phrase in the database.” For instance, “if a user creates a text document, presentation, or other document with a problematic phrase, the policy violation checker may notify a member of the legal department of the existence of the document.”

One can imagine all sorts of immediate applications for a service that highlights and records “problematic phrases” as you type them. But it strikes me that the policy violation checker’s real potential will emerge only when Google perfects its neuronal interface — the one that Sergey Brin described as “a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain.” At that point, policy-violation checking could become preemptive. The moment a problematic thought entered your mind, you would be alerted to the looming transgression and the thought would be deleted before it even reaches the expression stage. No one else would need know the incident ever occurred, except, of course, the designated third party.

Photo via x-ray delta one.

“It’s a really welcome addition to the growing field of rodent virtual reality.” So says Northwestern University neurobiologist Daniel Dombeck in commenting on a new study, published yesterday by Science, that compares what goes on in rats’ brains when they navigate digitally created spaces with what goes on in their noggins when they navigate the real world. Rats, like humans, have place cells, which are neurons that fire reliably at particular locations and, it’s believed, play a key role in the brain’s creation of cognitive maps. The study reveals that place cells are considerably less active in virtual reality (VR) than in the real world (RW):

When Mayank Mehta, a neurophysicist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, compared the activity of place cells in rats running along a real, linear track with place cell activity in the rats running in virtual reality, he saw some surprising differences. In the real world, about 45% of the rats’ place cells fired at some point along the track. In virtual reality, only 22% did. “Half of the neurons just shut up,” he says.

Individual place cells also behaved radically differently in VR than they do in RW:

On a real track, [a particular place cell] would fire when [the rat] had taken two steps away from the start [of the track], and then again when the animal reached the same spot on its return trip. But in virtual reality, something odd happened. Rather than firing a second time when the rat reached the same place on its return trip, [the cell] fired when the rat was two steps away from the opposite end of the track … That’s like the same place cell in your brain firing when you’ve taken two steps away from your door and then when you’ve taken two steps away from your car. Instead of encoding a position in absolute space, the place cell seems to be keeping track of the rat’s relative distance along the (virtual) track. [Mehta] says, “This never happens in the real world.”

Mehta thinks that the difference may stem from the lack of “proximal cues” — environmental smells, sounds, and textures that provide clues to location — in the digital world:

And considering that when those cues disappear, the rat’s cognitive map appears to change from one based on absolute space to one based on relative distance, proximal cues might be the key component to how those mental maps work in the real world.

Rats’ sensory perception of the world differs from that of people — rats don’t see very well, for instance — and that (among other things) makes it hard to know whether human brains react to VR and RW in the same way. But the study at least hints at the richness of our perception of the world — a richness that is very much embodied in our physical being even though it may be hidden from our conscious mind. To me, this raises an important but rarely heard question about so-called augmented reality (AR), particularly the use of computers to add an extra layer of visual information to our conscious perception of the world: Is augmented reality also diminished reality? In other words, by adding input to one (conscious) layer of perception, do you end up degrading other (conscious and/or unconscious) layers of perception?

Is RW + AR > RW or is RW + AR < RW?

And does it matter?

Photo by UCLA Neurology.

First: The guys most excited about Google Glass are the same guys who install a gold-toned shower head onto chrome plumbing.

Second: Scoble looks particularly appealing when moist.

Third: I was starting to get really nervous that Glass might actually become a fashionable facial accessory, but, as Marcus Wohlsen suggests, this photo pretty much squelches that possibility.

Fourth: Scoble is my new hero.

Photo: Selfie* by Robert Scoble.

*(One hopes.)

Last fall, Facebook released its first television advertisement. The ad was titled “The Things That Connect Us.” It was intended, Mark Zuckerberg announced, with characteristic humility, “to express what our place is on this earth.” It opened with a shot of a red chair levitating in a forest. Some music welled up. Then came the voiceover:

Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair and, if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together.

Doorbells. Airplanes. Bridges. These are things people use to get together, so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things that people share.

The Universe. It is vast and dark. And it makes us wonder if we are alone. So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind us that we are not.

If Terrence Malick were given a lobotomy, forced to smoke seven joints in rapid succession, and ordered to make the worst TV advertisement the world has ever seen, this is the ad he would have produced. It even ended with a soaring shot of The Tree of Life:

Despite its all-encompassing silliness, the ad was revealing. Its emphasis was entirely on the physical, on the real. Other than a brief image of a couple sharing a set of earbuds, a viewer would hardly have known that we are in a Digital Age. The ad showed people eating and talking and sitting on chairs and walking across bridges and pushing doorbells and sitting on chairs and watching lectures and lying entwined on lawns and waving flags and sitting on chairs and climbing trees and reading paperbacks on porches and having difficult conversations in kitchens and sitting on chairs and dancing and drinking and watching basketball games and climbing trees and gazing at tiny insects drifting through beams of muted sunlight and sitting on chairs, but there was hardly a computer or a smartphone in sight. Everyone was deeply engaged, deeply in the moment. All the objects of the world were luminous. Everything was shining.

In retreating into a gauzy, pre-digital myth of civic and social bliss, “The Things That Connect Us” sought to position Facebook squarely in the mainstream, to portray the social network as a slice of homemade apple pie. Facebook, the ad told us, with considerable defensiveness, wasn’t revolutionary or disruptive or even particularly new. It was just the latest link in a long chain of human-fashioned objects that have allowed us to “open up and connect.” If the point weren’t hammered home hard enough, the ad even included an image of an old dial phone sitting placidly on a desk in the magic hour:

You see: Facebook is just the new Ma Bell. Nestle yourself in her ample lap, rest your weary head on her matronly bosom, and be wrapped in the comforting embrace of friends and family. Have a Coke and a smile.

2. Home invasion

Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home. The announcement came with all the trappings of a Silicon Valley Big Deal: the enigmatic invitation, the fervid PandoInsiderCrunch rumor-mongering, the haltingly portentous Zuckerberg presentation, the synchronized Steven Levy puff piece. But the product itself was a pretty paltry piece of work: essentially, a Facebook-themed Android skin. Big whoop.

Far more interesting than the product was the series of three ads released to promote it, and the most interesting of those ads was the one entitled “Dinner.” “Dinner” is set in an ugly, underlit suburban dining room. An extended family sits around the table, picking at ugly suburban food. The spinster aunt — the one with, you know, the ugly glasses and the ugly ill-fitting sweater and the ugly haircut and the ugly flat voice — launches into an interminable tale about going to a supermarket to buy cat food for her two cats. Everybody starts squirming. The young, attractive woman sitting next to the spinster aunt gives the spinster aunt a quick disgusted look, and then turns her attention to her smartphone and the other, better home that is Facebook Home. She swipes through a series of photos, and the pictures come to life around her: there’s her friend bashing joyfully on a drum kit in an ugly corner of the ugly room; there’s a troupe of ballerinas dancing across the ugly table and the ugly sideboard; there’s a happy snowball fight and a plow that drives by and flings pretty snow onto the ugly family. The attractive young woman smiles and double-taps a Like as the spinster aunt drones on.

“Dinner” has already spawned much commentary. “Ugh,” wrote Robert Hof at Forbes. “Facebook Home makes it a whole lot easier to be rude to your family and in-the-flesh friends, who are often, yeah, so boring to a cool person like you.” Evan Selinger, at Wired, saw a deeper corruption of social ethics being celebrated in the ad’s “propaganda.” “Dinner,” he wrote, tells us “that to be cool, worthy of admiration and emulation, we need to be egocentric. We need to care more about our own happiness than our responsibilities towards others.” He brought in Kant, who challenged us to ask ourselves “what right we have to be self-absorbed while expecting others to rise above indifference.” Whitney Erin Boesel, at Cyborgology, offered a different view. On the one hand, she wrote, the ad combines “the best of Silicon Valley ‘play ethic’ with good old technoutopian neoliberalism: traditional social bonds constrain us, but technology liberates us, makes us more independent and self-sufficient, and enables us to express ourselves more fully and freely.” But, on the other hand, the attractive young woman can also be seen as enacting a rebellion against the “well-recognized social obligations” symbolized by the family gathered around the table: ”It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power.” I have trouble seeing the ridiculed spinster aunt as a face of power — and the rest of the family members come off as utterly powerless, the underemployed, futureless denizens of the class formerly known as middle  — but Boesel is right to point out that the ad is not just about being a thoughtless creep but is also about escaping from an oppressive situation. “Sometimes rudeness is also resistance.” The asshole is the hero.

What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself. “Our place on this earth”? Doorbells? Bridges? What a load of crap! The earth sucks! Things are boring! People are ugly! Go online and stay online! Chairs, mawkishly celebrated in “The Things That Connect Us” as bulwarks against the meaninglessness of the universe, as concrete means of connection and hence liberation, become in “Dinner” instruments of torture. They trap us in the distasteful world of the flesh, the hell of other people.

Has another company ever come out with a high-concept, big-production “brand ad” and then, just a few months later, turned around and utterly trashed it? I don’t think so. What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, “sincere” and “insincere” are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising. Despite their glaring differences, “The Things That Connect Us” and “Dinner” actually draw from the same source: the well of nihilism. I’m sure Zuckerberg never gave a thought to the fact that the two ads are contradictory. He knew it was all bullshit, and he knew everyone else knew it was all bullshit.

“Have it your way,” wrote Wallace Stevens:

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

One wants to see the levitating red chair as a Stevensesque symbol of the redemptive imagination. But it’s not. It’s the same chair that the ugly spinster aunt is sitting on. It’s the same chair that the attractive young woman with the smartphone is sitting on. Facebook gives us image without imagination. Everything is beyond redemption, which is what makes everything so cool. Have it your way.

3. Two poles

“Home is so sad,” wrote Philip Larkin:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes.

Home and Away are the poles of our being, each exerting a magnetic pull on the psyche. We vibrate between them. Home is comforting but constraining. Away is liberating but lonely. When we’re Home, we dream of Away, and when we’re Away, we dream of Home. Communication tools have always entailed a blurring of Home and Away. Newspaper, phonograph, radio, and TV pulled a little of Away into Home, while the telephone, and before it the mail, granted us a little Home when we were Away. Some blurring is fine, but we don’t want too much of it. We don’t want the two poles to become one pole, the magnetic forces to cancel each other out. The vibration is what matters, what gives beauty to both Home and Away. Facebook Home, in pretending to give us connection without the shadow of loneliness, gives us nothing. It’s Nowheresville.

I have a brief review of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new and surprisingly gloomy book The New Digital Age in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s how the review begins:

The New Digital Age opens with a Panglossian overture. The computer revolution, write the authors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, has “barely left the starting blocks.” Soon we’ll be blessed with “integrated clothing machines” that not only wash, fold and shelve laundry but “algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user’s daily schedule.” Robot barbers will give us haircuts that are “machine-precise.” Nasal implants will alert us to oncoming colds. When we sense that our kids are getting spoiled, we’ll be able to transport them, via holographic projectors, to a Third World slum for a stroll among the destitute.

Those fortunate enough to be among the world’s “super-wealthy” elite will have it even better. Attended by “human-like robots,” they’ll zip overhead in “motion-stabilized automated helicopters” while popping bespoke pharmaceuticals to keep mortality at bay. Should one of their internal organs go bad, a mechanical surgeon will swap it out with a synthetic replacement. Their loafers will be outfitted with “haptic devices” that give their feet a friendly pinch when they’re running late for a meeting.

And here’s how it ends:

As tech industry VIPs, Schmidt and Cohen deserve credit for probing the dark side of progress. In the wake of the Boston bombings, their warnings about the Net’s dangers have gained chilling salience. But it’s hard to know how seriously to take their speculations, which, lacking analytical rigor, come off as a hodgepodge. Writing as enthusiasts rather than critics, they’re quick to present technological trends as destiny but seem indifferent to the subtleties of politics and culture that shape the behavior of people and the course of history. Clumsily written and slackly argued, The New Digital Age feels less like a coherent treatise than like the hurriedly assembled notes from a series of brainstorming sessions.

Chronicle subscribers can read the whole review here.

Photo by James Cridland.

“The mainframe is the eternal computing platform,” writes Rudolf Winestock in a pithy essay about the circular path of computing’s history, from time-sharing on central mainframes to time-sharing on central clouds. The “PC is dead” storyline has been around for a while now, but what’s really dying is the practice of “personal computing,” at least if we take that phrase to imply personal ownership of the means of computing—processors, software, data.

The desktop computer won’t completely disappear. Instead, the outward form of the personal computer will be retained, but the function — and the design — will change to a terminal connected to the cloud (which is another word for server farm, which is another word for mainrack, which converges on mainframes, as previously prophesied). True standalone personal computers may return to their roots: toys for hobbyists.

The original mainframe era provoked, in the mid-60s, a revolt by the young against the central, corporate control of personal information. The reduction of the self to a string of numbers stored in a database—a database that was a component of the military-industrial complex, no less—seemed to pose a threat not just to privacy but to individual autonomy, to freedom. It was viewed as a form of imprisonment. “I am not a number” became a rallying cry that rang through popular culture.

We haven’t seen much resistance to the new mainframe, or mainrack, era. In fact, most of us, and particularly the young, have been actively complicit in the shift away from personal computing and toward the corporate central-processing station, as Winestock makes clear:

Users love the web apps coded by rebellious hackers who’d never have fit in during the Stone Age of computing. Without any compulsion, those users volunteered their data to web apps running on mainracks that are owned — in all senses of that word — by publicly-traded companies. … Demanding the ability to export our data and permanently delete our accounts wouldn’t help even if we could do it. The data is most valuable when it is in the mainrack. Your Facebook data isn’t nearly as useful without the ability to post to the pages of your friends. Your Google Docs files aren’t as useful without the ability to collaborate with others. Dynamic state matters; it’s the whole point of having computers because it allows automation and communication.

To quote Woody Allen: We need the eggs.

But there’s another reason, I think, that today’s internment of the self in centrally stored data has not spurred the kind of protests we saw a half century ago. In the 60s, the reduction of the self to computable numbers found a tangible, ubiquitous symbol in the punchcard. To hold a punchcard with your name printed across the top was to see your being reduced to a series of binary punch holes, a series of inscrutable ones and zeroes. Like draft cards, punchcards served as concrete touchstones for protest. Ordered by some faceless bureaucracy not to fold, spindle, or mutilate the cards, one felt a moral obligation to fold, spindle, and mutilate them. To tear up a punchcard was to liberate oneself from, as Mario Savio famously put it on the Sproul Hall steps, “the machine.”

The machine’s interface—its outward representation of the numeric self—is no longer the cold, bureaucratic punchcard. It’s the avatar, the selfie: the lovingly curated, intangible image of the I. The cloud, and particularly its social-networking mechanism, personalizes depersonalization. It allows us to design our own representation of the numeric self. Behind the scenes, it’s still all ones and zeroes, but whereas the punchcard brought the binary code into clear view, the avatarial image hides it. The apparatus of control wears a new face, and that face is our own.