“You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it’s a slum.”
-Bruce Sterling

1

Hardware is a problem. It wears out. It breaks down. It is subject to physical forces. It is subject to entropy. It deteriorates. It decays. It fails. The moment of failure can’t be predicted, but what can be predicted is that the moment will come. Assemblies of atoms are doomed. Worse yet, the more components incorporated into a physical system – the more subassemblies that make up the assembly – the more points of failure the apparatus has and the more fragile it becomes.

This is an engineering problem. This is also a metaphysical problem.

2

One of Google’s great innovations in building the data centers that run its searches was to use software as a means of isolating each component of the system and hence of separating component failure from system failure. The networking software senses a component failure (a dying hard drive, say) and immediately bypasses the component, routing the work to another, healthy piece of hardware in the system. No single component matters; each is entirely dispensable and entirely disposable. Maintaining the system, at the hardware level, becomes a simple process of replacing failed parts with fresh ones. You hire a low-skilled worker, or make a robot, and when a component dies, the worker, or the robot, swaps it out with a good one.

Such a system requires smart software. It also requires cheap parts.

3

Executing an algorithm with a physical system is like putting a mind into a body.

4

Bruce Sterling gave an interesting speech

at a conference in 2009. He drew a distinction between two lifestyles that form the poles of our emerging “cultural temperament.” On the one end – the top end – you have Gothic High-Tech:

In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible. And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car. But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.

And then there’s the other end – the bottom end – which Sterling calls Favela Chic. These are the multitudinous “play-laborers” of the virtual realm.

What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That’s Favela Chic. You lost everything, you have no money, you have no career, you have no health insurance, you’re not even sure where you live, you don’t have children, and you have no steady relationship or any set of dependable friends. And it’s hot. It’s a really cool place to be.

The Favela Chic worship the Gothic High-Tech because the Gothic High-Tech have perfected unreality. They have escaped the realm of “the infrastructure” and have positioned themselves “in the narrative,” the stream that flows forever, unimpeded. They are avatars: software without apparatus, mind without body.

Except when a part fails.

5

H. G. Wells, in his Gothic novella “The Time Machine,” used different terms. The Gothic High-Tech he called Morlocks. The Favela Chic he called Eloi. Of course Wells was writing not in a time of virtualization but in a time of industrialization.

About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Under-world. I understood now what all the beauty of the Over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

6

The young, multibillionaire technologist is left with only two avocations: space travel and the engineering of immortality. Both are about escaping the gravity of the situation.

There are two apparent ways to sidestep death. You can virtualize the apparatus, freeing the mind from the body. But before you can do that, you need to figure out the code. And, alas, when it comes to the human being, we are still a long way from figuring out the code. Disembodiment is not imminent. Or you can take the Google route and figure out a way to quickly bypass the failed component, whether it’s the heart or the kidney, the pancreas or the liver. In time, we may figure out a way to fabricate the essential components of our bodies – to create an unlimited supply – but that eventuality, too, is not imminent. So we are left, for the time being, with transplantation, with the harvesting of good components from failed systems and the use of those components to replace the failed components of living systems.

The Gothic High-Tech, who cannot abide death, face a problem here: the organ donation system is largely democratic; it can’t be easily gamed by wealth. A rich person may be able to travel somewhere that has shorter lines – Tennessee, perhaps – but he can’t jump to the head of the line. So the challenge becomes one of increasing the supply, of making dear components cheap.

7

A week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a move that he said was inspired by the experience of his friend Steve Jobs, announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature that would make it easy for members to identify themselves as organ donors. Should Zuckerberg’s move increase the supply of organs, it will save many lives and alleviate much suffering. We should all be grateful. Dark dreams of the future are best left to science-fiction writers.

My reservoir of patience, deep as it may be, is running dry. Nearly a year has passed since the culmination of the fabled Carr-Benkler Wager, and Yochai Benkler has yet to pay his debt to me. Dude, have you heard of PayPal? I haven’t even received a simple acknowledgement of my triumph.

What, you ask, is the Carr-Benkler Wager? Well, that’s hard to say definitively. But here’s how Benkler defined it back in July of 2006, when Web 2.0 was still an innocent babe cooing happily in its mother’s arms:

We could decide to appoint between one and three people [that never happened] who, on some date certain – let’s say two years from now, on August 1st 2008 [this was later extended to five years, so the operative date was August 1, 2011] – survey the web or blogosphere, and seek out the most influential sites in some major category: for example, relevance and filtration (like Digg); or visual images (like Flickr). And they will then decide whether they are peer production processes or whether they are price-incentivized systems. While it is possible that there will be a price-based player there, I predict that the major systems will be primarily peer-based.

I took the bet. I argued that, if you looked at the most influential sites across major categories of online activity in 2011, you would find them to be dominated by price-based players (i.e., commercial entities), whereas Benkler argued that they would be dominated by peer-production players (i.e., loose, unmanaged groups of unpaid contributors). Basically, the wager boiled down to this: Is the web fated to follow the path of earlier media and become dominated by commercial interests, or will it be ruled by amateurs operating outside the traditional marketplace and its money-making incentives? (Just to be clear, neither Benkler nor I saw this as a black and white question. Peer production and commercial production will both continue to exist online – as they always have offline. What Benkler predicted is that peer production would be the dominant mode of online production; I disagreed.)

This is an essential question – maybe the essential question – about the fate of the net. It’s pretty much the same question that Tim Wu posed, more eloquently, in his 2010 book The Master Switch:

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the second closing of the traditional information industries was complete … [T]he industrial concentration had reached levels not seen since the 1950s. The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of these consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. “We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy,” prophesied Yochai Benkler. “It is displacing the industrial information economy …”

Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn’t consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had – in fact, have – a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests. … Is the Internet really different? Every other invention of its kind has had its period of openness, only to become the basis of yet another information empire. Which is mightier: the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle?

So what’s happened over the last five years? Let’s look at the blogosphere. Many of the most popular sites in 2006 were strictly amateur productions, often written by a lone scribbler. Today, the most popular blog sites are almost all corporate productions, usually written by teams of wage-earners employed by corporations, often large media corporations. That doesn’t mean the amateurs have gone away; it just means they’ve been marginalized. Video? In 2006, YouTube was a playground of amateur videographers, uploading their work for kicks. The amateurs are still there, but the most popular videos today are corporate productions – from TV networks, film studios, recording companies, publishing companies, game studios – and even a lot of the amateur productions are wrapped in advertisements. Beyond YouTube, online video is dominated by sites syndicating professional productions: Hulu, Vevo, Netflix, and the various TV networks, et al. Online music? Definitely dominated by sites offering professional productions from record companies (iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, etc.). Again, there’s still plenty of amateur music online, but the dominant outlets are fundamentally commercial. Even open-source software – one of Benkler’s core examples of peer production – has shifted in the last five years toward commercial dominance, with many contributors to the largest open-source projects being salaried employees of software firms.

There are certainly places where unpaid contributors continue to play a dominant role online – photography, Wikipedia – but they are exceptions to the net’s general evolution away from a populist medium and toward a commercial one. There is also, importantly, the phenomenal rise of Facebook and Twitter. But what is the nature of Facebook and Twitter? Certainly, most contributors are not getting paid for their activity, but many of the most popular tweeters and Facebook pages are motivated by commercial interests – entertainers and other celebrities promoting their (profit-making) careers, journalists contributing as an element of their (salary-paying) jobs, corporations using the networks as PR or marketing channels, etc. And, beyond the individual contributors, Facebook and Twitter are of course commercial entities that operate their sites for profit (or at least for IPO riches). What Benkler calls social production is not going to disappear from the net – thank goodness – but, like amateur radio, it is turning into a sideshow. Wu’s “Cycle” is, once again, playing out. The dominant production systems in most online media categories are commercial ones.

I am happy to consider the counterargument – that Benkler was right and that the web has become less commercial over the last five years. But even a cursory glance over the net’s recent history makes it hard for me to believe that such a case can be made. So I will continue to await my PayPal windfall from Yochai Benkler.

How much will that windfall amount to? Exactly this much: $0.00. Unlike the web, the Carr-Benkler Wager exists outside of all price-incentivized systems. It is a purely social bet.

UPDATE: More.

Galleycat notes that a team at USC has nabbed a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to, as the grant states, “support production costs for a video game based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

This game is going to kick some serious ass. Check out the trailer:

Right after that bass-fishing mission, there’s a killer bean-field mission where you do battle with a gang of woodchucks using a two-handed hoe as your only weapon. I also hear that – spoiler alert – the game culminates in an insane melee with the local tax collector that begins in the Concord jail and ends in the kitchen of Emerson’s house.

And, no, there’s no multiplayer option.

Ever since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground two thousand years ago, people have yearned to rebuild it. Today, thanks to the internet, the dream of a universal library seems closer to fulfillment than ever before. But as Google’s ill-fated Book Search project has revealed, the challenges to creating a comprehensive online library remain great – and they have little to do with technology.

In the new issue of Technology Review, I report on the latest and perhaps most ambitious effort to create “the library of utopia”: the Digital Public Library of America, or DPLA. Led by Harvard luminaries, the DPLA has big plans, big names, and big contributors, but it, too, faces big obstacles, not least of which is its hesitancy to define what it wants to be.

Here’s a bit from the article:

If you were looking for Larry Page’s opposite, you would be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Robert ­Darnton. A distinguished historian and prize-winning author, a former Rhodes scholar and MacArthur fellow, a Chevalier in France’s Légion d’Honneur, and a 2011 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the 72-year-old Darnton is everything that Page is not: eloquent, diplomatic, and embedded in the literary establishment. If Page is a bull in a china shop, Darnton is the china shop’s proprietor.

But Darnton has one thing in common with Page: an ardent desire to see a universal library established online, a library that would, as he puts it, “make all knowledge available to all citizens.” …

Read it all.

Ross Andersen has a superb interview with the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at the Atlantic’s site. Krauss’s recent book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing has, by design, kicked up a controversy. Krauss argues in the book that science is now “addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing” and that, indeed, recent scientific discoveries in this area “all suggest that getting something from nothing is not a problem.” In his afterword to the book, Richard Dawkins writes, “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.” In a New York Times review last month, the Columbia University philosopher David Albert begged to differ, writing that Krauss is “dead wrong.” Albert argued that what Krauss claims is “nothing” – in short, “empty space” – is actually something and that, therefore, Krauss’s explanation does not “amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.” In the Atlantic interview, Krauss calls Albert “a moronic philosopher.”

Fun stuff.

But important stuff, too. As Andersen writes, “To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is troubling. Not because scientists shouldn’t disagree with each other, but because here they’re disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to the public as a legitimate scientific discovery.” More than that, they’re arguing about whether non-scientific approaches to explaining or even contemplating the origin of the cosmos – not just theological approaches, but also philosophical ones – still have any legitimacy. Krauss has little regard for philosophy, as he makes clear at the outset of the interview:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, “those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.” And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; … it’s really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I’d say that this tension [between science and philosophy] occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.

And yet – and this is testimony to Andersen’s skill as a questioner – as the interview proceeds Krauss begins to sound as much like a philosopher (a philosopher of science, even) as a scientist:

Andersen: I think the problem for me, coming at this as a layperson, is that when you’re talking about the explanatory power of science, for every stage where you have a “something” – even if it’s just a wisp of something, or even just a set of laws – there has to be a further question about the origins of that “something.” And so when I read the title of your book, I read it as “questions about origins are over.”

Krauss: Well, if that hook gets you into the book that’s great. But in all seriousness, I never make that claim. In fact, in the preface I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking “Why?” forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can’t answer, but if we can answer the “How?” questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle’s prime mover to the Catholic Church’s first cause, we’re always driven to the idea of something eternal. If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object – infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it’s infinite, it’s infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book.

The universe is still big enough to accommodate both scientists and philosophers – and even philosophical scientists and scientific philosophers. I suspect it will remain that way for some time yet.

UPDATE: Two more perspectives:

At the Huffington Post, Victor Senger writes:

Albert is not satisfied that Krauss has answered the fundamental question: Why there is something rather than nothing, that is, being rather than nonbeing? Again, there is a simple retort: Why should nothing, no matter how defined, be the default state of existence rather than something? And, to bring religion into the picture, one could ask: Why is there God rather than nothing? Once theologians assert that there is a God (as opposed to nothing), they can’t turn around and ask a cosmologist why there is a universe (as opposed to nothing). They claim God is a necessary entity. But then, why can’t a godless multiverse be a necessary entity?

And here’s John Horgan, at Scientific American:

Science has told us so much about our world! We now understand, more or less, what reality is made of and what forces push and pull the stuff of existence to and fro. Scientists have also constructed a plausible, empirically founded narrative of the history of the cosmos and of life on Earth. But when scientists insist that they have solved, or will soon solve, all mysteries, including the biggest mystery of all, they do a disservice to science; they become the mirror images of the religious fundamentalists they despise.

And let’s not forget Wallace Stevens’s portrait of the man

… who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This morning I had cause to look at Tim Carmody’s tweetstream. Man, that cat can tweet. Anyway, it got me thinking about whether you might be able to categorize social networks according to their resemblance to recreational drugs. If a sharing site were an abusable substance, which abusable substance would it be?

Here’s my first cut:

Twitter = Black Beauties

[symptoms of abuse: hyperactivity; increased awareness of surroundings; increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities; decreased appetite; decreased ability to sleep*]

Facebook = Pot

[symptoms of abuse: red, watery eyes; fuzzy-mindedness; inexplicable laughter; weight gain; self-absorption; suspicious changes in friendships]

Pinterest = Quaaludes

[symptoms of abuse: slowed heart rate; drowsiness; indiscriminate displays of affection; regrettable decisions; stupidity]

YouTube = Cocaine

[symptoms of abuse: dilated pupils; accelerated heart rate; public blathering; manic episodes; impotence]

MySpace = LSD

[symptoms of abuse: colorful hallucinations; bad taste in clothes; psychosis]

Google+ = Ambien

[symptoms of abuse: sleep, drooling]