After the Future...

I once heard, (and I'd be grateful to anyone who could find where this quote is from) that the best indicator of future science, was science fiction. In light of this, I have been thinking about what the internet could mean for humanity in the long run.
The psychedelic philosopher , Terence Mckenna believed that the introduction of the world wide web is as important to human history as the introduction of language. For him, the internet is not so much a technology as it is the manifestation of our collective conciousness. ( I wonder what he would have thought if he had lived to see google zeitgeist).
Futurist Ray Kurzweil believed that by the next century, the human species would be completely disembodied psychic entities, communication electronically.
On a much more pessimistic note, Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in his novel peace on Earth, imagined a future where a poor starving humanity, lived in a collective illusion of technological luxury.
Of course, our species might just destroy the planet before any of this stuff happens.

The Coming Dark Ages?

After reading Distracted, I became curious as to whether or not our society is heading to a new dark ages. The author of distracted explains that since we are losing our capacity to maintain attention, civilization itself is coming to an end.
The concept of a postmodern dark age is not a new one. At each major step of technological and cultural change, there has always seemed the possibility of civilization's collapse. The perceived excesses of the youth culture of the 60s were once seen as the end of western civilization. This has manifested itself in our cultural imagination. One of the more obvious examples is the zombie film. Zombie movies chart the fear we have of losing our common humanity. A fear completely understandable in the light of the major atrocities of the twentieth century. This fear is inextricably linked to our discourse on technology. It's not a coincidence that the Zombies in Night of the Living Dead were created by radiation from a newly sent satellite to Venus.
The fear is also cosmic in a way. We are afraid that mankind has (to quote the pilot from Day of the Dead) "overstepped its britches". Of course the most obvious literary example of this would be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This fear underlies distracted. The second chapter ended with an almost poetic discussion of how the internet is severing us from our ties to location, to each other, and to the Earth as a whole. Implicit in this is the moral judgement that mankind must be bound by the laws of time and space, and any attempt to transcend them will end in Promethean tragedy.
The scary thing is, that this might all be true. There is more and more evidence that our technologically advanced lifestyles are changing the makeup of our brains. Maybe we slowly are becoming zombified?
But then, maybe the ability of humanity to transcend space and time isn't a bad thing. In many ways, this has been the goal of human art, religion, and science for millenia. Our technology might be simply the ability to realize these dreams. Even if this technology changes what it means to be human (something, I think, that has already happened) that change isn't necessarily negative. It might just be the growing pains of homo sapiens 2.0.

by the way, I should mention that historians are discovering all the ways in which people in the so-called Dark Ages were actually smarter than we are.

Save the Children!

Both of our readings this week, Distracted, and the Dumbest Generation, are highly suspicious of contemporary youth culture. Both authors blame this culture's failings on the rise of cyberspace. I actually share many of these authors' concerns with post-modern culture, however, in blaming the internet for this, I think they really miss the point.
Both authors point to a fundamental shift in the way young people appreciate knowledge. Mark Bauerlein, for instance, is apalled that children use their leisure time to actively forget their education, rather than to integrate its lessons into their daily lives. Both Jackson and Bauerlein treat knowledge almost with a twinge of religious awe. Mark Bauerlein especially relies on a deep veneration of the cannon to underlie his arguments.
I think the main factor in "the dumbing down" of is the commodification of knowledge.
The Dumbest Generation opened with a discussion of the culture of overachievement. Schools have become so focused on results, that the process of learning is ignored. All that counts is the test score not the knowledge itself. How can anyone enjoy learning in this context? Marx's concept of the alienation of labor is easily applicable here. The focus on providing good numbers and bright and colorful (though completely superficial) powerpoint demonstrations has made it impossible to focus on the intrinsic value of knowledge itself. In that situation, why wouldn't you try and distract yourself as much as possible?

The Future of Virtual Worlds?

The other day, my roommate showed me possibly the coolest digital marketing campaign I've ever seen. General Electric is trying to promote themselves as a "green" company by showcasing their "smart-grid" technology. Based on our class reading on market research, I would guess that GE is targeting early adopters.
The GE website enables you to hold a "hologram' of the smart grid in you hands. first you print out a piece of paper with a specific pattern. then you put it in front of you web-cam, and the pattern is recognized by your computer, and turns into a 3-d representation of the smart-grid. By moving the paper around, you can move the image of the smart-grid and view it from all angles.
My first thought on seeing this would be the possible application of this technology to virtual worlds like Second life. Imagine how much easier it would be to navigate in Second Life, if you could control your avatar by moving an object in real-space. Possibly, this could be combined with facial recognition technology to have an avatar's facial expressions correspond to real-time facial movements. Of course, this might just exacerbate the latency problems.

Legalize marijuana?

In the past few months, the legalization of marijuana for medical and even recreational use has gathered an unprecedented amount of media attention and public support. Massachusets recently decriminalized possesion of less than an ounce. The California State legislature is looking at a bill that will legalize and tax recreational cannabis. If this bill is passed (and it has support from the San Francisco Sheriff and members of the board of equalization) it should raise one billion dollars for the state budget.
In fact, out of all the questions online visitors submitted to president Obama, the number 1 question was whether he will legalize marijuana, and whether he thinks that this would help the economy. Obama laughed this question off, disingenuously saying that it "ranked fairly high' not that it was the most frequently asked question.
There are several factors allowing for this rise in public opinion. one is that the "powers that be' are finally beginning to realize how ineffective and destructive the war on drugs has become another is financial. During the great depression, prohibition was lifted because the governemnt needed the revenue from taxes on alcohol, could no longer afford the law enforcement expenditures, and wanted to cut off the main source of revenue for organized crime. certainly, considering the immense debt states are in, the staggering cost of arresting and jailing drug users, and the massive violence caused by the Mexican drug cartels, this historical parallel seems very relevant. (Though as with prohibition ending the war and drugs cannot singlehandedly rescue the economy.) However, I think that the main catalyst for this public debate is the web. web 2.0 is allowing for the public to play a much bigger role political discourse than ever before. The idea of participation has, in a very short time, taken root in our culture. Obama's online Q&A is a great example of this change. The
opnline community' is now considered as a legitamte political force, and as with most issues related to the new web, the major implication of this have yet to be fully realized.

Ahoy! Mateys

Reading the last chapter of Click, I was struck by how important filesharing has become integral to the way in which music was consumed. The example he used about the Arctic monkeys just proved what some artists (Radiohead) have been saying all along. Who's going to take a chance on new music when you have to pay $18 for a single CD? It's become clear that free mp3s are now integral to promoting new bands or even new albums by established ones (Thom Yorke claims that the popularity of Kid A was mainly due to napster).
As a musician, I would like to weigh in on this. David Weinberger talked about how data is becoming so cheap that soon it will be essentially free. This is an extremely important development. Existing intellectual property law is based on the assumption that distributing content ois not free. Manufacturing books and LPs takes a lot of resources, and its only reasonable to expect some sort of financial compensation for them. However, when you can just post your ebook, or mp3s online, it costs next to nothing (or in some cases actually nothing). I'm not saying that there should be no form of compensation at all, but, using existing copyright laws to regulate online content is like using laws about horse-drawn carriages to regulate the auto industry. They just are not applicable.
The record industry has been enormously short-sighted, and has essentially ensured that the future innovations in music (since I believe that content ultimately will always have to adapt to its form) will happen without them.
In Europe, there is an increasingly powerful movement of pirate parties, arguing these exact points. in Swedish parliament, the Green, left, and even the moderate parties have adopted this position.
But if everything is free, how can artists survive? Well, in the short term, alternative means of compensation can be provided. This has already happened in classical music in the 1940s. Since living composers were no longer able to live off of the revenue from publishing their works (largely due to the popularity of recordings) ASCAP worked out a system where registered composers would get paid a certain amount of money determined by how frequently their works were performed. This system could easily be adapted to other forms of music, especially if revenue was generated by advertising (like Hulu).
Or maybe web 2.0 will lead to many more drastic changes in how we view art. In some ways (with mash-ups) we are seeing the rebirth of a genuine folk culture, where the public produces its own art, music, and discourse, rather than relying on the big media conglomerates to tell them what to listen to.
Either way file-sharing is so common, that simply due to volume, it will continue to spread regardless of what governments or content providers do.

Astroturfing

Web 2.0, is supposedly the peoples internet. Anyone can run a blog, start an event on facebook, or edit wikipedia. Manny thinkers from leftist academics to business have hailed this new version of the web as the emergence of a genuinely participatory culture. However, the reality of the internet (like technology in general) is much less cut and dry.
The same resources used to initate a grassroots campaign can just as easily be used to create a fake grass-roots campaign. In fact, this is becoming commonn enough that there is now a word for it: Astroturfing.
This was brought to my attention in a series of articles published at the alternative news site, exiledonline devoted to the Rick Snatelli and the Chicago tea party campaign. Conservative NBC commentator Rick Santelli posted an angry blog entry about how fed up he was with Obama's Stimulus Plan, and announced his plan to hole a "Chicago Tea party" to protest. Hours later websites such chicagoteaparty.com sprang up, and a nationwide "tea party" movement was set up. There were blogs, facebook events, twitter "tweets", the whole shebang. Yet, not many showed up to these protests despite the huge internet presence or media coverage.
As it turns out, the whole thing was funded by Freedomworks, a right-wing thinktank, run by Dick Armey. May of the tea party domain names were purchased before Santelli's blog post. The whole thing was not to form a movement, but to give the appearance of one.
This plan backfired dramatically. Santelli's scheduled interview was dropped from the Daily Show, and I'm sure that this debaucle is not going to help him keep his job.
It's pretty interesting to know that a purely digital fake portest can have a the same effect as a real one.