INFO-FEEDERS
We need to develop birdfeeder-like devices and things like duck decoys
for humans. We have to learn how to make electronic or
media-birdfeeders, info-feeders, so that we may lure people into our
neighbourhoods and then by feeding them information, we'll entice them
to stick around. Images of flat stomachs with abdominal 'six packs' are
excellent decoys for attracting 24 year old wannabes.
When people ask us what are we going to do in terms of stickiness, I
tell them we intend to create a kind of cultural flypaper. Or for
larger audience blocks, we've invented a new mousetrap. We are also
developing digital decoys and duck-blind-like cover, and for hostile
audiences we are experimenting with cyber-booby traps.
Info-feeders and all kinds of other info-devices are prone to breaking
free from the world, and so info-devices can't really help connect us
with nature. You know, the Land Rover is confined to the highway most
of the time. Things always seem to slip farther and farther away as we
get closer and closer to the perfect or absolute unreal.
Remember, if it looks like information, it probably isn't.
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SPECIAL EFFECTS
Special effects are no longer special. They are expected as the
manufactured frontier of the 'explicit-unreal' replaces the real and
ordinary domain of the physical. With computing power becoming faster
and cheaper, by implication there will be a lot more computer-generated
films with more and more elaborate special effects. And by implication
these special effects will become less and less special as we, in our
physical domain, become more real and ordinary, and less special,
everyday.
The expansion of the human experience will be the materialized
imagination. By firming up a mold or template for the imagination, we
will guarantee the total collective uniformity of fantasy.
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SUPER MORPHING SAGA
New technologies will come and go, but human nature advances or
regresses slowly… We always look to new technologies to stimulate
social interaction. We want to buy friendship, dialogue, community,
presence and influence…ultimately respect.
We are the content of any new medium. First the content is the people,
then the medium itself, and finally people emerge again as the content
of any new, but aging, medium.
It's a story of people transcending or overcoming media–it is a kind of
super-morphing saga where people transform into and emerge from
inanimate objects.
We are just as genetically hardwired as the birds and bees, with our
instincts, our most fundamental behaviours, plus we have our religious
conditioning, family values, societal engineering, class status and
politics…
We carry large complex architectures of thought with us wherever we
go–architectures of thought unique in detail, but surprisingly uniform
in architecture and overall assembly.
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ACCORDION STRUCTURES [ports, vorts, horts, -orts] OF AUGMENTED HUMAN
DEVELOPMENT
There is a sexy sense of fragility in the electronic, digital culture.
Coupling is necessary. Being and remaining aloof is too risky. This
vulnerability is reflected in our tentative, shifting identities. It's
a sketchy existence at best…such a shaky cognitive in-firm-a.
People are trying to charge attractive magnetic sites, where eyes are
drawn, sucked into the quicksandish ooze of attractive images. Portals
are the sites of general communal interests: water, food, shelter,
companionship. The vortals, vertical portals, are where social selves
are transformed into individuals. The vortals are intimate spaces, the
private rooms. Then in hortals, the re-flattened vortals, the
temporarily definitive selves are let out into a more spacious
uncertainty, like range animals, encouraged to collect and cultivate
their own cohorts and cults, to reestablish societal integration, within
concealed limits.
In other words, the human development scenario is now regulated and
paced by technology. People alternate between introversion and
extroversion, exercising their instincts when facing accelerated cycles
of self definition and disintegration. They reestablish, then reject,
social ties, rediscovering the feeling of belonging, then escaping
commitments, vanishing into thin air…
Restraint, not tight bondage, is in order. The gap is always where it's
at, even if its tethered at both ends. The objective is to grab people
and hold them without letting them know they are captured, permitting
them to move around in a loop, struggling without too much discomfort.
Appropriate or sensitive containment should provide all the trappings of
being held. Give them the illusion of choice. They must think they can
unplug or escape whenever they want, but of course they can't without
terminating themselves. This is like being completely immobilized by
television at the end of the day, holding the remote, scanning, roaming
the channels…being completely exhausted, yet unable to hit the power
button, to kill the television and by extension, oneself, ending one's
engagement with the 'world.'
Thus people experience the feeling of being restrained by a firm embrace
of their consciousness–not a comforting embrace, but an embrace,
never-the-less. The somewhat comforting, uncomfortable sense of being
held. Arrested. Industrial-strength belonging.
In vortals people are rediscovering the feeling of belonging– then
before things get too chummy, they are redispersed, sent on their
way…hortaling out into another void…
We value the vacuum or draw of empty space, as we move out into an area
of low pressure, where our ideas are extracted, drawn like the wind,
depending on the prevailing conditions or circumstances.
We are talking about the development, the manufacture of an essential
frontier: reverse-engineering a private space.
Portals, vortals, hortals and subsequent -ortals. We move through an
expanding and contracting spatial labyrinth, an accordion-like
sequential structure for harnessing human development. Ports, vorts,
horts and -orts…
We witness the oscillations of animal magnetism (attraction, confusion,
boredom, rejection, repulsion) in these accordion structures of
augmented human development.
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THE COST OF KILLER APPS
Everybody's killer app is still, oddly enough, e-mail… People are
hunting and pecking in record numbers, writing and speaking in the
language-of-the-gap. English is the filler in-between cultural
differences and diversity. Even the machines speak English. Machine
English is in its own way a kind of valley speak, as even the machine
voices lift the end of their phrases, making statements that sound like
questions, telegraphing that they are not through talking yet, they have
more to say… As with all in-between languages, there is a radical,
breathless evacuation of meaning. Nobody knows what the words mean
anymore. We think we do, but we don't, really… Today's English is
often completely empty.
English is the linguistic commons, like the sea, or a tract of land
jointly owned by neighbouring parties, nobody really owns it, and thus
nobody cares for it or protects it. Think about it, the seas, the
oceans, are the wet empty space between continents. When speaking the
language of the gap, of the commons, whether it is English, or video
pouring from a digital spigot, or the rigid, universal design
protocolity of the web, there has to be serious compromises. Anyone who
isn't interested in compromising and speaks up in an anomalous, gritty,
jagged manner, is seen as an anarchist, as the incomprehensible and thus
very scary enemy (this is also the way creativity is viewed in
conservative, traditional minds). Hacktivism is therefore seen as a
societal ill, a form of insanity.
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T NOT P
Increasingly we are bored stiff. We may be leading longer lives, but
our lives are increasingly empty. There is a monotonous, flaccid tone
to our lives. We are tired, made weary of constantly adapting to
change. We are constantly asked to accommodate technological change,
apparently arbitrary change. This flatness or deadness of heart is
unnerving. Don't check for my pulse. I just want to be a dial tone.
