Interactivos: Magic & Technology
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
I've been invited by Medialab Madrid to give a presentation on Magic & Technology at the start of Interactivos.
This is a two week workshop in which artists make work together and produce a show at the end. This year they are responding to the theme of magic.
I'm looking forward to this a lot. I get to perform magic but also talk about the philosophies of the great magical thinkers. I seldom get to do both of these things.
posted by stuart nolan @ 1:43 PM, ,
Citizen Players vs. Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy
This is an outline of the talk I gave at the Meeting of Minds think tank on User Generated Content last week. Thanks must go to Pat Kane whose inspiring talk at Lego the week previously and a conversation I had with him while waiting for planes in Billund and Amsterdam helped form much of this talk. The good stuff is probably from him and the dodgy thoughts from me.
Citizen Players vs. Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy
In 2020 cyberspace will continue to be a place for play. I'd like to discuss the tension between positive and negative play and how this relates to citizenship.
I refer to three of the greatest works of predictive fiction to illustrate my pessimistic view.
"The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught." Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy is invented, in part, to keep the machines of industry moving. Throwing a ball to each other is just as much fun but does not need manufacturing. The game is important as a form of social control. To quote Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death
"Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure."
Commentators such as Lawrence Lessig recognise that the Internet is a contested space that must be actively defended from those who wish to control and own it. The Orwellian fear of a captured Internet is real and the coming years will see this battle intensify as the second billion arrive in cyberspace and we face what Ethan Zuckerman has referred to as the problem of the Internets. I will return to this.
In contrast, Huxley's dystopian vision sees the people being distracted by interactive media (the feelies), sex (the Internet), and games. All brought together in the Hot Coffee mod of Grand Theft Auto.
Huxley could not have imagined a Bumble-Puppy as elaborate as GTA let alone Second Life.
But Huxley's dystopia is still a world of inflicted pleasures. What happens when we generate our own pleasures?
I have mentioned both 1984 and Brave New World. My third classic of predictive fiction is the Judge Dredd stories in the comic 2000AD.
In one issue of 2000AD Mega City One has passed a law making all pointless hobbies illegal. Judge Dredd arrests a man who has spent the last 15 years trying to headbutt an egg, dropped from an elaborate mechanism, into a bucket of sand without breaking it. It is a crime because all citizens are required to actively contribute to society and not to distract themselves with useless pleasures.
One look at the present cyberspace is enough to feel a little sympathy for Judge Dredd's position. And as we look forward to 2020 it is possible to see this thread of useless, distracting hobbies becoming a real issue for those of us who are concerned about the level of political engagement in West. It has been said that the reason that the UK has never had a successful political revolution is that there is a flaw in our national character that can be summarized with one word: trainspotting. I fear that this is becoming a cultural trait of cyberspace.
It is easy to see the problem of those who wish to control the Internet though it is not easy to actually fight them. The problem of the Internet as a Bumble-Puppy is harder to see.
So my pessimistic view of 2020 cyberspace is of a space of dumb distractions, mindless chatter, petty bickering, divided energies.
My optimistic view? Let me begin with a critique of the phrase User Generated Content - is a term that reveals more about the incumbent media organizations and those who wish to monetize the creative work of others than it does about the people who make the stuff that it refers to.
I have always disliked the term content when applied to media. It strips creative work of all its emotion, energy and subtlety. A film-maker does not feel that she is generating content - like some kind of factory robot. Neither does she feel like a user - a junkie factory robot perhaps?
People Make Stuff. They always have done. This clarifies the issue for me. What kind of stuff will people be making in 2020 and what does it mean for citizenship.
Although recent MORI polls suggest that 32% of the UK population still know nothing about climate change and there has been little significant lifestyle change trend forecasters as diverse as Marian Saltzman, Rohit Talwar and Faith Popcorn all predict rises in environmental concern, conscientious consumption and moral status anxiety. This trend will favor the locally made over the mass manufactured and I suggest it will influence how we build 2020 cyberspace.
Paul Harris of The Guardian describes The Arcade Fire as a band who were shaped in the innocent 1990 when people talked of the end of history. But then came 9/11, the war on terror and climate change. Their music expresses this climate of angst and the same concerns are palpable in cyberspace. Threaded between the song-mimes of YouTube and the glitter outfits of MySpace are similar serious concerns about terror, war, imperialism and the environment.
This increased seriousness is picked up in the UK by Gordon Brown in this way,
"I think we're moving from this period when, if you like, celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous. I think you can see that in other countries too - people are moving away from that to what lies behind the character and the personality... People are wanting the concerns that they have discussed in a rounded way. So I'm not sure that the public are in love with trivia."
David Milliband, a possible candidate for Labour leadership in the UK outlines his new political vision,
"The 1950s were the "I need" era when people required state help with housing, education and health. Then came the 1980s, the "I want era" when everyone yearned for material wealth. Today we are in the "I can" era, where government and the people - liberated and better informed by new technology yet still wanting the reassurance of involvement in community causes - can and must work together to solve the challenges of a chaotic world.... The notion that the country that succeeds will be the country of players not spectators is a very powerful notion. The audience has gone to the stage."
This is a seductive view. People would no longer be spectators of government but players in it. We can note how a similar recognition of the urge to participate meaningfully in the polis as an independent player occurs in Autonomist writers Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and whose concept of the multitude is particularly relevant to a political imagining of cyberspace in 2020.
The multitude is seen as composed of autonomous individuals who, despite differing cultures, views and political stances, are both willing and able to come together to struggle for its shared goals or against its shared enemies.
By 2020, should we maintain the free use of the Internet, we will certainly have the technological ability to allow the multitude to share concepts about its goals and its enemies. I use the word concepts rather than information because we will have moved beyond a passive swapping of information and will be exchanging something far more powerful - professionally-realized, broadcast-standard stories. These will not just be the work of tech-savvy individual. We have begun to see decision markets applied not just to the rating of media but to the making of media.
A Swarm of Angels is an open source film project, whose aim is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. The crowdsourcing project aims to attract 50,000 individual subscribers each contributing £25 to the production.
We will have the ability to come together on political issues and the wisdom of the crowd suggests that given autonomy, communication, and decentralization we could be making good decisions by 2020. But will we have the will to overcome our differences?
To return to Zuckerman's problem of the Internets: We now have more than a billion people online but the idea that we all work and play on a common global internet is an illusion. As Zuckerman says,
"The web is becoming ever more fragmented, and international borders are increasingly visible online. More and more web pages are appearing in languages other than English. China has more than 130 million Internet users and is starting to play by its own rules. Soon to follow are the Middle East, India, Russia and Brazil. Is the technology that we thought was uniting us really dividing us?"
By 2020 the mix of Internet cultures will mean that the stories we tell are more likely to offend one group or another. Frank Furedi has said that a true community is somewhere that it is difficult to leave. The practically infinite size of cyberspace makes it easy to opt-out of of a community and build another.
Either the Internets will segment out and have little to do with each other, reflecting the issues of multiculturalism, integration and citizenship seen by European nation states facing mass migration of workforces, or we find ways to build bridges between online communities and some of the ideals of the multitude are realized.
The eTwinning project uses the Internet to run projects between schools in Europe highlighting the experience of working with other cultures for children. By 2020 we may be eTwinning between the Internets in order to foster multicultural understanding.
It has been suggested that play is intrinsically ethical as it requires the ability to creatively imagine how others perceive you.
Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic, suggests the metaphor of a well-constructed playground for player citizens of the future.
posted by stuart nolan @ 12:12 PM, ,
