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"Once we had our data, we divided it up into works set in the Near Future (0-50 years from the time the work came out), Middle Future (51-500 years from the time the work came out) and Far Future (501+ years from the time the work came out)."
"One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it."
death of binary documents
collaborative flow
re-invention of email/inbox
signal v. noise
ebooks
business data platforms
"In his short book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou argues that today all that remains of the ideological machinery of freedom, human rights and Western values is a simple, negative statement: communism failed. The labors of the capitalist philosophers, he says, amount to little more than the assertion that there is no choice but to consent to the capitalist, parliamentary present. But what "exactly do we mean by 'failure' when we refer to a historical sequence that experimented with one or another form of the communist hypothesis?" he asks."
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On this occasion, though, Žižek's response was serious. In speaking of a communist "we," he explained, he was not evoking an already existing political subject, let alone an inherently revolutionary sociological class. Rather, the use of "we" could best be understood as a speech act or a performative utterance – that is, as one of those utterances identified by the philosopher of language JL Austin that do not describe an existing reality but instead produce a new one. Just as statements like "I do" or "You're fired!" are themselves actions, transforming rather than describing a situation, Žižek said he hoped the act of evoking a communist "we" would contribute to bringing a collective subject into existence.
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Badiou's point is not that the participants in these uprisings are subjectively communists – indeed, after decades of successful annihilation of the left across the Middle East, this would hardly be expected. Rather the point is that a successful popular uprising points toward the horizon designated by Marx as the withering of the state, opening up a realm of non-state political action in which that elusive figure "the people" comes into being.
"Communism", Badiou writes, "here means: a common creation of a collective destiny." Such a common, he argues, is generic, representing humanity as a whole, and capable of overcoming statist contradictions between substantive identities. When female doctors from the provinces sleep peacefully in the middle of a circle of young men, when a row of Christians keeps watch over Muslims at prayer, when a group of engineers entreats young suburbanites to hold firm, these situations and inventions, he suggests, constitute the communism of movement.
"Here are some diverse resources we have found that have inspired us and might be helpful for you."
"Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was "captured" by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies – that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net."
"In fact, said Stephenson, we already have much of the fundamental technology we need to fulfill such science fiction ambitions as large scale solar power production, or routine space flight. Instead, he said, we need to start looking at the non-technological obstacles to these advances, citing insurance as a key example. The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved. Turning to the audience of mostly MIT students, Stephenson said "maybe some of you people need to go into the insurance industry instead of writing code."
"Furthermore, by the nature of overlapping generations, there is no point at which a coherent distinction between current and future generations can be drawn. In the absence of some general catastrophe, many children alive today will still be alive in 2100, at which time people already alive will reasonably be able to anticipate the possibility of survival well into the 22nd century."
"Which got me wondering whether the future that is already here might include a class for whom space travel is not merely an interesting idea, but one that is affordable."
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The diminishing marginal utility law dictates that the more money we have, the less utility we get from any additional incremental gain. And this bites the top 1% very hard indeed.
Examine the world around us from the point of view of someone with a net income of $5M/year ...
Food is essentially free; you can afford to spend $1000 per meal, three meals a day, in the most expensive restaurants in London or Tokyo or Manhattan, and not make a dent in your income. (Oddly, even the hyper-rich don't typically spend $1000 on lunch every day: a more realistic expectation might be to dine out expensively twice a week, for $100K/year, and have the best of everything in-house the rest of the time, with a live-in chef, for another $100K/year.)
Clothing is essentially free; want a different $5000 suit for every day of the week? That's going to set you back only $35K! Spouse wants a dozen designer evening gowns a year? That's still going to be on the low side of $200K.
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There are some things that having an income of $5M/year, or even $5Bn/year, can't buy you.
First on the list is health.
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"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."
"I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization."
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I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.
Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.
By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.
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This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.
Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.
"I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left."
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I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.
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Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.
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Despite the impressive efforts of such universities, however, in the rest of higher education distance programmes were often seen as second best to classroom courses. It was the establishment of open universities, dedicated solely to this approach and deploying newer communications media, which brought distance education into the mainstream. Beginning in the 1970s, open universities multiplied and expanded, enrolling millions of students by the end of the 20th century and making a significant contribution to widening access (Daniel, 1996). These institutions delivered their programmes through multi-media forms of distance education based on print, audio, video, stand-alone computers and, often, elements of face-to-face tuition.
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This leads us to an interesting question: will higher education split over the coming years into a public sector focussed on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching? Several trends make this a plausible hypothesis.
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"A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). Broadly, VID seeks to broaden the criteria for judging the quality of technological systems to include the advancement of moral and human values, and to proactively influence the design of technologies to account for such values during the conception and design process. VID has been a motivating factor in my research on vehicle safety communication technologies, Web search engine privacy practices, and book digitization projects, just to name a few examples, and my commitment to achieving VID has also lead to explorations of some of its challenges"
"In thinking about these eschatological questions, I start from Matt Kirschenbaum’s observation that DH is not a single intellectual project but a tactical coalition. Just for starters, humanists can be interested in digital technology a) as a way to transform scholarly communication, b) as an object of study, or c) as a means of analysis. These are distinct intellectual projects, although they happen to overlap socially right now because they all require skills and avocations that are not yet common among humanists. "
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So DH has no future, in the long run, because the three parts of DH probably confront very different kinds of future. One will be generalized; one will likely settle in for trench warfare; and one may well get absorbed by informatics. [Or become a permanent trade mission to informatics. See also Matthew Wilkens' suggestion in the comments below. - Ed.] But personally, I’m in no rush to see any of this happen. My odds of finding a disciplinary home in the humanities will be highest as long as the DH coalition holds together; so here’s a toast to long life and happiness. We are, after all, only eleven.
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