“We can only transform ourselves as fast as we can transform our language.” –Terrence McKenna

I have been processing this post by James Bridle, Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction, since seeing it re-tweeted by Matt Jones of BERGLondon fame the other night.  Between this, and Paul Raven’s post yesterday on Futurismic on the same subject, I am glad to see I am far from the only person quite taken by Gibson’s latest.  It tickled my brain in a way I haven’t felt since first watching Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.  (But that’s another story for a different blog.)  What these two share are reminders that is the twenty-first century and we do things differently here.

As Bridle says early on, what Gibson has been doing with the Bigend trilogy is “Just-in-time futurism.”:

Zero History is happening right now. It’s as if all of his writing has been concertinaed down into today. Liveblogging the present.

Given publishing’s long lead times, this is quite an achievement. But writing anything that feels so explicitly now, almost to the day, is an achievement in itself. I’d go as far as to say that you have to have been writing future Science Fiction for 25 years in order to write so convincingly about the present.

Some people have complained about the predominant use of iPhones in the novel, but I agree with Bridle where he says that what Gibson is doing is time-stamping the period.  In five, ten, twenty years iPhone will mean what horse-drawn carriage does today;  immediately establishing the context for the story taking place.

But it’s more than just that.  Everyone knows what an iPhone is.  Everyone.  But the smaller details Gibson includes changes the reading experience depending upon their knowledge of them.   Because Futurism is still expected.  For Bridle that’s the Festo, saying “their strangeness seemed something truly of the future, authentically Gibsonian—but only a couple of days later someone twittered a link to the manufacturer’s video.”

Now, as our long time readers know, that was posted here early last year.  But who bothers remembering things any more?  We export our memories online and need only recall the keywords we tagged them with.  Twitter and forget.  When in doubt, Google.  Via Paul’s Futurismic post, we get this quote from Alex Vagenas’s take on Zero History:

The amount of googlable details is actually staggering. It creates a vertiginous impression that the novel, in a more heightened sense than traditional realism, acquires and maintains a truly reciprocal relationship to the world as it is filtered through the web, in a Borgesian continuum of mediation. Zero History springs from and redirects to myriad cultural minutiae that Gibson has been assembling and which will take on their arbitrarily imposed narrative significance once again, when the reader looks them up.

A new Realism for a new age.  Bridle appears to agree, as he continues:

In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.)

…it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.

I want to give it a name, and at this point I’m calling it Network Realism.

Continuing still; and this is the part that formed new connections in my brain, that felt so instantly true (and that all the above has really been to contextualize):

Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.

Zero History is Network Realism because of the way that it talks about the world, and the way its knowledge of the world is gathered and disseminated. Gibson seems to be navigating the spider graph of current reality as wikiracing does human knowledge.

He goes on to name several works that also fit within this category, but the only one I am familiar with is Makers – except it was called Themepunks then, when it was serialised on Salon.

To bring this all back to the Terrence McKenna quote at the beginning – living, as we are,  in a time of ever increasing change necessitates that we modify our language through the invention of new words (neologisms) and re-appropriate existing ones to form new concepts – as fast as we can, really.  Grabbing onto whatever’s nearest and hacking it to fit, so that we have placeholders to tweet with and can start using them to discuss building whatever comes along next.

Language is Humanity’s oldest technology; it must be continually upgraded.  If our fiction doesn’t reflect and include that, then it’s useless.  And that’s why everyone is so excited about Zero History.

Or, as Bridle ends:

We live in strange, new times. New eras require new forms, as Sydney Harbour Bridge reminds us—in fact, they produce them, out of themselves, out of their conditions. Network Realism feels, to me, like something genuinely new in literature, and we’re only just seeing the edges of it.

Thank you James.

*

Hah!  You thought I’d talk about Zero History without mentioning Atemporality.  Well, instead, I’ll quote straight from Paul, who’s, as always, spot-on (speaking on SF by any other name):

If we ever manage to define sf in a way that everyone can agree on, it’ll probably ossify and die within months. And you might even argue that it follows logically (in a way that Darwin might recognise) that sf has become interested in atemporality because atemporality is the best survival strategy available to it.

(Also, Southland Tales really is a very good movie; ignore the reviews and see for yourself.)

From Open The Future:

On Thursday, October 21, CBC TV will show Surviving the Future, an hour-long documentary on both the major challenges facing us over the next half-century and the amazing technologies and social shifts underway to meet those challenges. Directed by the award-winning documentarian Marc de Guerre, Surviving the Future is a rather intense piece of work, with interviews with a variety of scientists, writers, and other thinkers. They also talk to me. The trailer can be found here.

While CBC documentaries often end up on the “CBC Doc Zone” website weeks or months later, I know that some of you (hi Mom!) might want to hear what I have to say sooner than that. Since the producers were nice enough to send me a DVD ahead of time, I’ve managed to pull out the bits in which I appear.

 http://www.vimeo.com/15959445

Comrade-in-arms, grinder, and occasional Science Fictional overlord M1k3y recently penned a very insightful, spoiler-laden and topical overview of William Gibson’s new novel ZERO HISTORY over at the Tech Gonzo Diary.

ATEMPORALITY!  There, I said it again.  It’s been an obsession of mine recently and much of my excitement on the release of this book stemmed from videos of Bruce Sterling’s lectures on the subject, which he kept speaking of as a back’n’forth between him and Gibson, as they fleshed-out this idea.  That Zero History would be the bible of Atemporality. That this would be the case was furthered by twitter exchanges between these two, and thusly hashtagged tweets by them on the subject.

So is Zero History a manifesto of Atemporality.. a guidebook to a new understanding of progress, a new way of viewing the present, the defining of a new historical epoch?

[Via: The Tech Gonzo Diary]

What follows is Jamais Cascio, who we’ve mentioned here a few times before, presenting a condensed, thirty-minute version of the Institute for the Future‘s forecast for the next ten years.

This is what Futurism looks like today; not rabid predictions of jetpacks and flying cars, but sane, measured statements that pick up recent trends and forecast their result.

Sit down and get ready for 16minutes of wisdom from ‘ the Prophet’, Bruce Sterling, as he delivers a speech he’s titled “At the 9am of the Augmented Reality Industry“.

This is a sequel to his previous speech “At the dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry“, which you can find here.

I feel pretty vindicated by this that we’re doing a decent job of tracking Augmented Reality here. For the casual reader, you’ll find examples of everything he’s talking about under that link.

The latest update of the iPhone OS seems to be finally allowing the development of decent AR apps for that device. The first of these is Junaio.

But it’s still Android phones that are the place to be for the cutting-edge geek. I made the targeted jump to the aptly named HTC Desire a month ago (replacing my now ancient futurephone, the Nokia N95 8Gb), and my two favourite apps, especially for that game of ‘wow the non-tech kids’, are Google Sky Map and Google Goggles. Both of which are Android-only; both of which give you superpowers.

Now, no.. I’m not missing the point of Bruce’s speech. I’m very excited to see what happens when this industry truly augments our realities. Rest assured, we’ll continue tracking that right here.

Lurker SneakyLil left a link to this in our comments:

I have only read Pinker‘s How The Mind Works, but I believe most of his work to be well worth checking out.

What I would like to pick up and extend on are his comments on how ‘cosmopolitanism’ and Peter Singer‘s ‘expanding circle’ have helped erode our feafulness of the Unknown Other, through reading about and understanding cultures and people we don’t see in the world around us. As my friend David Forbes says, There Is No They.

Our increasing connectedness, and ease of making new connections, is the great benefit of technologies such as Twitter. I daily read the stories of people on every continent on this planet and above it (thanks to tweets coming in from the residents of the ISS).

I would also point to people’s further awareness of their place of ‘privilege’ through tagging their tweets #firstworldproblems. I know it can seem a tad trite at times, and it’s often just a way for people to feel better about bitching about their iPods or Macs. But then think back to your classic literature and remember just how insular and self obsessed some of these great works seem now; completely obsessed with Upper Class Problems. Yes, I’m looking at you Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde!

So tweet away and tag them guilt free.. but do try to ever expand your circle, there’s enough inward facing collectives out there today (fuck you Glenn Beck!), let’s shake things up and dare to join hands across timezones and yes, even generational limits (I dare to believe not all Boomers are evil!).

We’ve been a bit remiss here in only sporadically covering the great work Wikileaks are doing. I promise you a more in-depth post on them in the future; the work they’re doing in Iceland in particular.

In the meantime, just watch this short interview to see why they’re so important to our efforts to build a future worth living in:

Will the real Facebook killer please stand-up?  Diaspora is the latest hat being thrown in the ring to save us all from the evils of Facebook and it’s privacy-busting, corporate-favouring, people-hating walled garden.

Especially as many people, following this Gizmodo post, have jumped that wall and are looking for an alternative.

Here’s the two videos that have been circulating, if you haven’t seen them already:

It’s a little thin on exact details.  All they really say on their site is that “current implementations include GPG encryption, scraping Twitter and Flickr.. and the initial stages of connection infrastructure (“friending” other Diaspora instances).”

UPDATE: This video explains the basic idea of their service in more depth:

You have to admit this is pretty fucking future though.  A crowd-funded, open-source Facebook-killer perfectly timed to ride the backlash wave against it’s um, evolving, notion of privacy.  Making the Kickstarter campaign quickly go viral and reach over 1000% of their target.

Still, I can’t help remembering the buzz around the launch of identi.ca. Equally open-sourced and federated, this Twitter-killer was created back when Twitter was falling down on a regular basis?  (Wait.. what do you mean it still is?) Identi.ca?  Anyone..?!  Exactly.

And given recent events, things could get messy quickly if they try to import data from Facebook in a manner they take exception to.

Nonetheless, I’m crossing my fingers for this project’s success.  I’ll even go so far as to say I’ll happily pay a subscription fee if they include data hosting;  my subscription fee for a pro-account with flickr is coming up and I’d much rather scrape that clean and store everything in my own cloudlet.

Know Your Meme has a handy guide to fighting YouTube takedown requests for content – this time focused on the downfall of the Downfall videos.  While admitting that DMCA challenges are more complicated than YouTube’s own internal system for taking down content at the copyright holder’s request – it is always fascinating to see how people fight back when copyright holders try to trample on Fair Use.

[Via Everybody]

What exactly is a cyborg anthropologist? 

Let Amber herself tell you, in this video from late last year on ‘prosthetic culture’:

Like to know more?  Our friends over at Technoccult just did a great interview with her.

Thanks for the YouTube link Vertigo Jones!

To Age or Not to Age profiles the science of aging, it also addresses some of the moral, religious, practical and economic implications of increased, lifespan. Who will have access to the medicine? Who will benefit from the breakthroughs? Will the price of these compounds make this a drug for the elites?

This has had very limited screenings so far, but if you’re in, or near, Paris you can see it on the 29th.

Previously on Grinding I posted a video of Bruce talking about Gothic High-Tech and Favella Chic in his Reboot 11 closing speech. In it, he mentions he was trying to make concrete his notion of what this next decade might be, something he was calling Atemporality (“it’s steampunk with metaphysics”, he said).

At the recent Transmediale Festival, he’s back to report that all the historical narratives are broken, multi-temporality is the new multi-culturalism and network culture is the new dominant force.

Strap your brains in, take your smart drugs and drink deeply from the fount of knowledge that is Sterling’s mind:

The above picture is from Ariana Osborne’s blog, where she lays down some solid ranting regarding the “opposing” disciplines of Art and Science.

I was going to call this 50mins of pure mind candy, but that doesn’t quite capture it.  Mind superfood might be a better description.  Matt Webb’s opening keynote for Wedirections South is an mp3 superfood capsule for your brain.  You just can’t unhear his ideas, it is true synapse rewiring material;  this description barely does it justice:

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

So grab the mp3 and load it onto your prefered player, or just hit play on this embed:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Bonus Content!

As Matt says on his blog, this was an extension of his Reboot 11 presentation:

You should watch this too.

I remember reading a scan of an old real print comic once.  The character in it was railing against the imaginary people of his imaginary world, taking them to task about their dissatisfaction with the future they lived in.  But it was really aimed at the stupid people who wanted their stupid little futures and who were too stupid to see that the future is now.  It’s always now.  Except it isn’t anymore.  The TITANs changed that.  The future is now yesterday, and last week, and ten years ago.

–ECLIPSE PHASE

In August of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rob Boyle and Brian Cross – two of the minds behind the post-singularity, transhumanist horror Role-Playing Game ECLIPSE PHASE.  We covered a lot of topics — from details about the game and the game world to the singularity, technology’s influence on politics, reputation economies, anarcho-transhumanism and more.

(Also?  Creative uses for bacon in the dark post-singularity future.)

You can listen to the interview (recorded August 7th, 2009 in a noisy bar during the GEN CON gaming gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana) here:

(Or you can download it in a podcast format from here.)  As a minor warning, there are some setting spoilers in the interview.

ECLIPSE PHASE comes out this week in the US and elsewhere from bookstores and gaming retailers.  (Or in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG.)

Last year, Grinding did a cross-promotion with Esozone, the Portland-based “unconference”. This year we can’t offer a reduced ticket price because this year Esozone is free.   For those Grinders looking for something to do this weekend in the Portland area, Esozone once again promises to bring in a mix of people and interests.  Last year there was magick, marketing, and fringe technology.

This year there’s going to be an Ignite Esozone, music, Radical Therapy for Radical Minds, tantra,  more marketing, psychogeography, data modeling and an Ex-Occultists Support Group and all sorts of general high-weirdness and possible upgrades for your mind.

ESOZONE 2009 takes place OCTOBER 9-10 in Portland, and it is mutant friendly and free to all.

Jamias Cascio drops violent wisdom over here at The “End of Politics” Delusion.

You have my express permission to kick the next person — especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement — who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid “politics.” Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goals.

He’s right, you know. But I tell you, sometimes I do wish there were no politics and people could pull their heads out of their asses long enough to do the right thing. And yes, all of that is code for “Dammit, why doesn’t everyone think like me?!”

I’m not proud of the times when I think like that, but there you go. I tend to call those my “Magneto Days”.

I agree that there are a lot of technophiles who express either a desire to be “above politics” or who believe that technological advances will free us from politics, but I think a lot of technophiles are really looking for an out of politics as we experience them today.  And that IS something I think technological advances can pull out us out of.

Speaking as an American, embedded squarely in the middle of American media and politics, what we refer to as “politics” bears little or no resemblance to any rational form of communication or discourse. Of course there is no “golden age of politics” to look back on. Politics, being the interaction of various levels of power, has always been an affair that has been ugly and has brought out the worst in people. So long as there are power differentials between people or groups, there will be politics. The technological Singularity has more potential for creating power disparity as it does for levelling the playing field.

And keep in mind that the last major Political movement that had a goal of moving beyond conventional politics was the Neoconservative movement, whose experiment in national myth-making is in part responsible for the wreck of the political system we’re witnessing today. The technofuturist “End of Politics” is no more upon us than the Neoconservative “End of History” was when Francis Fukuyama declared it was imminent.

But…

Technology does have the potential to change how politics are perceived and performed. Right now, in the US, the political discourse is a screaming match between two major factions that only agree on one thing: theirs are the only voices that should be heard. There’s no readily visible relationship between the left and the right in the US save one of antagonism. The right is against the left and the left is against the right, no matter what shape that debate takes.

One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Politics as it visibly manifests in the US is mediated and shaped by corporate media. The 24 hour news networks and their various other media limbs, in order to sustain and grow their business model, sell a purely oppositional narrative. The system insures that the lack of a national dialogue on any sort of important issue translates directly into profits for the corporations that run mass-market media. This is why what should be a national discussion about a health care system that no one really likes (save politicians who get kickbacks from insurance companies) has turned into a screaming match with bold-faced lies and national coverage of supposed politicians ranting incoherently about “Death Panels” and telling people on national news that the old and infirm will be euthanized.

What technology could do is make it easier for people to escape from the “us” vs. “them” mentality that drive the media machines and give them the power to come to their own educated conclusions. It seems like a long shot, most days, but technology has the potential to infuse the volatile political landscape with knowledge, non-media mediated discourse and hopefully a little bit of compassion. Technological mediation has the potential to create a more permeable membrane between “them” and us”.

No, I don’t think that we can ever escape politics for good or ill, but what we have, is the potential to forge politics tempered by knowledge, compassion and real human needs.

io9′s Charlie Anders reports on Worldcon’s  ”The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?” panel.

Some highlights:

Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it’s inevitable — so there’s no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to “telepathy or dianetics,” science-fictional ideas which some people adopted “with religious fervor.” A core question in science fiction is “where is our technology going, and what can we do with it,” noted Wilson. “The Singularity is just one answer.”

…

“The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?” says Wilson.

Interesting stuff, and questions well worth asking even if you’re not a Sci-Fi fan.  Me?  The only sci-fi stuff I read tends to either be so near-future that calling it Sci-Fi is just pointles genre-pigeonholing (like say Spook Country ) or transhumanist stuff.  But, by and large that’s because tranhumanist-themed books seem to be where the heirs to Cyberpunk ended up.

Doug Rushkoff‘s appearance on The Colbert Report. Great to see his book Life, Inc getting increased exposure!

As some of you may know, I live in the US, and today, July 4th, is the day we celebrate beer and large colorful explosions.  Also, guns.   There’s some rehtoric about liberty and Independence in there, too, but you’ll get as many answers about what that means as you’ll find people to ask.

However, a bit more recently (set your wayback machines for 1996) Grateful Dead lyricist, former campaign manager for Dick Cheney, cattle rancher, and Co-founder and Vice-Chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow sat down in Davos, Switzerland and wrote “A Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace”.

What follows is one of the most famous and influential statements on the liberating potential of telecomunications technology:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

It’s easy to look back on this ancient relic of the first days of “cyberspace” and dismiss a lot of it as fantasy, wish-fulfillment and undelivered promises.   Of course two months ago, the cyber-pundits that dismissed Twitter as “for Twits” hadn’t seen the most innocuous of information technologies turn, however briefly, into the voice of a national revolution.

So, almost 13 years have come and gone since the piece was written.   The “Walled Garden” model of information control on the internet came, went, and is coming around again.  Virtual Worlds are here, but not in the way they were invisioned back then, and dreams of immersive Virtual Reality are shifting towards visions of intergrated Augmented Reality.   Whole nations seek to control the flow of information across their borders more than ever before and corporate giants seek your consent in controlling the information you have access to.

My question for you is this:   Do you think that the “Declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace” is still relevant?  Is the vision of a kingdom of the mind as presented there still one that can or should come to pass?  Or have the shapes of the technologies involved changed the shape of what technologicaly-assisted freedom and liberty look like?