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Grave Digger Blues

Jesse Sublett is a rock and roll veteran as well as a novelist, i.e. a multimediast, and he’s blowing into full-bore convergent mode by creating an ebook rich with images, a book that can be performed, a book with its own theme song:

(Note the spook that whisks by at the end).

Grave Digger BluesI really love this book, Grave Digger Blues, a detective noir bit of fiction set at the end of the world. It’s very rock and roll, with a side of blues. And it’s easy to get for your kindle or (not as much fun) as plain text. But the whole thing was conceived for the iPad, an innovative composition using the iBooks author app. It’s a true convergent media piece, incorporating music soundtracks, audio chapters with jazz musicians like Johnny Reno, sound effects, and video.

Amazon’s overview:

Welcome to the USA in the near future, the last summer before the end of the world. A right wing Republican coup and terrorist strikes have decimated the social infrastructure. The digital world is 90 percent gone. Only a handful of elites have cell phones, and making a call on someone’s land line can cost plenty. The power grid is shot. Our guides to this blasted world are Hank Zzybnx, a damaged war vet, private eye and hit man, haunted by the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, and The Blues Cat, a jazz musician on an endless series of one-nighters, beloved by strange women, shadowed every step the muscle men of his nemesis, Big Clyde. Grizzly bears and alligators have invaded the cities. Weird epidemics ravage the land. Crime is rampant. Nightlife in bars like the Morgue, however, is booming. Envision Mad Max crossed with the Weimar Republic, to the tune of Mack the Knife played by Tom Waits. The Blues Cat, tired of roaming, yearns for the one thing he can never have–a quiet life and a loving wife. Hank searches for clues to his fragmented past. He rarely sleeps, and never dreams.

Check out Jesse’s blog, and don’t miss a chance to see him perform…

Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013

Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz

Update: Statement from Aaron’s family:

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

Aaron’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Further details, including the specific time, will be posted at http://rememberaaronsw.com, along with announcements about memorial services to be held in other cities in coming weeks.

Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com

In 2003 during SXSW Interactive EFF-Austin and EFF threw a party in a club called Texture in downtown Austin. Cory Doctorow, Sandy Stone and I were instigators of the party. Cory showed up with Lisa Rein and a teenager who helped us make the wifi work. Cory told me that the teen was brilliant, but I could see that for myself. He seemed a little shell-shocked, too – an east coast kid in Texas for the first time with the whacky, diverse crowd that EFF-Austin attracted.

He was Aaron Swartz, and I crossed paths with him at other conferences and heard his name over and again as found ways to apply his genius, helping create the essential RSS protocol for online sharing and cofounding Reddit and Demand Progress. Those who noted his accomplisments saw him as a force to be reckoned with, and imagined that he would have a brilliant future. Unfortunately he had a brush with the law for downloading 4 million academic articles from JSTOR.

Aaron, who had battled depression, committed suicide yesterday. Read Cory’s obit. Read Larry Lessig’s reaction.

I don’t have anything to add – I didn’t know Aaron well enough, I don’t know the merits of the case, I’m conflicted over IP issues and would like to see the copyright wars end with a truce and some kind of reasonableness. I don’t know that Aaron’s death was brought on by his legal troubles, but I’m pretty clear he wasn’t a criminal, and I’m sure being treated as one didn’t help.

Epidemic

My barista, while clovering a cup of Komodo, said he doesn’t want to get a flu vaccination because he thinks it’ll make him sick. I resisted getting the shot myself – I appear to be allergic to the preservative thimerosal (aka mercurochrome), but found a preservative-free option, so I went for it. Seeing the chart below, I’m glad I did…

State of the World 2013: read the conversation

Bruce Sterling and I (with substantial contributions from others) conversed online for two weeks about the state of the world, as we do every year; that talk ended yesterday, but is archive for your perusal:

State of the World 2013

Here’s my concluding post, in response to a post by Gail Williams on war as metaphor and war as hard reality:

Gail, your post makes me think about the perception of (or,
trendier, optics for) war post WWII, sanitized by the many postwar
films and accounts. Those who knew better kept quiet. Meanwhile those
of us who grew up in the 50s were deluded; we played war games, it was
fun. Vietnam taught us better, or I should say, taught us bitter.
Bitter disillusionment.

Drone war reduces risk but, arguably, increases the probability of
collateral damage. In fact, in war all damage could be characterized as
collateral damage, as powerful elders, safely away from the front,
send the young and innocent, true believers, into battle.

Hopefully by now many more of us, a majority, understand that war is a
nightmare to be avoided. And the war metaphor doesn’t serve us all
that well.

We won’t end rape by declaring war on it. We’ll end rape through
education, cultivation of sensitivity and empathy, rethinking the
meaning of gender difference.

We won’t end poverty by declaring war on it, or by throwing money at
it. We’ll end poverty by caring about it.

We won’t end drug problems by declaring war on drugs. We’ll end drug
problems by understanding why and how drugs become a problem, by
treating addiction as a very human issue, maybe a disease, not a crime.

Robots

Robot photo from Rhizome

My favorite-so-far Bruce Sterling post in the State of the World conversation:

“Following on from John Payne’s comments in <76>, are the robots coming for our jobs? Is a certain amount of unemployment going to end up as part of the system and, if so, what happens next?”

*It’s so interesting to see this perennial question coming into vogue once again. When I was a pre-teen first discovering “science fiction,” that automation dystopia story was all over the place. Even on the cover of TIME magazine. See this Artzybasheff computer monster, all busy stealing guy’s jobs? Looks oddly familiar, doesn’t it?

Heckuva commercial artist, Artzybasheff

Of course that issue pre-dates me by a long chalk. It’s also the folk song of John Henry the Steel-Drivin’ Man, who breaks his heart defeating the boss’s Steam Hammer.

I can tell you what’s NOT gonna happen with “robots.” Nobody’s gonna defeat the logic of the assembly line by starting a Pre-Raphaelite Arts and Crafts commune where people shun the Robot and make hand-made wall tapestries. That’s been tried eight thousand different times and places. It never works for anybody who’s not Amish.

Framing the issue as “robots coming for our jobs” is rather a moot point anyhow, because the blue-collar guys who “own” assembly “jobs” have zero input on whether robots get deployed or not. What practical difference does that question make? No modern salaried employee anywhere has the clout to defend a “job” from “the robots.” The investors deploying the robots are serenely unworried about Luddite saboteurs or crippling labor-union strikes. Those possibilities of working-class resistance were de-fanged ages ago.

So, you know, either they automate some processes at the cost of human labor, or they don’t. Somebody’s alway gonna try it, and in some areas it works out rather better than it does in others, but the basic robot story isn’t robots, it’s “whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody.”

Apparently this latest little robot-vs-job flap gets most of its impetus from two things, a cool new assembly robot created by Rodney Brooks and a typically Emersonian intervention from Kevin Kelly.

So, here I’ll tell my Rodney Brooks story. I met the guy once, at some forgettable event in Washington DC, and after the panels were over, Prof Brooks and I ventured into the bar.

So, I was nursing a whiskey sour, and I was like: “So, Doctor Brooks, I know a little about your work, and –”

“Call me Rod!”

“So, Rod — level with me about this MIT scheme you have to automate the movement of insect legs. How’s that supposed to work, exactly?”

So, Rod was nothing loath, and he was pretty well going at it hammer and tongs, while I was asking the occasional provocative sci-fi style question — stuff like “so, how does the cube-square law work out when the robo-insects are walking on the ceiling?” — because we sci-fi writers dote on MIT.

Then I happened to glance across the bar, and I saw that our bartender was “frozen in disbelief.” He was so amazed by what Brooks was saying that his glass and his cleaning cloth were rigid in his unmoving arms. This bartender had the affect of a sci-fi movie android with a power failure. It was the only time I’ve ever seen that figure of speech as a genuine aspect of human behavior.

So, I give Rodney Brooks a lot of credit, he’s a fascinating guy, I’m glad to see him kept busy on things other than, for instance, an MIT-style Vannevar Bush Manhattan Project at an undisclosed desert location. I’m confident that Rod’s new manipulator is pretty snazzy.

But let me ask this: if an assembly-line device is going to “take our jobs,” wouldn’t a 3dprinter also “take our jobs?” Why do we treat them so differently? I mean, they’re both basically the same device: automated mechanical systems precisely moving loads in three dimensions by following software instructions.

So how come the Brooks robot is framed as a sinister job-stealing robot, while a 3dprinter is framed as a printer, like, a cool nifty peripheral? Didn’t digital printers also take a lot of “people’s jobs?”

Besides, a Brooks robot is just imitating human-scale movement while 3dprinters create objects in micron-accurate ways that no human can possibly do at all. So clearly the 3dprinter is a more radical threat to the status quo.

Along this same line: Chris Anderson, late of WIRED, has got a new book out about “Makers.” I read it. It’s all about how network society cadres with 3dprinters and open-source schematics and instructables are going to create a “Third Industrial Revolution.” Great, right? Okay, maybe Makers take over the world or they don’t, but how come nobody says “A Third Industrial Revolution means those Makers are going to take our jobs?” Because they would, wouldn’t they? How could they not?

Shouldn’t this prospect be of larger concern than Rodney Brooks’ latest gizmo, one among hordes of assembly line robots that have been around for decades now? An “Industrial Revolution” should *almost be definition* take everybody’s jobs. But the general reaction to Anderson’s book is that the guy is *too optimistic,” that he drank his own tech-hype bathwater and is having way too much fun. Isn’t there an inconsistency here?

Then there’s the latest Kevin Kelly argument, which is more or less about how robots are gonna take everybody’s jobs, but fine, that’s great, especially if they’re sexbots. There’s nothing sparkly-new about this line of reasoning, it’s very Automation Takes Command. The pitch is that robots take the dull dirty and dangerous jobs, which frees us to become, I dunno, humane speculative creatives like Kevin Kelly, I guess.

However, I don’t believe automation has ever worked like that; there’s no creeping wave-line with “robotics” on one side and “humanity” on the other. Playing chess is very “human,” but Deep Blue is a robot that can kick everybody’s ass at chess. You can claim that “Deep Blue” is not “a robot,” but come on: just put a tin face on him and give him a manipulator arm. Instant “robot.” Robotic has never been an issue of mechanical men versus flesh men, like in a Flash Gordon episode.

The stuff we call “robotics” today is more like Google’s “robot car,” which is not some Karel Capek man-shaped “robot” of the 1920s; the Google Car is the Google Stack with wheels attached to it. Similarly, “Google Glass” isn’t virtual-reality supergoggles, it’s the Google Stack with a camera, Android mobile software and a head-mounted display. Will they “take your jobs?” How could they not?

If you lose your job as a bus driver because a Google Bus took your job, you didn’t lose it to a “robot,” you lost your enterprise to Google, just like the newspapers did. Don’t bother to put a sexbot face on the silly thing, it’s Larry and Sergei & Co. Go find a musician and buy him a drink.

Fighter pilots are “losing their jobs to robots,” to aerial drones. Are those the “dull dirty and dangerous” jobs? Heck no, because fighter jocks are romantic folk heroes, like Eddie Rickenbacker and the Red Baron and George Bush 1.0. When most flight work is carried out by “robots” (actually by GPS systems and databases, but so what), are we somehow going to discover a more refined and human way to fly? Will we be liberated to fly in a more spiritual, humanistic, Beryl Markham poetic aviatrix kind of way? I very much doubt that. I’m pretty sure we’ll stop “flying” entirely, even if we anachronistically claim we’re “flying” when we’re zipping around in sporty ultralights letting drone systems do all the labor.

Bookstore clerks never had “dull, dirty, dangerous” work, they were the mainstays of humanistic commerce actually, but Amazon is a Stack. Amazon’s all about giant robot warehouse distribution logistics. It’s all databases and forklifts in the Amazon stack, so of course “robots” took the jobs of bookstore clerks. Bookstore clerks imagined they were chumming around with the literate community turning people on the Jane Austen, but the high-touch, humanly clingy aspect of this line of work changed nothing much about its obsolescence.

So it’s not that “robots” take “our jobs.” It’s more a situation of general employement precarity where applications built for mobile devices and databases can hit pretty much anybody’s line of work, more or less at random, without a prayer of effective counter-action. Right? Let’s move right along, then!

That being the case, “what ought to be done?” Well, if job security of all kinds is going to be made precarious indefinitely, then the sane, humane thing to do is clearly to socialize security and put everybody on a guaranteed annual income. Brazilian-style socialism: keep your nose clean, keep the kids in school, and we fee you off and you can go buy whatever produce the robots have cooked up lately.

One might also invent some kind of Stack Fordism, where Facebook pays you enough to hang out on Facebook making Facebook more omniscient. It’s a lot cheaper than putting the unemployed into prison.

Obviously the American right-wing isn’t gonna go for this wacky liberal scheme; bailing out the “takers” of the 47% is their worst Randroid nightmare. But what people never understood about the John Henry story is that we have no steam hammers left. The robots “take your job” and then the robots *keep changing at a frantic pace,* the robots have the lifespans of hamsters. We’ve still got plenty of muscular, human John Henries, but his steam hammers are all extinct.

Look what happened to Nokia. These Nokia guys had the classic Wired magazine bulletproofed dream jobs. They’re not John Henry. They’re creative class, computer-literate, inventive, super-efficient, global, digital, Asperger’s high-IQ types… They got annihilated in 18 months. Not by “robots” but by Google and Apple. However, well, same difference really.

What kind of “jobs” do Republicans have to offer themselves, when their nominee was a corporate raider, and their top financier is a weird Jewish casino owner up to the eyebrows in Macao? That’s not exactly the Protestant work ethic happening, so, well, I dunno.

It might still work, just needs more political pretzel-bending. Don’t use the word “guaranteed income,” farm it out to Fox News for semantic re-framing. Toss in the “values requirement” that your annual income requires you to wear Mormon undies, go to tent revival meetings and own and display a handgun. They’d line up for it.

Photo from Rhizome

State of the World 2013

Bruce Sterling and I are holding forth on the State of the World in our annual conversation on the WELL, with several other contributors joining in.

Bruce:

Speaking of art, the past, and its lessons for the future:

In my neighborhood in Turin, there’s a bronze statue to a statesman
called “Massimo d’Azeglio.” Massimo happened to be born a rich
Turinese aristocrat, but he always wanted to be a novelist and painter.
He married the daughter of the most famous novelist in Italy, and his
brother actually managed to become a painter.

Massimo himself never managed that. He wrote a few derivative
knock-off novels and he did a lot of weekend painting, but he happened
to be living in a time of national catastrophe and tremendous political
upheaval. So he enlisted in the cavalry, where he got shot in a
losing battle and never recovered his health. Then he got called into
politics, where the King made him Prime Minister because he was the
only courtier around who didn’t lie and cheat all the time.

Massimo is a great statesman and the father of Italian
Constitutionalism and all that, but I never stroll past his statue, and
in Turin I do that all the time, without a shudder of dread. That guy
was a born artist who was forced to become important because he was
never left alone to do what he personally wanted to do.

He put his bohemianism aside, and he became dutiful and responsible.
He made a big difference: he liberated a suffering people (for the
brief periods before they got stomped again), he forged a new national
consciousness, he signed a lot of budget bills, he sat around a lot of
smoke-filled tables with the rich and the well-born. The wife never
liked it much. There seems to have been a lot of trouble over that.

Massimo’s got a bronze painter’s palette and an open bronze book,
sculpted at the foot of his towering monument — ’cause his persecutors
knew he was an artist — but he’s never gonna be able to bend down
from his bronze heights of statesmanship and pick them up.

Given his noblesse oblige, I’m not sure that Massimo was ever allowed
an open choice about being powerful rather than being an artist, but
power is a form of bondage. No one who needs power and has it, ever
gets enough of it. Artists like to talk about their work, but powerful
people like to talk about their vacations.

To think that you can become powerful, and not become like that
personally, is like thinking you can knock back a gallon of Gentleman
Jack and not get drunk because you can write novels and paint. You can
write and paint, but that’s not what it is, that’s not what it means.

He bought his guns on the Internet

Gun Room at Philadelphia's City Hall

In casual conversations, we often hear someone say “I read blah blah on the Internet,” and if you ask for a specific source, you’ll often get “I don’t remember where.” So it could have been the New York Times, or it could have been an inexpert blog post: a comment qualified in that way has no authority or meaning. Same with “bought it on the Internet.”

I was struck by a comment MSNBC’s Chuck Todd made while talking about access to weapons in the U.S. He mentioned that James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora shooter, bought considerable guns and ammunition “on the Internet.”

My first thought was that Todd is a careless journalist (something I never thought before), in part because he used a phrase so vague. Also because he followed with a comment suggesting that Holmes dyed his hair bright orange “like Heath Ledger’s Joker in Batman.” The Joker existed as a character before Heath Ledger played the part, and clearly does not have the bright orange hair we see in the photos of Holmes. Chuck, you’re thinking of Bozo the Clown. The Joker’s hair is green.

But I digress. The relevant question here is the significance of saying that Holmes bought his arsenal online? That anyone can buy guns? Could we argue that, had Holmes bought his guns from a physical gun store, the clerk would have noted his demented stare and refused to make the sale? I doubt it.

It doesn’t matter where he bought the components of his arsenal. He could have bought them anywhere guns (and bullet-proof vests) are sold. Or so I read on the Internet.

John Shirley: “empathy may be a precious commodity in the future”

In the wake of the Connecticut shootings, John Shirley posted on Facebook this excerpt from a text he wrote as the basis for a TedX talk:

“People who are quadriplegic have stated that they feel less emotion than they did, when they could still feel their entire bodies. The projection of the self into electronics reduces our relationship to the body, the seat of our emotions, and for several reasons that might lead to an increase in psychopathology.

“And empathy may be a precious commodity in the future. Most people unconsciously cut off their empathy when they’re feeling endangered–when the population increases to 8 and 9 and 10 billion, we may instinctively become, as a race, proportionately less empathetic–unless we actively struggle against that kind of degeneracy.”

Just another post about a tragedy

[Don’t waste your time reading my hasty post before you read Ethan Zuckerman’s take: “Mourn, and take action on guns.”]

Another senseless American tragedy with much chaotic wailing in social media, including my own. More traditional media, as ever, is ready and willing to tell us what we are thinking, if not what we should be thinking. The Onion manages to be more real than “real” news in this:

Americans reported feelings of overwhelming disgust with whatever abhorrent bastard did this and with the world at large for ever allowing it to happen, as well as with politicians, with the NRA, and above all with their own pathetic goddamn selves, sitting in front of a fucking computer instead of doing fucking anything to help anyone—Christ, as if that were even fucking possible, as if anyone could change what happened, as if the same fucking bullshit isn’t going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it’s time to change the way we live, so what’s the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?

Roger Ebert had an interesting take on the media’s role in his review of Gus Van Sant’s film “Elephant,” inspired by the Columbine shootings. I’ve seen this quote 2-3 times on the interwebs over the last 24 hrs:

… I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

12/12/20115 Austin American-Statesman
Austin American-Statesman front page, 12/12/2015

This news is everywhere. It filled the front page of Austin American-Statesman today, with a max point size headline saying “Our Hearts Are Broken Today.” The New York Times says “Nation Reels as Shooting Details Emerge.” I don’t question the sincerity of most responses, though there were also outrageous viral hoaxes like this one, posted on Twitter (I fell for it):

Landfill Harmonics: rethinking/reusing what we’re throwing away…

Transforming garbage into good-quality musical instruments – forget flying cars, this is the more relevant future. Thanks to Joseph Rowe for sending this my way. Joseph says of this sort of good news: “… most media (big or small), if they report it at all, class it condescendingly as ‘entertainment’ or ‘human interest. When will those with power and influence start to realize that art is not an ornament, nor a luxury, but a necessity of life?”