transmit nowhere

I’ll warn you. I labeled this part 1, but it’s all that exists.

I wrote this because a few friends and I challenged each other to write a novella. The competition fell through, but like any good kick in the pants, it got us to start writing. Here’s the work in progress.

—-

Codex

It was the worst perversion of trust. Nevermind the firings, forget about divorce.

If people found out that you’d ever touched someone else’s Codex – you were an immediate villian.

It had gotten to the point where a simple allegation would ruin your life. You did NOT touch someone else’s Codex.
It was understood that some couples chose to explore their Codi together, in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Adventurous? Definitely. Stupid? Maybe.
The hyper observance of privacy that extended from this had grown to ridiculous proportions.

Outsiders, as they were known for their insistence of carrying their Codex on their person, were beginning to be shunned by the society as a whole. Laws barring the public display of Codex had nearly passed a couple times, but it was a freedom that the Senate didn’t want to infringe. Given the build up, a single Codex law would have unleashed a torrent of emotions.

And why not? It made sense. Everyone understood the danger of the Codex.

But she couldn’t help herself. The more he talked about his early days, the more she had to know.

Sometimes it can seem like such a crime, that we might find the right person years into our lives, and yet to never have known them before. Or to have known them, and never realized. It’s a tricky thing. Before the introduction of the Codex, maybe we didn’t care as much. We embraced the novelty of someone new, the excitement of finding them, however later we did. But for some, there is lingering curiousity.

Courts had never sided with an intruder. Juries would sympathize – especially for married couples. We all did want to share in our lovers’ pasts. To know them before we knew them. To see their lives in a different light. The worst were the obsessive stalkers or ex-girlfriends. The inability to let go led to theft. Newer models were protected against intruders, but like all security mechanisms, they could be bypassed.

There was still some leeway in the case of the deceased. People with known depression were permitted their loved one’s Codex in the aftermath of their death. Most people elected to have theirs deleted or destroyed upon death. The one law that had been past was forbidding the burial of a live Codex. Cemetaries simply couldn’t keep people from digging up graves for the black market. The drug of choice these days was the Codex market. Most were imported, but hard to trace. It was a known evil that the government had accepted. They were working to legalize and regulate the market while preserving the rights of their own citizens. It was a dirty matter indeed.

She digressed. She had made up her mind last night. Late in the night, she decided she had to know. She’d asked R. for his blessing before, but he’d always been guarded. He was always defensive about sharing his credentials, his email, his mail. She trusted him – and after 5 years of his nonsense, she had to. It was his way, they way he was. And that’s why she didn’t feel so guilty. She chose to lump his refusal into hyper paranoia.

She loved him, and she always would. No matter what the Codex revealed.

She’d even offered to share hers with him, but he saw it for what it was. She knew him. She knew he wanted ever so dearly to peer into hers. But the exchange was too much. He refused to let her into his, and if that meant he’d not see hers, then so be it.

The official company story was that Mrs. Jade (a legend now) had been inspired by an early 21st century book, “The Time Traveller’s Wife”.
She had decided that she wanted her husband to know her better than he ever had later, when they were older. And she would like to know him. And so she had worked to expand the developments of NIC to create the device. It was simple. Every time you wanted, you would connect yourself to your Codex, and it would remember you. That’s it.

It’s like a backup for your brain. For you. Your personality, and your life.
The first few versions were buggy, they’d only remember what you thought, remembered, or thought of while they recorded. In their seventh generation, however, they recorded everything. What you thought of yourself. What you thought of your family. What you wanted to do with the neighbour’s 15 year old daughter. The urges you had at work when facing off against your boss. Everything.

wandering around Washington, D.C, met up with the former employer’s DC delegation.
sought out nearby coffee at a freshly erected coffee house that refuses to serve espresso to go.

promising.

sitting and talking, learning that espresso is considered a staple in italy and its price is regulated, i find myself at the intersection of two latent guild networks

baristas.

and

spotters.

the former – james introduces us to his barista. it’s his day off, but he just can’t escape the embassy. apparently they throw down locally once a month, first thursday. it’s purely an art competition — latte art. seattle told me it was started there, but i didn’t know about the throw downs.

but this pales in comparison to the world barista competitions – espresso, cappuccino, and a signature drink. local, regional, nationals, international.

of course this all makes sense and isn’t surprising in the least, but he and his lady friend were on their way – on their day off – to watch videos of people competing. guild passion everted. there’s a different kind of structure in play.

—

the latter – another barista walks in, wearing a shirt bright purple with pink lettering, and i immediately recognize it. they don’t sell this stuff in stores, you can only get them a few times a year if you know where to look. and all i’ll say is that you have to know what you’re looking for to recognize it like i did.

so i approach the counter, there’s a 50/50 chance that i can take without revealing too much.

“i have a weird question for you”

guy looks at me, sizing me up. “shoot.”

“are you a dirt?”

“excuse me?”

“a dirt. do you know what i mean?”

“ummm…” the guy shifts uncomfortably.

“sorry. nevermind. i just saw your shirt…”

“OH! YES! Sorry, I’m not up on all the lingo yet… I’ve never met anyone who knew what this was…”

“you must be new — welcome. i’m known as __________. Yeah, it doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice to know it does, right?”

“Yeah!! Dude, what’s your real name??”

True story, from just a couple hours ago. Made myself a new friend named Aaron. Well, that’s not his real name, but you know. That’s what you’d call him if you met him.

And then catching up on my streams, I see that Foreign Policy has a bit on the world’s future in cities, Beyond City Limits

And I think to myself… they’re already five minutes in the past, five minute too late. But the article’s worth reading, if only for the photo essay with all the world’s cities.

The last week has kept me mostly offline. Much of the midwest kept me offline, even with the promise of EDGE connectivity. Bursts of connectedness result in a violent resynchronization with the world at large.

Some parts of being disconnected are great.
Some are not.

I wonder if it’s a kind of pathological condition now, to be able to be connected all the time. I wandered the city of Chicago yesterday untethered. Good: being forced to take in the experience (architecture boat tour and all!) completely, without digitized distraction whether email or tweet or txt. Bad: Not having a camera to capture everything.

But need I? No doubt many people have taken the same boat tour, experienced the same angles and understood.

So there are a set of conditioned thoughts around information and data. That on a tour-like thing I should take lots of pictures. And when I have thoughts I should share them. Apparently immediately. And when I want to tell someone something I need to do so. Quickly.

All of it has resulted in some… brain plaque developing. Like a backlog of habit that I need to clear out and flush out when I touch a terminal. So I find myself doing odd things when I return to the network: messages, email, wikipedia. A sticky interface between wetware and netware.

What does it mean? I don’t know. But it makes me think that I want to stop generating this kind of mental debris when I am disconnected.

I’ve been driving across the country (http://rytrip.posterous.com), and as we crossed through much of the northwest and midwest, we’ve found internet to be sorely lacking.

Read: Nonexistent.

And that’s been excellent for the most part, except for when we rely on Google Maps for directions. Or finding gas. Or bathrooms. Or trying to priceline a hotel.

At some point it became a mark of scarcity, that we’d be looking for something, and need to slurp down something ASAP when we could receive a single bar of signal. (for example, What To Do If A Tornado Hits).

And now that I’m back in an urban space with 3G, Wifi, and all the internet I could want, I’m overwhelmed.

Emails
Tweets
RSS entries
Re-syncing with people over IM

And at the same time, it feels good to be re-introduced into the network. Feels like belonging, togetherness, like I’m connected.

Much like the borg dude in that episode that one time who was disconnected from the collective.

Ahem.

What is the role of architecture in today’s world?

Technologists would say it is to support the digital mind. But in some ways it creates the mind as we live in it. The traditional setup of an architectural problem is to require that we take into account the environment and surroundings of a potential project. That the design should interact with the existing neighborhood and population. But in the world we live in today, the nature of digital means that we look to the past for convenience, not for necessity. Can we then construct a building that doesn’t play well with it’s surrounding to the betterment of the environment and the people who interact with it? Maybe not built from scratch but making a conscious effort to transition an entrant from the real world to the world of the building. Like double doors but mental not environmental.

Is there a statement to be made in each form? As an outsider the shapes that have been showcased in recent memory evoke a sense of cool more than any other emotion. Exceptions are the SPL, Stata, and Simmons.

I don’t particularly appreciate subtractive architecture. I will skip it. The other two evoke in me a sense of wonder and inspiration. For different reasons.

SPL feels very much an escape from the surroundings. A place to retreat into and hide. It feels in some ways like a hodge podged hive. The various ventricles have distinct transition points between them. That a move from one ventricle to another can be made explicit, registered, and complete. (in some ways this is why I insisted on a roadtrip before my next jump)

CSAIL feels like an organic order found within chaotic crystalline growth. It might just be the colors and textures, but the building always feels fresh. There’s something growing within its walls that’s slightly intangible. Viewed from the outside, it seems like a concrete and glass mechanical fungus feeding of Gaian energy.

What I’m getting it is the possibility of using the design of environments – buildings or otherwise – to influence mood and thought very intentionally. Intentioned by the creator as well as by the entrant.

The aftermath of inception makes me wonder if it is possible to create a series of buildings that are each designed with the express purpose of evoking and everting specific states of mind. That if it’s possible to create environments that evoke wonder, play, inspiration, luxury, lounging, socialization, communication, could there then be a series of rooms or buildings that cause an individual to change their state of mind?

I think immediately of two structured social programs. School and prison.

Both are incidentally intended to develop the mind and being in different ways. But thus the intents are similar.

With school I could imagine an extreme form of boarding school. Students would be left to their own devices in a building that is intended to teach you something. And that the lessons to internalize come from ones interaction with the building and environment. Years later, they would eventually come out the other end, ready to face anything.

If I’m honest, this is effectively what many problem or puzzle solving games are and do. You exist in some environment and are expected to develop an understanding of the world. Zelda comes to mind. But there would be I think a big difference if you were forced to live in it. In the way that Juny remembers the architecture of churches evoking a feeling of majesty can we then evoke peace? Or intelligence?

There are other means to manipulating such emotions via marketing, habit and priming. Are there projects that explore this kind of intentional manipulation? I feel like the internals of malls and retail environments are such a project. TEAL was the only project I could think of having experienced that explored the notion of a classroom.

(At MIT, there was a classroom called the TEAL room. Tables were circular, we sat in groups. The lecturer was projected (including slides) onto every wall, not unlike a telescreen in Fahrenheit 451. This way people would sit in groups to solve problems during class to take in the material, as well as be subjected to the professor’s glare throughout.)

How would you design a building such that it would make the people who enter it forget the world outside.
This could be used for cults, entertainment, or to foster a superhuman problem solving dynamic.
Probably all of the above.

I want to claim that the workplace has been studied. I wouldn’t know, I’m not an architect. But it seems like if there’s anyone interested in the possibilities of influencing the brain and behavior, it would be the workplace. But even that is for groups at large, and not individuals.

I can imagine a future in which our environments are bespoke. Rolls Royce is like this to an extent, from what I hear (I wouldn’t know). But that as an individual, you have a profile about the things you like and the way you like them, and that when you join a company you would come in 2 days later after they were able to construct a work environment that matches your spec. Maybe Myers-Briggs personality traits map out into buildings that people like, or it’s encoded in our DNA.

Just some random thoughts.

the means of communication in large social spheres is drifting towards broadcast. if you want to stay in touch with a lot of people (and some people do), then you want to be able to tell everyone everything. Have everyone know quickly.

With that comes a certain expectation that you’re being followed, you’re bring read, etc.

When the expectation shifts towards expecting that people are up to date on your life, two things can happen:

1. People start to be annoyed by the minutia that you think somehow significant in your life. Solution? Stop finding minutia significant unless it’s “aha!” inducing.

2. Social interactions can be built upon a stronger foundational base of understanding between two parties. Awesome.

I find that often what I’ll try to do is tell one person deeply, and then copy and modify it so it’s not quite a form letter, but it’s still very much repeated.

I just watched Surrogates this past weekend. Not bad. I’m either rusty or the plot twists were genuinely difficult to predict.

But I have to say the ending left me just a little unsatisfied. Part of it may just be that I’m a technologist at heart. Slap some powered silicon onto something, and you can bet I’ll think it’s interesting. (Maker Faire last weekend felt a little like that, but that’s for another day). Apparently I like Fitbits because I’m interested in tech (but if you don’t know them, try one. I’m on my second after a bit of water damage on the first). But it’s a clever bit of technology. It just tracks every step you take, a pedestrian game in life. And you can monitor your sleep at night (even more fascinating).

iPads aside, the spread of sensing technology will definitely lead to Surragotes or I, Robot style exo-skeletons for human use.

What really bugs me is it seems like most of these techno-thrillers about the future seem to portray the hyper-advancement of the field as an inherently bad thing, often preaching a kind of Luddite philosophy. Now mind you, I don’t think there should be a movie where everything is better because of the tech (I don’t think a story that’s happy through and through can be a very good story, there has to be strife…)

…strife.

So why not a movie looking at problems in the world we currently think of as intractable, with the story about the development of said solution. The R&D I’m sure would be boring, but you could really emphasize a grand conspiracy of anti-solution sentiment coupled with the docile inactivity of the mass population. It’s like a non-dead zombie apocalyptic scenario where the average person is effectively a mediated zombie, ODing on pizza and television. There’s a big problem (well, several are hinted, but we focus on one) looming ahead that a subset of the population can see, and nobody else seems to give a damn.

Oh, wait.

And then the rest of the film can be about the struggle to bring solutions to fruition. With a plot twist and international intrigue thrown in for spice.

What are you doing right now?

What is your arch-nemesis doing right now?

And if you don’t have an arch-nemesis, you’re really missing out. I hope I meet mine one day. So far all I know is that she’s formidable.

I’ve been interested in pen based computing since high school. I remember in elementary school I was lusting after a laptop being advertised with the financial paper on weekends. And a family friend joked with me that I should wait for the smaller laptops of the future, “palmtops”. And he held out his hand like it would sit on his palm and be typed on with his other hand. At the time I didn’t appreciate it, I wanted a laptop after all.

Me of little faith. When the PalmPilot came out a few years later and I read about the Apple Newton, my savings were reallocated.

I believed Gates when he would talk about tablets being the future. Especially learning about little slate tablets in school houses before mass paper or cuniform tablets of lore.

Even the Windows XP Tablet computer I procured after college felt different. Like holding it in my lap wherever I went actually changed the thoughts and emotions I would have.

So, standing in line today I have some mixed perspectives about the device.

The XO-3 concept design unveiled late last year, and at the time I wondered I it made sense.

http://i.engadget.com/2009/12/22/olpc-shows-off-absurdly-thin-xo-3-concept-tablet-for-2012/

I trust in Yves Behar, but coming from an older school of thought, it can be hard to let go of the past ideas of the future. But if anything, the iPad releasing today is perhaps setting the model for kids in the future. Indistinguishable from magic, we grew up with the idea of a natural tablet and touch interfaces from Star Trek if nothing else. I’m sure others can point further back. But a child today will look at the iPad and the captain’s log and wonder why space ships have antiquated technology.

On the edge of reality. We live on the edge of reality and it’s hard to look over it. For our generation, as we try to think of what we could do with the toys and infrastructure we build, it’s going to be increasingly difficult, burdened with the memories of the old way.

Remember when Apple was about to wither away? And Microsoft invested, saving competition?

The OLPC project seems to be on the edge of reality. It’s unfortunate that even technologist like myself cannot fond the time to pour energy into a thing like Sugar and the XO.

But now I’m excited. Because if the XO goes the direction of the XO-3, and my hope is that mass demand for this class of consumer products will drive the cost down. And if everyone starts to have a tablet, we won’t care as much about the form factor.

Our world will become software. That’s why today is especially exciting.

William Gibson shares some wisdom on writing, answering some forum questions:

Q: Which novels did you enjoy writing most?

A: Writing novels is a painful and anxiety-ridden process, for me. There are *moments* of enjoyment. I very much enjoy the state of having written.

Q: Least?

A: They’re all equally if differently painful, and each one seems, at some point, to me, to be not only a very bad novel, but the worst novel ever written. That crisis, I’ve learned, indicates that I’ll be finished soon, and that the worst is over. But knowing that doesn’t seem to decrease that devastating and absolute conviction of utter failure.

from http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2010_03_01_archive.asp#6800925744412544840