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Bruce Sterling is here this evening to talk at our IMD seminar.
He’s fresh from Ars Futura in Barcelona and looking to discuss his new book, Shaping Things.
Here’s a Flickr stream with photos from Bruce’s talk at Ars Futura.
Some Notes
Spime‘s move us away from ubiquitous computation and toward electronically enhanced tags embedded in architectural environments. His book is a mainifesto of a world that contains objects that aren’t smart, but that generate histories and stories embedded in the environment.
Started by trying to write a novel on the subject
energized by Marc Weiser.
Power and mainframes in the environment and everything is sitting around with some processing capacity.
The more he thought about it and try to write a scene and waking up in that sort of environment, he had some deep difficulties.
Ended up thinking that the problem was that it wasn’t ubiquitous (cause there was always patchiness “seams”) and not computation cause you don’t have to move much computation into the tag.
It just needs identity — enough to have some individual identity.
Came to this conclusion this year
Asked to give a lecture at art center. started thinking about govchips and bloggets. rather than giving help, they offered to have him join the faculty and drill down on the subject.
RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy
If you’re interested in the subject, start by reading RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy by a colleague of his Simson Garfinkel. They put together a primer on the issues with the heavy duty players and their takes on the topic.
The other is Spychips: How major corporations and government plan to track your every move with RFID (foreward by Bruce Sterling) Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre
Katherine Albrecht is the foremost anti-RFID advocate and a Christian with a doctorate in Marketing from an Ivy League college. She also wrote The Spychips Threat : Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Computer Tracking.
Katherine Albrecht researched patents and revealed the ways that corps are getting IP holds on which are very scary schemes. The Spychips book represents the loyal opposition
What does it mean when you have a computer and a radio attached to all kinds of objects.
To get down to the nitty gritty of the issue. Exteremely bizzare and very profound set of technologies.
Who is going to make all this happen?
Alien Technology, Intermac, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, Microsoft, Toshiba, NCR, plus smaller “pure play”
Secured Global VeriChip Subscriber Registry is the money object.
WalMart and the DoD are joint sponsors of the electronic code initiative.
WalMart has a really really good supply chain and were able to ship goods to New Orleans faster than FEMA or anything under the US Flag. You’re better sitting under the WalMart flag.
Guards and prisoners in LA County prison are given RFID bracelets
Career criminals repurposing RFID for kidnaps
We’re basically hot-tagging everything. point of fact, the people who built the internet, a bunch of interest groups redefine the stuff as a smaller scale development platform.
What does that do? it changes the supply chain into a different kind of entity.
What is a supply chain? it moves things into our possession.
Beginning link and an end link, and the end link is junk. everything moves in one direction so that everything ends up as junk.
What he’d like to see is a supply loop, so that things come back around
Fabs disintermediate the supply chain. How?
1. virtual plans
2. identity – unique identity for objects; a genuinely unique identity that makes it tracable
3. search engines – allow you to manifest the identity
4. geolocation – the ability to find physical objs. in a physical realm
5. social software – not sure what that or web 2.0 mean, but all of them are apps for real world objects, which is compelling. atelier way for small groups to break into the chain to turn it into a transparent realm. way to rip the old way to shreds. not cute or clean, but like what bloggers were able to do to transform the world, e.g. the US President’s Supreme Court nominee was disassembled by bloggers in important ways. Suppose “social software” could support the same practice for objects like a 747?
6. fabricators
7. cradle-to-cradle assembly technology and design for disassembly
Cradle to Cradle title of a book saying that we don’t get to have industrialism unless we can say that waste is food.
The object is an instantiation of the support system. it’s like it’s own support system. it’s inscribed with itself.
It’s like buying a book on Amazon that comes with an image, information and cross-references, assembled with reviews, etc.
word nuggets
The shadow that supports the object becomes more important than the objects
The Engine is the “Thing” of warcraft
The object is an instantiation of the support system. It’s like it’s own support system. it’s inscribed with itself.
what’s actually new about today’s epic disasters, tragedies, wars, false pretenses leading toward war? 6 billion people trending towards 11 billion the north pole melting away. we’re moving from the unthinkable towards the unimaginable. it’ll be worse than cambodia
Judgments of evil are time bound. it wasn’t evil to find oil for the first time.
It’s to be a modernist to believe that design provides solutions. We need a method to deal with consequences with better attention to managing problems. We need ways to cope, not solutions.
You can track people and keep them in certain areas or away from certain objects. It’s already being done in casinos prisons.
We got the internet we deserved. You can open your browser and get robbed by 10 people before breakfast
The rain falls on the just and unjust alike, even if you’re Trent Lott. You don’t argue for wildfires and melted ice caps.
Games? Maybe invent a game of tag that puts a laquer of the virtual on the physical.
references
VeriChip (CEO former PR guy – ruthlessly looking for some kind of PR angle. Wanted to attach implantable RFID tags into the bloated corpses of people in New Orleans after Katrina and toe tags were no good because the bodies were decomposing and injectable tags were more effective.)
RAND Terrorism and Homeland Security
books mentioned
The other is Spychips: How major corporations and government plan to track your every move with RFID (foreward by Bruce Sterling) Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre
Katherine Albrecht is the foremost anti-RFID advocate and a Christian with a doctorate in Marketing from an Ivy League college. She also wrote The Spychips Threat : Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Computer Tracking.
RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy
[w:The Nine Nations of North America]
Why do I blog this? Sterling has been Visionary-in-Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and has passed through here a few times in various contexts. (He was propped in the back left corner of the room in which I gave my 4S paper a few weeks ago.) He participated in the SoCal Digital Culture Group several months ago and, as part of a discussion, offered the word nugget that “Al Qaeda is a FlashMob” in response to some glowing description of the political import of distributed networks. I enjoy the provocateur in him, even as I think he’s pretty much spot-on on the topics he’s talking about — a sort of [w:Mike Davis]-esque apocalyptic vision, but the vision is more than everything is going south, it’s where it’s going south and notions of ways of coping rather than trying to instrumentalize a modernist solution. I appreciate that kind of capacity to polemicize in that way.
Technorati Tags: Bruce Sterling, Dead Media Project, RFID, security, sensors, spimes