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I love my country.
PS - also check out Rick Mercer's interview with new MP and Conservative Health Critic Steven Fletcher. Not only does Steven support universal healthcare (see above quote) but he gets to use really cool technologies!
Townsend's comments about Intel cracked me up - and the article definitely cites the big players: Intel's Urban Atmospheres and Place Lab, Seoul's Digital Media City and "Hewlett Packard's Urban Tapestries project in Bristol, U.K." (Oops! Presumably this is a mash-up of HP's Mobile Bristol project and Proboscis' Urban Tapestries project?) And despite giggling at the "geek turned urban theorist" scenario - I imagined Benjamin's hefty Arcades Project replacing the featherlight laptop as the most-toted geek object - I wondered if this was true. After all, I know many of these people and they're not posers. Nonetheless I am often enough annoyed by sloppy borrowing from unfamiliar disciplines. And it's important to note that much of the urban and cultural theory being cited is explicitly critical and in opposition to the interests of big business. I also know that companies like Intel and HP will be amongst the first to commercialise these technologies, and in the process, commodify some or all of the social practices cited as inspiration. It will be very interesting to see how - or if - these contradictory values get resolved. It also would have been interesting if the article mentioned more artistic explorations in this space that provide fruitful counter-points to the large-scale corporate examples. Nonetheless, I really appreciated this comment:
Companies like Intel and HP project market saturation and work hard to make it happen - but the actuality of global pervasiveness has yet to be seen. After four years of researching this, I am convinced of only one thing: we have mistaken the myths and virtualities of ubicomp for the actualities of technological development, political support and cultural uptake. And much to my surprise, it was the corporate interviewees who helped me realise this.
First of all, I recognise that there are many kinds of humanism, and I'm specifically referring to one kind of posthumanism (and one that definitely shouldn't be confused with transhumanism). Now that gets dodgy, so I try to clarify.
When I think of humanism, I think of the philosophies that hold that "reason and science are the soundest means for investigating claims of truth; that all ideas, values, myths, and social systems are based on human experience; and that free thought thrives best in free, democratic societies." These ways of thinking are historically bound to particular types of scholarship that are the foundations of both the Renaissance and a liberal arts education like my own.
Two elements of humanism interest me the most: the focus on rationality and the focus on individualism. From what I understand, the Greek philosopher Epicurus taught, amongst other things, that pleasure makes humans happy. While certainly suggesting that "people only act according to what they find pleasurable and in their self-interest", Epicureans were referring to the sort of pleasure that comes from avoiding everyday passions and delights in favour of the more lasting aspects of a virtuous life. But this focus on self-interest is what's most interesting to me because it provided the foundation for Western civilisation's belief in free will, individual rights, democracy and capitalism. Futhermore, the scientific revolution was greatly influenced by the combination - and exaltation - of the principles of individualism and rationality.
Now I find myself stuck. Personally, I do not hold individualism and rationality amongst the most important aspects - let alone defining characteristics - of being human. In fact, anthropological fieldwork in aboriginal communities taught me that there are places and ways of living where these concepts are almost entirely meaningless except in, for example, their ability to explain why I was there studying those people instead of the other way around. Because of these experiences I find it very easy to imagine a posthuman world where our assumptions about individualism and rationality are challenged.
Hayles discusses why we may fear the posthuman - at best it suggests redefining what it means to be human and, at worst, it suggests that humans will be replaced by something else (intelligent machines, for instance). Either way, it changes how we understand what it means to be human. In the former case, Hayles suggests that our understandings of humanity may have only ever been true for the privileged few who had the power, wealth and leisure time to conceptualise themselves as autonomous beings. Hayles continues to argue that we might be able to mitigate the fear of becoming enslaved or obsolete by understanding that there is a limit to how seamlessly humans can be articulated with machines because our embodied experiences are fundamentally different.
The redefinition of the human does not scare or worry me. In fact, I might be inclined to extend Latour and say we have never been human. Neither does losing the belief in the supremacy of individualism or rationality bother me. Actually, I find it somehow comforting. So why do I keep thinking about this?
Is it my fear that there are as many kinds of posthumanism as there are humanism? Some of these ideas - and none more so than the ones that proclaim to be humane - enrage and frighten me to the point that I find myself wanting to defend a humanity I don't even believe exists! In the end, I think what I really want to hold on to - whether or not we are entering a posthuman world - is a sense of humanitarianism. I am, first and last and always, concerned about the welfare of people, all kinds of people.
And that leaves me with a new question: what happens to humanitarianism in a posthuman world?
And Hervé Fischer muses On the Sophisticated Fragility of Digitized Memory:
I tend to agree that the "prosumer" label ironically smacks of branding-guru-speak, but it also smacks of the "RFID-on-all-products-will-allow-me-to-make-better-informed-purchases-and-therefore-stick-it-to-the-man" and other non-ironic utopian, technological, democratic discourses I keep reading.
Thanks also to Things for pointing at Eye magazine's special issue on brand madness and Design Observer's discussion of Nick Bell's implication (indictment?) of designers in The Steamroller of Branding.
I'm also more interested in Terry Eagleton's Fresh Look at Wally Olins's Highly Regarded Branding Manual - but perhaps not for the same reasons. I groaned when the "fresh look" concluded with this statement:
Brands may not represent identity, but they certainly act in our performances of individual and group identities, including No Logo anti-brand identities and "I-am-impervious-to-the-power-of-brands" prosumer identities.
Whether or not you support brands and branding, prosumption is not really a critique of consumption or consumerism. Marketers may have overestimated the importance of brands in terms of loyalty and sales, but saying that consumers have more power because they have more information is a dodgy claim. Power to do what? Buy what we want? Versus what? Buying what we are told to buy? When did we ever do that? And power to be who? People never identified with purchased goods? Non-consumers? I don't think so.
You can check out the syllabus and lectures notes, as well as the class blog. And if you ask really nice, Liz will send you the readings.
My quick answer?
There's always The Phenomenology of Perception. But The Body in Pain really made me think about when language fails, and Dangerous Emotions is a hell of a read.
And, really, to do philosophy is to live life.
But Wal*mart says:
Well then. I guess that settles it. Shopping wins.
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You can catch Greg Lynn speaking on Going Primitive, Peter Galison on Epistemic Machines and Giles Lane on the City of Memory, amongst others.
(via Simon)
In today's (subscription only) Globe and Mail, Samarasekera is also quoted as saying:
I hope she keeps her word, and I certainly look forward to witnessing her accomplishments over the next five years.
As a social anthropologist, I take for granted what Stumpf exalts. This everyday life is exactly what ethnographers and cultural studies seek to describe, and it was with this focus that some of the best critiques of everyday life - including living and cooking - were formulated. By focussing on the mundane and the taken-for-granted, these types of research move beyond surface, and critique the social and cultural status quo. Stumpf describes this process as a shift from looking to living, and as much as I take heart in his appreciation for these perspectives in design contexts, I suspect that the potential contribution of critical ethnography and cultural studies remains underestimated. And ultimately, I believe it is people, not design, who suffer for that.
No offense, but purpose is not enough when we're talking ethics. You know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all...
The IEET "works closely" with the World Transhumanist Association. And far be it from me to say I know better than an Oxford philosopher, but transhumanism really weirds me out.
No, I don't think it's dangerous in the same ways that, say, Francis Fukuyama claims, or that certain scientific research should be entirely prohibited, but as an ethical position it is not a given.
So, while I certainly support greater attention to the ethics of technological development, I would - and should - be careful to define what those ethics are. Otherwise the IEET might appear to represent all ethical positions instead of just their own.
I also like the "punctuation" rationale behind the new display systems:
Well done.
Along these lines, Geraci and Dana Spiegel led workshops on building community wireless hotspots at Spectropolis, and John also presented Community and Boundary in the Age of Mobile Computing at the Ubicomp 2004 Ubicomp in the Urban Frontier workshop:
While I certainly appreciate characterising communities as social threads (practices) instead of as discrete objects, and I believe that physical and virtual worlds indeed overlap, I am very suspicious of the notion that any technology will dissolve social boundaries. Not only does this suggest that borders and boundaries are inherently oppressive - which they are not - but it also implies that they are weak enough to disappear without being missed. And clearly, Neighbornode envisions some sort of locally bounded community of neighbours.
There is also something else here that troubles me, but I'm not sure I can properly explain it yet. It has to do with underlying assumptions about individuals and groups, and how they relate. This weirdness (see how articulate I can be?!) also appears in most social software and social network discussions, and has something to do with mutually exclusive categories and systems-thinking... I'll have to get back to that another time.
In response, John Thackara (in the November Doors of Perception Report) predictably slams academics and exalts, well, I'm not exactly sure:
Since no one likes ivory-tower academics, they're a too-easy target. And surely intelligent and insightful non-academics like Thackara understand the value of using examples to make a point?
I can't be the only one who thinks hers is a valid question - where is the best of today's critical design?
Later in the same report Thackara points at the interesting-sounding Spark! Design and Locality book, as well as the System Disruption and Viper Basel events - all of which look like good candidates, and not lacking in academic involvement or interest.
UPDATE: Carl DiSalvo - a fabulously interesting PhD Design Candidate at Carnegie Mellon - writes to say "I think one of the problems in answering the question is that it is unclear what constitutes critical design. As you have pointed out in the past, much of critical design is not critical - it might be confrontational, it is often 'conceptual' - but not necessarily critical. That being said, I would vote for the obvious, Dunne and Raby. It would seem that academic design is the place for critical design, I just don't see it being a sustained practice in professional 'out in the world' practice. Also I'm not sure if issues like 'design and cultural difference, design and sustainability, design and technology, or even user-centered design' constitute critical design. These issues certainly are engaged in professional 'out in the world' practice, but not necessarily in any critical manner. For example, I'm reminded of seeing a well-known sustainable architect speaking about how he designed an eco-appropriate Ford plant in the Amazon, and being valorized by designers for his 'social conscientiousness' - it was baffling."
Good points. (I cringe when I think about someone being congratulated for building a Ford plant in the Amazon!) Carl's dissertation is "concerned with the roles and responsibilities of design in the distribution of agency between people and products" and he currently works with CMU's Project on People and Robots. In the past he was involved with the (critical-in-the-way-we-mean) Predatory Lending Garments performance.
Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and are due by November 15, 2004. Panel proposals are also welcome. Please submit them to: conference@transmediale.de
