Aram Squalls

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

Mechanized telekinesis strikes again -- this time, as a souped-up TV remote

There seems to be little question that thought-reading machines -- once the exclusive province of science fiction -- are now becoming a viable technology. Although the concept immediately calls up the worst imaginable dystopian nightmares of ultra-Orwellian, networked global mind surveillance for some of us, the press has mostly covered the technology with a "gee-whiz, what won't they think of next" angle. News stories primarily consist of feel-good tales of paraplegics remotely controlling computer cursors and digital prostheses, and torture-free detention centers where the awful truth is sucked painlessly from the minds of terrorism suspects.

But there's something even more deeply unsettling about the new edge of banality creeping into these fantasies. According to the latest version of the story, these amazing new technologies will allow us to change the volume or channel of our TV sets without us having to exert all of the energy it takes to hit a remote control with our thumbs.

Really? That's it? You create a helmet that reads thoughts, and sell it as a souped up TV-remote-skullcap? What's next, a time machine you can use to find a parking space during street-cleaning hour?

New research: Playing music synchs your brainwaves

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute an the University of Salzburg just published new research in BMC Neuroscience demonstrating something that music makers have known for time immemorial: playing music together makes your brainwaves synch up. And the longer you play together, the more synchronized your brainwaves become.

As I argue in my doctoral dissertation and forthcoming book, Configurable Culture, this facet of the musical experience is precisely what makes it such an effective tool for communicating -- and monitoring -- social organizational ideas. Put in other words, the act of making music together is not only analogous to, but constituent of, the act of producing society.

There's a pretty nifty video here showing the EEGs side-by-side with performance footage. Unfortunately, there's no embed link.

Broken industries, fractured lives

I recently saw an old friend of mine, Norm Savage, after about 10 years without contact. He's a writer -- of the post-beat, neo-romantic, soul-searching, confessional variety (although he'd hate being classified this way, I'm sure). He wanted to talk with me about using the Internet to self-publish.

Norm had been a hair's breadth away from landing a big publishing contract with FSG for his powerful memoir of diabetes and heroin addiction, Junk Sick: Confessions of an Uncontrolled Diabetic, which had been about 25 years in the works. Just before the paperwork went through, the economic downturn shook up the market, and his editor got canned. She recommended he wait until she landed somewhere else, and publish with her there, but Norm just couldn't wait any longer. After a quarter of a century of masochistic labor, he wanted his words out in the world.

Despite my frequent championing of participatory culture, I have to admit I was a little skeptical about self-publishing on a site like SmashWords. I've been more successfully brainwashed by the traditional cultural gatekeepers than I like to admit, and for me (an aspiring book author myself), the concept was tainted with the odor of "vanity publishing" -- narcissistic, self-deluded, amateurish, delusional, desperate, etc. After all, FSG is the top of the heap publishingwise, and SmashWords just seemed to be such a tragic fall from grace.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a ridiculous point of view that is. I've read drafts of Norm's book, as well as other work of his, and I know that his story is one that needs to be told, and that his style is one that needs to be read. His book is deep, powerful, painful -- in a word, human. If the traditional publishing industry is so dysfunctional they can't serve as a conduit for writers of Norm's caliber to reach potential readers, then maybe we readers and authors should let them die -- and switch our focus to publishers like SmashWords. Don't get me wrong -- I love the stuff that FSG puts out, from their cover designs to their content. It's just that, knowing the specifics of this case, I can imagine all the other innovative and valuable books they and the other publishing houses are failing to put out.

I'd never purchased a book on SmashWords before, but I just bought Junk Sick. It only costs $2.99, and for that price, I can read it in every imaginable digital format, from HTML to PDF to EPUB. And it's DRM-free, so I won't have the amazingly frustrating experience of being locked out of my own library by a stupid robot, which ended my brief sojourn into ebook-purchasing a few years back.

If you're at all interested in the psychological and social dimensions of diabetes, addiction, writing, sex, music, loneliness, pain, friendship, art, introspection, exhibitionism, love and fear, you should seriously consider buying this book. SmashWords will even let you read the first 35% of it for free. Or you could read an interview with Norm at the SmashWords blog, which will give you a pretty good sense of his character, his story, and his relationship to language.

Norm also publishes his own blog, which is basically fragments of his new book-in-progress, posted as he writes them. It's called The Savage Diabetic.

Robot calls me an unfeeling, pointy-headed jerk

According to Typeanalyzer.com, this blog is completely cerebral, unintuitive, non-idealistic and unfeeling. And to think I was worried at seeming too starry-eyed over Obama...

No one who really knows me would ever recognize me in this description (right, guys? right?):

The analysis indicates that the author of
http://aramsinnreich.typepad.com
is of the type:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Getting inside a composer's brain

One of my arguments about configurability is that it exposes cognitive processes that were once private and internal into the harsh (and/or nurturing) light of public scrutiny. Back in ye olden times, a composer would hear a bunch of influences, integrate and assemble those influences inside his skull, and expose us to the results. Now, we can listen live as this process happens, and even watch a DJ drag and drop samples and effects into Ableton Live.

The industrial side of the equation has a similar story arc. Once upon a time, we could buy a CD or vinyl record, and imagine what each of the parts sounded like on their own (apparently, this is part of the reason nonmusicians like to smoke pot and listen to music -- it allows them to hear the parts separately the way musicians do). Nowadays, musicians will often post the isolated component tracks (e.g. vocals, drums, guitar) to the internet, and invite fans to remix them (as Radiohead did recently).

Well, my crazy composer friend Scott Pinkmountain has taken things to the proverbial next level. He's a music analyst over at Pandora, and he's just produced a fascinating podcast episode for the site where he narrates his compositional decisions while he pulls the tracks of a song apart and reassembles them.

It's really entertaining stuff. Give it a listen.

Thought-control interface for gaming

People who know me know that I love stuff like this: creepy sci-fi technologies seeping almost without comment into our quotidian world. A company called Emotiv has just announced it will be shipping thought-control (and emotion-reading) interfaces, mass marketed to video gamers, later this year. Of course, this stuff has been around for a while -- mostly, DARPA-funded projects whose ostensible purpose is to help paraplegics move a mouse cursor, but of course the real agenda is more like Firefox (not the browser -- the Clint Eastwood movie) -- thought-controlled weaponry to nudge our soldiers ever closer to maximal killing efficiency and an Ender's Game-like remove from the visceral experience of taking life. But, to my knowledge, this is the first time such technology will be available at BestBuy.

Of course, as I've been arguing for years, this tech is half of the necessary infrastructure for networked telepathy (the other half has also been built -- someone just has to put the two pieces together), or, if you want to get really sinister about it, networked thought control.

To put on my analyst's hat for a second: imagine the data mining possibilities this thing will have! McDonald's will actually be able to target action-oriented marketing (buy a Big Mac right now, for 99 cents!!!) based on the real time emotional state of media consumers. Whoa. I've got to bake that into my SEMPO projections.

Now, to put on my video game professor's hat: imagine the feedback effect the adoption of technologies like this would have on game design. Once designers can count on collecting and delivering data through such an interface, it could significantly change gameplay; levels could become faster or harder depending on the level of stress the user exhibits (certain biofeedback games already do this, in a way), or enterprising designers could use the device to break the 4th wall. Imagine Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid taunting you -- not with "his" psychic knowledge of the games you've got stored on your memory card, but based on "his" real-time assessment of your emotional state. [Shudder].

(Thanks, Masha!)

UPDATE: Dave [surname redacted] sez:

hmmm....i'll believe it when/if it works...
at this point, it is all very functional and doesn't work very well, at least what i've seen.  it is all based on mapping electrical signals AFAIK.  neuroscience/brain imaging scares the shit out of me b/c so many people want to believe its possible (and have a vested interest in making it appear possible) that the technology is being sold as being able to do more than it can.  you've seen the stories CNN has done where they're using fMRIs on people to show their "real" voting preferences?  it's batshit crazy to say that one is true (the scan) over the other (the person's articulated preference).  at best you can say that they're in conflict.  but once CNN (or Wired or anyone who can make money off overblowing claims) gets a hold of it, they start making fMRIs say more than they do.

i've been thinking a lot about Eugene Thacker's biomedia argument- what you get is not someone's thoughts, but a machinic interpretation of them, mediated by a computer program that is designed to interpret signals in a particular way.  it is IMO not any different from what was going on in the 19th C when they were measuring fatigue and inferring neurasthenia based on slow reaction time, declining tactual acuity, etc. 

Dawkins, R. (1989). Memes: the new replicators. In The Selfish Gene, pp. 189-201. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes

Cultural transmission and evolution is not unique to man (e.g. bird-song dialects), but is obviously much more complex and thorough in our case.

As in genetic evolution, cultural change may be progressive (e.g. improvements in science)

Replication and differentiation are the keys to evolution. Genes just happen to be the means by which life on this planet evolve. Similarly, memes are the equivalent of genes for cultural transmission and evolution.

Memes are physically instantiated in our nervous systems.

Wow, Dawkins really beat me to the punch here. For a while, I actually believed this was my idea. Obviously, it’s just a meme I inherited from him somehow. But I think his work can still be extended, by looking at the relationship between network society and meme distribution and evolution.

Keys to meme survival are the same as those for genes: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity.

If memes seem to have low copying-fidelity, maybe that is because they are compound memes. Analogy: interracial couple has a baby which seems to “blend” the racial traits. In reality, the genes aren’t blending, there are just a large number of them with complex emergent properties. The same may be inferred for memes.

Although there is no equivalent of chromosomes in the world of memes, they are still competitive. The limiting factors are time and storage space – both in the human nervous system and in the media. Wonder how the explosion of media storage space and acceleration of transmission speeds affects the nature of this competition.

Memes can be self-perpetuating and mutually reinforcing, e.g. “god” and “hell”

Quotes

“Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.” (189)

“for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas of evolution.” (191) this is refreshing, given our genetically deterministic tendencies today. 

“all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities” (192)

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” (192) thesis statement

“the survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.” (193)

“Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution on their own.” (193)

“An ‘idea-meme’ might be defined as an entity that is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another.” (196)

“a cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself.” (200) this is a really important point.

“We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” (201)