"There’s not enough time in the world for people to sacrifice infinite amounts of opportunity and cognition. This means that, in a SPIME world, designers must design, not just for objects or for people, but for the technosocial interactions that unite people and objects: designing for opportunity costs and cognitive load. These resources deserve special design attention because these are the resources that are now in scarcity."
"In a world of SPIME, the growing problems of attention load and opportunity costs have been finessed. Most probably, they’ve been deputized to powerful information machinery. These processes depend, as search engines do, on social software which can track human desire and interest."
Bruce Sterling - Wired Blog Review
Having read thousands of blogs on innumerable topics, the 'Best of the Web' award goes to Sci Fi writer Bruce Sterling and his Wired blog, "Beyond the Beyond". Sterling's writing and ideas are perfectly suited to the medium, with insights, comments, and artifacts published on a daily basis - making it an essential bookmark or RSS feed for those interested in underground cyberculture and the evolution of technology. The blog is a stream of literary artifacts hand-picked from obscure bins across the internet, mixed together with images of cyberpunk, steampunk, and pop culture, illuminated with remarks by Sterling in triple parentheses. Blogging, to Sterling, is “inherently unstable… built on an unstable platform.” He makes the point that 93% of the blogs started since he began “Beyond” in 2003 have disappeared. Print media is also disappearing. So are the polar icecaps. What we are presented with are bits of information, minor events, appearances, tossed from storm to storm, framing the public disasters and media catastrophes that form our collective culture and contemporary history. Like a dictionary whose definitions are constantly in flux as its pages are torn out and whirl around in the wind, Sterling is the laser scanner that surfs and frames the memes moment by moment before they are flagged as spam and deleted. In our time, it is profoundly visionary. As he writes,
“The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it. The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions. Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion. None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank recognition of the stakes... When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”
"In a SPIME technosociety, most everything has metrics. Human beings and their objects are awash in metrics. There are many ways to make these metrics impinge on my behavior – by making things cost more or less, of course, but also mostly by making their workings more obvious, giving me a stake, and putting them closer to my fingertips."
"When the entire industrial process is made explicit, when the metrics count for more than the object they measure, then GIZMOS become SPIMES."
Bruce Sterling – Biography, Bibliography, & Links:
“Beyond the Beyond” is the work of a literary DJ, and Sterling has recently written a chapter on its practice in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008). His previous works were seminal in founding both the Cyberpunk and Steampunk movements, through the “Mirrorshades” anthologies and his novel, “The Difference Engine” written with William Gibson. MIT MediaWorks has published his ebook, “Shaping Things,” described as “a brilliant, often hilarious history of created objects and the environment, Shaping Things proposes that in the future we will see a new kind of thing: the user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable ‘spime’ that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. This short book is a call to great action.” As is written on his Wikipedia page,
“He has been the instigator of three projects which can be found on the Web -
(1) The Dead Media Project - A collection of ‘research notes’ on dead media technologies, from Incan quipus, through Victorian phenakistoscopes, to the departed video game and home computers of the 1980s. The Project's homepage, including Sterling's original Dead Media Manifesto can be found at http://www.deadmedia.org
(2) The Viridian Design Movement - his attempt to create a 'green' design movement focused on high-tech, stylish, and ecologically sound design. The Viridian Design home page, including Sterling's Viridian Manifesto and all of his Viridian Notes, is managed by Jon Lebkowsky at http://www.viridiandesign.org. The Viridian Movement helped to spawn the popular "bright green" environmental weblog Worldchanging. WorldChanging contributors include many of the original members of the Viridian ‘curia’.
(3) Embrace the Decay - a web-only art piece commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. Incorporating contributions solicited through The Viridian Design 'movement', Embrace the Decay was the most visited piece/page at LA MOCA's Digital Gallery, and included contributions from Jared Tarbell of levitated.net and co-author of several books on advanced Flash programming, and Monty Zukow, creator of the winning 'decay algorithm' sponsored by Bruce.”
For more information on Bruce Sterling, visit:
Bruce Sterling - Wikipedia Page
"Beyond the Beyond" - Wired Blog
The Mirrorshades PostModern Archive
"Shaping Things" - MIT MediaWorks
The WELL - State of the World - 2009
