Science fiction novel by Vernor Vinges; the Wikipedia summary forgots to mention the confiscation and destruction of library books.
If you spent the last two years in Second Life, agitating about Mesh and Display Names and going to SLCC and various Metaverse Meetups, and fretting about copyright and SL Marketplace, obviously, you weren't at the cutting edge, as we all know.
Somewhere about two years ago, or two or three of those Virtual World Expo conferences ago (now they're renamed Engage! Expo and cover everything virtual, not just worlds but mobile, electronic kids' toys that hook up to the Internet, etc.) I could see that people like Tish Shute were losing interest in virtual worlds because they'd sort of played out. They had kind of done everything they could with them and they were either too expensive to keep playing with, or the tech was getting old and not "scaling," or whatever, and so if they couldn't get themselves a Farmville sort of game deal (like Raph Koster did with his Metaplace, which then morphed to Island Life and then got him a position in Playdom, where Robin Harper (Robin Linden) is now, too) -- they moved on to two other areas: a) apps for mobile phones, where they could make a fortune (or so they would hope) on various Yelp and FourSquare clones, or b) augmented reality via smart phones.
Augmented Reality would usually make some Second Lifers roll their eyes -- it had a lot of the feel of LARPs (Life-Action Role Play) of being out in real life doing something dorky. But certain SLers tried to combine SL and AR in various ways (remember Jerry Paffendorf linking up an art show with Destroy TV at the Lit Lounge art gallery?) and of course Tish Shute very early understood that she needed to drop not only commercial virtual worlds, even their open sim reverse-engineered clones that weren't really that exciting, and go into AR (VWs may be pressed into service later).
If you've tried to keep up with Tish's blog in the last two years, you'd give up, because not only are the posts extremely long (longer even than what I write), the material is very technically difficult for the non-geek and worse, very heavily geek culture ideological. They are always making a better world....
But, it would have paid to pay more attention to Tish and try to argue with her and her geek pals more (I did to some extent, and it's not too late to go to her blog and catch up) because as you can see from this "news you can use" sort of popularized New York Times article, AR will be a reality that will "slowly start to make consumers change their behaviour" (!) before you will have had time to properly understand what it is. And that's how the geeks like it -- disruptive, even destructive, as long as they profit and gain power from it.
I tune into it now and then, and usually have to bookmark it and leave it for later. Hence this blog, a kind of bookmark of a bigger sort to remind myself to "do something" about this latest encroachment on freedom
As you can see from the various very uncritical pieces in the Tech pages of the times about Layar and such, there is very little critical thinking going on about this topic, and instead, a headlong giddy rush, as with other new tech toys, to allow geeks to set the agenda by the lights of their own hacker culture, with some of them taking the kind of nihilistic and obliterative approach that we see fictionalized in Vernor Vinges "Rainbow's End" science fiction novel.
It's all the more nihilist and obliterative because it poses as "fun" and "cool". I'm going to try to convey what I came to understand about the experiments I saw being done with this in SL, which included Babbage Linden's tagging system, and this strange gang on the Transhumanism planet having a talk with a major brand about creating clothes that would be wired into your autonomous nervous system (remember how they always like to go for that, see Ed Castronova) and flash colours like a mood ring, or portray on your avatar as akind of elaborate emoticon.
If you've been following all this complex stuff for years, there is a great greed around it -- not just greed by this or that company to capitalize on it, although there is that, too, but greed even (especially) by those who want to make it all open source (so they can offer it free, collect audiences and then build their consulting or app businesses on top of that freeness). There is an enormous thirst to take over people with it, to impose heavy doctrinal messaging under the guise of groovy seminar-speak like "the world we need is one we have not even seen yet" (see ugotrade.com) and to win.
One of the things these geeks like O'Reilly get excited about is the idea of the *petabytes* -- sheer huge unknown quantities -- of data that coders can manipulate and that even requires computers watching computers beyond human understanding, so that the beloved Singularity (the Geek Rapture) begins to arrive and assume us all up to cyber-heaven (and of course, some will be Left Behind if they are guilty of FUD). There are Google engineers studying deep data and peering into the vastness of vast information and the people Tish writes about describe this process where by unconscious machines take over as an ecstatic one, without ever bothering to establish that these are in fact machines *of loving grace* or not. I have a feeling they won't be.
Years ago when people talked about AR (like virtual worlds) they got sidetracked on imagining the problem of how you'd get people to wear goggles that would have a virtual world going in one eye, with augmentations piped in, and get them also to see reality -- it would be confusing. Or how you'd get people to sit with terminals and have AR -- it all seemed cumbersome.
So people didn't realize right away that when you have the palm-sized "smart phone" with the eye in it you can wave around to do stuff, why, it will be like the Lindens' hand-eye logo -- in fact, why not sew one of those cameras right into your palm and insert a nanobot into your nervous system and be done with it?!
The way in which intrusive and collectivizing AR will be sold at first obviously won't be that way, but will be in forms that seem like crowd-pleasers. What, you're not willing to help fight pollution in the environment with these detectors? That was how David Orban and Joi Ito were going to foist their spimes on you (they seem to have disappeared with those, but they will bring them back when ready). Spimes, of course, are sensors in "space-time" (hence "spime") out of a science fiction novel that get stuck on everything everywhere and relay info back. But...you don't have to put spimes out against the will of "backward" townspeople who hate the idea of spying devices on their telephone poles when *you get everybody with a cell phone already just to hold it up*. Easy as pie!
What, you're not willing to have children learn cool science-y stuff in school by waving their phone-wands around and having tags talk to them instead of people, what, you're not interested in seeing the ingredients in a product, etc. etc.
See how it works?
But then you start thinking about the rest of it...why Google feels the need to take pictures of every single building and street in every city (to be able to use it for AR), what data is captured merely by using your phone, its apps, and that little camera eye that begin to augment your reality whether you want to or not (like that ACLU ad about privacy placed in the future, where the guy tries to order a pizza and gets a lecture about poor nutrition and offer of a yoghurt instead).
This 'news you can use' style popular article also couches this wonderfulness in terms of games and coupons, the way social media business models try to work now. Who wouldn't want "augmented reality" on your phone the way you'd want a 3-D movie like Avatar, or 4Square fun? They aren't thinking through what it means when everything in your life is embedded with tags as part of its manufacturing, sale and purchase process...which means that it is no longer our own, but the Network's.
The most obvious problem isn't even the hidden "obey" and "consume" signs a reader invoked fearfully (or cynically), such as those that "the Hidden Persuaders" put into ads (as such subliminal advertisers were called after a book by Vance Packard of that title in the 1970s). Those you might get an ap to pick out eventually the way all ad blocking works.
What's more troublesome is *who gets to make and decide the interface*. Under the guise of the need for "standards" (how dare we not have standards on the Internet!), some group of big companies, or some pioneers with an agenda, will basically overthrow everybody else on this before they even realize what hit them.
Just like "Rate My Prof" and the hotel ads that people put online that can be devastating cruel or stupid or unfair, we will all be stuck with reviews and comments and tags and other detritus of the new "Internet of Things". Say, who gets to write all the reviews? They will be *cough* crowdsourced?
And here's the worst part of it, as I've conceived of it thinking about it for some years in the virtual world of Second Life (where the developers and their friends are very keen on this AR stuff and have experimented on it extensively): when you tag everything, when you put a RFID in everything, when you digitalize everything, when you make everything a connected node in the "Internet of Things," you completely collectivize reality. Private property ceases to exist as we know it. The thing-in-itself as it is in the real world barely matters anymore; what matters is how it renders and is accessed and overlaid with Layar and other applications and possessed by the crowd -- or those few "thought leaders" who hide behind the crowd.
Of course all the share-bears love that idea.
But...I find that part of it is really awful. I think people haven't even begun to realize how awful that's going to be. When every single thing in your life, a bottle of water, a chair, a bed, an alarm clock, a bus ticket, becomes a narrating talker, narrating a story you may not control.
A disconnected plant not on the Net, with no RFID, with no "share," with no narrative, with no picture, might become something very precious indeed, as if beckoning to you to come to another life where you will be free, and where you are no longer...
yep.
the internet of all things.... all "revalued". YOU mostly.;)
AR goes back to the same 15 years ago as VR on the web. Same "techie" arrogance about needed Head mounted displays dominated it for years...
portable "screens" with cameras.. yes.. the magic bullet for the AR folks...
i had done a bunch of AR designs/ writngs in the early 2000s.. but hated the idea that "tagging" wasnt "real information" being sensed.. just mediated pap that would lessen value.....
so i didnt patent it all..lol
oh well. id rather have the tricorder that analysises the unknown, more than an iphone that just tells me whats been tagged as "real" in front of me.
i alo wrote about giant 6" mickey mouses walking around the streets of the future back in the mid 90s... but i thought it was satire and for entertianment value only - even in that future...."roger rabbit" anyone? but know we have a culture who saw that movie as kids... making over our entire realworld as the cartoon.
they really need to "watch" the twilight zone episodes with billy mummy and "better worlds"...
cornfields for us all..
Posted by: cube inada | 12/21/2010 at 11:44 AM
http://mediabastard.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/its-a-good-augmented-life-meet-the-new-boss/
Who will YOU be. tommorrow?.. better yet, who (or what) will Billy make you?;) virtually "only" of course...;)
Posted by: cube inada | 12/21/2010 at 01:14 PM