*When it comes to software deployment I'm in the anti-sorcery camp.
*The title of this van Kranenberg discussion, or rumination, or riposte, seems to be "Bilbo and the Trolls," but I'm not sure why.
We don't need sorcery: false magic enchantment
We need magic and for that you need to trust the magician, e.g. yourself
(a reply to Why have we yet to be enchanted by the internet of things?)
"The first of all magical sciences being the knowledge of one's self, so is one's own creation first of all works of science; it contains the others, and is the principle of the great work...To learn self-conquest is therefore to learn life, and the austerities of stoicism were
no vain parade of freedom!" - Levi
Vassily Kandinsky sends a painting to art historian and critic Michael Sadler, Christmas 1913. This was 7 months before WW1." It appeared to Michael Sadler that the painting was ‘explosive’, ‘warlike’. A year later he asked Kandinsky if he had made the painting because he felt there was a war going on. No he said I knew nothing of war. But this I did know, that there was a terrible battle going on at a spiritual level. It was that battle that led me to paint this." - Michael T. H. Sadler
"If customers are to embrace the new era of connectivity, devices must be imbued with a touch of magic", says MIT researcher David Rose. According to Levi in his History of Magic "there are two kinds of realization, the true and the fantastic. The first is the exclusive secret of magicians, the other belongs to enchanters and sorcerers." David Rose is an enchanter and a sorcerer. It is vital to realize this and not have our #iot paradigm build on watered down principles of transformation. To respect the notion of becoming itself, the very source that brings life as perpetual small moments of conflict and release, let's call it love, ok we say it - we need to bring our energy up to the level of a pragmatic cybernetics; a system level.
The engineering toolset recently began eating itself as it found that it had no more real boundaries. After automating work, leisure, administration, governing, it succumbed briefly to the notion of the ‚Living Lab’ but soon realized that the last territory it had to conquer was the space in between driving to work and back home: everyday life and living. Like a grin trying out faces it tried out all human forms of organization till it found the space in between where love lives and hope and shame and fear.
It is a pity hat I have to come forward and talk about things best not spoken and certainly not to those who have no clue of what is being said. Silence is always best. Silence always stays, you keep it close, don't let it stray.
There are times so serious, however, that one cannot keep silent. Moments before someone put together the parts of the wheel, or carved that roundness out of some tree trunk, dreamed it in a starry night, stumbled of a cliff stepping up a round boulder. Who knows? The minute before the final part clicked itself inside the framework that build the steam engine. Now who is concerned with the sea of moments before that happened? That is just the past and the present somehow got made or somehow made itself. But does it?
No, we are not always so lucky, charmed or doomed to be in the presence of ontological shifts: transitions that shift the basics of what value is, what meaning is and what it means to be human.
These shifts are no flashes, they build up slowly over time. Real transitions are rare. The normal is like the bank in the casino. It always has an edge over anything else.
At Clemson University Nathan Weaver set up an experiment to figure out how to make it safer for turtles to cross highways. He “put realistic looking rubber turtles, no bigger than a saucer, in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched as over the next hour, seven drivers intentionally ran over the turtle, and several more appeared to try to hit the defenseless animal, but missed….One in 50 drivers ran over the dummy turtles. In itself that ratio might seem –although still awful (and not taking into account drivers aiming for but missing the turtle) not alarming, “but consider how long it take a turtle to cross the road and it becomes plain to see that road-crossing for turtles on any semi)busy road means guaranteed death.” I have always missed this particular kind of intelligence as being instrumental or maybe at some point even decisive. Yet the fact is that this intelligence has particular technology that ensures that by each small unkind and selfish act it is not an equally small consequence but - due to the fact that the infrastructure (road) forces the tool (car) to follow a particular path - is able to destroy totally that which is its opposite (slow, vulnerable, purposeful).
In our case we have to mention outsourcing the tooling of our everyday surroundings to the machine and to software leading up to the paradox that with all our apps we still feel radically insecure as we can no longer reverse engineer every step along the way without using the same software. We have to mention RFID hacking back to WWII with Spitfires returning to base with active cones in their noses; friend-foe technology. The barcode from 1974, TCP/IP of course, the 1988 Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf text on Knowbots in which they outline what Google would be doing; building products as gateways between Body Area Network (Glass, Lens), LAN (Powermeter, NEST), their car covering the Wide Area Network and their work in the 'smart' city (sponsoring any type of cultural media institution). That mysterious Cloud shapeshifting somewhere around 2000, no, wireless updating of electric cars could not be done in the 90s because of the cost of storage. Google and other Over The Top players like Über and AirBnB combined with free messaging services such as LINE and Whatsapp, building individual profiles and indicators realizing dynamic pricing not only in closed environments like planes (we all pay a different price), but in our supermarkets under five years, 2020.
Laplace said: "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
Well, we are in the process of individuating every object on the planet to be addressed digitally, build ipv6 into the cheapest ecology of hardware (a commodity), open source software, storage, analytics and connectivity (a commodity) in short we are entering a world in which every transaction, every negotiation, every encounter will no longer be analogue but fully hybrid. There will always be a third party involved somehow. That third party is a hit in a database. The database is owned by a company with shareholders. They want shareholder value: lots of it.
And so in this new axiomatic space David Rose brings in 'Sting'. In this ontological shift he wants us, he wants you! - to look at gadgets and make us all believe that this trickery is what we should long for. To be enchanted. But is saying by whom? By lovely elves or disinterested witches? Ah no. You will be, you need to be, you long to be enchanted by the next level of marketing. Ooh you will say. Now I shift to the right and look the lamp is going on or off. Wow! The Fort -Da moment Feud interpreted as our way of dealing with the symbolic absence of the mother.
"The inspiration of Frodo’s sword can be seen in something Rose invented a few years ago – an Accuweather – connected ambient umbrella with a handle glows if rain is expected in the next 12 hours."
Rose invented that? In early 2000s Victor Vina and Hector Serano made netUmbrella, an umbrella providing you with the weather forecasts, Victor and Hector called them Netobjects. John Cris Jones, Softopia (UK) wrote about them: 'the new in the old' (December 2, 2003). "Each object has one very simple and specific function. For example, netGossip is a pot dedicated to the readers of Hello magazine and keeps them posted about the latest (mis)adventures of their favorite stars. netUmbrella, is an umbrella providing you with the weather forecasts, netFlirt is a box that stamps love messages for lonely hearts, netCuckoo is a cuckoo clock that displays news, with a switch to choose between left wing or right wing news, etc."
The first encounter of Bilbo in The Hobbit with our space is quite different:
"Bert and Tom went off to the barrell. William was having another drink. Then Bilbo plucked up courage and put his litle hand in William's enormous pocket. There was a purse in it, as big as a bag to Bilbo."Ha", he thought, warming to his new work as he lifted it carefully out, " this is a beginning!".
It was! Trolls' purses are the mischef, and this was no exception." ' Ere, oo are you" it squeaked, as it left the pocket, and William turned around at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind the tree. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p.34)
Tolkien himself had a term for what we come to know as Internet of Things, aka pervasive computing, aka ubicomp, aka Ambient Intelligence; he called it the Talkative Planet.
“No, I don't claim to know anything about such things, and I'm not laying down the law. But I feel it. I have been visited, or spoken to, 'Ramer said gravely. 'Then, I think, the meaning was direct, immediate, and the imperfect translation perceptibly later: but it was audible.”
I raised the issue of animism at Ubicomp 2002 in a discussion with researchers and nobody understood that. That fact and my experience at an earlier Conference in Jonschöping on Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3) - where a speaker said that in ten years time everyone would have a Bluetooth ring and point at a tree when walking in the woods and a screen would pop up! and you would get information about that tree and I looked around and everyone seemed to be happy with that - led to my work in the past fifteen years of building Council - theinternetofthings.eu - as a way of gaining agency and becoming an influence in the actual building of it.
So yes it is extremely important how we approach questions of magic, agency, the scripted serendipity (internet of things second hand ‚magic’) in David Rose's database reality of ‚Google Now’ and whether it will be possible at all for the younger generations to approach any non-tagged or non-micro-processored object thereby losing the very notion that that object itself resonates and ‚is’ or ‚acts’, being removed thus twice from what we have until perceived as reality. We also have to find a way to compensate for that loss and investigate what can be gained and what can be won in such a world.
In a ubiquitous computing environment the new intelligence is extelligence, “knowledge and tools that are outside people’s heads”. When computational processes disappear, the environment becomes the interface. In such an environment - where the computer has disappeared as visible technology - and human beings have become designable and designerly information spaces - design decisions inevitably become process decisions. Are our current designers, architects, policy makers equipped to deal with these fundamental issues and dilemma’s, where what used to be media ethics has now become building ethics itself?
Ten years ago I wrote:
"Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependent on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be externalized. Throughout Western civilization the history of memory externalization runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not been deliberate. This then is the fundamental change and the design challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology. In what respect will it alter our notion of the self as a more or less stable identity? Will it not provoke an identity building on the ability to change roles in communication environments? What kind of privacies lay hidden in our new connectivities? In a mediated environment - where everything is connected to everything - it is no longer clear what is being mediated, and what mediates.’
Our current shift towards a 'smart' world, 'ambient intelligence', an Internet of Things could be felt in the past decades, was noted by science fiction authors and is engulfing itself towards the more 'normal' notions of the 'real'. As more people are 'getting it' this eschaton "a real future event which will be qualitatively different from all previous events and which is the only event that can give ultimate meaning to one's present situation.", is beginning to work its way into finding interfaces to make the transition from Renaissance time to Realtime possible as a foundation of a new kind of order, in the plain sense of the word; ordering space, body, movement and action. In this light we can understand the notions of end-time, end of times, or the 2015 ideas on radical change; we are moving to, or will awake in a world with a qualitatively different notion of time as experiencing multiple and consecutive events become the default of ordinary experience, a kind of experience that in Renaissance time was the stage of the visionary, the tools of the creative painters, the psychotic trance of self salvation of the manic mind. The exception becomes the rule in Realtime.
The question is who can live there? And what kind of solidarities will be forged in a world where multiplicity of experience and identity is the default? This is the space after all where everything lies painfully shining in light and transparency is radical. It took Nietzsche a lifetime to painstakingly conquer it, and in conquering 'it' losing himself as self.
For you an RFID tag on a t-shirt or can of tea is still an object + an RFID tag. You know that an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag/sticker can talk to your phone with an NFC reader (for example all LG phones currently) as the last four digits point to a web page and your phone is always on so it goes an collects that page to show you allergy information or where it came from or who made it. But your kids won't. For them the tag has become a 'quality' of the shirt. It is normal for them that shirts trigger information on a device. It is 'natural'. Now what will happen if only money-makers are in that link from the tag to the device/phone? Any story told through that link will be seen as 'real'. As real as the shirt or the can of tea. And that is how power has for centuries scripted reality.
There is nothing magical about that. There is no enchantment here. It is raw power actualizing itself into a new marketing scheme. And this time that reality, as Baudrillard shows us in his Agony of Power, becomes 'integral', as there is nothing but that reality. According to Levi: "Evocations should have always a motive and a becoming end; otherwise, they are works of darkness and folly, most dangerous for health and reason. To evoke out of pure curiosity, and to find out whether we shall see anything, is to be predisposed to fruitless fatigue."
This is not the moment to start talking about solutions. They are there. You can start here http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/what-is-the-internet-of-things
We cannot go back, nor go to live in a world without this connectivity. But this is sure. New forms of power are being forged as we speak. We will have new Kings and new Queens and they will answer to no one, to no parliament, to no law that is not hardcoded in devices or the infrastructure. We have a tiny window of opportunity to spread the benefits of #IoT over every human being, animal, machine and even the planet. Either we grab that, or we will live in the new middle ages. Smart gated communities for those who can afford them. Mad Max in between.
Make your choice. Choose your magicians wisely.
Let's hear Levi again: "Things that are external are for us what our word internal makes them. To believe that we are happy is to be happy ; what we esteem becomes precious in proportion to the estimation itself : this is the sense in which we can say that magic changes the nature of things."
Let us esteem honesty, integrity, respect and love. In doing that we might be able to build that smart society for all, eradicate corruption and dishonesty and exploit the talents of all the population.
"for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes." - Laplace
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Rob van Kranenburg
bio
http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/rob-van-kranenburg
@robvank
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Notes
Andy Meek: Why have we yet to be enchanted by the internet of things?http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/16/internet-of-things-connected
ELIPHAS LEVl'S TRANSCENDENTAL MAGIC ITS DOCTRINE AND RITUAL, LONDON GEORGE REDWAY 1896 : "There is a true and a false science, a divine magic and an infernal magic in other words, one which is delusive and darksome ; it is our task to reveal the one and to unveil the other, to distinguish the magician from the sorcerer, and the adept from the charlatan. The magician avails himself of a force which he knows, the sorcerer seeks to abuse a force which he does not understand. If it be possible in a scientific work to employ a term so vulgar and so discredited, then the devil gives himself to the magician and the sorcerer gives himself to the devil. The magician is the sovereign pontiff of nature, the sorcerer is her profaner only. The sorcerer bears the same relation to the magician that a superstitious and fanatical person bears to a truly religious man."
Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814 http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/laplaces_demon.html
http://www.publicwriting.net/2.2/digital_diary_03.11.09.html See also http://www.hectorserrano.com/index.php?id=41&m=lab&grupo=net
The project was developed by Hector Serrano (the designer of the swimming pool lamp) and Victor Viña and launched last October 2003 at e-culture fair 2 in Amsterdam. The exhibition consists of eight interactive prototypes, eight photographs, and a video with testimonials of the eight characters of this story. http://jisunlee01.blogspot.be/2005/03/internet-for-those-who-wouldnt.html
Talkative Planet: A term coined by Tolkien long before the father of ubicomp, Mark Weiser, coined the term. The Notion Club Papers (part one). The History of the Lord of the Rings, part 4. Christopher Tolkien. J.R.R Tolkien Sauron Defeated. Harper Collins, 2002, p. 230. In his Notes Christopher Tolkien mentions that his father had written 'Ramer is 'Self', but had crossed that later.
BUILDING TOMORROW TODAY: Community, design and technology, 13 - 15 September 2000
Jönköping, Sweden. This year's i3 Annual Conference, Building Tomorrow Today, will integrate key concepts and perspectives from innovative computing technologies, the design of interactive and collaborative systems, and research into systems which support communication and collaboration among communities. http://www.i3net.org/btt/
Extelligence is a term coined by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in their 1997 book Figments of Reality. They define it as the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media (e.g. tribal legends, folklore, nursery rhymes, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, etc.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extelligence
Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity, The Gospel of Liberation, p.76
Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, 1814 http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/laplaces_demon.html
