Metaverse Madness

Late last month Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc., or simply Meta for short. The timing of the announcement led many commentators to interpret the re-branding as an attempt by Facebook leadership to direct attention away from the leaked documents and whistleblower testimony that were drawing scrutiny to the company at the time. Zuckerberg himself downplayed the coincidental timing and described the primary motivation of the name change as minimizing confusion that may be generated by the corporate entity sharing a name with one of its many app services.

The October re-branding announcement sparked a deluge of commentary and a spike in usage of the term “metaverse.” Yet the notion of the metaverse has been floated by Zuckerberg and others far in advance of the recent name change. In January of last year venture capitalist and essayist Matthew Ball penned an oft-cited overview of the looming metaverse. Ball’s primer presents a definition of the metaverse and surveys the fundamental characteristics of what the metaverse both is and is not. The primary case study in this account is Epic Games, purveyor of the uber-popular Fortnite. Part of what sets Fornite apart, Ball says, is its role as a virtual gamespace where players engage and interact with an unparalleled range of pop culture intellectual property (IP).

“To this end, Fortnite is one of the few places where the IP of Marvel and DC intersects. You can literally wear a Marvel character’s costume inside Gotham City, while interacting with those wearing legally licensed NFL uniforms. This sort of thing hasn’t really happened before. But it will be critical to the Metaverse.”

The image of gamers clad in licensed superhero regalia while interacting in pop culture themed environments brings the movie Ready Player One to mind, and Ball actually refers to Ready Player One to illustrate how aspects of the metaverse may be reflected in the popular imagination. Last Spring, in the halcyon early pandemic days when I still thought my stay with my family would only last a month or two, I watched Ready Player One with my mom and sister. I had seen the film once before, and the story itself was the same bland trifle that I remembered. However, watching the movie in 2020, in the context of a global pandemic that has sent everyone indoors to more fully interface with virtual fantasy worlds mediated by various screens, the film seemed chillingly vital. When the film concluded I stated to my viewing companions that while the movie wasn’t very good, it might be among the most important in terms of reflecting the zeitgeist.

The not-too-distant future of Ready Player One seemed shockingly more possible in 2020 than when it was first released in 2018. Drones deliver pizzas amidst the ramshackle housing towers comprised of motley stacks of mobile homes. Within these rickety domiciles the inhabitants don VR headsets that enable users to ignore their deteriorating real world surroundings by immersing their consciousness in virtual dream worlds. Furthermore, the film’s emphasis on recognizable pop culture artifacts, decontextualized media signifiers, and reverence for the minutiae of fictional worlds seems highly resonant with our contemporary media and consumer culture. Our cultural landscape is dominated by an endless proliferation of cinematic universes most pervasively characterized by the remediation or reinvention of established franchises or IP, a cynical appropriation of memory and experience where nostalgia is mined for brand recognition. Our collective imagination seems bereft of novel or alternative visions to an extent that does not merely portend a stultifying homogenization of entertainment content but also implicates our very capacities for imagining and the horizons of our possible futures.

Facebook signaled a clear interest in Ready Player One-style VR gaming when it bought virtual reality company Oculus in 2014. Following the Meta name change Zuckerberg talked about research into material for a body suit like the characters wear in the movie, and the company is also working on haptic gloves.

Gaming applications do seem like a ripe avenue for metaverse initiatives. I’ve talked about Niantic on this blog for several years, not only in relation to the role of Pokemon Go in popularizing augmented reality but also regarding their ambitious plans for further AR ventures. Earlier this month Niantic announced that it was launching an AR developer kit designed to support development for a “real-world metaverse.” This news is not interesting in and of itself; what I did find interesting was that Niantic CEO John Hanke’s announcement of the initiative described the metaverse as a “dystopian nightmare.”

“As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two million years of human evolution, and as a result those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them.”

While I remain ambivalent about Niantic’s operations and ultimate goals, it is nice to see Hanke acknowledge how these dominant metaverse imaginaries seem to support a retreat from our physical environments in favor of purely virtual spaces. Zuckerberg’s promotion of his metaverse ambitions arrived shortly after his fellow billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson were criticized for their respective vanity space-faring projects, activities that seem like extremely expensive and indulgent rocket hobbies in light of the ongoing precarity and existential anxiety being experienced by people around the world. While the space-faring billionaires seem to have elected to abandon the doomed Earth by escaping to another planet, Zuckerberg offers escape into the metaverse. As James D. Walsh put it in an editorial:

“There are some very uncomfortable things about all of this. We live in a capitalist society — money equals options. The people with the most options in the world, specifically Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, either want to be off the planet or they want to create a different universe on this planet. It feels like the mother of all abdications. “We don’t want to improve the world, we want to go to a different world.” It seems somewhat nihilistic and strange.”

There are obvious ideological implications here (it is also depressingly unsurprising that Zuckerberg’s demo video announcing the metaverse centered around a work meeting…even after more than a year of the horrors of remote work and endless zoom meetings, Zuck can’t imagine an application of the metaverse beyond what amounts to a Second Life room for interacting with colleagues and being surveilled by your boss.). Some notable differences between these two visions of escape routes from civilizational collapse: the metaverse at least offers greater accessibility in the sense that many more people could realistically gain access to the technology as compared with the elite few who might end up migrating to Mars. However, the rocket jockeys have the benefit of actually having somewhere to go. The metaverse (which, it should be noted, is nascent at best) might promise virtual spaces for gaming, interacting, and (*sigh*) working, but it cannot offer a space to sleep, or food to eat, or air to breathe. In light of the social strains, environmental catastrophes, and other existential threats posed by the ideology of limitless growth meeting its inherent contradictions, the ultimate difference between these two abdications of capital may just be their respective timeframes.

Niantic responds to Pokemon Go players, acquires scanning company

In an earlier post I wrote about how Pokemon GO developer Niantic was rolling back some gameplay changes implemented during the pandemic, and how many players were pushing back against the reversion to the pre-pandemic status quo. Last week Niantic posted a response to the Pokemon GO community:

“We have heard your feedback about one change in particular - that of the PokéStop and Gym interaction distance. We reverted the interaction distance from 80 meters back to the original 40 meters starting in the U.S. and New Zealand because we want people to connect to real places in the real world, and to visit places that are worth exploring.”

Several threads on Pokemon GO-related subreddits featured reactions to Niantic’s statement. Some users dismissed the developer’s message as diversionary corporatespeak and crisis PR. This was echoed in several of the top comments in an r/Games thread:

“tl;dr We heard you. Now shut up and leave us alone. Quit telling us how you should be enjoying our game. But just to make you be quiet, we promise to make an investigative task force who will look into the risks and benefits of increasing the distance and get back to you at a later date.”

“Ah the classic "we need an internal team to decide the best course of action" when the solution is already right there and had been implemented for months. They're not changing anything, they're attempting damage control and hoping it all blows over.”

Over on r/PokemonGo, several users found Niantic’s stated rationale of “encouraging exploration” as dubious:

“This game is like 2% exploration and 98% visiting the same neighborhood pokestops and gyms over and over again, and Niantic knows this.”

“You want to give us exploring? Give us biomes, give us rare Pokemon in hiking areas, give us better pokemon in eggs so we see the benefit of walking. Why the hell would I want to walk any extra to get the same dumb pokemon that is in the wild? Do I really need to "explore" a QFC parking lot? Lies. Exploring has nothing to do with it.”

Many of the comments in the above thread posited that Niantic was appealing to virtues of “exploration” and “exercise” in order to mask their purely financial interest in prompting players to move to Poke stops. Niantic is clearly invested in maintaining their edge in geolocation and augmented reality technology: last week the company acquired a 3D scanning company called Scanverse. As Greg Kumparak wrote for TechCrunch:

“As I first wrote about years ago, one of Niantic’s goals is to build a detailed and endlessly-evolving 3D map of the world — a step they see as fundamental to enabling true, rich augmented reality experiences if/when the world ever embraces something like AR glasses. It’s a rather massive (and never-ending) task, but one made a bit more feasible by way of its ever-roaming player base across games like Pokémon GO, Harry Potter Wizards Unite and Ingress.”

Meanwhile, debates over the gameplay changes have now spawned divisive conversations over Covid and vaccines on the Pokemon Go subreddit. One user asked why Niantic was reversing the pandemic gameplay decisions when the virus is still with us, and the board moderators have affirmed a zero tolerance policy toward Covid denial or anti-vaccine posts.

COOL MEDIUM podcast episode #1

MISC Monday: MLK media literacy; social media stress; the attention economy, and more

• Almetria Vaba of PBS Learning Media has posted a collection of resources for exploring media literacy through the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.:

Examine the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement with hundreds of PBS LearningMedia resources.  Here is a sampling of resources from the extensive offering in PBS LearningMedia. Use these resources to explore media literacy from historical documentaries to media coverage of social movements.

• Sonia Paul at PBS MediaShift reported on a recent Pew Research study on social media, stress, and the "cost of caring":

Among the survey’s major findings is that women are much more likely than men to feel stressed after becoming aware of stressful events in the lives of others in their networks.

“Stress is kind of contagious in that way,” said Keith Hampton, an associate professor at Rutgers University and the chief author of the report. “There’s a circle of sharing and caring and stress.”

• Lily Hay Newman reported on the survey for Slate:

In a survey of 1,801 adults, Pew found that frequent engagement with digital services wasn’t directly correlated to increased stress. Women who used social media heavily even recorded lower stress. The survey relied on the Perceived Stress Scale, a widely used stress-measurement tool developed in the early 1980s.

“We began to work fully expecting that the conventional wisdom was right, that these technologies add to stress,” said Lee Rainie, the director of Internet, science, and technology research at Pew. “So it was a real shock when [we] first looked at the data and ... there was no association between technology use, especially heavy technology use, and stress.”

• LiveScience writer Elizabeth Palermo looked at the gendered differences found by the study:

The higher incidence of stress among the subset of technology users who are aware of stressful events in the lives of others is something that Hampton and his colleagues call "the cost of caring."

"You can use these technologies and, as a woman, it's probably going to be beneficial for your level of stress. But every now and then, bad things are going to happen to people you know, and there's going to be a cost for that," Hampton said.

• Nicholas Carr recently penned an editorial for The Guardian considering whether we are becoming too reliant on computers:

The real danger we face from computer automation is dependency. Our inclination to assume that computers provide a sufficient substitute for our own intelligence has made us all too eager to hand important work over to software and accept a subservient role for ourselves. In designing automated systems, engineers and programmers also tend to put the interests of technology ahead of the interests of people. They transfer as much work as possible to the software, leaving us humans with passive and routine tasks, such as entering data and monitoring readouts. Recent studies of the effects of automation on work reveal how easily even very skilled people can develop a deadening reliance on computers. Trusting the software to handle any challenges that may arise, the workers fall victim to a phenomenon called “automation complacency”.

• David Whelan at Vice interviewed Carr on the issue of technology dependency: 

Should we be scared of the future?
I think we should be worried of the future. We are putting ourselves passively into the hands of those who design the systems. We need to think critically about that, even as we maintain our enthusiasm of the great inventions that are happening. I'm not a Luddite. I'm not saying we should trash our laptops and run off to the woods.

We're basically living out Freud's death drive, trying our best to turn ourselves into inorganic lumps.
Even before Freud, Marx made the point that the underlying desire of technology seemed to be to create animate technology and inanimate humans. If you look at the original radios, they were transmission as well as reception devices, but before long most people just stopped transmitting and started listening.

• Writing at Figure/Ground, John Dowd argues that being there still matters for teaching and learning in the digital age:

From an educational perspective, what we must understand is the relationship between information and meaning. Meaning is not an inevitable outcome of access to information but rather, emerges slowly when one has cultivated his or her abilities to incorporate that information in purposeful and ethical ways. Very often this process requires a slowdown rather than a speedup, the latter of which being a primary bias of many digital technologies. The most powerful educational experiences stem from the relationships formed between teacher and student, peer and peer. A smart classroom isn’t necessarily one that includes the latest technologies, but one that facilitates greater interaction among teachers and students, and responsibility for the environment within which one learns. A smart classroom is thus spatially, not primarily technologically, smart. While the two are certainly not mutually exclusive (and much has been written on both), we do ourselves a disservice when privileging the latter over the former.

• Dowd's argument here is similar to Carr's thoughts on MOOCs:

In education, computers are also falling short of expectations. Just a couple of years ago, everyone thought that massive open online courses – Moocs – would revolutionise universities. Classrooms and teachers seemed horribly outdated when compared to the precision and efficiency of computerised lessons. And yet Moocs have largely been a flop. We seem to have underestimated the intangible benefits of bringing students together with a real teacher in a real place. Inspiration and learning don’t flow so well through fibre-optic cables.

• MediaPost editor Steve Smith writes about his relationship with his iPhone, calling it life's new remote:

The idea that the cell phone is an extension of the self is about as old as the device itself. We all recall the hackneyed “pass your phone to the person next to you” thought experiment at trade shows four or five years ago. It was designed to make the point of how “personally” we take these devices.

And now the extraordinary and unprecedented intimacy of these media devices is a part of legal precedent. The recent Supreme Court ruling limiting searches of cell phone contents grounded the unanimous opinion on an extraordinary observation. Chief Justice John Roberts described these devices as being “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”

We are only beginning to understand the extent to which these devices are blending the functionality of media with that of real world tools. And it is in line with one of Marshall McLuhan’s core observations in his "Understanding Media" book decades ago.

• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic contributed a piece to The Guardian referencing Carr to consider how technology has downgraded attention:

As early as 1971 Herbert Simon observed that “what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. Thus instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk in order to translate information into knowledge. As a result, we are collectively wiser, in that we can retrieve all the wisdom of the world in a few minutes, but individually more ignorant, because we lack the time, self-control, or curiosity to do it.

There are also psychological consequences of the distraction economy. Although it is too soon to observe any significant effects from technology on our brains, it is plausible to imagine that long-term effects will occur. As Nicholas Carr noted in The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, repeated exposure to online media demands a cognitive change from deeper intellectual processing, such as focused and critical thinking, to fast autopilot processes, such as skimming and scanning, shifting neural activity from the hippocampus (the area of the brain involved in deep thinking) to the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain engaged in rapid, subconscious transactions). In other words, we are trading speed for accuracy and prioritise impulsive decision-making over deliberate judgment. In the words of Carr: “The internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it”.

• James Vincent at The Verge covered a recent study that links nighttime screen use with less REM sleep:

The research carried out by the Harvard Medical School and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studied the sleeping patterns of 12 volunteers over a two-week period. Each individual read a book before their strict 10PM bedtime — spending five days with an iPad and five days with a paper book. The scientists found that when reading on a lit screen, volunteers took an average of 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and received 10 minutes less REM sleep. Regular blood samples showed they also had lower levels of the sleep hormone melatonin consistent with a circadian cycle delayed by one and a half hour. 

• At AdBusters, Douglas Haddow writes that sleep is the enemy of capital:

Ever since the frequent cocaine user and hater of sleep Thomas Edison flicked on the first commercially-viable electric lightbulb, a process has taken hold through which the darkness of sleep time has been systematically deconstructed and illuminated.

Most of us now live in insomniac cities with starless skies, full of twinkling neon signage and flickering gadgets that beg us to stay awake longer and longer. But for all this technological innovation, we still must submit to our diurnal rhythm if we want to stay alive.

And even though sleep may “frustrate and confound strategies to exploit and reshape it,” as Crary says, it, like anything, remains a target of exploitation and reshaping - and in some cases, all-out elimination.

• In an interview with TruthOut to discuss his latest book, Robert McChesney addresses telecommunications monopolies, net neutrality, and advocates radical solutions to systemic problems: 

What is striking about this corporate monopolization of the internet is that all the wealth and power has gone to a small number of absolutely enormous firms. As we enter 2015, 13 of the 33 most valuable corporations in the United States are internet firms, and nearly all of them enjoy monopolistic market power as economists have traditionally used the term. If you continue to scan down the list there are precious few internet firms to be found. There is not much of a middle class or even an upper-middle class of internet corporations to be found.

This poses a fundamental problem for democracy, though it is one that mainstream commentators and scholars appear reluctant to acknowledge: If economic power is concentrated in a few powerful hands you have the political economy for feudalism, or authoritarianism, not democracy. Concentrated economic power invariably overwhelms the political equality democracy requires, leading to routinized corruption and an end of the rule of law. That is where we are today in the United States.

• In light of recent terrorist attacks and renewed hysteria about fundamentalist ideologies, I revisited Mark Manson's essay probing why there seems to be more fundamentalism in the world today:

The short answer is technology. Yes, Facebook really did ruin everything. The explosion in communication technologies over the past decades has re-oriented society and put more psychological strain on us all to find our identities and meaning. For some people, the way to ease this strain is to actually reject complexity and ambiguity for absolutist beliefs and traditional ideals.

Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that it would be just as difficult to not believe in God in 1500 as it is to believe in God in the year 2000. Obviously, most of humanity believes in God today, but it’s certainly become a much more complicated endeavor. With the emergence of modern science, evolution, liberal democracy, and worldwide 24-hour news coverage of corruption, atrocities, war and religious hypocrisy, today a person of faith has their beliefs challenged more in a week than a person a few generations ago would have in half a lifetime.

Smart Cities: India's initiative; technologized transport; democratic dilemmas and dystopian dangers

• Smart cities continue to be a hot topic for urban designers and commentators, even as the very definition of the term is debated. Kieron Monks at CNN recently addressed this in an article on the next generation of smart cities:

The urban planning equivalent of a Rorschach test, a "Smart City" can be taken to mean almost anything.

But by the most popular criteria; sustainable energy and development, open data and government, and integrated information, communications and technology (ICT) serving wide areas of a city, these ultra-modern hubs are on the rise.

• One site for this next generation of smart cities is India, where the Prime Minister has advanced a vision of building "100 smart cities":

Secretary of India's Urban Development ministry, Shankar Aggarwal interacted with the people and officials involved with the ambitious project.

Aggarwal said a smart city may have diverse significance for different groups belonging to various fields.

"The definition of smart city differs from person to person. One can say that smart design is smart city or smartly deployment of a city can be considered as smart city. If utilities are put forward in a smarter way can be defined as a smart city. Assimilation of all the things makes a smart city. If there is growth of economic activates, improvement of quality of life, that is a smart city," he said.

• Urban designer Alykhan Mohamed has written about the process of introducing "smart city" technology and infrastructure to ancient cities and holy sites, and the inherent challenges posed by the country's stark inequality:

Smart cities have the potential to transform India's cities, but unless the people who design them are sensitive to the reality that half a billion Indians are not even on the current grid, and almost a quarter of the country is illiterate, real change will not happen. Unless the engineering is combined with ingenuity to address fundamental political, social and economic weaknesses, smart cities will inevitably become another high profile megaproject; a false promise that does not realize its potential and becomes a burden, much like an empty Olympic stadium after games that promised much needed infrastructure and sustainable economic development.

• Writing for Forbes India, economic journalist K. Yatish Rajawat urges urban designers to "focus on liveable cities, not smart ones":

The current model of city planning is based on an outdated Le Corbusier concept that the city needs to be flat. Indian planners still believe that Chandigarh is the best city as it was planned by Corbusier, but it is not a smart city because you need a car to live in such a city. And dependence on a car means depending upon fast-depleting fossil fuels; it means commute as a part of daily life.

While small initiatives like Raahgiri are catching people’s attention as they reclaim the streets from cars for a few hours every week, what if it was part of a city’s design? That the streets belonged to people, and not to cars? A fundamental shift in even the way permissions are given for development and integration of public transportation has to be part of city planning. Then only can a city be livable; it has to be embedded in its planning and not in its sensors.

• A letter to Indian business daily Business Standard suggested that smart city design should also address drainage and agricultural concerns:

Another suggestion would be to make the city self-sufficient in terms of agricultural produce, so that in times of crisis it is capable of taking care of the basic requirements of the residents of the city. Of course, it seems to much to ask for in the current scenario but with advanced technological know-how it's not impossible.

• In the Straits Times, editor Han Fook Kwang recently argued that many urban issues in need of being "smarter" have nothing to do with technology:

But just as having a smartphone doesn't make you a smart person, a digitally smart city isn't necessarily one that's doing all the right things by its citizens and making their lives more pleasant.

In fact, a smart city with all the computers at its disposal can be doing many dumb things, and doing them even more quickly.

A really smart city (as opposed to being just digitally smart), on the other hand, knows what the right things to do are, with or without technology.

• Adam Greenfield at The Guardian writes that the "smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology":

The true enablers of participation turn out to be nothing more exciting than cheap commodity devices, reliable access to sufficiently high- bandwidth connectivity, and generic cloud services. These implications should be carefully mulled over by developers, those responsible for crafting municipal and national policy, and funding bodies in the philanthropic sector.

In both these cases, ordinary people used technologies of connection to help them steer their own affairs, not merely managing complex domains to a minimal threshold of competence, but outperforming the official bodies formally entrusted with their stewardship. This presents us with the intriguing prospect that more of the circumstances of everyday urban life might be managed this way, on a participatory basis, by autonomous neighbourhood groups networked with one another in something amounting to a city-wide federation.

• In a recent article for the New York Times, Diane Cardwell reported on Copenhagen's new network of street-embedded LED lights:

The system, still in its early stages, has put Copenhagen on the leading edge of a global race to use public outdoor lighting as the backbone of a vast sensory network capable of coordinating a raft of functions and services: whether easing traffic congestion, better predicting where to salt before a snowstorm or, to the alarm of privacy advocates, picking up on suspicious behavior on a busy street corner.

Cities worldwide are expected to replace 50 million aging fixtures with LEDs over the next three years, with roughly half of those in Europe. Some are mainly interested in switching from outmoded technologies to one that uses less energy and can last for decades. But many others want to take full advantage of the LED’s electronics, which are more conducive to wireless communication than other types of lighting.

• Gordon Feller at The City Fix has also written on smart urban transportation systems:

Many cities are also using smart technology to integrate services between different areas of government. For example, Barcelona has undertaken an ambitious multi-year program, Smart City Barcelona, in order to efficiently ensure that city services reach all citizens. The city’s long-term plan involves government, residents, and the business community in developing and shaping the city’s technological initiatives. One of these unique solutions will be called CityOS (operating system), for which the city is currently seeking a developer. City officials envision this OS as an open platform that unites the various smart technology projects operating across the city. In particular, the OS is expected to improve the daily commuting experience as well as reduce the operating costs of transport systems.

• Finally, Steven Poole in The Guardian considers the dystopian dangers posed by such smart city initiatives, and whether "they will destroy democracy":

One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” He quotes Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: “The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

[...]

One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that “a smarter way” to build cities “might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”

Political Economy in Mumford's "Technics and Civilization"

I've written about the media ecology tradition, attended the Media Ecology Association's conferences and had an article published in their journal, but up to now Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death are the only primary texts associated with the tradition that I've read. To broaden my knowledge of the tradition I'm reading some of the books considered foundational in the media ecology canon, beginning with Lewis Mumford's Technics & Civilization. I paid special attention to Mumford’s references to capitalism in Technics & Civilization because I have an abiding interest in the marriage of critical/Marxian analysis and media ecological perspectives. One of the most common criticisms of McLuhan’s writings on media is the charge of technological determinism, and that McLuhan’s media theory focuses on wide-reaching social and psychological effects while ignoring the historical, political, and economic factors involved in the development and dissemination of technologies. Although this is a valid criticism, as McLuhan’s approach did not emphasize the political economy of media, a number of scholars have re-evaluated McLuhan and other media ecologists to identify parallels in their work with critical theory and the Marxian critique of capitalism. The same criticisms cannot be legitimately levied against Mumford, whose account of successive technological complexes demonstrates careful consideration of the historical, political, and economic situations in which these complexes developed. Technics & Civilization makes clear that a media ecology perspective can incorporate a pronounced political orientation and an analysis of political economy.

Reading through Mumford’s account of the phases of technological complexes, I noted how the capitalist mode of economics is heavily dependent on technology. The interdependence seemed so crucial to both that it almost seemed that the history of capitalism is the history of technological development. Though Mumford does distinguish technics and capitalism as separate but interrelated forces. In the conclusion of the final chapter, “Orientation,” Mumford writes “we have advanced as far as seems possible in considering mechanical civilization as an isolated system” (p. 434). Technics & Civilization was first published in 1934; a contemporary reader will likely extend Mumford’s analysis to account for the last 80 years of technological progress, particularly in consideration of the information and telecommunications revolutions (an editorial note before the main text states that Mumford “would have loved” the Internet). Such an extension must account for the associated developments in capitalism. Scholars have used terms like “hypercapitalism” and “network and informational capitalism” to describe the new outlets of capital accumulation made possible by the global telecommunications infrastructure. Mumford wrote that “we are now entering a phase of dissociation between capitalism and technics” (p. 366), due in part to the over-working of “the machine”. Hypercapitalism has seen new forms of over-exploitation, and the continued commodification of intangibles such as information and attention, calling into question the dissociation of capitalism and technics. Mumford’s warning of the capitalist threat to physical resources, however, remains pertinent today.

The attention Mumford gives to the psychological effects of technics is a fascinating component of his analysis that prefigures McLuhan’s observations on technology as extensions of the human organism. The introduction of introspection and self-reflection instigated by the mirror’s effect on the individual ego; the metamorphosis of thought from flowing and organic to verbal and categorical brought on by print and paper; the shift from self-examination to self-exposure ushered in by the introduction of cameras; these are just some of the examples cited by Mumford to establish that the technological complexes built up from every individual innovation are not constrained to the obvious external manifestations but involve dramatic internal changes as well. In fact, the psychological and material transformations are not distinct processes, but are necessarily interlinked, two sides of the same coin.

Mice memory implants, augmented reality trends, predictive policing, more

• In case you haven't already heard, scientists have implanted false memories into the brains of mice.

Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses influenced by memory.

• The inevitable Total Recall references have already appeared. Others have gone with Inception as the pop culture touchstone.
• I recently discovered the Augmented Reality Trends website. Some noteworthy posts: How augmented reality aids advertising.

Augmented reality blurs the line between the virtual and real-world environment. This capability of augmented reality often confuses users, making them unable to determine the difference between the real world experience and the computer generated experience. It creates an interactive world in real-time and using this technology, businesses can give customers the opportunity to feel their products and service as if it is real right from their current dwelling.

AR technology imposes on the real world view with the help of computer-generated sensory, changing what we see. It can use any kind of object to alter our senses. The enhancements usually include sound, video, graphics and GPS data. And its potentials are tremendous as developers have just started exploring the world of augmented reality. However, you must not confuse between virtual reality and augmented reality, as there is a stark difference between them. Virtual reality, as the name suggests, is not real. It is just a made up world. On the other hand, augmented reality is enhancing the real world, providing an augmented view of the reality. The enhancements can be minor or major, but AR technology only changes how the real world around the user looks like.

• And a profile of SeeMore Interactive and their work on augmented reality shopping:

Augmentedrealitytrends.com: Why augmented reality and why your prime focus is on retail industry?

SeeMore Interactive: We recognize the importance of merging brick-and-mortar retail with cloud-based technology to create the ultimate dynamic shopping experience. It’s simply a matter of tailoring a consumer’s shopping experience based on how he or she wants to shop; the ability to research reviews, compare prices, receive new merchandise recommendations, share photos and make purchases while shopping in-store or from the comfort of their home.

• Brian Matchick at Geek Exchange writes about how Deep Learning brings A.I. one step closer to Hal, Skynet, and the Matrix:

Deep learning is based on neural networks, simplified models of the way clusters of neurons act within the brain that were first proposed in the 1950s. The difference now is that new programming techniques combined with the incredible computing power we have today are allowing these neural networks to learn on their own, just as humans do. The computer is given a huge pile of data and asked to sort the information into categories on its own, with no specific instruction. This is in contrast to previous systems that had to be programmed by hand. By learning incrementally, the machine can grasp the low-level stuff before the high-level stuff. For example, sorting through 10,000 handwritten letters and grouping them into like categories, the machine can then move on to entire words, sentences, signage, etc. This is called “unsupervised learning,” and deep learning systems are very good at it.

• This Economist article looks at predictive policing and American company PredPol (amazingly, a sly sub-section heading is the only reference to the book or film Minority Report and it's pre-crime unit and pre-cog mutants.):

Intelligent policing can convert these modest gains into significant reductions in crime. Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual, but when they are free they return to the spots which the computer suggests. Officers may talk to locals or report problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could encourage crime. Within six months of introducing predictive techniques in the Foothill area of Los Angeles, in late 2011, property crimes had fallen 12% compared with the previous year; in neighbouring districts they rose 0.5% (see chart). Police in Trafford, a suburb of Manchester in north-west England, say relatively simple and sometimes cost-free techniques, including routing police driving instructors through high-risk areas, helped them cut burglaries 26.6% in the year to May 2011, compared with a decline of 9.8% in the rest of the city.

• The BBC web site has published an article on the cities of the future:

Although they may all look very different, the cities of the future share a new way of doing things, from sustainable buildings to walkable streets to energy-efficient infrastructure. While some are not yet complete – or even built – these five locations showcase the cutting edge of urban planning, both in developing new parts of an existing metropolitan area and building entirely new towns. By 2050, it is forecast that 70% of the world’s population will live in cities. These endeavours may help determine the way we will live then, and in decades beyond.

• This piece from Vice's Motherboard examines Bill Gates' nuclear power company TerraPower and alternative nuclear fuel thorium:

Mention thorium—an alternative fuel for nuclear power—to the right crowd, and faces will alight with the same look of spirited devotion you might see in, say, Twin Peaks and Chicago Cubs fans. People love thorium against the odds. And now Bill Gates has given them a new reason to keep rooting for the underdog element.

TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But the concern just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too.

• Unsurprisingly, a porno movie filmed using Google Glass has already wrapped:

Google might have put the kibosh on allowing x-rated apps onto Glass (for now) but that hasn't stopped the porn industry from doing what they do best: using new technology to enhance the, um, adult experience. The not yet titled film stars James Deen and Andy San Dimas.

• Speaking of Google, the company's research department recently announced details about their Machine Vision visual recognition program:

There has always been a basic split in machine vision work. The engineering approach tries to solve the problem by treating it as a signal detection task using standard engineering techniques. The more "soft" approach has been to try to build systems that are more like the way humans do things. Recently it has been this human approach that seems to have been on top, with DNNs managing to learn to recognize important features in sample videos. This is very impressive and very important, but as is often the case the engineering approach also has a trick or two up its sleeve.

• From Google Research:

We demonstrate the advantages of our approach by scaling object detection from the current state of the art involving several hundred or at most a few thousand of object categories to 100,000 categories requiring what would amount to more than a million convolutions. Moreover, our demonstration was carried out on a single commodity computer requiring only a few seconds for each image. The basic technology is used in several pieces of Google infrastructure and can be applied to problems outside of computer vision such as auditory signal processing.