I attended a talk last night by sci-fi author and “futurist” Bruce Sterling at the Space Studios near Bethnal Green in London. (I say “futurist” because, as Bruce pointed out during the evening, futurist isn’t really accurate anymore, being an old term from the 60’s where you could actually do futurist studies). Here’s a brief summary of the topics he spoke about, and some of my own thoughts.

His talk centered mainly on ideas around Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things, (there were several terms he covered) brought about by RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), and the role art can play in bringing awareness of RFID to the general public, which he says is woefully uneducated on the subject. As an example, he pointed out that most London tube travellers use Oyster cards and are blissfully unaware that they contain RFID chips that help to track your movements. He covered some of the history of RFID, saying that it was developed by the Pentagon in conjunction with Wal-Mart, “one of the few” real examples, he said, where technology has been imposed upon us from up on high. Personally, I don’t agree with this at all except in the sense that it’s one of the few cases where it’s specifically driven by laws and business requirements to embrace this technology rather than follow the usual route i.e. using public funds for development within the military-industrial complex and disseminating it to the public via corporations. As Chomsky puts it, “all the rest of modern technology, it’s funded by the public. It comes out of the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation and so on. Just like computers and the rest of electronics. The public pays the cost, then you hand it over to private power.” I imagine that the same is true elsewhere in the world. In a way, all technology is imposed on us except not by “law”.

At any rate, Bruce pointed out that there was nothing especially sinister in the fact that it was imposed by the Pentagon and Wal-Mart, it was simply a case of business: making all of Wal-Mart’s and the Pentagon’s suppliers use RFID gave them invaluable data to build massive databases on all commercial products, data that used to only be the domain of the companies manufacturing the products. In other words, it represents a competitive advantage for Wal-Mart.

On the art side, he gave some interesting examples of the current state of Art and Arphid - the term he believes should be used to describe the technology, not RFID. He showed a few screen shots of current artists using Arphids in their work. He spoke about Project Urban Eyes which combines Arphids, CCTV cams and pigeons, the “vermin” of the city as Bruce called them, as “Arphid performance art”. He then showed us Nancy Nisbet’s Exchange Project, an anti-NAFTA Arphid performance art that, according to her site, “critiques and exposes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology”, “offers artistic resistance to international economic agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement”, and “questions and disrupts correlations between corporate consumer data and personal identity through the dispersal and exchange of personal belongings”. From the Adobe pamphlet on her site:

Nisbet will RFID tag and inventory all her personal belongings. Her belongings will then be hauled in a commercial shipping container and will be freely traded throughout Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Another site that Bruce touched on was we-make-money-not-art.com, an interesting blog covering a wide range of art technology performances, including “sousveillance” which Bruce described as being us watching those that watch us. As an example, he said you could find out about the maker of the Oyster card, and then start following him around, making a blog about him and his family. Pretty amusing stuff. Bruce also mentioned rhizome.org, specialising in “the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways”. He had high praise for this site, and said that anyone thinking of getting into Arphid should consider joining up here.

Bruce also covered his own views of Arphids, where it is now and where it may go. He said that he saw Arphid art following three main stages. The first phase is what he called the “magic phase”, which he compared to the birth of film where people just did stuff because you could, and people went “WOW!” because they didn’t know how you did that. Bruce also saw the rise of what he called “jarking” (see here for some background to this term), which is essentially tagging people with Arphids without them being aware of it.

The second phase is where more artists become aware of the ubiquitousness of Arphids, and begin to try exploit and deconstruct it, to really push the boundaries of what’s possible with the technology. The final step is what he classified as the mature phase, just like any other medium (like screen art/cinema) where the art has become more refined. In all, he saw the lifespan of this process to be around seven years or so. It was his (hillarious, and probably 100% accurate) point of view that what was really going to bring RFID into the public consciousness (in the UK) would be “the Oyster Card Sex Scandal”, where some MP gets caught out having an affair by being tracked with his Oyster card. He pointed to the case of Matthew Mellon, heir to a multi-million pound fortune, who was alleged to have hired a phone-tapping and hacking gang to sell sensitive information to clients for blackmail (ZDNet were forced to pull their story as it could not be proved he was involved).

What Bruce really stressed was the fact that it was ultimately impossible to know where this future would go; we couldn’t know the advantages, but this world was definitely coming and it was time to think about it seriously. This was the most interesting part of the talk. He covered his own personal ideas of the longer term implications, in particular his “Spime” concept which Wikipedia describes as “a currently-theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object.” Bruce sees a convergance of technologies resulting in: the identification of things where everything has a unique ID; the searchability of things, where you’ll be able to google (or some equivalent) for your carkeys to find them in your bedroom; the trackability of things; the life and time of things where we’d know from birth to death the entire timespan of objects; the behavioural patterns of things, how they move about in society and such like; the archiving of things; the recycability of things (we can find junk and recycle it, something he saw as being one of the greatest uses of this); and we can tag the the idea of things (in other words, create virtual plans of objects). Bruce also mentioned a few books of other viewpoints that would be essential reading for anyone looking at Arphid: Ambient Findability by Peter Morville, RFID by Simpson Garfinkel and Beth Carole Rosenberg, Adam Greenfield’s Everyware, and Katherine Albrecht’s Spychips (who believes RFID is the Mark of the Beast; Bruce recommended people read this book in order to have a look at downsides to the technology; have a look here for an interview with her). As Bruce pointed out, all the technology is already here to be in a situation where you could walk up to a Realizer fabricator (or fabber) machine with the “Oyster lurch”, your RFID transmitted a design you’ve made of something, and it creates the object for you and off you go. All it required was someone to mesh it all together.

Pretty freaky and interesting stuff. The implications of all of this blow me away. Personally, I see another dimension to Bruce’s convergance of technologies that doesn’t just affect “things”. For me, the convergance of these technologies must necessarily relegate us, the users (well, at least, our minds), to becoming objects ourselves. This is already happening I think: the Web 2.0 phenomenon of “tagging”, for example, seems to me to be the extension of our mind into this virtual world, a branding exercise in a way whereby we’re showing the world a dictionary of words and terms and what they mean to us as invidivuals. We’re ordering and classifying our thinking, in fact. Web 2.0 tools are essentially remote repositories of our minds, the stuff that defines our thoughts.

The convergance Bruce talks about seems to mean that the physical world, in addition to our minds, now occupies the virtual, almost a complete seperation of the “form” of things from their physical existance. Just what does this mean exactly to us? One of the prime effects of technology has always been to order and structure the world and ourselves in logical ways, removing the “mysticism” of nature (as Reggio pointed out). I approach this with pessimism rather than optimism because, much like the AT&T-NSA scandal has demonstrated (and the Oyster cards in London), the patterns and content of this data in the “internet of things” hold profound implications in how the state or future ruling powers will control and order society. I do worry with the seeming relentless optimism I hear in speeches like this about what the technology can be used for and so on, because as I’ve said before, technology is not neutral in any way, shape or form. Whatever ways we think we can use it for some good system, or poke holes in it and push the boundaries, it seems to me to still be a subset of its actual essence, as well as part of greater social structures that probably require greater attention.

I do sometimes wonder if we are just concentrating on the possibilities of the content , rather than looking at the medium itself. Of course, this medium is going to affect society and our relationships with each other whether we agree or disagree with this progression in the technology, but I still shudder to think what this convergance will bring. It’s almost as if we are making ourselves as humans the content of this ubiquitous medium, and this worries me because it seems like a total disconnect from the physical world, let alone the natural world. I do tend to think there needs to be a greater symbiosis between technology and the natural world where both depend on each other rather than the current system of one being parasitic of the other.

During question time, Bruce pointed out he’s been trying to write a novel about his ideas, and said that it’s extremely difficult and just bizarre, almost like trying to explain to someone in 1950 what it must be like to Google for something. I can’t remember all the questions that were asked (and there’s no podcast up as yet - at least, none that I could find) but, being a budding sci-fi author myself, there was one thing in particular I remember him mentioning, which was namely that sci-fi authors are not futurists, they’re historians. If you want to know what the future holds, go back ten years and see what was happening then. He also spoke about the experience of writing with William Gibson. I can’t remember the name of the book in question, but it was at the crossover between typewriters to computers. Sterling had nothing but high praise for Gibson, saying that if there was anybody who understood the implications of the crossover and what was to come, it was him.

A few people also asked about whether or not he sometimes wonders whether or not he’s a conduit for disinformation, or if he’s helping to contribute to the paranoia of society. I found that pretty funny because I don’t think you should blame the messenger for the news he’s bringing. As always, we’re blinded by the content when we should be looking elsewhere.

As you can see, Bruce got my brain firing on all cylinders, and for that I’m forever gratefull. It was a really informative talk. Thanks to my mate Warren for getting me to go.

Bruce has his own blog, by the way, located here.