Those Who Look in from the Future

We are, it seems, concerned with the future. Somewhere in the background of all this noise, there is the lingering sense that something about our time is special. Not unique, per se; all times are unique. Rather, it seems that we are in the midst of something big and, as the world around us collapses noiselessly, we slip, silently, from one moment in human history to the next.

This is a transitionary era that one day will fade into the gaps between the pages of a history text. As the age of the book gives way to the age of the screen, the early twenty-first century may simply be a blip, a time when the future was born and the past was forgotten, and no-one will remember us and the work we’ve done to build it, to coax it from its tremulous, hidden beginnings into the light. And when we’ve succeeded, when we’ve painfully laid our past to rest – when we’ve written our names on manuscripts no one will remember how to read – metaphors about pages in books… well, they will cease to mean anything at all.

It’s three in the morning, so you’ll have to forgive terribly flowery, diffuse prose (and no, I wasn’t serious about that last line. It was just a gesture to… something). Still – this thought occurred to me yesterday: my favourite bloggers and blogs are those who write about the present from the perspective of the future. Naturally, there’s a bit of metaphor at work there. But you get what I mean, right? A certain sort of resistance to old certainties. A free-wheeling, fearless abandonment of the things we hold dear. My new definition of courage: the self-effacing Twitter-stream that, like the text of identity it produces, evaporates and re-forms, evaporates and re-forms.

Want examples? Well, look at:

• The way Robin, Matt and Tim write about the fringes and edges of a world about to move into the centre.
• The way Rex has created a post-everything world in which so much has collapsed into a Bakhtinian, carnivalesque rewriting of the things we knew.
• The way Matthew writes about game design as if it already had a hundred-year history – and he were merely adding the finishing touches.
• The way Diana, often beautifully, thinks about what it means to “to live in a liminal state between the screen and the sensory world”.
• Or the manner in which, I imagine, Kevin Kelly sits in a cool glass fortress, occasionally slipping into his time machine, returning, and then throwing out snippets and crumbs so that, for a moment, we catch a glimpse of what is just ’round the corner.

It’s late and I’m tired and I still have to rewrite an intro to a column. But this seemed like an idea worth putting down. Anyone want to add anything?

Fimoculous on Wired’s 15th: How Cloudy was their Crystal Ball?

I know I’ve been linking to Fimoculous a lot lately. I think it’s partly out of a sense of karmic duty – and partly just lingering regret over a missed opportunity to hang out with Rex and Anil Dash when they were in Toronto last year. But I felt I had to link to Rex’s piece on Wired‘s 15th anniversary if for no other reason than it exemplifies that Sorgatz is at his best when he’s a cultural critic. The article outlines the significance of Wired as a cultural linchpin and historical marker of the early internet age, examining how, among other things, the magazine consolidated and nurtured the then-tiny ‘geek culture’ and became its most mainstream mouthpiece. It’s an amazing read even if you, like me, only read Wired sporadically, and to steal from Mathew Ingram’s response, it contains just the right amount of nostalgia and critical distance.

Of course, this wouldn’t be Scrawled in Wax if I didn’t perform some half-assed ‘analysis’ and so, in a salute to never learning from my mistakes, here are some generally random tangents that struck me as I read the piece.

1) Who gets to decide what’s Wired and Tired? In many ways, the ‘Wired and Tired’ section hailed the rise of a technocractic elite. While the theory of influentials has recently been challenged, a ‘technorati’ was/is only possible due to the ever-increasing economic and cultural import of technology. Why do Apple announcements get so much play in the mainstream press? Because they are not merely product launches – they are cultural events. They speak to the growing confluence of technology and popular culture in ways far more intricate than the staff of Wired – or any of us – could have imagined. People like Gates and Jobs and their ‘Web 2.0’ successors influence our day-to-day lives in microscopic ways – from how we communicate to how we listen to music, these people are forces of culture as much as they of business.

2) Negroponte’s misguided “HDTV is irrelevant” bit: What Negroponte couldn’t have foreseen was twofold: 1) the brief ‘anti-mainstream’ bent of the early nineties would go up in smoke (around Cobain’s death?) and consumerism would hit new the-eighties-tweren’t-nothin’ heights – people wanted stuff more than ever before, and they wanted to make sure others saw it; 2) related: no-one could have guessed that technology would become the marker of both financial and cultural success. Seriously, what point is a Benz if it isn’t full of gadgets and if you aren’t driving the thing home to a 60″ plasma? Nobody knew that people would start to care much more about identifying through items of technology rather than what technology would allow them to do. (There are other things to be said about wealth producing elevated expectations and home-theatre becoming a viable alternative to cinema but you’ll have to look to another blog for those.)

3) So why did the age of hyper-personalisation never arrive? The hyper-personalised age never arrived because its proponents missed one simple fact: differentiating oneself has its limits. Why, I suppose, depends upon how cynical you want to get. The positive spin? The example of watching a baseball game from your very own angle is simply too personal, robbing individuals of the pleasure of collective experience. The negative take is that mass-commodity-culture performs an odd double move of celebrating individualism while promoting conformity. Perhaps customising a Netvibes page is about as much personalisation as people want, preferring instead to buy the same clothes as everyone else and then choosing to wear them with a different hat.

4) Can we still talk of a clash between culture and technology? One of Wired’s most prominent tropes was and is that of “the clash of culture and technology”. But the thing that struck me – and I’m pretty sure I’ve read Rex say the same thing – is that the dichotomy itself is becoming outmoded: that technology is culture and vice versa. While one can debate the relative merits or pitfalls of that fact, I think their inextricability is pretty incontrovertible in the richer parts of the world.

If you have any thoughts about these ideas or the article, hit the comments and engage in some half-assed ‘analysis’ of your own 🙂