tease philosophical themes out of it. And even for pop philosophy, it is very light. There are some references to a few theories (general semantics, for example) but no engagement with the philosophical tradition at all. I use some five-dollar words at times, but without much attention to traditions of thought and canonical theorists who deal with them. The organization is poor, from a standpoint of hard philosophy writing. I'm very critical of this work when it comes to philosophy, because I was in the land of philosophy academia for a while, and I'm conscious of the difference between “real” philosophy, and just theoretical thinking. It's not a judgment on the merits of one over the other—I'm no longer in the academy anymore, for a reason. But each sort of writing is good for different things.
The idea here is simply to open up a bunch of drawers, and show that there is some really deep shit inside them. So often we only get a chance to speculate about the implications of technology in a thousand-word blog post (like my first attempt, prior to the interviews). And then, after the initial burst of speculation, there's no follow-up, no alternate line of approach. That just doesn’t cut it. So this is the ten-thousand-word blog post attempt, with six different lines of approach. But it isn’t a hundred-thousand-word philosophical text. I might flatter myself and call it a prolegomena, but it is difficult to look at these essays, and pull out definite theses. It isn’t intended to propose theses. It is meant to tell a number of complicated stories, and hopefully start the gears turning in the minds of the reader. Whatever one might call that goal—if this work can achieve that, I feel I've succeeded.
Why collect this into an ebook?
Posting the essays on Rhizome.org was a great venue, because I feel that the audience there is uniquely interested in this sort of little-bit-deeper thinking. But they were posted separately over the course of six months, and really belong together as a set. It was easy enough to put them together, with the introduction and coda, and now they are available for free to anyone who wants to read the whole together. The ebook is as much a saved archive as anything.
Is it useful to coin new terms, like the “Future-Present”?
Kind of. It’s always a bad idea to coin new terms, because then you are using a word which you know, but no one else does. On the other hand, judiciously using a new term helps separate what one is talking about from previous conversations. In this case, Future-Present seemed to work, because it was a way of talking about how we talk about the future, while reminding that what we are actually talking about is in the present. Will it prove to be a useful concept in the future? Well, I guess the implicit answer in what the “Future-Present” means, is who knows, but we’ll see.
How useful are these archetypes? Were they inspired by other sources?
Archetypes have fallen out of favor in literary criticism, I feel, because they are simplistic. And they certainly are. They are a way of tying an entire work or narrative under a single metaphor of what it is “supposed” to mean. But in this case of this series, these archetypes are themselves new stories that I made up on the fly. It is a reversal of standard literary criticism—rather than theorizing pre-existing stories by simplifying them into abstract archetypes, I am inventing new stories with complexifying them with specific archetypes. Is this the right thing to do? I have no idea. But my own fascination with technological innovation and evolution are in these archetypes. I’m legitimately fascinated by the fact that only seven years ago, there were no white LEDs, and now they are everywhere. I find drones absolutely mind-boggling, in how they have been personified, stigmatized, hobbified, and politicized. I think everyone “liked” the Apple Maps glitches, while at the same time they were incredibly frustrating. So the archetypes are pulled from real stories, and then used to tell new stories. Maybe this makes them not archetypes at all.
Do you have any future plans for these ideas, or this series?
I’m always thinking about these ideas, and continuing to measure them against reality. As for this series, I might try to print it into a pamphlet, if it seems like there might be an audience for that sort of thing. I like printing things, just for the fun of it. But I’m happy with it as it is, and I think it serves as a good milestone of the thought I was exposed to on these topics in 2012.
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