are able to describe what we have produced. Like Deb suggests, it is not whether or not the human schematic response to an instruction or a piece of technology is perfectly correct, or of a particular discourse. The framing we give a thing is the ultimate significance of that thing, for better or worse. But it is not that thing. Our experience of consciousness is a cataloging of shadows.
I feel optimistically that there is a sort of archive impulse. There are people who like going to libraries and taking out books. But people also make photo albums, collect cookbooks, etc. People like to form multimedia databases. There’s a connection to memory through objects and other media artifacts. This wouldn’t get you into an Ivy League school or even get you an A in a class. But there is an archive fever. People like setting up a system and fitting things into it. Even through Facebook, people are engaged through this sort of activity. With the internet--just like the release of the Kinsey report--suddenly we realize, “my God, everyone’s doing it.” It’s allowing more people to engage in these conversations, and it’s revealed that all along people were into this. They just didn’t live next to an academic library.
I don’t know if this means that this is making more people like that, or just revealing them. But it is definitely allowing people to do things that they had been wanting to do all along. There are people with incredibly detailed photo albums. It’s the same impulse, to organize info, brought into the mainstream.
- Geoff Manaugh
Art may serve as a strategic reserve of schematization. Rather than simply mapping the quickest route from point A to B, we have people who hide data in brick walls, or embed codes in the ambient surface patterns of nearly any object. The shortest distance is a line that can be cut, but the wider net of meaning in a space can survive a blockage in the flow. Schematically, art complicates rather than simplifies. Not everyone is economizing and minimizing. Others are obscuring, obfuscating, and accentuating until the basic becomes the baroque. The same impulse that drives us to aesthetically tile the world’s into 3D maps also causes us to add apopheniac tags to the world, making some sort of pattern— or better yet, making so many opportunities for new patterns that the patterns begin to fade into noise.
There's no danger that people are actually and literally going to make everything they can dream up. There's been something of a lowering of the barriers to aping Thomas Edison and tinkering in an industrial lab, but there are still plenty of genuine barriers, and they'll weed out the people who are delusional about their maker chops. It's quite hard to make effective things, especially without some hard-won understanding of the tools and the grain of the material.
The Makers scene is like what happened in publishing, in music, and in video, but it's for objects. There's a lot of semi-effortless music and video around nowadays, too, but if you think you're gonna compose like Wagner and film like Fellini, well, you won't.
- Bruce Sterling
The truth of society’s open schematization of the world is that there are no standards, no rules, and no moderating authority. There is no grand design, and no underlying pattern to be discovered, other than the patterns themselves. Schematization can bring amazing things to light, bury important things deep, and dissolve away into its component pieces in seconds. We are left standing in the middle of this map, watching one edge crumble away while we draft and paste additions onto the other, wondering what will happen to the area seemingly supporting our weight.
Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #6: Critical Vulnerability
To Table of Contents
Throughout this guide I’ve tried to isolate the patterns of how we think about the Future-Present, as symbolized by particular evocative technology. By engaging five, extraordinarily knowledgeable informants, I’ve traced their thoughts into directional arcs that don’t necessarily nail down this swirling cloud of future-forward ideas, but at least give us sense of the difficulty of the terrain.
The archetypes are stories, each one about us, our ideas, and our material world. The excitement of the future is represented by the LED. Neodymium magnets tell a story about the the allure of technological magic interacting with our everyday life. The fable of the cyborg explains a bit about our interface with our own history. The theology of our technologically advanced commodities are explained to us through drones. And our maps’ tendency to glitch is a cautionary tale about our minds’ inherent difficulties in navigating all of these different idea structures at the same time.
I like to think of these archetypes as stories, because there is something harmless in allegory. A meaning is intended, but if it doesn’t particular stick, or if as storyteller I trip in my delivery, the stakes are low. These are not actually designs for massive structures, harnessing dangerous physical forces to be constrained within conduits wrapped around us while we sleep at night. If these narratives become unpleasant, we can simply wake up, dispelling them like a dream, returning to the safe world of consistent reality that is not fraught with loops of meaning and pitfalls of symbolism. We can clear the slate easily, claiming the fallibility of narratives, and returning to the kernel of “simple” material things, ignoring the implications of our ideas. And then the next night, we have a chance to dream again.
But what I have come to realize is that stories are not a low impact art. True, any particular essay about the future might be ignored, deemed to be of little use or effect, and sent to join the vast quantities of cultural product that collect upon the roadsides of the networks, like so many bottles and cans without even as much value as a token deposit. But the effect that a narrative can have is extraordinarily real. Those roadsides are not only avenues of amusement, but also the pathways of history. What is the worth of a narrative when the climate of the world is at stake? What is its value when a commonly told story could result in the use of a catastrophic weapon, as opposed to its development alone? What is its currency, when an implicitly understood fable forms the boundaries of a person’s lifelong torment, or pleasure?
We have a limited time to shape these potentially-valuable/potentially-worthless stories because our technological history is unfolding, not in the future, but immediately. And we have very few means for judging history’s effectiveness. As much as we think about the strengths and functions of any particular narrative, there is no way to be aware of every vulnerability. There is no such thing as surety, when it comes to narratives. There is only ever our best guess, and our endless capacity for second-guessing it.
The narrative of criticism of the Future-Present, in all its difficulties and cultural diffuseness, is the story of the last archetype: the “zero-day”. The zero-day is a particular sort of software or other system vulnerability, named sometime in the mid 1990s as the sharing of knowledge between technicians sought to focus on vulnerabilities previously unknown, and therefore more important. Hunted by developers and hackers alike, the zero-day is not just a weakness of a designed system, but a weakness held and stockpiled, a “secret weapon” of sorts for exploiting that system in the right or wrong hands. Unlike the known vulnerabilities that are patched over with security updates, there are “zero-days” of warning about these particularly strategic exploits, and defense against them is difficult to impossible. When used in an attack on a system, those who would defend that system are caught unaware of the weakness. Depending on the severity of the exploit and the system it invades, the value of a zero-day can run into the millions of dollars, as in the hands of either the attacker or the defender, it could represent the difference between maintained security, or complete compromise.
While it is obvious that the vulnerabilities of any sort of system, technological or otherwise, will always be hunted down, that this particularly strategic exploit would be classified, commodified, and cultivated is perhaps a little surprising. That there would be an industry devoted to not just taking advantage of systems, but of finding the best way to utterly destroy their trustworthiness, is not just a cynical fact of the human species, but speaks volumes about the way our
society has come to exist.
But that is also what this series’ theorizing of the Future-Present is intended to do. Whether we think of ourselves as wearing white hats, black, or some shade of grey, we are trying to not only figure out where things are going, but looking for the holes in the system that will inevitably result. We call this criticism, and we may do it for fun, for a cause, for pay, or all three. It is a bug and a feature of our society that while some may be enamored by narratives of progress, success, triumph, and heroism, others will cultivate narratives of dystopia, cataclysmic failure, slow degradation, and outright villainy. Humans will experiment with vulnerabilities--not only as a minority report, but to be part of the system. The holes in the optimistic narratives are not empty, but filled with a certain thriving rot. This decay is the undercurrent, the living strata of the reverse of the system, the microflora and humus necessary for growth. A strong culture of criticism is vital.
How do we use these theory exploits? Do we stockpile them, like zero-days, waiting to take our enemies unaware? Or do we sound the alert? Depending on the system, an argument could be made