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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #76 of 223: Gary Greenberg (gberg) Wed 6 Jan 10 03:12
permalink #76 of 223: Gary Greenberg (gberg) Wed 6 Jan 10 03:12
THere is a DARPA-funded project, multicenter study going on in which mathematicians, physiologists, and computer scientists are trying to digitize the hippocampus. The stated goal of the study is to create a hippocampal prosthesis, which will replace lost memory and other cognitive skills dependent on the hippocampus, especially learning. They've dispensed with all the philosophizing and figured out an algorithm that accounts for the signal processing that takes place in the hippocampus: given input A, what output B will the hippocampus will produce? Turns out you can model this, with the help of a supercomputer or two, with like 99 percent accuracy. (More accurate than my hippocampus, that's for sure. )The algorithm, placed on silicon, now mimics the rat hippocampus. Next trick is to get it into a rat's de-hippocampized brain and see if it can remember its wife's birthday. I'd tell yoy more but DARPA has an info embargo on this one. You can see something for yourself at http://www.neural-prosthesis.com/
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #77 of 223: Lisa Harris (lrph) Wed 6 Jan 10 06:35
permalink #77 of 223: Lisa Harris (lrph) Wed 6 Jan 10 06:35
From off-site reader, Julian Bond: The rapture of the nerds discussion seems to be dropping into the usual top- down vs bottom-up problems. If we study neurons, we can't see any mind; If we study mind, we can't see what generates it. Perhaps we should all go back and re-read about ant-hills in Godel, Escher, Bach. Viewed purely as an engineering problem, uploading mind is fraught with issues. Let's say we construct something with equivalent complexity to a human brain and somehow work out how to set the initial conditions. Our current knowledge of chaos and complexity theory suggests we have very little idea what it will do in the first microsecond after turning it on and simply cannot know what it will do a few seconds after. And all of that will also depend on the nature of the inputs and sensors attached. As Bruce points out, this really ought to include inputs from inside the "body" as well as outside if we are to expect continued human-like behaviour of the system, except there is no "body". Setting the initial conditions means destructively or preferably non-destructively taking a snapshot and reading the state of a brain and we have essentially no idea how to do that. But, some time in the next 10-100-1000-10k years I'd expect mankind to construct such a system with equivalent complexity. And pondering what it might do seems an interesting exercise. However, interesting as it might be, it doesn't feel like anything we come up with in 2010 is going to have much relevance when it actually happens. Discussions here about health care feel horribly US-Centric to this Brit. The UK is also going through a re-examination of health care and the issues surrounding automation. Quite apart from the horrendous history of IT failures, the big issues seem to be about centralised government run databases with insufficient privacy controls than anything about better (or worse) informed patients. Rather than a retrospective of the previous decade or predictions of this one, I've been thinking about what I would like to see in the near future, no matter how impractical. A couple of the more prosaic involve Bruce to some extent. 1) Amazon start a print on demand service and arrange deals with publishers to obtain and/or digitise their back catalogue. What prompted this was trying to obtain a copy of Islands in the Net. As far as I can tell this is out of print, which strikes me as absurd for an award winning book from 1988. It then turns out that almost all the missing books in my library of cyberpunk are similarly out of print and essentially unobtainable. In 2010, this is just wrong, isn't it? So what happens to all those thoughts wrapped up in books that have been remaindered, pulped and are now locked up in publishers back catalogues by agreements that were struck pre-internet? Copyright term agreements are bad enough but when they result in work being deliberately kept off the market, they really suck. 2) Cheap, Electric-Assist Bicycle kits. Islands in the Net reminded me of Go-Motion, solar powered, electric assist, desert buggies. Well of course, I want one! But more realistically, I want a cheap electric-assist bicycle conversion kit. And perhaps a cheap solar and wind powered generator on the garage roof to charge it. So off I go to research this and all I can find is stuff that is way over-priced and way under-engineered from places like Seattle or Marlborough, UK. Then I look on Alibaba and find 20,000 Chinese suppliers who can ship 1000 off quantities to anywhere in the world. WTF! How come Alibaba never turns up in google searches but eBay does? Woah, there's a lot of food for thought in all that. From Google's inadvertent cultural imperialism because it's algorithms think I'm not interested in non-US/UK/english language sites. To disdain for the bicycle in large parts of the world but adoration in others. To the shift in small scale manufacturing from the West to the East. To questions about Chinese design and quality control and how fast its improving and overtaking the west and Japan. To the state sponsored pigopolies of infrastructure suppliers that make small scale, local, power generation hard. To?
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #78 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 06:38
permalink #78 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 06:38
Modeling some aspect of the brain with the intention of creating a prosthesis might make sense. Not the same as transplanting consciousness from wetware to hardware. What's more interesting to me is the kind of practical cyborganics you see in Bruce's Google example. Years ago, when Paco Nathan and I were working FringeWare, we realized that we were cyborgs, in a sense - technologically-enhanced humans. We didn't need implants, the extensions could be external - like the very capable Macbook that's extending my capabilities right now, as I tap keys and surf references. To my right there's an iphone, a powerful multifaceted extension I carry in my pocket wherever I go. Bruce, there's much volatility in the climate change discussions these days, maybe that's what we should address next. Copenhagen was a bust, and in the U.S. (and only the U.S.), climate change deniers are picking up steam, even as Arctic ice is melting and polar bears are drinking warm Cokes. There's a kind of global political paralysis, we're stalled as mean temperatures increase. Are we past the possibility of mitigation? What do we do when we're stressed to the point that air conditioners are exploding? Meanwhile, for those of you who are not members of the WELL but want to comment or ask a question, send email to inkwell@well.com. The Inkwell team will post your messages here. (Julian Bond's comment slipped in while I was typing this.)
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #79 of 223: Emily J. Gertz (emilyg) Wed 6 Jan 10 07:44
permalink #79 of 223: Emily J. Gertz (emilyg) Wed 6 Jan 10 07:44
>If we can have better participation, and especially if we can get the real passions of the people pumped into the legislative process - won't that balance the "crimping and demeaning effect" you mention? Jon L., I think you've described the Tea Party Movement. And look how much that's contributing to making our system a better one. The ideas about the potential for "participatory medicine" strike me as an offshoot of techno-utopianism -- a belief that if the tools and structure change for the better, human nature will follow. This has been disproven time and again. But since the tools keep getting shinier and more complex and, let's face it, a lot more fun, it's a lesson we keep relearning, some of us. These ideas need to be tested beyond the cozy echo chambers of like-minded converts. You might find that, much as the Tea Partiers can turn the techniques of Alinsky-style organizing against the progressives, that they've got a lot of potential for negative impact that you don't yet perceive.
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permalink #80 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 09:58
permalink #80 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 09:58
Wow! lots of very good posts. However, with all respect: > If it were genuinely important there would be a Cabinet officer in charge of Brain Immortality, and some kind of Brain Immortality StartUp Cluster, probably somewhere around Pittsburgh where they could hang out with Hans Moravec. "Genuinely important" and "possible with currently technology" aren't remotely the same. I'm extremely familiar with the research cited by <gberg> in <76>: the main researcher, Ted Berger,'s been decoding hippocampus machine language for more than 30 years, which is about state of the art. The trigger for the recently DARPA funding was him definitiviely cracking the code, at least for rabbits: he has a chip that can talk to hippocampuses in their own language, with startling results. Basically, in a key experiment, when a chip was off, a rabbit didn't display a conditioned reflect. When it is on, it did. >The rapture of the nerds discussion seems to be dropping into the usual top-down vs bottom-up problems. If we study neurons, we can't see any mind; If we study mind, we can't see what generates it. And this is a statement of one of the oldest problems in philosophy, the mind-body problem. We have matter and energy on the one hand; we have minds on the other. Minds don't seem to be matter/energy in any measurable or understandable way. But if they're something different, how can they make matter and energy (for example, human bodies) do things? Philosophers have clanged their heads against this problem for millennia. And not just philosophers: with the advent of Christianity, the idea of soul (and the immortality of the soul) entered the discussion - again, leading to the same mystery: what's the soul, specifically, and how does it connect with body. It's my thought that the work of Michigan native Claude Shannon )April 30, 1916 February 24, 2001), offers insights to the resolution of this mystery. Many scientists put him in the league of Archimedes, Newton, and Einstein -- but most educated people don't know his name. His contribution was actually defining 'information,'in terms of its opposite, disorder or noise, and proving that it could be transmitted or preserved not just well but perfectly, regardless of noise. His papers setting this forth, published in 1948, created computers. (His earlier paper, in the 30s had predicted digital computing). Is personality information? Intuitively, it seems a lot closer to information than to matter and energy; and we see it at work in computers. [more 2 come]
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permalink #81 of 223: Lisa Harris (lrph) Wed 6 Jan 10 10:19
permalink #81 of 223: Lisa Harris (lrph) Wed 6 Jan 10 10:19
From offsite reader Stefan Jones: bruces wrote: "The population *identifies* with vampires and zombies, wants to marry them, settle down with them." Man, the *obvious* choice for a charismatic supernatural lifemate is a werewolf, if only because he or she would be able to drag a haunch or two of venison to your bunker when the moon is full. Although an edge-city dweller like me would probably have to settle for an were-urban-coyote who supplies bunnies and squirrels. * * * The Oughts were actually pretty good to me financially, but I don't think I've felt more bummed by the apparent face of the future. Including in the early 80s, when the whole nuclear holocaust / Mad Max scenario seemed possible if not imminent. Outright stupidity, or at least hard-boiled refusal to face the facts and challenges of our times, seems utterly pervasive now a days. I find myself wondering if the best way to assure a good future for myself is to find a way to scam the suckers, dupe the stupes, or otherwise take advantage of fucktardery. Like a diet based on Little Debbie snack cakes and Hot Pockets, or a multi-level marketing scheme that sells discount carbon tax stamps to terrified SUV owners. Wrap a flag around it and fake a plug by Glenn Beck and it's as good as gold. Stefan
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permalink #82 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:02
permalink #82 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:02
Emily - "Jon L., I think you've described the Tea Party Movement. And look how much that's contributing to making our system a better one." Not really what I as describing. Teabaggers and protesters in general are not participating, they're just making noise and showing how they feel rather than what they think, often orchestrated by some top-down organization manufacturing an appearance that is supposed to suggest popular will. The people who orchestrate those events are working the emotions of the crowd. And emotional response is not informed participation. "The ideas about the potential for "participatory medicine" strike me as an offshoot of techno-utopianism -- a belief that if the tools and structure change for the better, human nature will follow." Participatory medicine is definitely related to technology - facilitated by access via networks to more information and to other people who are dealing with similar issues. I don't see that there's any expectation that human nature will change, not sure where you're getting that. What changes is the role of the patient and her relationship to the various healthcare providers in the context of treatment. The goal is a more robust informatin change in all directions, and better treatment. For example, a better informed patient might be more sensitive to implications of various sensations or physical manifestations that they might have overlooked if they didn't have some sense how it relates to their condition - and they can have better communication with a physician who's dropped the wall of expertise so that the patient can feel comfortable talking, and the doctor's really listening. This is really more social, more human, than technical. I'm baffled how this fits any concept of the "technoutopian." "This has been disproven time and again. But since the tools keep getting shinier and more complex and, let's face it, a lot more fun, it's a lesson we keep relearning, some of us." All I can say is speak for yourself. I personally am suspicious of the shiny object and complexity for its own sake. "These ideas need to be tested beyond the cozy echo chambers of like-minded converts. You might find that, much as the Tea Partiers can turn the techniques of Alinsky-style organizing against the progressives, that they've got a lot of potential for negative impact that you don't yet perceive." Oh, I'm very aware of echo chambers and of the potential down side of various emerging technologies, including those we're discussing. I don't dismiss a technology because it has a down side, when there's also a clearly discernible upside. What I think I'm hearing you say, though, is that free speech is not such a great idea, and we should suppress even limited democratic participation because "it has a potential for negative impact" - people we disagree with might also have voices. I mean, I hope that's not what you're saying, but I'm having trouble reading it any other way. Sure, those pesky global warming deniers would go away if we didn't give them so many channels in which to rant and spew, but we were using the same channels to make the point about climate change.
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #83 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:29
permalink #83 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:29
> Sure, those pesky global warming deniers would go away if we didn't give them so many channels in which to rant and spew, but we were using the same channels to make the point about climate change. The problem is, bad money drives out good. Something written by a hack that sounds sort of scientific and that reinforces prejudices and what an audience wants to believe will be believed, no matter how unscientific and wrong. Not saying that suppression is the answer, but the problem is rooted in human nature. In the words of one of my favorite writers, 'truth does not do as much good in the world as the appeearance of truth does evil.'
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #84 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:55
permalink #84 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 11:55
<80> continued: I think we are a long way from current brain work (like that described in <80> & <76> to understanding brains and consciousness. The process is a building the tools to build the tools to build the tools, in which we are many tools away. But I don't see the innate impossibility of, taking human identity/personality/memory out of a brain and embedding it in either another brain or electronics, or (most likely first) a hybrid of electronics and cultured nerve tissue. What am I missing?
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #85 of 223: Thomas Petersen (sushi101) Wed 6 Jan 10 14:31
permalink #85 of 223: Thomas Petersen (sushi101) Wed 6 Jan 10 14:31
Bruce As always it's a great pleasure to read your thoughts, although I don't agree with everything you say. Thanks for that. I have a question that have been on my mind for a while now and would like get get your opinion on. Recently I wrote an essay about it called "Slaves of the feed - This isn't the real time we've been looking for" Here is an expert: "...To get signal we need to plow through our noisy feeds to find the gold-nuggets that are of importance to us. Manual work by which our lacking ability to consume more than one feed item at a time becomes the bottleneck for how fast we can process and evaluate the information. Something gotta give. Its clear that we need information because we orient ourselves more and more through our online living. But its also quite obvious that our natural ability to process the very information that we need, dont scale well. The paradox we find ourselves in is that on one hand we dont know what we dont know so it doesnt really make sense to exclude any sources of information. On the other hand, much less than what we are forced to consume is really of relevance but we only find out which after we have consumed it. In a world where time is one of the most precious resources this doesnt compute. We need quality instead of quantity in our feeds. We need a better ability to find the gold nuggets. But as some of you have probably already asked yourself, what is quality? How can we know what is truly of relevance? Thus we find ourselves in an unsettling scenario. Designing for the bottleneck In other words, the aggregators that we have are capable of harvesting almost as much information as we want from them, but we have to evaluate each piece of information, meaning that we have to design the aggregators around the bottleneck. Meaning us. There are attempts to solve this in order to create better quality data streams. Wordburst algorithms that look for when words or sentences suddenly start to peak within a short period of time, is one example. Popularity of a given feed item might be a different approach. But right now most of these algorithms dont take the individual interest-space into account. Instead they look at global trends and as much as I believe that New Moon the movie is a great youth movie. I was kind of hoping for New Moon the moon when I clicked on the tag in the trend cloud. We find ourselves in a situation where there is no shortage of information in the digital space but only a very limited ability to extract relevant information thus making us depending on so much manual labor, one would be excused to think that slavery had in fact been re-inserted..." The rest can be found here http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtime-weve-been-lookin g-for/ What I am really after is where is this addiction to information leading us and what can we do to free ourselves of the reliance off the feed. Perhaps these where some of the things that Stewart Brand talked about too. How do you see the whole subject of information and how we deal with it? Not just twitter.
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permalink #86 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 17:05
permalink #86 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 6 Jan 10 17:05
"But I don't see the innate impossibility of, taking human identity/personality/memory out of a brain and embedding it in either another brain or electronics, or (most likely first) a hybrid of electronics and cultured nerve tissue. What am I missing?" What are you moving, exactly? What are its components? Where in the brain do you find identity/personality/memory, and how do you move it exactly as is to some other context or platform?
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #87 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 17:19
permalink #87 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Wed 6 Jan 10 17:19
>What are you moving, exactly? in words of one syllable, a soul. >What are its components? We have names for some: memory. sensation. cognition. >Where in the brain do you find identity/personality/memory, and how do you move it exactly as is to some other context or platform? brain mapping has moved pretty far - that's a relatively easy part. The 'exactly' is where the digital translation comes in. No, it is not going to be easy. But impossible? Why?
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #88 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 07:59
permalink #88 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 07:59
*So, I happen to be here in Milan for a day, so I did what I commonly do when I want to check out Milan's moral temperature. I went to the Rinascente department store. *The place is of particular interest to me because it's next to the Duomo, right in the blast zone of the tourist trade, and yet the Milanese themselves shop there. So the Rinascente is a kind of Milanese-glocal consumer paradise. It's got what Milan offers the world that the Milanese themselves are customarily willing to buy. *So what's in there, you may wonder. Fashionable clothes, mostly. Milanese couture. Shoes, belts, raincoats, scarves, acres of incendiary lingerie, Prada, Versace, Missoni, all the usual suspects. If you're into fashion-trendy, the Rinascente is kind of a one-stop trend-spotting shop. *So, you know: what's new for winter 2009/10? Well, shiny lightweight quilted jackets for both men and women, oddly drapey and buttonless gray sweaters, and weird toques that are made out of knitted tubes. *But, you know, perhaps the genuinely new development is that I do go to the Rinascente with great interest, and I'm keenly aware of the seductive power of all these luxury European goods, and I very rarely buy *anything.* It doesn't even occur to me, frankly. I paw over the stuff, sometimes I even take notes. I don't purchase anything. *I'm like some kind of pest who goes to the racetrack to admire the horses and never places a bet. It's like being the Open Source guy at the Apple store. Sure, one appreciates the genius of Jobs and Ive, but... pay money for that? It's all smoke and mirrors; I gotta see what's out on Sourceforge. *I don't have the time for it. I don't know where I'd put it. So I ogle it and I don't get any. Maybe a notebook, a pen. Sometimes I have a coffee while I peoplewatch. *The basement of the Rinascente is full of domestic industrial-design product. Huge. Beautifully packaged and displayed. Totally fascinating. There's like Alessi and Droog and Moooi and Starck, guys who are arch postmodernist designers doing design that's way out of the box... I'm like hefting this stuff, checking out the price points and the manufacturing processes, looking at the labels on the bottom... Do I take any of it home, the anthropomorphic salt-shakers, the translucent plastic Louis XIV chairs? Nope. Wouldn't dream of it. I'm down there occupying valuable floor space and sucking up oxygen. From the point of view of the Rinascente staff, I must be a drag on business, but since I look pretty much like the paying foreign customers, they can't grab me by the ear and throw me out. *Rem Koolhaas said some time ago that, in the future, museums would open stores while stores would curate their products. I wonder if he meant that people would go to stores, stare at things on the walls and shelves, and never buy the stuff. Retail stores are dying all over the place; the USA has dead, weed-grown malls from coast to coast. *Some of that is surely because the population is broke. But at least some of that has to be because some people in 2010 just aren't consumers any more. They're not dropouts or the Amish or thrifty on principle, they just look at things that they should have grabbed reflexively, used a week and stuffed in their garage, and the romance is gone for them. They just don't do it, they don't respond. Consumption is a lost art for them, like penmanship, square-dancing or hog-hollerin'.
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #89 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:11
permalink #89 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:11
One of the first things one notices about Milan is that they have a dress code. Actually, they have several different dress codes -- every Milanese caste or class has a dress code. But they all dress, and they've been doing it for five hundred years. I wish I understood how that started. Presumably, there must have been some hairy-eyed, half-barbarian, medieval Lombard guy, wrapped in the customary functional rags of the Dark Ages, and he must have put down his axe or halberd or whatever, and figured: "This just won't do. Instead of these Rome-smashing combat garments, I need something of fine linen that's been tailored on the bias cut." There doesn't seem to be any compelling *reason or motive* for the Milanese to dress up so hard. But they do it; every foreigner who drops by can see it; they even do it when they are being starved and bombed, and it's been that way for centuries. *They're not a rude people, although they're a big-city people with a no-nonsense attitude, so it takes you a while, maybe a couple of weeks, for you to realize you're hurting their feelings. There you are, your clothing is clean, properly zipped, considered acceptable in most other places, international airports, whatever... but you're Not Okay. Mostly it's the shoes, which for the Milanese are almost never Okay, but it's really the whole affect. You're an alien; you haven't caught on. It's not exactly offensive, but you're outside the game.
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #90 of 223: Harmless drudge (ckridge) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:23
permalink #90 of 223: Harmless drudge (ckridge) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:23
>some people in 2010 just aren't consumers any more. They're not dropouts or the Amish or thrifty on principle, they just look at things that they should have grabbed reflexively, used a week and stuffed in their garage, and the romance is gone for them. They just don't do it, they don't respond. Consumption is a lost art for them, like penmanship, square-dancing or hog-hollerin'.< Avarice doesn't go away, at least not for any significant number of people. If avarice has come detached from medium-sized objects you can carry home and leave around the house, to what has it attached itself?
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permalink #91 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:24
permalink #91 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:24
As a non-Milanese, there at first seems to be little you can do about this situation. As a non-Milanese alien, you cannot really gain any personal benefit from being fashionably dressed; it's a no-win situation for you. They best you can hope for is that you stop hurting the Milanese, stop throwing sand in their social gears and provoking their inner anxiety, which never seems far from the surface. *You can maneuver around within the caste system a little. Stage 0. Hobo, backpacker, tourist slob: subhuman Stage 1. Properly dressed alien: subhuman Stage 1-B. Freak-scene alien: goth, metal dude, Krishna worshipper, techno DJ, etc: freak Stage 2. Actually wearing the same clothes as a normal Milanese, because you went out and bought them: fraud, ringer Stage 3. Dressing as a posh SuperMilanese because you are a model, actress, foreign millionaire, etc: vaguely irritating. May be formally encouraged because it's good for business. *So, given this reality, what to do?
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permalink #92 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:50
permalink #92 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:50
*You can't win, but sometimes you can lose in an interesting way. *Ramp up the semiotics. This means dressing in garments that might conceivably be fashionable in Milan, but, in fact, aren't. You have to make the attentive gestures toward your appearance that the Milanese customarily do, while purging any elements of your wardrobe that identify you as a hick. Because they can't place you instantly, the Milanese will stare for three or four seconds... because they're sensing, and properly fearing, that something has appeared on the fashion radar that they haven't yet seen. *Then they realize that you're just an alien. But you're an alien who's fronting. That seems to be Okay. In some sense, you're actually dressed in Code Alien. There are Japanese Gothic-Lolita types, mostly 18-25 demographic, who are in Milan and superb at this -- supremely alien but somehow honorary Milanese, thanks to the extra fuss with the pastel silk bows and the crimpy ankle-socks or whatever. *The rich Arabs, the Russians, the German housewives from Bremen, they all get the eyeroll, but those Nipponese Code Alien girls... they get, like, preferential seating on buses. *In theory, it might be possible to push this further. It would be cruel and ungentlemanly, but a clever man or woman with bad intent could hack the Milanese couture system. I'd be guessing the most effective method would be some kind of Milanese steampunk schtick -- attacking the modern-day Milanese by dressing in the garb of Milanese from another time period. *For instance, kitting yourself out in full-scale Futuristi couture from 1911, with the jagged, heart-stopping "abstract-dynamic" graphics. It's antique and futuristic at the same time. Most Milanese wouldn't recognize this century-old Futurist gear, but there's no way they'd laugh at it, or find it funny or weird. They'd know it was Milanese all right, but they'd have to go into some kind of conceptual overdrive in the effort to place it and respond properly... This might take too many processing cycles and the whole system might crash. *That would be a pity. When I first saw the Milanese, many years ago, I saw them as the Milanese, but nowadays I see them as people behaving as Milanese. I guess that's a subtle distinction, but somehow it makes them endearing. You end up really rooting for them somehow; you want 'em to pick up the ol' soccer ball and run off with it into the stands.
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permalink #93 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:58
permalink #93 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 08:58
Tomorrow morning I have to fly over to the Balkans, and it's snowing on the European transport system. If I don't show up for a couple of days, send the Saint Bernards. I see that the Eurostar is claustrophobically stuck in the bottom of the Channel Tunnel again. If I never encounter that particular travel experience, I'll be a happy man.
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permalink #94 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 09:01
permalink #94 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 09:01
If you're low on hand-wringing, brow-wrinkling pundits, I suggest chewing on this for a while. This piece is supposed to be coming across all resilient and perky, but boy is it glum. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/american-decline Rather a lot of stuff in there about California.
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permalink #95 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 09:17
permalink #95 of 223: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 7 Jan 10 09:17
*Uh-oh. Send a LOT of Saint Bernards: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/6/822520/-Freak-Current-Takes-Gulf-Stream -to-Greenland
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permalink #96 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 10:11
permalink #96 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 10:11
That Gulf Stream to Greenland thing could be really bad news. Besides cold Europe, melting Greenland icecap....
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #97 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 10:15
permalink #97 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 10:15
There's a short version of the Fallows gloom to much the same effect as an op-ed in today's LA Times by the always-cogent Orville Schell. A ... tipping point has also been on my mind lately, and it's left me no less melancholy. In this case, the threat is to my own country, the United States. We Americans too seem to have passed a tipping point. Like the glaciers of the high Himalaya, long-familiar aspects of our nation are beginning to seem as if they are, in a sense, melting away. <http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schell7-2010jan07,0,7458460.story>
inkwell.vue.373
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #98 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 7 Jan 10 16:20
permalink #98 of 223: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 7 Jan 10 16:20
Interesting about the Milanese. While they're trying on shoes, sniffing the fresh leather, Austin's Alan Graham of Mobile Loaves and Fishes is buying blankets for the homeless who're living on the streets in a historic cold snap. (http://twitter.com/mlfnow) You can text a blanket to a homeless person in Austin from anywhere in the world. Last night I was rereading parts of "Shibuya Epiphany" in Howard Rheingold's book _Smart Mobs_, written as SMS was just emerging as its own kind of virtual world-builder. Cellular reality is a complex evolving dimension of the emerging noosphere. Teilhard de Chardin would be elated. Tonight the cold, cold streets of Austin will be slow and quiet as everyone watches football, the University of Texas vs Alabama, the BCS championship game. I didn't know what the hell BCS was, not being a persistent and attentive football fan. It stands for Bowl Championship Series, a selection process that I won't take time to get my head around (because it's already too full). In matters of football, I'm very Andy Griffith (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNxLxTZHKM8), but I'll be watching this game, caught up in the local enthusiasm. However screwy the world may seem, we get on with our lives, shopping and buying shoes, watching championship football games, posting short bursts on Twitter and longer diatribes on our blogs, having meetings to schedule more meetings, pondering the past, speculating about the future, avoiding the present, arguing politics, flipping television channels, dancing, shouting, bouncing, trying to carry a tune... We just keep on. Here on the WELL, Emily Gertz has been talking about her experience covering the COP15 Copenhagen Summit. It's frustrating - we have a critical problem that scientists generally understand... they know what we (as in everybody, globally) should be doing about it, but we can't muster the political will to take comprehensive action. Copenhagen produced a weak, non-binding,unenforceable agreement. Where do we go from here?
inkwell.vue.373
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #99 of 223: Mark McDonough (mcdee) Thu 7 Jan 10 18:08
permalink #99 of 223: Mark McDonough (mcdee) Thu 7 Jan 10 18:08
That Fallows piece is interesting. He keeps saying "We're doing great," but by the end the overall message is "stick a fork in us, we're done."
inkwell.vue.373
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Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
permalink #100 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 19:23
permalink #100 of 223: for dixie southern iraq (stet) Thu 7 Jan 10 19:23
Milan's a great place to buy stuff but beyond that...
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