Hmmm... Hackers? M
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 2:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Vanishing interstices I wrote this to a friend but FW came into it as I wrote. It occurred to me that it might not be very much OT here. I haven't much re-edited it for FW except to obfuscate DG's name. DG is a digital tech wizard, friend of a friend whom I've only met once long ago. This exchange relates to a recent happenstance email encounter. --- Hi B -- Did you send my comment on his remark to [DG]? (Recap:) dg> As a race, we are about to give up the, shall we say, self dg> sufficiency of what it was that got us here. There is so much to dg> say, yet so much ambiguity in a future that a technologic positive dg> feedback loop can bring us. Or maybe not just us. How would we dg> know once we cross the threshold or singularity or whatever you want dg> to call it? We approach the threshold as the Monstrous Blobs grow and exfoliate and the vast space in which they float is gradually reduced to mere interstices between them. We cross the threshold when the interstices between the Monstrous Blobs become discontinuous. Regrettably, neither we, the motes of biomass in the interstices nor they, those within the Monstrous Blobs, can have a sufficiently global view to determine just when that has happened. I think it has already happened. Telecom infotech has hastened it. I think I may have to write a whole rant on this. --- [Later] I still haven't written the rant but I may yet. This is on topic to the FutureWork mailing list I'm on, as well. Some of William Gibson's characters had this notion of "when it changed". That cusp in Neuromancer was very science-fictiony. In the Bridge trilogy, the change at the end of the last book was science-fictiony, too. But a couple of guys with special abilities grasped that it had "all changed" once before, agreed that it was some time in 1911, that the death of Pierre Curie under the wheels of a horse-drawn wagon in 1906 was somehow a trigger. When it all changed.... My FutureWork pals haven't got the "when it all changed" notion but I infer from their remarks (or short essays) that they intuit such a thing. Candidate loci are Nixon's repeal of Breton Woods, Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers, repeal of Glass-Steagall under Clinton and others. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the most recent one. If it has "all changed", one (or all) of those may have been triggers, releasers, what you may call it, but "when it all changed" has to do with the interstices. Too late at night to do a real rant now but here's an example: Gas stations. Oil companies are Blobs, have been during my lifetime. But gas stations were interstitial -- or at least an interface with the interstitial. Really dumb guys could pump gas, do oil change and lube, change tires. Smart guys with little education could be really good mechanics. Guys of moderate or even mediocre abilities could run a gas station biz. Ex-cons could work in gas stations. Gas stations, certainly rural ones and even many urban ones, were social foci, technology foci. All of this was, in a sense, infrastructure for people who lived in the interstices. Now there are no gas stations under that rubric. There are self-serve pumps, usually with an attached "convenience" store, wholly owned by a Blob oil company and run by a franchisee who operates out of a ring binder. Yes, there's a clerk or three but there's no pride, no texture, no fabric to being a minwage clerk. I once worked for half a year next to a genuine retard. He was a whiz grease man and took pride in his work. He wouldn't have been able to do clerking right and wouldn't have taken any pride in it if he had. So the oilco Blobs have squeezed together, squeezed one part of the interstitial landscape almost out of existence. There are still a few stand-alone repair shops, some as adjuncts to junk yards, but they're now more or less isolated examples. This particular kind of interstix has become a thinly distributed scattering of discontinuous cells. This has all happened since I worked as a mechanic in Amherst [Mass.]. Just one example. If you think of gas stations as a paradigm, you can spot other instances where interstices that once propagated social fluid have been squeezed into discontinuous cells of relative stasis. Your words for the day. Send them to [DG] if you're inclined. -m -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
