Random highlights of the Well's state of the world in 2020
I always enjoy the Well's annual State of the World discussion. This year's was no exception. It's great that this long-lived community open up this particular thread for everyone to enjoy.
Some of the highlights for me in the 2020 SotW follow. The state of tech, and the state of Making, mostly.
Bruce Sterling provided an intro, setting out that everywhere has the same malaise, now. Dubai and Estonia are no longer interesting tech innovators; India is changing too.
Ouch. Kevin Welch elaborates:
(A reminder of the Viridian Manifesto from 2000 "a group that can offer a coherent, thoughtful and novel cultural manifesto... The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will." The Viridian concept was closed in 2008.)
Jon Lebkowsky reminds us that action might still be possible, something between individual action and campaigning:
David Gans suggests The Great Endarkenment.
Jane Hirshfield says "Or if we may be extremely lucky as well as extremely proactive, The
Small Endarkenment."
Fingers crossed.
Some of the highlights for me in the 2020 SotW follow. The state of tech, and the state of Making, mostly.
Bruce Sterling provided an intro, setting out that everywhere has the same malaise, now. Dubai and Estonia are no longer interesting tech innovators; India is changing too.
So in MMXX, we're in a world situation that claims to be
post-global and post-Internet and post world-trade, where everybody
wants to take back control, be great again, assure sovereign
cyberspace, set tariffs, jail immigrant tots, beat up ethnic
minorities, nurture billionaires, ignore science, and reduce
education to assure that there are fewer brainy chicks -- but in
practice, there's no big difference among the players. They ALL do
that. There's next to no genuine cultural variety. They all use
the same hardware, slogans and techniques.
Also, there's no technological innovation in MMXX. Innovation
and invention are out of style. The closest we've got to innovation
is "capital moating," where you start some allegedly technical
company to screw around with, say, hotels or taxis, and throw so
many billions at the project that businessmen are awed. That's
financially innovative -- sort of -- it's like the space-aviation
biz staying aloft by angling subsidies. That's not Moore's Law,
there's nothing amazingly great that is busting out of the garage to
set Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft on their ear. There is
no wonderment, because there is no reason to wonder.
The fix is in. The Industry has consolidated. Best of the year
lists from tech journalists have been replaced by lists of the worst
things happening in tech. For the first time in my life, it's
getting hard to find any genuine technical novelty.
Ouch. Kevin Welch elaborates:
It seems in our New Dark 1.2 each country has a choice between aBruce Sterling also looks at what Bill Gates is up to:
neo-liberal overlord who will take your money and give it to their
friends and a ethno-nationalist proto-fascist who will take your
money and give it to their friends, with the only difference between
the two being whom they're blaming for the grift instead of
themselves. It's like a pan-nationalist version of the two-party
system.
Bill informs his social media followers that he's gotten very
interested in getting enough healthy sleep, and that he's deeply
engaged in reading good novels. There's also a few of Bill's
customary hobbyhorse remarks about nuclear power plants and averting
senile decline.
I can't blame Bill for sleeping through this one. If I didn't have
the WELL State of the World to awake me from my dogmatic slumbers,
I'd be sleeping more myself, and, hey, I sleep like a top.
.... Basically, Bill seems to be reserving hisWhat does this all mean for society? Sterling offers:
energies and trying to avoid dementia until he finds an era more
hospitable to his vision of rationalist techno-philanthropy. ...
Oligarchy feels strange and different to Americans, but it’s by no means a newBrian Slesinksy moves things on to Making:
condition in the world. The condition of social affairs there is
not “depressing.” It’s “humiliating.”
It’s about humiliation, not sadness. Huge class differentiation and
vast wealth disparity is about humbling people. People have to be
taught there’s a lot they just can’t do that their betters can do,
and they’re better off not asserting themselves or making trouble
above their station, unless they’ve pledged fealty to some nobleman
who commands resources.
I'm wondering if anyone wants to comment on the state of the Maker
community?
... Attempting to make just one thing myself also got me reflecting onBruce Sterling of course has thoughts (highlights mine):
our utter dependence on the global supply chain. You can unplug from
social networks, sure, but where are you going to buy your stuff? If
you make it yourself, where do you buy parts and tools? Not to
mention outsourced services like laser cutting and PCB board
manufacture. It's hardly "buy nothing" day; I'm ordering more stuff
than ever.
People are down on world trade but I don't think anyone's really
contemplated what it would be like to try to go it alone. A large
nation with lots of manufacturing capability could maybe do it, if
they're willing to do without on some things. Maybe China would
manage it assuming Trump has convinced them to seriously try?
(Probably not.)
The nationalistic mood doesn't seem much in touch with globalist
reality?
"Movements," as opposed to institutions, tend to go somewhere, andI also found it very interesting to see Bruce's commentary on Casa Jasmina and how that reaped publicity and attention (links in-lined by me):
then they stop. So "Making" was an eclectic tumbleweed of a lot of
moving novelties that I enjoyed learning about, such as Web 2.0,
open source hard ware, 3Dprinting, artisanal electronics,
shareables, fabrication labs, public hacker events, sneaking weird
cyberpunk DIY personal projects into dead Italian factories, and
even more!
... However, fifteen years is a rather long time for any "movement."
Nobody talks about "Web 2.0" any more; the Internet was famously
"built with O'Reilly books," but Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon,
Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, those vast post-Internet
entities are not built with O'Reilly books, and O'Reilly was the
source of Make, the way Whole Earth was the source of the WELL.
Even the Maker Movement had to meet some bills, it couldn't
run just on raw joy and sweat equity. For Make that was the
magazine, selling some tools and tie-ins, and throwing big,
profitable public events quietly underwritten by tech companies.
Eventually they suffered a cash crunch when their discreet alliance
with the corporations broke down.
In MMXX, if you're a tech company enamored with making, you
just build your own fab-lab in the basement and give it to the
engineers as a playroom/R&D lab. You don't need hand-holding from
MAKE magazine columnists.
These big-time sponsors figured out that they could have
trained professionals tinkering. They don't need a massive popular
movement of random tinkerers tinkering -- that doesn't convey to
them any genuine research and development benefit. Nobody tinkers
up a functional and legal mass-market stove or refrigerator.
Makers are hobbyists and popular-mechanics people, they mostly make
toys, games, collectibles, costumes, and Burner-style FX
knick-knacks that approach technology-art, device art, and machine
art. Activities dear to my heart, but they're not heavy industry
and they rarely scale.
Then there's the experience of the "Makers" themselves -- as
in, what are accomplishing here, what is your own end goal? Is this
something you do on the weekends, like building ships in a bottle,
or are you a designer/engineer light-manufacturer who is at it all
day? If you're a professional craftsperson, you'll need to
manufacture instead of tinkering --- because"real artists ship."
You want inventory, patrons, a customer base, maybe a brick and
mortar shop -- maybe you use some digital tools, but you're a
self-employed skilled laborer, and good luck with it.
If you don't ship any product, and you're a professional
tinkerer, then you're actually into "Makertainment" rather than
making. You want to record and sell your process as a form of
monetizable performance-art.
Maker-entertainment is quite a different animal than the "Maker
Movement," because there's a lot more money and fame in it. This is
Adam Savage pulling down Starbucks sponsorship money for harnessing
an aeolopile gizmo with liquid nitrogen.
At "Casa Jasmina" we never made any profit, because we also had
a covert alliance with a corporation. In our case, it was the
open-source hardware outfit "Arduino," with CEO Massimo Banzi as our
maestro, theorist and gray eminence. Like a lot of hobby startups
Arduino had some rough times, but they've pulled through, and at CES
in Vegas this year, out came the first mainstream industrial Arduino
product, the "Arduino Portenta."
The "Portenta" is not a maker-style "innovation platform," it's anHeh. Which is a nice segue into the state of tech. It's Bruce Sterling writing again:
open-source heavy-duty industrial device, and why not? I dunno if
it'll sell, but in terms of where the maker movement went as it
developed with the years, that makes sense to me. You "innovate,"
and you either write down the experiment and close the lab, or else
it turns into something commonplace that is no longer "innovative."
.... Don't cry if it's gone, rejoice that it was ever there.
"Casa Jasmina" is over, but in the meantime, Internet-of-Thingsindustry booster Stacey Higginbotham says today that the entire ideaof a "smart home" has to be abandoned. If they're run in the surveillance-marketing fashion that they are today, no sane person
ought to trust one.
With that said, that said, in my opinion, the tech scene isIt's the times we live in, at least in America, not tech specifically:
kinda overdoing it with the self-scourging tech-lash. The techies
happen to be top dogs in a particularly rotten era, so people
naturally blame them for most-everything. Also, the tech moguls
love the limelight and would much rather look like massive baddies
than just blundering morons who ran themselves into a ditch.
Sometimes a hand-wringing mea culpa is a great way to play drama
queen.
When you look around, obviously the other major industries are
just as bad or worse than Big Tech is. Other big American
industries are not moral exemplars of corporate good-citizenship and
kindness to the user-base. The US has become a crooked country, and
its industries look and act crooked.
Real estate is wicked, cruel, unworkable. The car biz kills and
pollutes. The arms biz, it’s huge and takes whatever it wants.
Aviation is crashing headlong, electricity blacks people out,
nuclear was an awful, irretrievable mistake in tech development….
Cable TV is blatantly corrupt and exploitative, the most fiercely
hated US biz of them all, while Big Pharma kills people outright,
and even agriculture lives on handouts….. The fossil-fuel biz is
super-ultra-terrible, literal crush-the-world bad. They’ve become
super-villains, in a trip-to-The-Hague level of
crime-against-humanity. There’s never been a major industry so
wicked as people who can melt the poles, set continents on fire and
lie about it. They make Zuckerberg look like a Teletubby.
You can’t be a morally squeaky-clean commercial enterpriseOuch again.
within a corrupted society. That can’t be done. Professional
integrity isn’t possible either — the editor of WIRED is arguing
here that software engineers ought to act more like
engineer-engineers, but China is a Communist-engineering
technocracy. China’s got engineers out the wazoo, and they’re
engineering Xinjiang and face-surveillance. Osama bin Laden was an
engineer. Engineers are just a profession like doctors or lawyers,
and those professions can’t look good when politics are crooked and
the health system kills people.
The simple truth is, it is humiliating to live in an oligarchy.
Injustice prevails, and most people have to sacrifice their freedom,
dignity and initiative. It feels like a bad scene all around
because it’s indeed just plain bad, and with few paths of moral
redemption. Cool hardware in your hand doesn’t redeem you from the
general air of corruption, arrogance, oppression, repression, and
all-around shame and sleaze.
... I don’t think that the tech biz
has the innate ability to grab its own bootstraps, clean itself up
and march ahead manfully. That’s like expecting American
health-care to miraculously reform itself because doctors and nurses
somehow become more Hippocratic.
Voltaire lived in an Oligarchy, and he was an EnlightenmentLuckily the State of the World is not without hope, even if it's just that we should be honest.
figure. The lesson of Voltaire is that it’s better to be honest
than to try to be good.
(A reminder of the Viridian Manifesto from 2000 "a group that can offer a coherent, thoughtful and novel cultural manifesto... The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will." The Viridian concept was closed in 2008.)
Jon Lebkowsky reminds us that action might still be possible, something between individual action and campaigning:
In his 100th Viridian Note, Bruce wrote:What will historians call this age?
"There are three basic activities we Viridians can fruitfully
pursue: we can create new concepts, we can spread ideas, and we can
be a moral force by example.
"Being small and diffuse is a tactical advantage for those three
activities. We can never expect to rule the planet by Papal decree,
but we're by no means without potential influence. Small diffuse
groups get quite a lot done in the world.
"If we Viridians successfully affect the course of events, it won't
be by lobbying, staging elections, shipping products, or passing
laws. It'll be by making a new world seem plausible, by becoming
early adapters, and by the Vaclav Havel method of publicly "living
in truth."
"Becoming an effective early adapter means finding new things and
processes, and making them modish. It's about cause celebres,
theatricality, publicity stunts, and hype.
"Creating buzz is something at which we Viridians should excel.
Besides, it's fun."
David Gans suggests The Great Endarkenment.
Jane Hirshfield says "Or if we may be extremely lucky as well as extremely proactive, The
Small Endarkenment."
Fingers crossed.