Question Technology

The End of Books by Uzanne and Robida

Albert Robida was a 19th century French artist and writer of satirical science fiction. I first heard of him last year when I read about him in Maggie Jackson's Distracted. Jackson described some of Robida's surprisingly accurate predictions from his 1882 novel The Twentieth Century, which is the only work of his that's currently in print in English translation. Robida was a contemporary of Jules Verne but is much less known today, at least in the English-speaking world.

I was searching for more information on Robida and came across a short story from 1894 called The End of Books, written by Octave Uzanne and illustrated by Robida. It's a pretty amusing read in light of the ever-present fretting over the death of books, the threat of audio books (see Kindle), and the invention of things called "video books" (see Jeff Jarvis). Uzanne and Robida predict (and to my ears make fun of) this very same stuff. Below is one of Robida's illustrations of a future reader, enjoying a book the modern way -- by listening to and viewing it.

Links to the story and related material:

• The University of Adelaide has an English translation: The End of Books.
• An excellent summary of the story in English by Michael Ward, with links to the French text and illustrations: abstract.
• Gutenberg has the French text and illustrations: Robida. (They have a link to a supposed English version but it's actually the French.)
• An article by Edward Tenner about Robida: "World Greatest Futurist" (see the pdf).

Book Notes

It's been a while since I did a book post here. Here are a few newish books I think are worth your time.

My pick for best book of 2008 is Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson's main topic is attention, but the book is about much more than that. She surveys the impact of technology on modern society from a wide variety of angles and sources, including science, literature, philosophy, and personal interviews. The style is more journalism than popular science, which seems to have disappointed some of the Amazon reviewers. If you liked the style of Bill McKibben's Enough then you'll probably like this one.

According to Jackson's website the book is coming out in paperback in September.

My pick for best book of 2009 (so far) is the second edition of Hubert Dreyfus's On The Internet. I wrote about the first edition (published in 2001) previously. A lot has changed since then and it shows in this heavy revision. Dreyfus's previous pessimism about whether search will ever work on the Internet is largely gone now, thanks to the success of Google. The book's second topic, distance learning, is less hyped these days so Dreyfus devotes less attention here to debunking it. In new material he describes his positive experiences with podcasting lectures via iTunesU and his not-so-positive experience lecturing in Second Life. For Dreyfus, embodiment is vital to experience, and his critique of Second Life and telepresence in general follows that argument, using ideas from Heidegger and existentialist philosophers.

On The Internet is part of Routledge's Thinking In Action series of books applying philosophy to contemporary topics. Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost philosophers of technology and also possibly the world's leading expert on Heidegger. If you ever decide to tackle Being and Time, as I am thinking of doing this year, then check out Dreyfus's Heidegger course on iTunes. It's probably my only hope of halfway understanding that book.

Finally, just in time for the silliness of switching to daylight savings time this weekend, you may want to check out Michael Downing's Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. This is a revised edition of a book that came out a few years ago at the same time as another book on the same topic by David Prerau called Seize the Daylight. I have not yet read either, but I picked up Downing's book based on the strength of a previous book of his I read (Shoes Outside The Door). There is an excerpt from Spring Forward at Downing's site.

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Bruce Sterling on the idea of Google as a collective intelligence

This is not an especially new thought, but Sterling does have a way with words (correction: see link below for his actual words):

The original sin of geekdom is to think that just because you can think algorithmically and impose it on a machine that this is disembodied intelligence. That is just rules-based machine behavior. Just code being executed. Sure it's an art and science. Calling it intelligence is dehumanizing. It makes you look delusional, sad and pathetic. It's like being an old woman whose only friends are cats. Also, collective intelligence is not your friend. Just as markets aren't your friend. They'll jerk you around.

The quote paraphrase is from a speech he gave about Web 2.0, reported by Annalee Newitz at io9: Why does Bruce Sterling hate web 2.0?

Update: What Bruce Sterling actually said about Web 2.0, a transcript posted by the man himself.

Nicholas Carr Interview in The Sun

The American magazine The Sun (not to be confused with the UK newspaper) has an interesting interview with Nicholas Carr in the current edition: Computing the Cost: How the Internet is Rewiring Our Brains.

You can read it free online but I recommend you pick up a physical copy to read the other contents, including a reprint of a short piece by Wendell Berry called "Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer," originally published in 1987.

The Reality of Radical Life Extension

In case this blog is seeming a bit too frivolous lately, here's a short quote from Simon Critchley's brilliant Book of Dead Philosophers, from his entry on Lucretius. (Something for Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil and other modern techno-immortalists to think about.)

To run away from death is to run away from oneself, to succumb to the desire for immortality, against which Lucretius offers a mathematical argument: the amount of time one is alive is not going to reduce the eternity of one's death:

So an unquenchable thirst for life keeps us always on the gasp. By prolonging life, we cannot subtract or whittle away one jot from the duration of our death. However many generations you may add to your store by living, there waits for you nonetheless the same eternal death.

What is a year or a decade more or less in comparison to the length of time spent dead? Viewed from the standpoint of eternity, what Spinoza calls sub specie aeternitatis, life's brevity or longevity is nothing in comparison to the eternity of our death. Moreover, this eternity is nothing to fear, but is the basis for contentment and calm.

Critchley takes as his starting point in this book the saying from Cicero, echoed by others through the ages, that "to philosophize is to learn how to die."

The Onion on Sony's New Stupid Unusable Product

The Onion's latest product review is brilliant. Video embedded below. (Warning: language may offend some!)

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

(via uselog.com)

Wired for War

Everything I've read or heard about Wired for War by P.W. Singer has been excellent. Here's a blurb about it from Singer's website for the book:

An amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. This upheaval is already afoot -- remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years.  But it is only the start. Military officers quietly acknowledge that new prototypes will soon make human fighter pilots obsolete, while the Pentagon researches tiny robots the size of flies to carry out reconnaissance work now handled by elite Special Forces troops.

Wired for War takes the reader on a journey to meet all the various players in this strange new world of war: odd-ball roboticists working in latter-day “skunk works” in the midst of suburbia; military pilots flying combat mission from their office cubicles outside Las Vegas; the Iraqi insurgents who are their targets; journalists trying to figure out just how to cover robots at war; and human rights activists wrestling with what is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines. 

Links to some good interviews with Singer last week about the book: Fresh Air, The Daily Show.

Update: Singer has an article in The New Atlantis, adapted from his book: Military Robots and the Laws of War.

Slow-tech by Andrew Price

New book by environmentalist and marine biologist Andrew Price: Slow-tech: Manifesto for an Over-wound World (only out in the UK apparently). From the book description: 

The modern world has put its faith in high-tech processes that has left it weakened and ill-equipped to withstand catastrophe. "Slow-Tech" argues for a world with greater robustness, something that is possible in surprisingly simple ways. A sailor crossing the Atlantic in a small yacht would want to minimize excess baggage. But it would be unthinkable not to carry more fresh water than seemed necessary, to survive unexpected calms or storms. Yet the imperative of profit, especially over the last century, has driven modernity towards 'lean, mean' strategies in every area of life; squeezing waste out of commercial, technological and environmental systems may make money in the short term, but is our highly geared, highly strung way of life sustainable? Andrew Price, sailor, explorer and environmental scientist at the University of Warwick argues that in the long-term, spare capacity actually pays. From the destruction of New Orleans to the loss of the world's fish-stocks and intractable problems such as MRSA, "Slow-Tech" demonstrates how the reckless pursuit of efficiency and cost-effectiveness frequently backfires. It makes the case for robustness as an equally important measure of performance in fields as diverse as healthcare, military operations and engineering.Unexpected and counter-intuitive yet convincing and timely, "Slow-Tech" offers an alternative vision for life in the twenty-first century - a rounded vision of balance and robustness that would be healthier for the planet - and healthier for us.

Bryan Appleyard has a review today in the Times. His verdict is mixed (good idea but too much about boats). I like the title.

Techno Tuesday: Worn Out Finger

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

Lessig's Prose

Whenever I read something by Lawrence Lessig I feel like my head is filling up with fog. Today I came across a new book by David Post called In Search of Mr. Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, which has the following blurb by Lessig on the back:

"Reading this beautifully written and extraordinarily diverse work today is what it must have been like to know or read Jefferson then. Post has crafted an experience in understanding that allows us to glimpse the genius that Jefferson was, and to leave the book astonished by the talent this extraordinary writer is."

Back in October I read an article of Lessig's that I believe was excerpted from his new book, Remix (Tom Slee has a good review of it at his blog). The article was called In Defense of Piracy, though it never really offered one. I read the article twice with the intention of writing something about it here (but never managed to). One of the points I wanted to make was that for a lawyer, Lessig is surprisingly vague and muddy in his writing.

Is this fair or even relevant? I think so. It means something when the spokesman for a new culture is such a bad writer. And I don't claim to be any kind of prose master, but I don't think that's a prerequisite for criticism.

Deep Ecology founder Arne Naess has died

Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who introduced the concept of "deep ecology" has died. (Norway Post, AP.)

His short article from 1973 in which he lays out the principles of deep ecology as contrasted with shallow ecology is online here: The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement (and probably elsewhere). Some excerpts:

The emergence of ecologists from their former relative obscurity marks a turning point in our scientific communities. But their message is twisted and misused. A shallow, but presently rather powerful movement, and a deep, but less influential movement, compete for our attention. I shall make an effort to characterize the two.

I. The Shallow Ecology movement:

Fight against pollution and resource depletion.
Central objective: the health and affluence of people in the developed countries.

II. The Deep Ecology movement:

1. Rejection of the man-in-environment image in favor the relational, total-field image. [...]
2. Biospherical egalitarianism-in principle. [...]
3. Principles of diversity and of symbiosis. [...]
4. Anti-class posture. [...]
5. Fight against pollution and resource depletion. [...]
6. Complexity, not complication. [...]
7. Local autonomy and decentralization. [...]

See also the Foundation for Deep Ecology, which has a good summary of the movement's history.

"How to think about science" now in print

The CBC Ideas series by David Cayley on "How to think about science?" (mentioned previously here and here) is now available to buy as printed transcripts (presumably bound in some format, but I don't know) at the CBC shop.

The audio is still available at the Ideas web site in Real or mp3 format. You can also find it on iTunes.

Aldous Huxley's Island

Jeffrey Kripal on Aldous Huxley:

I find it strange, and more than a little depressing, that, despite all of this well-known biographical and metaphysical material, Aldous Huxley is best known today for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Why is a man who had so much to say about the synthesis of science and spirituality and the deeper dimensions of human consciousness known primarily for a novel about the authoritarian horrors and technological dead-ends of the modern consumer state? Why is this consummate individualist, intrigued by the potential for spiritual ecstasy, still mostly identified with a story of moral despair and fascist political control? Obviously, part of the answer is because Brave New World was so incredibly accurate. But Huxley did more than diagnose the disease; he also provided what he thought of as a realistic treatment in Island.

I interviewed Laura Huxley about Island a few years ago (she died last year at the age of 96). She described the novel to me as "the last will and testament" of her late husband. Island, she suggested, is where he left his most sincere convictions and deepest thoughts about what human beings are capable of at their best. He was very careful, she pointed out, not to include anything in the novel that was not possible, that had not been practiced somewhere before and found useful. So he was quite upset when Island was received as a piece of fantasy rather than a practical program for translating his abstract philosophy of consciousness and existential mysticism into effective social, educational, and contemplative experiments. Island was no fantasy for Aldous Huxley. It was, as Laura said, his "ultimate legacy."

This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky (the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."

Link: Brave New Worldview: The Return of Aldous Huxley (Chronicle of Higher Education)

The full article is much longer and worth reading if you're interested in Huxley and issues of science and religion. I haven't read Island, but I'm tempted to give it a try now, though I think it may still be a wee bit too metaphysical/new-agey for me.

Techno Tuesday: Virtually Connected

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

What if the book business collapses?

Hugh McGuire asks "What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?"

Link: Hugh McGuire's blog, discussed also at Huffington Post. See also the recent article by David Streitfeld in the NYT: Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It. Related viewing: Paperback Dreams.

I increasingly fear for bookstores. The chains are devoting less and less space to books. Indies I used to visit have closed and the rest are struggling. I confess I still sometimes buy from the chains and Amazon for convenience, but I try to spend more at independent stores or direct from publishers online. Indie publishing will last longer than indie bookstores, I think. They can profit from selling direct or by subscription to the scattered readers who remain (as the excellent Open Letter does). But the physical bookstore, or at least the bookstore that is substantially a bookstore and not a music or video store, won't last much longer. This is not because they cling to an out-of-date "retail experience". The problem is primarily a cultural one -- people aren't reading books. We should be grateful that the Internet will continue to make it easier than ever for those who still read to find books, but we should also be sad that the superior experience of buying books in good bookstores is dying.

See also: Tom Slee's series of stories "Mr. Amazon's Bookshop".