Quote: Quantum logic…

Because when I look at the quantum computer, I see a logic that, directed carefully, could do more for us than crunch bigger numbers. It is an information processor with an associative imagination, an operating system whose modus operandi is delicate quirks and unpredictability, a machine that performs its best secrets away from the prying eyes of experts. Most structures in our lives don’t like to admit the efficacy of ambivalence or ambiguity. And yet there they both are, fueling what could be our most promising new machine: ambivalence and ambiguity, animated by a sense of purpose, an acute epistemological power, and the willingness to abide by practical rules. Ambivalence and ambiguity that are, furthermore, smart collaborators – that not only share their uncertainty, but sharpen it into a precise mode of communication.

I want to know what our lives would look like, reorganized by that logic. If we built work cultures that dispensed with bullet points, celebrated missed deadlines, and distrusted tidy bottom lines. Or wrote school curricula that combined frog dissection, gym class, and musical theater into one huge embodied biology. Or formulated linguistic theories which accounted for the communicative powers of raised eyebrows, weeks-long absences, and the things we ate for dinner last night. And enacted those theories through deliberate programs of winks and pregnant pauses. With a sigh of relief at the death of tight-knuckled directness and all that exhausting linearity.

Miranda Trimmier, “Quantum Drift”.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – Ursula Le Guin quote

If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you–even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

And yet old. Before–once you think about it, surely long before–the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger–for what’s the rise of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in–with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

Ursula Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in Dancing At The Edge of the World.

Available as webpage here and as a pdf here.

Technological mediation as a supposed barrier to authentic enjoyment

In recent discussion of some apps which have been developed to allow visitors to engage with historical sites, I encountered some resistance from some people who make the argument that this somehow ‘cheapens’ the experience. The argument goes that in having a cultural experience, however broadly this may be understood, there needs to be something approaching a one to one correspondence. Cultural artefact X plus individual Y combine to create authentic experience Z. This reminds me of the analysis offered by Susan Sontag in On Photography. 

Technology and mediation

“For some, no doubt it is less comforting to think of rural Bangladeshis using cell phones than to imagine them sharing the experiences of the day at the hearth with their families. But the fact that the rural communities in developing nations can and do use cell technology brings them just that much closer to their “developed” counterparts. Not in the sense of having more technology at their disposal, but in the sense of thinking about communicating with people in similar ways, of being accustomed to maintaining relationships over distances, of acting on one’s desire to talk at the moment one has it, of possessing the confidence and the technology to project one’s needs and desires towards disembodied authorities and remote friends when one needs to.”

“The pursuit of authenticity in the attributes of the other constitutes a degraded form of critique. Its fundamental predicate – as convenient for the marketing executive as it is for the travel agent – is that we question and modify our own practices and seek authenticity in those of others.”

William Ray, The Logic of Culture, pp. 175-176, p. 178.

Robert Tavernor – Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity

The title leads one to expect a diversionary tour of the history of the technologies and the debates regarding measurement, and to an extent it is. Sadly, this perfectly serviceable intention is sidelined in favour of a wacky partisan position, in the process making Robert Tavernor the Baigent and Leigh of measurement.

This book is worth reading for the substance and the history, and not the crankery of his interpretation of matters, which makes him come across as a mixture of resentful autodidact (which he isn’t) and flat Earther. The tone is very uneven, and worth turning a deaf ear to. Just in terms of this interpretation (wanting a turn to supposedly more ‘human’ measures), his examples are self-serving. Why he cannot see the efforts at greater accuracy in measurement as a testament to the human mind is baffling. This sense of bafflement is why I have come to regard Tavernor’s position as “not even wrong”. His crankery is so far in the deep end that to engage with him is to risk destabilising reason. To take exception to metric measurement, as he clearly does, need not imply taking exception to rigour in argument and logical coherence.

The dangerous fundamentals of Business Intelligence 2.0

I do not intend here to get into the arcana of Business Intelligence 2.0 (BI 2.0), because I am not one of its acolytes. That is, I am not trying to sell you anything. What I want to point to is one central problem with the entire notion of Business Intelligence, which is related to other, similar problems with information. In that self-serving white paper from 2002, “Business Intelligence 2.0: Are we there yet?” (pdf link here), Gregory S. Nelson gives what he sees as a speculative projection of where BI 2.0 might take us.  In between repeated, and worrying references to Star Trek, he suggests that through BI 2.0, hey-presto

Decisions, facts and context will be developed through “crowdsourcing.” No longer will reports (or how data is structured) be left up to the designer, the environment will evolve as users make the data and derived insights work better through contributions of many.

This can be called the fallacy of absent agency, common to most popular applications of the concept of emergence to society (Nelson misattributes this to evolution rather than emergence), which operates under the assumption that all that takes place in the realm of Web 2.0 happens magically, without the intentionality of human actors being present.

The Silicon Vatican and the root of technology disputes

One point which I believe is worth making regarding the ongoing and eternal dispute between techno-sceptics on the one hand (such as the ever-compelling Dale Carrico at Amor Mundi) and the techno-utopians and techno-ideologists on the other hand (take your pick…) is the differing degrees of investment in the ideas being discussed. Carrico refers to these acolytes of undiluted progress as Robot-Cultists, both for specifically rhetorical and tactical reasons, but also in terms of the group identity they seek to foster for themselves. I am tempted to play Good-Cop to Carrico’s I’ll-beat-a-confession-out-of-them-yet-sarge-Cop (making me a techno-scepto-wimp?), and to say that this identity isn’t quite so monolithic as to warrant being called a cult, but perhaps is closer to something like a religious order.

Thus there are not just Dominicans, Jesuits, Norbertines, Benedictines, Poor Clares, etc., but there are the tiniest gradations in between some of these orders (not the first two though, who put a premium on coherence before differences of conscience). Thus there are the positively po-mo number of Benedictines (extra po-mo given that many of the differences are boil down to choices in footwear and other clothing…). Accordingly, the techno-utopians all seem to the following the same basic message, as promulgated by the various Cardinals of the Silicon Vatican (after Steve Jobs’s death, there has still been no white smoke to say “habemus papem”). The message that is sent out is that the share price is holy, and thus our works our good.