[musings] convivialing

I make physical widgets for rich dudes.  This has some drawbacks and begs some questions.

Rich dudes don’t need more stuff, it fabricates desire and solves non-problems.  It’s resource intensive to make and in a few years becomes landfill.  

But cocreation is fun.  And in the smartphones first decade the work has been part of a democratizing for tech.  Smartphones and the internet are the only technologies Kevin Kelly calls convivial.   The benefits trickle down from white dudes. 

I also have largely participated in the “dumb” side of smartphones.  I make the artifacts that deliver the technology, but are a decreasing part of it.  Consumer tech HW is most about making shiny boxes for pixels, but the pixels are the medium and message.

So I’ve been at arms length from direct impact, making technological vehicles are are mostly ambivalent.  But the pace of improvement is flattening, and the hardware is moving away from the centralized pillars of consumer tech (smartphone, computer, tablet) and towards adding many, many branches (thermostats, ears, robots).

I went to an internal talk at Apple once where Jony brought out his favorite (at the time?) design object and it was a stool made from a tractor seat.  To him it was utilitarian, spartan, elegant, lasting, and well suited to its work.  But he noted that its form and function were inextricable, and that with designing consumer tech we face different challenges.  A computer has no necessary form, it can be fashioned into any shape and operate just fine as a computing device.  This went into a long anecdote about putting handles on iMacs, which was a very clever way to make computers subservient to humans again.  (If it has a handle it’s a tool, it asks to be picked up and moved around.  Beige boxes were intimating and stoic to most non-technophiles, and brightly colored boxes with handles were approachable and subservient.)

The work I’ve done to date has been unabashedly targeting the limbic system more than the cerebral cortex.  The shiny new phone is not an object of cognitive desire, but physical desire.  The apps utility and benefits are more conscious, they are acts of engaged thinking (Tristan Harris’ extremely salient points not withstanding).  So to date I have made objects that the corporeal body finds compelling to have and use, but have not troubled myself terribly with the more conscious interactions - it has been neutral technology.  But this is shifting.

Increasingly we make devices that are smart yet pixel-less. The medium is the message again.  Cloud-linked earbuds are more like tractor seats than like computing boxes.  That’s fun!  But it’s also scary, because I think it’s far easier to create non-convivial tech when you’re targeting the limbic system than when it’s more filtered by conscious consideration.

Technology is more and more about hooking into our lives with ever finer granularity.  Your kids, sport equipment, activities, memories, lights, thermostats, refrigerators, speakers, cars, all of it is connected.  It gathers data about your life and intends to make it better, but it also portends to make it less human and less subject to your immediate personal agency.  Privacy falls off the map, government has more hooks to intrude, private companies have more knowledge about you.

The insidious side of technological adoption is not new, but it is unfamiliar to me personally.  And my worry is that the physicality of technology belies its gravitas as the wolf in sheep clothing.

For the first time I am making devices I actively do not want in my house.  I’ve made tablets when I don’t want a tablet, but I’m not actually averse to them.  But digital devices that always listen to your conversations so they can participate in your family life?  I actively reject that technology.  I will not beta-test & dogfood that tech if I build it.

Are we creating digital animism?  Does plugging every noun into an increasingly power intellect (human and technological both) create a more spiritually resonate world or an oppressive one?

Does tracking need transparency?  Is Strava less frightening than Palantir because its about merely exercise or because it is transparently tracking and sharing its information for everyone?

What would the totemic/animistic design look like?  What would it mean to be a meaning maker?

Is it possible to create a job where you marry the practical of [team management, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing, fashion, craft]

with the emergent of [miniaturization, cognition, interconnection]

and the human cultural foundations of [religion, cognitive science, history, art]

to ultimately [design / build / sell / meaningful / smart / objects]

which parts are under represented in modern design?

which parts are coming fastest?

which parts are already being done well by others?

what analogous parallels are there to other industries?

talismans + totems

———

Look at the cognitive evolution in humans from physical to oral to written to thought. (noogenesis)

Look at evolution of language from concrete to abstracted (linguistics)

Look at the biology of sensory awareness (neurobiology, cognitive psychology)

Look at the evolution of tech from assembly to GUI to distributed.  (technium)

Look at the evolution of machine knowledge from algorithm to kinda animal to kinda human?  (machine learning)

Look at the evolution of religion from physical experience to animism to dogma and ritual. (cultural anthropology)

Looks the evolution of religious objects from totems to talismans to icons to spaces and words.  (neurotheology x art history?)

Does the shift in machine interactions from machine-language, to graphic language, to non-graphic language  (circuits -> assembly _> code / writing ->  GUI / pictures -> speech -> gesture)  make the designed object steadily more primitive?   Human cognition and communication evolved in the opposite and mirror way (gesture -> oral history -> pictograms -> writing -> maths)

Cultural anthropology and noogenesis follow known trajectories.   Technological objects are built upon those layers of abstraction, but are unapproachable to most as such.  Thus technologies strive to shed those abstractions in presentation and interaction, to become more primitive with each generation.  Our objects are getting more foundational human & animal, less cognitive and more emotive.  

Communication is in reverse:  Pagers -> texting -> emoji -> video chat

Social media is in reverse:  BBS/chat -> Facebook is written -> Instagram is visual -> Snapchat is oral

Does the emergence of ubiquitous machine intelligences amplify these effects to create techno-animistic objects where things are both primitive and beneficially thoughtful / interactive / active?

There is precedent for objects to be interactive and intelligent, even if they are inanimate or non-biological.  Animism, totemism, shamanism are the foundations of our most human qualities.  Religions build upon these abstractions, in kind with cognitive psychology and cultural evolutions.

What are the impacts of having the cognitive engine for most consumer tech be centralized rather than decentralized?  Even if Kelly is right and there will be multiple machine intelligence species, our personal interactions are likely to be with a very limited subset.