do the right thing--whatever ideal that might be; and we want to build things--whatever material object those might be. We are both the strength of the system, and the vulnerability of its holes. Between these two, in the process of navigating the difference, is what it means to be human: what has meant in the past, what it means today, and how we think the endless cycles of more “todays” will affect it all. Both Chris and Bruce come back to drones to describe this composite humanity. Drones are the Future-Present archetype for the commodified technological symbol: the singular abstracted entity for vast cosmologies of systems, meanings, and materials. Perhaps what is most uncanny about them, is that these are incredibly non-human objects, that could not have been made by anything other than humans.
I have a deep curiosity about how the self is constructed, how we define our own agency within a web of interdependencies, and how our technologies modify and extend our sense of self. So in this context, drones are fascinating as disintermediators of presence enabling both remote viewing and remote aggression. The drone is symbolic of our ability to extend our senses beyond our corporeal containers, made most compelling as an object of flight. Thus, we become the bird of prey, conferred with a sort of shamanistic projection through this technology.
Culture will attempt to contain powerful technologies in ways that align with its goals and defend its progress into civility. Thus, biology presents the core argument for or against technology: does it help me or hurt me? Culture contextualizes the technology within the social, moral, and ethical spheres: is this good or bad for society? And politics evaluates the role of technology within management structures, resource requirements, and inter-tribal dynamics: Does it help the stakeholders committed to the goals of the majority power bloc?
There are no politicians who are not a part of culture. And there are no earthly technologies that are not expressions of humanity.
- Chris Arkenberg
There's tremendous energy in the DIY drone scene. They're just cellphones with wings, they're not as remote and forbidding as the Manhattan Project. Weird cheap atelier drones are proliferating fast. There is a ton of action in the drone space. The [former] editor of WIRED US does practically nothing else.
Actually, drones are a cheap globalization hack. They're a way to put a virtual military presence on the spot without formally invading a nation-state and crossing its land-boundary casus-belli tripwire. If you start politically construing drones as an unalloyed political badness that inherently lacks any toy-balloon factor, that's a weak political analysis and untrue to historical experience with similar military technologies. Better to confront drones as what these devices really are, component-wise, capacity-wise, and don't construe them as Super Mario.
I'm all for political analysis, sort of, but if I were you, I'd hearken back to the historical reaction about mainframe computers: "they're for IBM, they'll spindle and mutilate all the good people". Or the ARPAnet: “it's from defense spooks, it'll spindle and mutilate all the good people." Drones are getting a free ride because the population's convinced that the people being spindled and mutilated are the terrorist-bad-people. We've been round that tech-proliferation carousel before.
I don't believe there's such an entity as an absolutely beneficial SF concept. "To the unclean mind nothing can be clean." It’s not an either-or issue. Drones aren't particularly efficient human slaughtering machines in any sense. Even the people most into the development arc of lethal drones are trying to make them efficient assassination machines, not efficient weapons of mass genocide. We already have efficient weapons of mass genocide.
I don't much care for the dictum that speculation needs a purpose in action. This kind of non-whimsical use-value argument is like the school of East German design. No toys allowed in your discourse? No thought-provoking curios? No surprises, no sense of wonder? Take a hike!
There's more at stake than the fates of "our" intriguing little projects and "our" little technological dalliances. We don't live in a world alternatively divided between Luddism and Cold War Skunk Works. Both those things have been dead for decades now.
Every cult's impetus to tinker is always being co-opted by some X. You need some intellectual generosity here. You can't virtuously do nothing with your lifespan because your every effort might be repurposed as a bayonet or a deodorant ad.
Also, if you "pledge allegiance" to something, what's the big scary downside that seems to be bothering you there? Are you afraid someone will laugh, somehow? That's rather a paralytic burden of dignity, isn't it?
- Bruce Sterling
The vastness of speculation, of criticism, and of narrative, is the overarching stimulus that snaps me out of the paralytic burden. Whether we identify central critical questions to define a technology’s ethicality or not, there is no escape from the interdependent network of shifting narratives. Every Future-Present Archetype I have identified could be pushing the wrong argument. This guide, as a topology of narrative arcs, could be outdated and insufficient in a matter of months, if it ever was useful. But what keeps the blood pumping through my writer’s veins is that critical archetypes will continue to emerge. Every day that passes, every stunning idea and technology that we hear about, every horrifying outcome of the human species, and ever point at which we pause, uncertain and unsettled, will be the underlying terrain of these stories. And this will be the space through which we’ll either understand our lives, fail to do so, or more likely a bit of both--now, and going forward.
Coda
To Table of Contents
There is a great deal more to be said on this topic than has been said. However, rather than continue to wax on about the theory of this stuff, I decided to turn the lens around, and focus it on my own contribution for a bit. As the compiler and author of this series, I had a large amount of control over the shape, even as I relied upon the participants to inform the contents and direction. And yet, my own point of view is somewhat hidden, disguised by the words of my sources. So, I’ve decided to interview myself about making this series, as sort of a “DVD-commentary extra”. I hope that in doing so, I can provide a bit more context of how this work came about, and how the process affected the ideas within it.
This is an unconventional interview piece. Tell us more how it came about?
I wanted to write an essay on something I was calling the “Intriguing Valley”, in the beginning of 2012. The idea was that certain technologies are much more speculatively interesting than others. 3D printing, drones, smart phones, etc. I wanted to pull together the thoughts of all the smart people I hear talking about these sorts of things, synthesize them into some theory of the thing, and explore what is so intriguing about it.
I wrote an essay, gave it to Joanne McNeil, who was my editor at Rhizome (she’s since moved on to other things) and she was interested in the idea. But she sent it back to me, because it seemed insufficient. I had to agree with her. This was such a big topic, so of the zeitgeist, that a thousand-word musing with some clever phrases just wasn’t going to do it justice. She suggested I interview some of these people directly, and get them talking about it. It was a great idea, and a great excuse to engage these folks in conversation.
However, after chatting with them over the phone and by email in the spring, I ended up with so much amazing content that I didn’t know how to proceed. Literally, every single sentence they had said to me was interesting and relevant, and it could never be a single essay. So I went through it all, line by line, and started sorting it, trying to find particular themes in what they were talking about. They were all talking about the same sorts of things, but approaching it differently, in the contexts of our different conversations. I came up with six separate categories, and broke up each text and transcript according to these categories. Then, in thinking about how I could possibly present a bunch of cut-up interviews as coherent essays, I came up with the idea of interpolating and connecting each category’s interview pieces with my speculative, pseudo-philosophical comments, providing the n
arrative flow for each category. The narrative for each, would best be embodied by an example of the particular category’s theme--and that’s where I got the archetypes. They all came pretty easily (except for one, which had to be thrown out later and reinvented when it didn’t actually work in practice). I pitched this idea back to Joanne, and she was down with it. I wrote each section individually, over the course of about six months from July to December. I said it before in the introduction, but Joanne was amazingly helpful in making this odd format work, by not only editing, but by seeing the big picture of where all this was supposed to go, and letting me know when I was getting off track.
Is this a work of philosophy? Of tech journalism? Of futurism?
It’s not journalism, because even though I interviewed some folks, I’m not reporting on anything. And I wouldn’t call it futurism, because I don’t think I’m really dealing with the future at all. This is strictly about the present, even if it uses future-forward language.
I would call this pop philosophy. Kind of like one of those “Philosophy of the Matrix” compendiums. It takes a fairly deep subject material than many people are familiar with, and then tries to