abstractions. We shorten the distance between our judgment of a thing and what that thing “is” until they are one of the same. What the world “is”, is comprised of our accepting a map as easily as we hear an uttered judgement, in the time of its hanging in the air, only as long as it takes to be spoken. The structure of a map may or may not be like the land, but a structure of a map is something that we know. We read it, and we know that it symbolizes space that is habitable. When this maps fails, we are not lost— we just don’t know where we are.
The third map, manifested famously in a particular instance by technology, was actually two maps— or the difference between two maps. When iPhone users updated their devices to a new version of the operating system in September 2012, they discovered that not only had Apple replaced the Google Maps program with a new Apple Maps program, but there were serious usability discrepancies between the two. Turn-by-turn driving directions had been added, but public transit directions had been removed. Search functions were lacking in the brand-new Apple Maps, as the hard work done by Google Maps to verify place data was no longer accessible. And the Street View data, meticulously collected by Google employees with 360-degree cameras on the ground for years, was replaced by an aerial “3D” view feature, that left odd glitches in the data: for example, portraying underpasses as solid walls, and making bridges over water appear melted.
The switch of map platforms, a decision made on the corporate level, betrayed what each of these platforms really were— a complicated stitching together of massive amounts of descriptive data, GPS information, and aerial photographs. Each of these two maps was actually millions, if not billions of maps. What allowed the map to be perceived as singular, and to make it useful as a means for orienting oneself in real space using a mobile device, was the seamlessness of the platform’s presentation of very similar data. The data— the maps themselves— were not dissimilar from each other. But the skip between one program’s presentation of the map data and the other’s, as it was presented for human reading, made all the difference.
The Apple Map “problem” is hardwired into our human capacity for navigation. Even if Apple had the time and resources to replace Google Maps with a program that was seamless and indistinguishable, this problem would have resulted at some point. It has before, and it will again. It could be a crash in the server, a forced downgrade to a phone without GPS maps, or any other real world issue that would separate us from seamlessly absorbing that useful abstraction of the map. We know that our sense of time-space is internal to our brains, and we know that the map is not the territory. But we don’t realize that our ability to use a map is because of the seamless integration of thousands of previously observed maps, of preconscious data visualizations in our perception and mind, of mental schema, and of their historical entanglement. Until, the occurrence of the glitch. Then we see the scaffolding of schema that underlies our perceptions. When this map fails, we are not necessarily lost, and not necessarily unaware of our location. At this point of failure we are conscious of how much of the world we know is only a map.
The Future-Present archetype we are encountering is not GPS, not our neurology, nor the ability of us to understand and make maps. It is the map that necessarily comes apart in our hands. It is the somewhat disconcerting revelation that the schema we use to understand history and our place in it, are it. To feel lost is a crisis of our person, and to have one’s recorded position displaced is a crisis of data. But to have the concept of a map devolve, is not so much a crisis of history, but its most visible presence. We have folded the Future-Present so deeply into our perceptions of the world, that sometimes we see it best when we fail to see it, when the overlapping schema we have stitched into our conception of everything becomes unthreaded, and we can look into the seams. In between the frames? Only more seams behind it. Seams, as it is said, all the way down.
Augmented reality presents opportunities to both extend and collapse the sense of self across spacetime. There is a deep revelation in this technology that promises to show us the hidden attributes of the world around us. It can be confronted as an occult technology in that it simultaneously reveals the hidden and offers a hidden view. What we see through AR can reinforce our personal experience of the world - what I see may become radically different from what you see - while simultaneously allowing us to share access to a common dataset underlying physicality - what I see contains the same rich detail as what you see. In this there is a path of algorithmic containment just as we see in all current algorithmic content streams, reinforcing what you like and filtering out what you don't. This is something that celebrates our individuality while robbing us of the agency to grow and see differently. If our adaptation requires seeing problems in new ways, will algorithms dull or enhance this ability?
- Chris Arkenberg
If we invented a technology that broke our mental schema for good, would we realize it in time? We map the levees around our cities, to be prepared for their inevitable ruin and failure. But what of the failure of the levees on the maps themselves? What of the failure of the levees in our conscious thoughts? These berms may not erode nearly as quickly, but that is not to say their are impermeable. Consciousness has always been too big to fail, but that is no guarantee.
The fans of [Future-Present] tech are indeed cross-disciplinary in their vocations. It may be more useful to look at the personality traits that incline a person towards such interests. They are hardware folks fascinated by the mechanics of functionality, the specs & schematics, the operational capabilities and engineering tolerances. They are military buffs into the tools of power & survival, the nuances of geopolitics, and the flow of milspec into civilian space. They are tech geeks looking for signs of their scifi fantasies coming to life; activists guarding civil liberties and revealing corruption; cybernetic psychologists tracking the ingression of the algorithm into the body; coolhunters & trendwatchers, analysts & futurists fed by the Edge, always propelled towards the precipitous drop into tomorrow. These types of orientations often emerge in childhood, reinforced by formative experiences and natural abilities. But as expressions of imagination, objects of novelty, and tools of functionality, technologies - especially the radical ones - always captivate our attention.
There may also be deep evolutionary structures compelling us to pay attention. Maybe something within our psyche is projecting into our technologies and demanding that we keep pushing forward, to the West, out to space, into the inner unknown. We are planners, after all, always watching the horizon to be prepared for tomorrow.
- Chris Arkenberg
It is good that we have so many people paying attention. The deep evolutionary structures that Chris suggests might be our only hope for survival. Our schema may be doomed to shatter, but saving grace is that we seem innately driven to construct replacements. The schematic opportunities in the Future-Present may be few or many, but considering these things from a variety of relative perspectives should hopefully keep us from fatally surprising ourselves.
[Identifying the Future-Present is] a framing thing. We have subconscious biases about who should be doing what. I’ve had male friends watching their kids on the playground— and people come up and ask “where’s the mom?” because no one assumes that the father would be with the kids on the playground. These are subconscious schemas about who should be doing what. It’s rarely malicious, it’s just part of our culture. It’s like taking the red pill in the Matrix. Once you learn about gender schemas, you totally see it everywhere. Sadly, there’s no going back. It’s not an unqualified win.
It’s not a totally design-based thing; it’s about the way we learn. If you have a schema or a mental model of what a used car salesman looks like and how they behave, it’s useful. If you think the person you’re buying the car from has your best interests in heart, that’s not good. The idea of framing, that once things are pointed out to you it’s possible to see them as part of a larger whole, is part of a broader psychology. “Culture is all the things
you do that you don’t know why you do them”... I don’t know who said that originally. I didn’t realize I was Canadian until I moved to the US. I apologize to people when I bump into them, even if it is totally their fault. That was a thing I did without thinking until I was in a place where that did not happen, and then I became aware of it. That’s the nature of culture.
- Deb Chachra
It is a chicken-and-egg question to ask if we develop schema-altering technologies by accident and then react to them, or whether we create technologies that purposefully incite new schemas as a way to seek new perspectives. It’s been suggested, in the conversation surrounding Venkat Rao’s “Manufactured Normalcy Field”, that our development of technology is done in such a way as to seek novelty, or alternatively, seek as little novelty as possible. Perhaps neither is truly the case. Technology doesn’t want anything that approaches the meta-schematic level of “novelty”, nor do human beings. Our desires don’t function on the semantic level of mapped culture theory. We don’t seek novelty, it is with the schema of “novelty” that we