Technology novels

The ten top technology novels as listed by PC Magazine.

And this is my shortest blog on record.

Development

The short documentary on a small Peruvian's journey into becoming a "developed" place in the world, offers insights into assumptions we rarely examine.

The popular notion is that "development"=wiring a place. To develop today means simply to attain a spot on the worldwide landscape of the Internet.

However, this small village has no road, a fundamental infrastructure without which the village in a geographical sense of the term, remains, as one of the wiser residents say, a "prison".

Navigating knowledge of the wider world via the medium of the screen is fine, but a prior acculturation to acquiring a sense of what's out there beyond one's village or strip of homeland, is necessary before the secondary witnessing of the world through a mediation by the Internet takes place.

It's like the hungry child has to be first fed with essential nutrients before it can successfully go on a diet of tertiary food.   

A paradox of Capitalism

Is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin, calls a post-market economy, an economy that has near-zero cost of production and its driving paradigm is the "Internet of Things."

I'm yet to wrap my brain around the concept of the Internet of things, but have a blurb on the book's content here:

The capitalist era is passing - not quickly, but inevitably. Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life. Ironically, capitalism's demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces. Rather, The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues, capitalism is a victim of its own success. Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies. Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero, which makes the product essentially free.
In turn, profits are drying up, property ownership is becoming meaningless, and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance, changing the very nature of society. Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons.
"Prosumers" are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost, and sharing them via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, bartering networks, and cooperatives. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) that also operate at near-zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.
As a result, "exchange value" in the marketplace - long the bedrock of our economy - is increasingly being replaced by "use value" on the collaborative Commons. In this new era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares. Cooperation replaces self-interest, access trumps ownership, and networking drubs autonomy. Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will no longer be the dominant paradigm. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Rifkins writes about the shared commons here.

Embrace your inner bot

The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT, predicts that the future of knowledge work would be largely owned by computers. 

According to the authors, computers would be able to perform increasingly complex parts of cognitive jobs like diagnosing diseasing, picking stocks and granting parole.

Is this something we should worry about?

NYTimes columnist, David Brooks says, we should worry about the future computer displacing the "average" skill-holder, whom he describe in terms of the "middle distance runner." A "middle distance runner" is the worker who regurgitates yesterday's news in language that's comprehensive and length that's graspable, but does nothing more.

However, it's the "creative" sort whom the smart computer will not be able to displace unless the smart computer develops emotive traits and a "heart". Brooks describes the new age creativity brilliantly:

Creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.

Thomas Friedman has some acute observations on the book here, and the authors' interview is here.

Is technology boosting or roasting our cognitive abilities?

A polarizing topic of the 21st century: Is technology making us smarter or dumber? Dumber, says Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows, and smarter, says Clive Thompson, in Smarter Than You Think.

In a New Yorker Blog on technology and intelligence, Tim Wu, Professor at Columbia Law School, makes the debate less polarizing by noting that the two writers aren't saying two opposite things, but two different things, because each is addressing a different "Us". 

The "Us" in Clive Thompson's book is the cyborg part of "Us", i.e. our auxiliary brains, while the "Us" that Carr is concerned about is the "man" whose identity is moored in the rich and timeless heritage of Western Enlightenment. The "man" in Carr's notion is getting diminished in the hegemonic universe of technology.

So, depending on which part of the "Us" "you" are addressing, technology is an augmenter or a diminisher. 

Artificial intelligence

A new novella by Ted Chiang, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, explores the inner lives of objects we categorize as objects of artificial intelligence.

The first chapter of the novella can be found here.

2025?

2025 could very well be the title of a new Dave Egger's new novel, The Circle, because the plot is a close echo of the plot of George Orwell's dystopian classic, 1984.

Orwell's totalitarian regime was the government, whereas Eggers' is a tech-behemoth resembling Google or Facebook. The company credo is "All That Happens Must Be Known." It has several Orwellian maxims like, "Secrets Are Lies," "Sharing Is Caring," and "Privacy Is Theft."

According to the New York Times, The Circle

Attempts to use the coming-of-age story of a young woman to create a parable about the perils of life in a digital age in which our personal data is increasingly collected, sifted and monetized, an age of surveillance and Big Data, in which privacy is obsolete, and Maoist collectivism is the order of the day. [Eggers] reminds us how digital utopianism can lead to the datafication of our daily lives, how a belief in the wisdom of the crowd can lead to mob rule, how the embrace of “the hive mind” can lead to a diminution of the individual. The adventures of Mr. Eggers’s heroine, Mae Holland, an ambitious new hire at the company, provide an object lesson in the dangers of drinking the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid and becoming a full-time digital ninja.

Technology triumphs food

As the picture above shows, Owsley County in Kentucky is a pretty place. But like the Appalachian region, has the distinction of being the nations’ poorest county, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States.

The County is 98% white and 81% Republican. More than half of Owsley County residents live below the poverty line and depend on Food Stamps, a Federal food assistance program that was hit hard yesterday when House Republicans voted to cut it drastically.

If the House Republicans bill passes, 3.8 million Americans will relapse below the poverty line by 2014. A large chunk of Owsley residents will go hungry. 

A paradox: There is Federal Food Assistance and then there is Federal Wireless Assistance, to “empower” the poor by giving them free cell phones. Walk down the streets of the Bronx in New York City, and men and women wearing nice clothes (looking very governmental), might just accost you, like a Jehovah’s Witness, and ask if you’re on any one of the government programs, If you are then you qualify for a free cell phone and free (albeit limited) connectivity [Assurance and Safelink Wireless, are two popular providers of “free government cell phones.”].

Is one to understand then it’s mandatory to provide free connectivity to the poor, but it’s not mandatory to subsidize their basic food consumption? How odd this paradox is. I suppose it’s based on the assumption that while technology is indispensable, food isn’t.

Food Stamps=freeloading, while free connectivity=a step toward self-empowerment?

As the very Parisian Marie Antoinette said (I am paraphrasing), give the poor cakes and they'll be happy. The 21st century equivalent of the 17th century Marie Antoinette "cake" paradigm is technology.

And why isn't there an App yet for downloading Food Stamps fast?

How technology is anti-matter

[Paul] sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center, Disney’s future-themed ‘amusement park’ that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one robot maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008. At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life—and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death—technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

An excerpt from Tao Lin's new novel Taipei. Technology and drugs play a dominant role in shaping the consciousness of Paul, the novel's protagonist.

Brave new world

Denise Calls Up is a 1995 movie that looks presciently to a generation that would prefer texting as the primary mode of communication and contact with their fellow humans, while even phone conversations would become too humanly intimate.

We are living in the midst of such a generation, as Stanley Fish points out in the context of the hegemony of the digital culture that's permeated the way all institutions, including institutions of higher learning, function.

Fish pulls the 90s movie out of the archives and outlines the plot:

Its conceit is that a bunch of supposedly close friends never meet; they know one another only through electronic media. Physical encounters are threatened, but never occur. Everyone pledges to come to a party, but no one shows up. There is a pregnancy, but the father is a sperm donor whose only contact with the mother is through the phone call of the title.

The culture of the movie, Six Degrees of Separations, seems like so cro-magnon by contrast.

From real to virtual

The Hunt Library of the State University of North Carolina, has a new library where students can check out laptops and flash drives rather than books.

Reporting on the emergence of digital libraries in college campuses and counties all across the United States, Margaret Rock writes:

In some ways, libraries are doing what they’ve always done: adapting to technology, whether by collecting documents, storing records and videotapes or offering e-books and computer terminals. Today, they’re under pressure to give more and create spaces that connect people to information and ideas.[...] Books won’t fade, but with so many other mediums to explore, libraries, especially those with technology, can enhance skills. Access itself isn’t enough: libraries need to harness the sheer overabundance of information in the digital age and become facilitators to help us sort through the avalanche.

Obsolescence: Bidding adieu to India's telegraph industry

As denizens of the U.S., we are used to obsolescence: Yesterday's smartphone, we know will become a mere museum piece tomorrow. The furious pace of technology makes sure that obsolescence is like the air we breathe and the microbes we live with--a part of the scene, as it were.

But there might be certain parts of the world, where machinery, gadgets and modes of communication, might still be in use. When I think of India, my birth country, I think of the last few outposts of pre-technology existing side by side with frontiers of modern, cutting-edge technology.

So when I learnt that Indians will no longer be able to send telegrams, I was surprised. Electronic modes of communication are usurping even the last outposts of old-world communication culture, I thought.

A telegram deliverer said that he would miss delivering paper telegrams to houses, and fears that now he will be asked to serve tea and mop government office floors. Workers tied to the old industry would become unemployable junkets.

Of Siren Servers and Agnostic Texts

Siren Servers: 

They are giant computers at the core of any ascendant center of power. They are the equivalent of oil and transportation routes, in that in the past power and influence were gained by controlling these. In our digital era, to be powerful can mean having the most effective computer on a network. In most cases, this means the biggest and most connected computer. The new class of ultra-influential computers come in many guises. Some run financial schemes, like high-frequency trading, and others run insurance companies. Some run elections, and others run giant online stores. Some run social network or search services, while others run national intelligence services.
Siren Servers are usually gigantic facilities, located in obscure places where they have their own power plants and some special hookup to nature, like a remote river, that allows them to cool a fantastic amount of waste heat.
[Siren Servers] calculate actions for their owners that reduce risks and increase wealth and influence. For instance, before big computers and cheap networking, it was hard for health insurance companies to gather and analyze enough data to be tempted to create a “perfect” insurance business, in which only those who need insurance the least are insured. But with a big computer it becomes not only possible, but irresistible.

Agnostic Texts: 

Are neutral texts created to be “agnostic” with regard to student interest so that outside variables won’t interfere when teachers assess and analyze data related to verbal ability. In other words, they are texts no child would choose to read on her own.There are already hundreds of for-profit and nonprofit providers of “agnostic texts” sorted by grade level being used in English classrooms across the country. There is also a lot of discussion among teachers over whether lessons align well with the new standards, but far less discussion regarding which texts are being chosen for students to read and why. In a sense the students, with their curiosity, sadness, confusion and knowledge deficits, are left out of the equation. They are on the receiving end of lessons planned for a language-skills learning abstraction.

The names of two means of unprecedented social control, textbooks and computer systems, fascinate me. Both the words "Siren" and "Agnostic" have Greek origins. While Sirens would powerfully, almost insuperably, lure ancient Greek heroes from their designated paths of heroic activities and glory, agnostics were Greek philosophers famous for skepticism. (Ironically, the agnostic texts adopted in the national k-12 curriculum are meant to douse skepticism and doubt).

What Jane Saw

What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.

Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.

Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.

The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book: 

If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine Miss Jane.

Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.  

From geek to Greek: A possible journey for Google

The Washington Post recently described Google as a technology "Titan." I'm used to technology "giant."

Dipping into Greek mythology 101, one finds the titans to be a "primeval race of powerful deities," that ruled the earth for a very long time. Unchallenged in their supremacy and confident in the everlastingness of their reign, the Titans came in for the rudest shock of their lives when they lost a war of succession to the Olympians, a race of younger, more powerful and beautiful gods and goddesses.

Thus the naming of Google as a corporate titan is appropriate; it affirms the near-totemic status that google already enjoys as a mega-corporation.

However, if one were to follow Greek mythology to the tee, then the naming is also ominous, for unbeknownst to the namer, it connotes the possibility of Google's fall in the foreseeable future. Who would be the Olympians in the sphere of technology to dethrone Google?

[Certainly not Bing].

Were a fall to happen, then it would be tragic with a fourth dimension--for the deities of Google verse, that is.

I remember reading about the epic demise of the Titans in John Keats' lovely poem, Hyperion.

Hyperion is the only Titan that is yet to fall from power, as the Olympians are taking over. There is a scene in which Hyperion, the about-to-fall king meets the fallen and crushed Titan Saturn. Saturn's fall has taken a deep psychic toll on the once mighty overlord of the mythical universe. Saturn is physically unharmed, but the inside of him is so badly mauled that he can't even get up to go about the business of his daily chores.

Saturn is, in other words, depressed into inertness.

Hyperion tries to inject morale into Saturn, but to no avail.

The tragedy that accompanies a shift in paradigm, especially for those whose paradigm has been thrown out to make place for the new paradigm, echoes hauntingly through the poem.

2013: A Real Space Odyssey

"Second Life" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We all know what was done to the swastika--the Hindu sacred symbol--when it was appropriated by the Nazis.

The symbol fell from divine grace and became a byword for genocide and evil.

Not all words and symbols suffer the same disgrace, but they do, in ways, small and big, risk altering into their "other" when hauled out of their originating contexts and put into a radically different one.

Italian artist Filippo Minelli recontextualizes names of Social Network giants like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube, by ripping them out of their familiar home of the browser and re-painting them on the walls of slums in Mali, Cambodia or Vietnam. 

His goal is not to strip these words, that are gateways into social networks that people enter to enjoy secure interaction and communication with online users across the globe, of their dignity, but to see if they undergo significant meaning-alteration when re-planted in real space and real time. Minelli is especially interested in putting the words in those spatial and temporal realms that are the "detritus" rather than the fragrant flowers of a technology-dominated capitalism. 

In a way, the slums of the world are the absolute "others" of the secure and organized virtual spaces of the online world. Imagine painting the word "Second Life" on the walls of a decrepit and dingy wall of a slum, where not only is another "life" a luxury and a sacrilege to contemplate, but also dangerously redolent of drug-addled escapism from the misery of real time indigence. Remember, the trainspotters in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting? The second lives of these Irish urchin addicts were cocaine trips into oblivion. 

Minelli says his intention behind transplanting social network words from their virtual cocoons into the real world of slums is "to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies."

Here is an excellent guide to what might be philosophically at stake in Minelli's work.

Where, I wonder can the word Facebook be re-painted? 

Viva la Google earth

Fiona Maazel's new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is not only on North Korea, but takes you inside North Korea.

Did Maazel ever visit North Korea? In a recent essay, the writer says, she has never set foot on the soil of this famous, isolation-embodying-one-of-a-kind nation state, yet her novel is filled with vivid descriptions of Pyongyang's topography.

Maazel confesses that she took it all in via Google earth's excellent maps. She even got the street names right!

If you can’t get to a place yourself, spy on it.

But why not write about places you've been to or are familiar with?

That's where Maazel's philosophy comes in: She'd rather write about the unknown, unfamiliar and unknowable, than about the deeply familiar. Maazel defines her subject matter in terms of what interests her, not in terms of what she is most in the know of.

There have been representations of places and people of the unfamiliar world by the "espying" eyes since time immemorial. Pliny the Elder's (ancient Greece) entire geography of what is now considered to be the Americas, was concocted or borrowed from what Pliny had read in others' books or in fantastical maps. 

I remember, the heroine in Out of Africa saying she's been a "mental traveler" all her life and could reproduce an authentic story based in China, without ever having visited China.

However, in earlier eras there was no technological interface between the visitor and the place visited. Google earth maps provide such an interface.

The maps can take you inside as is evidenced by Maazel's "interactive" visit to Pyongyang here:

So there I was at 3 a.m. on a cold December in 2004, on the banks of the Tumen River, on the Chinese side of the border with North Korea, with ambitions to cross over. The sun would be up in less than five hours, but for how dark it was, I’d lost all hope the sun would rise again. It was freezing, and I felt as if I couldn’t see past my own body. As if the hubris and ego of my life were as cornerstones of a dungeon to myself. And yet, being miles from what I knew, in a place where the forlorn would inherit the earth, I had the horrible thought that maybe I belonged there. The sun rose at 7:54. There was an arrangement of stars pretzeled above the southern horizon. I crossed the river untested, but it was just one trial among many.

Feels like she's there doesn't it?

Tyranny of the "social"

When I was growing up (in India), the word "anti-social" was applied to men, especially young jobless men, who were generally violent, i.e. they would go around doing the bidding of the local political mafia.

An anti-social was the rough equivalent of the goonda or the thug.

Anti-socials were, when they weren't burning effigies or breaking windows at the behest of their bosses, "bad" people in a very absolute sense of the term.

We, the "pro-social" one's, avoided them.

In this era of technology, the meanings of pro-social and anti-social have perhaps dwindled down to something despicably narrow. An anti-social is "un-sharing fellow," who likes to keep whatever information she gathers to herself, while a "social" woman is very sharing of the same (though not necessarily caring).

One of the framers of the changing, or shall we say, "evolving" connotation of this word, is Facebook and the master wizard of the "social" Hell Boy, Mark Zuckerberg. 

At least, this is so according to Evegny Morozov, whose well-considered and eye-opening argument against the god-like status granted to technology as a solution-provider to all problems of society, grip me.

In a piece, The Death of the Cyberflaneur, Morozov writes that Facebook assaults "solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking," by insisting in a one-sided way, that it's better not to pursue anything at all than to not pursue it "socially." 

Mark Zuckerberg posed the following question on a Charlie Rose show, where he appeared with Sheryl Sandberg:

Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?

A rhetorical question, to boot, it was answered by him right away:

You want to go with your friends.

Who would dare to say, "No, sometimes, I'd rather pursue something I like, alone."

Such daring, were it to take on a paradigm-effect would harm Facebook's precious "business model."

Sharing, is an implicit prerequisite of this business model. According to Morozov:

Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible. [...] It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.

"Share or die!" translates frictionlessly into "be social or perish!" but be "social" how? By getting bombarded with messages that the experience of enjoying things alone is a qualitatively inferior experience than doing the same "socially." 

Thinking about what Morozov says, I feel that the word social, as it has effloresced under the aegis of technology, has become constrictive and not such a good thing to be in its adjectival mode.

I'd rather be an "anti-social" than be a "social" in this context. 

Technology: not "disruptive" but "reactionary"

I continue to enjoy Evegeny Morozov's dissenting voice against the blind adoption of innovative technology as the solution to, not just some, but all, social and political problems.

Reminds me of Neil Postman's prescient warning that in the United States, more than in any other developed nation, technology will displace culture. It's now slated to displace politics and even some fundamental substructures of society.

The most recent scandal is the evolving concept of "virtual incarceration," to solve the problem of overcrowding in prisons in the United States.

Morozov also speaks out against the foibles of Big Data here.

Be creative and collaborate...and be transparent

I enjoy reading Evgeny Morozov's guest column on the dark side of technophilia.

This weeks column brings to mind something I've been thinking of for a long time--the pervasive use of words with little meaning.

"Creativity" and "collaboration" are two such words that annoy me when used in a mindless way (and used in mindless ways they are).

In the context of technology, Morozov takes on the word "openness." Open, he says, is now a word that has a "lot of sex appeal," yet "very little analytical content." 

Openness is the latest opiate of the (i-pad totting) masses [...] Certified as “open,” the most heinous and suspicious ideas suddenly become acceptable. Even the Church of Scientology boasts of its “commitment to open communication. [...] Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas. 

Then again,

For many institutions, “open” has become the new “green.” And in the same way that companies will “greenwash” their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read “openness” into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: “openwashing.”

I feel that like the "openness," "creativity" and "collaboration" have become powerful cults with their own set of dogmas. Be "creative" or perish, yet nobody can with pinpoint precision tell what constitutes creativity and what doesn't.