Art Reflects Life: Christakis & Fowler's 'Connected' as a Boardgame...

While reading the book Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I had a lot of different ideas flashing around in my head. One that really stuck, as I looked at the social networking maps and read about how they can be applied to look at human activity from various angles as the activity of one vast superorganism, was that this sort of thing would make a great instructional game for teaching about the way our actions affect and are affected by others on a larger scale. The way irresponsible sexual behaviour led to the Rockdale County STD outbreak, the way herd instinct affected behavior in the U.K. Northern Rock Bank incident of 2007, or the way voting patterns develop and emerge as with the 2008 U.S. elections, would all make excellent subjects for a game.

There is, in fact, a precedent for this sort of game in Black Death, by Greg Porter (you can find an updated print and play version here). This game places you in the 'persona' of a virus trying to infect mid-14th century Europe, in the manner of the Black Plague. A quick look at the map-board will be instantly familiar to anyone who has read Connected or used Social Network Mapping software:

Black Death map-board (1993 Blacksburg Tactical Research Center)

There are several concepts from Connected reflected in the structure and game-play of Black Death...

TOPOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE

The map represents Europe in the mid-14th century with the major cities (including, presumably their surrounding towns and villages) serving as Nodes and the main thoroughfares, be they overland trade route or sea lane, serving as our Ties. The whole of Europe and North Africa could be seen as a single Social Group amongst the massive Social Network that is the human race.

Some ties are actually weaker, in the example of the Black Death map-board, than others, and are marked with a negative number along the route, representing either a difficult and slow journey over mountains, sea or inhospitable terrain that might see plague carriers die before reaching their destination. On the other hand, large cities have 'sections' which give a bonus to infection, representing the poor and disease-ridden sections common in most major cities of the era.

Along with all the social connections within the group itself, we also have Weak Ties to other 'nation groups,' represented by the trade routes leading out from Moskva, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Tunis and Reykjavik, which lead to 'The Orient,' 'Darkest Africa' and 'The Americas.' Our contagions will be coming in along the eastern routes, representing the Asian origin of many of the plagues of that era.

TRANSITIVITY

The number of outgoing and incoming connections one has is described as their Transitivity, the ability for them to spread information (or in this case, viruses). The major, popular cities in Black Death, like Constantinople or Paris, have very high Transitivity, which makes it easier for viruses to spread to them. Reykjavik's isolated nature (a very unpopular destination with a very low Transitivity), on the other hand, makes it very difficult for viruses to spread to it and tends to protect it.

Major Cities are popular targets in the game as spreading from one section to another is easy due to high connectivity. You might think of the individual sections of the city as 'close friends' in this context, a very tight little social group within the larger group, possibly even one with intimate contact, where the '+1' section might represent a friend with high risk behavior.

These connections can be lost in a number of ways by the play of special cards, changing the dynamic of the social network and the way the viruses travel around it. Wars between cities can close off trade routes which also limits the movement of plague carriers along that route as can bad weather, which keeps people at home to die in their own beds. Traders on the other hand bring new and interesting diseases with them from the Orient and a Crusade can take distant and removed infections and drag them along to concentrate in and devastate the middle east, creating new vectors for viruses to spread.

THE VIRUSES
Interestingly enough, the Viruses, themselves, are made up of two attributes that mirror the concepts found in Connected: Virulence and Mortality.

Virulence, the speed by which the virus spreads, reflects the Connected concepts of Connection and Contagion. In a manner, the Virus can bee seen as a 'sub-node' in the individual City Node which represents the individual infection vectors that pass it from person to person in the city. For example, a Virus with a high Virulence which infects humans through a common medium (like an airborne virus or one that clings to objects and spreads by touch) could be seen as a node with multiple ties/vectors to other nodes, while one with a very low Virulence (one that spreads only through sexual contact or contact with blood, for instance) would be an outlying node with only one tie that is limited by the Three Degrees rule to only infecting a few people at a time and relies on carriers moving about a lot.

Mortality represents the Connected concepts of Intrinsic Decay and Network Instability. In the game, a Virus can be very Virulent, very deadly or something in between. As killing off folks is the way to win the game (as evidenced by the scoring track which is based on 'millions served,' a grimly humorous way to represent the dead), it would seem that having the highest Mortality rate would be the way to win. But killing off your host prevents them from spreading you effectively, so high Mortality viruses can end up cutting Ties before they can travel along them to replicate themselves.

Appropriately enough, when I've played the game, high Mortality viruses tend to cluster around cities within three degrees of each other and rarely make it very far into the map as they wipe themselves out or destroy whole cities, cutting off their potential vectors of infection.

A TRANSITIVE IDEA

This sort of rules structure could easily be transplanted to other games with a focus on different types and sizes of social networks. Imagine a game that high school kids could play to show how sexual behavior has much larger ramifications than who they are sleeping with at the moment. Or perhaps political science students could benefit from seeing how 'getting out the vote' organizations really do mobilize voters in an election, with various special play cards to represent outside  influences and events (like a negative media blitz or war in the mid-east). Games typically make this sort of subject material clearer and much more interesting and are increasingly being used for teaching methods in this manner.

The lessons learned from the game structure itself can also be of use. In Black Death, some ties are harder to cross than others, something that is not represented in Connected but could add some three dimensionality to the Social Network structure. Obstructed ties would be represented in a ordinary social network by people who are well connected, but avoided (the rich but mean old miser that everyone knows in a small town and is a central influence on the monetary and political life of the town, but is avoided as much as is possible by the townsfolk).

In any case, the game is fun, educational and is also now Connected to you by Three Degrees of influence: from Greg Porter, to Me to You. So grab a copy, check it out and spread the 'love...'

The Future Is Now...

As instructed by Dr. Parry, I will endeavour to make this post as 'opinion-free' as possible, but it feels rather an odd limitation to put on a blog which is, by it's very nature, a format centered around one's opinion. It would be a reasonable assumption to write, say, a research paper in as neutral a manner as possible, but the very point of a blog is to espouse one's personal views on the subject matter at hand and so it is fairly at odds with that remit. I'll do my best, however.

In reading the three articles assigned for this week (The Public Sphere by Jurgen Habermas, Cyberdemocracy by Mark Poster and Habermas' Heritage by Pieter Boeder) we get a snapshot of a growing concern with the effect of technology upon the 'Public Sphere,' the conceptual foundation of people interacting and exchanging views and ideas as the basis of democratic principles (or more specifically liberal/progressive social welfare mass state democratic principles). Each piece is informed by the technology of the era in which it was written (1964, 1997 and 2002, respectively) but in each case, even the most modern of these seems very outdated as technology is increasing at such a rapid pace that many of the ideas presented about the deconstruction of the 'public sphere' in favor of 'public opinion' and the loss of democractic virtues through commercialization have either not come to pass, or have come to pass, but not in the way the authours envisioned.

Habermas' fear of corporatism turning democracies back into feudal states, where the corporation, whether newspaper, radio or television, controls and dispenses the information as needed to control its subjects while still appearing to provide open information exchange, has been somewhat dulled by the very nature of competition in capitalistic environments. In 1964, there were few stations on the air and Intelstat I, the first commercial communication satellite, had yet to be launched. Today, there are a massive number of channels and communication services available that allow you to see news from around the world, access information from data repositories on every continent and talk in real-time to people on the other side of the world. The ability for people to gather information and compare it with other sources to get a clearer picture of what is actually going on has never been easier and the ability to control information and prevent its dissemination is practically impossible as Wikileaks and the informaiton coming out of Egypt and Libya this year have shown.

If you hate Fox News and think they are the essence of evil mindlessly arrayed against everything good and true and never tell the truth and kill small puppies and feed them to crying children that Rupert Murdoch made cry because he feeds of the pain of innocents, then you have a plethora of other major world news sources to get your information from. If, on the other hand, you think that they are simply another news agency amongst a score of others and that they bring up some good points that are missed by other networks, then you might watch them right alongside BBC News. The number of choices available provide such a massive impediment to even modest control of any message that Habermas might have been pleasantly surprised.

In much the same way, the idea that the internet will turn people from true political activity to 'feel good' political activity that makes them feel involved without actually making any real difference has been contradicted in the last few years by the rise of grass-roots organizations with no firm leadership but a single unifying purpose. The Tea Party, for example, have changed the dynamics of US politics despite disinformation campaigns, attempts to paint them as 'fringe' or unimportant, and a quite panoptic campaign of spies and plants within their ranks to pick out, or in some cases fabricate, any little thing to discredit them as a democratic group. They are the perfect example of Poster's Cyberdemocracy in action: a virtual community that constructs an identity (a minor one that ignores sex and race) for its members based upon the back and forth exchange of ideas and are not controlled directly by any one identifiable leader or entity. They are a decentralized democratic gestalt whose existence is only possible due to the presence of cyberspace.

If anything, the new media has opened up areas of arcane political and economic thought to the common man as people of all walks of life are able to communicate complex ideas back and forth to each other. No single person could have read the 2500+ page healthcare bill and understood it, but many did take the time to read portions of it and explain them to those who had neither the time nor the byzantine political and legal knowledge to decipher it. And you can be sure that whatever side is trying to get the bill passed, the other side will have someone dogging their every footstep and reporting them online. Never before have the voters had so much access and inside knowledge on how our government works and with this knowledge comes the power to make informed decisions and punish those who abuse the system.

This is all happening today, but even these events are simply the seeds of potential for a true democracy that is enhanced, not inhibited, by the technological evolution that the human race is only on the cusp of. In fact, I think I'll write my final paper on how technologies just around the corner could create a sustainable world governing body that would be effective without interfering in the personal lives, cultures and beliefs of its constituent members. That sounds like an interesting paper...

Neighborhood Crimewatch: A Panopticon in Miniature...

Before I start, I have to say that the fact that Foucault died in 1984 is fairly humorous, considering his obsession with Big Brother type power structures. I'm sure there are even a group of Marxist conspiracy theorists who would claim that the man was intentionally offed by the 'Man' for that very reason.

Today, I'm going to look at the Panopticon structure in a very focused social environment, the typical suburban neighborhood, through the lens of the Neighborhood Watch. As a Watch Coordinator for 5 years, I have a uniquely intimate perspective with this sort of structure and how it relates to Foucault's theory of Panopticism. Where Foucault sees such structures through the lens of paranoia and repression, however, I see a fundamental good in the use of the Panopticon structure to help keep society intact, and nowhere is this more obvious than in structure of a Watch Group.

THE PANOPTICON

In the Panopticon, all the subjects can be seen and know that they can be seen but are never sure whether the are actively being observed at any particular time. The mere threat of being observed, however, instills a seed of doubt in their mind that they carry with them in their daily activity: at any moment, they might be under active observation by an unknown entity and will be caught in their wrong-doing. This may well curtail the anti-social activity all on its own without the need for 24 hour observation, saving the state time and resources.

In Foucault's example, the Panopticon is a large tower in the middle of an expansive building that has, as its outer wall, a series of cells that can be easily looked into but cannot, themselves, see into or communicate with other cells or the tower proper. In modern society, technology frees the Panopticon from the physical restraints with the presence of cameras, heat sensors, internet snoopers and other devices which allow the user to observe without being observed in much the same way. In England, for example, CCTV cameras are ubiquitous around London and, although not every camera can be monitored, they very thought that a camera might be monitoring you at any particular time can subtly modify your behavior (a nuanced form of Enframing the citizenry, but also the government, who are now seen in a different role).

The Neighborhood Watch works on a similar principle, but instead of technology, we rely on the old-fashioned human observer and a few signs that allow the criminal element to know that this is the case. In this way, a criminal who enters a neighborhood with nefarious intentions knows that at any moment a pair of eyes may be looking out a window, recognize him as 'not one of the neighborhood' and mark that information down (through description, license plate numbers, etc.) to be used later if a crime is later committed. There is also the danger of being caught flat out if the observer thinks the subject stands out in a particular way, like painters wearing brand new $100 sneakers to 'paint' a house (a real example).

THE WATCH STRUCTURE

The Watch is divided up into streets, with a Block Captain selected by each Street to serve as a focal point for the street's needs and then a Watch Coordinator is chosen from amongst them to liaise with the local police and organize activity. In this way, we can see each street serving as a sort of cell in the overall Panopticon structure of the Watch and the Block Captains serving as the random observers with the Coordinator acting as the Tower itself, disseminating information amongst the Block Captains as though they were physically active on all the streets simultaneously (which would be represented by their 'walking' the tower).

As the liaison with the police, the Coordinator as the Tower can quickly identify problems and involve the police, and other external neighborhoods/Panopticons who, when working together and sharing information, form a larger city-wide Panopticon that can more appropriately distribute scarce police resources in a focused manner to capture criminals.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING NEIGHBORLY
Criminals are not the only ones affected by the 'tyranny of a thousand eyes,' as Foucault might have called such a set-up. By actively being an observer, the observers also know that, at any point, they can become one of the observed. The social pressure that comes from that can encourage the observer to keep up their lawn, make sure their house is in order and to generally toe the behavioral line of their neighborhood. This sort of arrangement would have been anathema to Foucault, but for the rest of non-academic human society, especially in a country as large and diverse as America, this sort of order serves not as a tyranny, but a means of communal support and protection.

From the capitalist point of view, this means more freedom, not less. The freedom to live in a clean and peaceful environment. The freedom to invest in your house without worry that the neighborhood will turn into a ghetto that reduces your overall property value lower than your initial investment. The freedom to let your children play in the yard, knowing that a thousand pair of eyes (in particular, ones you know well through community bonds) will inform you not only of any dangers, but when your kids behave in an anti-social manner as well so that you can deal with it before it gets out of hand.

THE WEAKNESS OF THE WATCH STRUCTURE

Despite the inherent strength of a thousand eyes looking out for you, your family, your property and so on, the modern Watch faces a number of weaknesses that actually stem from the sort of 'freedom from structured authority' that Foucault desires. For one, the individual Panopticon has no actual authority and their word carries no official weight in these cases, and many offenses must be actively observed by the police in order to be dealt with. This means that outside of actual break-ins or other felonious acts, many laws are often broken by perpetrators who know they are being observed but also know that the observers lack the power to punish minor criminal infractions.

A good example of this involves littering and noise ordinances. Certain parts of the neighborhood might run parallel to a main thoroughfare and collect a lot of trash from non-residents who think nothing of flinging their garbage out the window onto private property so long as it keeps their personal vehicle clean. Cars with bass amplifiers cranked up to around the decibel level of rolling artillery fire go cruising through neighborhoods at all hours, disturbing people at home, waking sleeping infants during the day and both them and hard-working adults at night, and causing general physical and psychological irritation. In both cases, even a citizen video-taping the offending car in question will not give sufficient grounds for the police to ticket the individual driving unless the police are there when it happens, which is highly unlikely, as the perp is gone long before the police can arrive to witness their activity.

Add to this the damage done to community structures by technology. The neighborhoods of old, where you actively engaged the world outside your door, walking the neighborhood, chatting with your neighbors about the latest news, and so on, are changing. In the era where the computer has become the center of human attention, where everything you need can be delivered to your door, including entertainment and companionship, people are less engaged with their local community and are therefore less influenced by them. Who cares what the outside of your house looks like when you've got a computer game to play or friends to tweet with inside and who cares how the neighbors feel about it when you don't ever have to deal with them directly? As a result of negligence and apathy, houses lose property value, good families move out and the cycle of urban decay is sped up.

THE PANOPTICON: A FORCE FOR FREEDOM AS WELL AS TYRANNY
Foucault, I believe, would appreciate and approve of this disintegration of the Panoptic Structure illustrated by the weaknesses in the Watch noted above, but its removal makes life difficult and more stressful for the average person, who lives in fear of their environment and shuts themselves off even further, considering everything outside of their door as 'somebody else's problem' (especially in the face of modern media reinforcement of the 'all that matters is me' attitude). In Foucault's world, the criminal and anti-social element roams free and unimpeded, empowered by the knowledge that the resources of the 'King' are too few and too scattered to stop them.

Can the Panopticon become a tool for Tyranny? Most certainly, as the Marxists and Communists have ably shown throughout the 20th century. But in the end it is just a tool, and a useful one for ordering society. One that enframes the observer as much as it does the observed. Eliminating it would have a deleterious effect on society at large, taking us back to a darker age when mob rule and bloody suppression by force of arms were the only order of the day and 'might makes right' was the only true law. And clearly 'Do what thou wilt' does not make for good neighbors or the basis of a free society...

Our own little Truman Show...

Martin Heidegger's final words on the subject of The Question Concerning Technology put me in mind of a few things, but none so much as the 1998 movie The Truman Show. In that movie, Truman Burbank lived his entire life within the confines of a world created for and around him, unknowing of his situation and manipulated by a mysterious director to please the masses with 24 hour reality television. Quite a few of Heidegger's ideas on technology and man's relationship with it can be seen on display here.

ENFRAMING

The whole premise of the movie is based around the concept of Enframing. Heidegger proposes that in nature, revelation is brought about by an almost symbiotic relationship with the seeker of knowledge and the propensity for knowledge to reveal itself. The seeker awaits revelation and then uses that gained knowledge to inform himself where to look for the next revelation. There is no force, there is no definition, there only is what is as it happens. In other words: Experience.

Technology, however, uses force to wrest that information from nature and then frames it in a way that can be 'used' to force other revelations from nature and generate power from these discoveries. It seeks not to experience nature and work with it, but to control it and keep it bound to the will of man, to be used at his whim.

In the example of the Truman Show, the Director wants to create an interesting fiction, but he wants natural results from his fiction so he creates an artificial world over which he has complete control to enframe another human from birth. The artifice of Truman's world was such that every event in his life was under complete control of the this director, who believed that only by removing all traces of artifice could he get true human response, the essence of human experience, out of Truman.

STANDING RESERVE

Watching the normal human experience unfold naturally is not good Drama, however, so the Director must be able to control the flow of Truman's life in order to make sure that his highs and lows are timed appropriately for the benefit of an audience and ratings. He does this by controlling the weather, the temperature, the behavior of the people Truman interacts with, everything and anything to keep The Truman Show entertaining for the audience. As such, Truman is an object, not a human, and exists solely as a Standing Reserve, as described by Heidegger. A resource to be tapped when needed.

THE BIG PICTURE

The Director may seem to be in control, and sees himself as the creator. A god of sorts. He sits in his heaven on the moon, removed from everyone, observing and interfering as he sees fit and even 'appearing' to Truman at the end of the movie in an effort to keep him from leaving the 'Garden of Eden' and gaining true knowledge. The truth of that matter is one that even he cannot see due to the effects of Enframing.

The demands of the audience through ratings, the need to introduce surreal and unnatural events into Truman's life for corporate purposes (like the unnatural use of Product Placement), and the need to have complete and total control of the environment show that even the 'creator' is only creating at the behest of forces even greater than he. He may sit behind the camera, but the camera is not the true Enframing device, and the Director is as much a slave to the show as Truman is. So is the audience, who hang on ever image. And the corporation, whose lifeblood depends on the show's success. The big picture is very big indeed. Far bigger than Truman's Dome.

THE HEISENBERG IRONY

By exerting such enormous control over one man's life in order to elicit the most pure example of human experience, the Director cannot get a natural response. The very act of interfering changes the way Truman behaves. The very act of the Audience watching changes the way The Director behaves. The Corporation using product placement changes the way the Audience behaves, etc. There can be no natural result from all of these technological machinations, only artifice.

THE REAL WORLD ∞

In our own world we have Reality Television, but although the player's all know that they are on camera, unlike poor Truman, the results are largely the same. The camera itself, the very act of Enframing, encourages the players to act in whatever way gains them the most fame or notoriety. Would Snooki be a drunken slattern if there weren't cameras following her around 24/7? Maybe, but the fact is that her behaviors would have very different results and consequences. The exposure ( in the camera sense) incentivizes her behavior.

And Snooki's antics affect her viewers. Her behavior, which would be considered far outside the norm to the average person, becomes normalized in the minds of the viewers who see her fame and money and want the same. Youtube is replete with folks who use the example of Snooki or Johnny Knoxville as the pattern for seeking their 15 minutes of fame by defiling or injuring themselves on camera (the number of videos where young men injure their testicles alone is an omen that doesn't bode well for future population growth) and posting their humiliation for the whole world to see. It's causing a huge cultural shift at the moment.

And as go the viewers, so go the corporations. Reality Television may or may not be good television, but it sure gathers the ratings so you can bet that broadcast entities will be stocking a great deal of their line-up with it. Which means that there will be less non-reality programming to watch. Which means that it will get higher ratings. Which means more Reality Programming will be produced, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Sort of like crossing a Reality Show Event Horizon into a cultural black hole.

Heidegger would have laughed...

The New Table-Top RPG Paradigm...

I got a comment on a thread about my Playbook app over on RPG.Net, and as grad school has given me some new tools for thinking on the subject, I thought I'd post up the comment and my reply (which is a more direct and precise statement of what I'm trying to achieve and why than the OP) here.

THE COMMENT

A friend pointed me towards your thread after a blog post I'd made wondering why there weren't games like this being made. Clearly there are. =)

There are two things I'm curious about regarding your approach to the product:

- The first is: Why did you opt to design it so that multiple devices would be needed?

- The second is: Why did you feel it important for it to feel like it was just like a tabletop game?

Part of what sparked my blog post was the number of other games that have play-and-pass modes for the iPhone, like Settlers of Catan. My thought was that you could have one game that you could play at any time anywhere you like. With the GM being the primary controller of the device, then passing it onto players when they need to take action.

From you description it seems like you are targeting a narrow margin of players who (a) want to maintain the feel of the standard TTRPG and (b) play with people that have multiple devices of the same format. When it seems like this is something you could approach from a new direction and bring new people into the hobby.

THE REPLY

You don't need to have multiple devices. You could easily just let the GM use the tablet to keep track of everything himself, use a combination of the tablet and traditional paraphernalia, like dice and paper record sheets for players, etc. It's just designed to work that way as the full realization of a shift in play style from the pen and paper of old to the digital play-style that future portable computing devices offer.

As far as the importance of the TTRPG paradigm, I spoke to that in the OP, but I'll reiterate the thought process here with a more personal reason behind the design. Basically, it boils down to the areas in which a TTRPG is different from a CRPG that make it a viable and interesting form of entertainment in the modern age:

1. TTRPGs allow more freeform story-telling than CRPGs with much less work and in a much more flexible setting.

2. TTRPGs are primarily a face to face social form of game play more in line with board games than CRPGs.

3. TTRPGs are, for the most part, more portable and can be played in a wider variety of real world settings (from the dining room table to a pub to the park) than a CRPG.

4. TTRPGs (and this is going to get a bit academic, here) exist in a more immediate acoustic form of space than the strict visual space of the hyper-mediated CRPG, which is a very different play experience.

And then there are the very practical reasons:

5. Print is becoming increasingly impractical as medium of distribution for independent designers. PDFs, which are simply print in a digital format, are very passive and still require the GM and players to utilize extensive external paraphernalia. Modern digital tools are very generic and require you to already have the game and then you (or somebody else) must program its parameters into the system, and most aren't very portable and take little advantage of the current technology, like the ability to 'flip' information (in our case secret messages, dice results, or even wounds) from one device user to another using simple wi-fi.

6. Humans, themselves, are quickly adapting mentally to incorporate the presence of smart-phones, tablets, social media and other forms of instant communication not as simple tools but as literal extensions of their bodies and identities. To not adapt a pre-digital art form to this new paradigm and take full advantage of it is to, IMO, relegate it to the dustbin of history.

And now for the very personal reasons. Basically, I find the TTRPG experience to be superior to the CRPG in a number of ways. The way they encourage spending time with my friends and family in a positive social environment, the way I can choose the people I want to share that environment with, the way they stimulate my imagination and don't limit it, the way they encourage me to tell my own stories, and the way I can leave the house on a nice day, go down to the park and sit around on the grass and play games with my buddies while watching my kid play football and generally interact with the world outside instead of sitting around in front of a computer screen and shutting myself off from it.

In all I am passionate about what is a historically unique hobby that is, by my reckoning and by the reckoning of others in the industry, slowly aging and failing to truly keep up with the ever-changing face of human-technology interaction. I want to see it thrive and survive, to evolve into a form that will give it a whole new appeal for future generations right up until the time they finally create the SquID or holodeck, either one of which will probably kill every other form of media interaction stone-dead.

To do this I'm taking the basic strengths of TTRPGs and:

1. Digitizing everything necessary to play in order to free the GM and player up from having to carry around anything but a very portable smart-device.

2. Automating as many of the basic rules as possible so that the need to flip through books, mark changes, or do math or any form of number crunching and accounting is eliminated as a distraction from game-play and allow the users to exist in a much more immediate, acoustic brain-space.

3. And finally, putting it all in a single package that resembles the boxed sets of old, but in a format that takes into account the new human-technology paradigm.

Long post, but I hope that answers your question... 

A Future Benjamin and Nichols Could Not Forsee...

After reading Benjamin and Nichols, all the talk of property and copyright brought to mind another (much more amusing) article I read last year that talked about the ultimate result of technological automation on the concept of commerce and capitalism: Forced Artificial Scarcity.

In simple terms , when intellectual property becomes digital, it becomes that much easier to reproduce and redistribute, devaluing the actual worth of the product. At that point, any value attached to an object of art or creative effort is, in reality, nothing outside of what you can make people believe it has. As a result, marketing  becomes more valuable than ever and more money may be spent on that than on the actual product itself. Well, that and trying to clamp down on resources, like the internet, to introduce scarcity in a post-scarcity environment.

We have some great examples of some of the principles talked about there, but here are three of the wider social ramifications of post-scarcity technology that come to my mind.

OWNERSHIP IS DEAD

While the ability to pirate material makes intellectual property worth pretty much nothing and makes a mockery out of copyright laws, it is also forcing companies to switch to a non-ownership model for software. There was a battle in the courts between Adobe and software resellers that centers around 'first sale rights,' the concept that Adobe is only selling the license to use their software, and the physical package does not actually constitute any form of personal property on the part of the consumer. Therefore, selling your old copies to a used bookstore is a form of copyright infringement / software piracy.

While this argument hasn't really hasn't had any traction with the courts, it has started manufacturers thinking about the way they provide software in the age of 'cracked' copies. With the near ubiquity of  high speed internet access, the concept of 'leased' software that exists entirely online could put an end to personally owned software. The Nook already has a similar licensing scheme in place.

Benjamin and Nichols argue that the rise of mechanical and cybernetic technology 'frees' the 'proletariat' from the 'fascism' that can only be held through 'property.' This new development seems to show the opposite, however, in that new technology has is being used to take the means of production, the property if you will, out of the workers hands completely.

THE POST-SCARCITY VILLAGE

If you can get everything you need from your computer, why go out and interact with your neighbors or society at large? This can have a detrimental effect on societal structure as the close bonds and sense of community that existed by way of necessity dissolve away and the individual becomes a lone island in a sea of indifference.

This has particular ramifications for crime prevention. The safety of many neighborhoods is centered around the individual homeowners knowing who their neighbors were, who belonged in the neighborhood, who didn't and by communication between members of the neighborhood watch or similar group. With people becoming more insular, due to the presence of a computer with internet access in every home and every need provided online, there is little incentive to get involved in the community structure personally or even to look out of the window on occasion to see what's going on.

This is a godsend for criminals, who depend on ambivalence and inattention to operate effectively. The most potent crime deterrent is nosy neighbors who are looking out for you, but  in most modern settings, folks are hard-pressed to tell you anything about the person living next door, much less two or more doors down and any strange noises that emanate from outside their personal sphere of existence is 'somebody else's problem.'

ART IS HARD TO DEFINE AND EVEN HARDER TO LIVE OFF OF

There are two real problems with the way IP is so freely reproduced and distributed across the internet. The first is that I sympathize with Lars Ulrich. As a writer of game books, I can expect to sell about 300 - 400 copies of an e-book before my sales tank thanks to the material being reproduced and downloaded thousands of times on Bittorrent. This of course, means that I'm actually only making a fraction of the amount I should have earned on material that people obviously enjoy, but don't want to pay me for.

On top of that problem, due to the fact that everyone and their dog can self-publish today, the torrent of material available in an already niche industry means that many good quality projects are lost in a sea of chaff. Mechanical reproduction may bring art to the masses, but it also brings a lot of dross as well and the desperation to make a living out of your art can lead to a 'lowest common' denominator kind of production where quick, cheap 'spam' is the order of the day.

The concept of the 'Starving Artist' is alive and well in the 21st century...

THE FUTURE OF FArtS

Ostensibly, the Cracked article is a comedy one, but there are real  ramifications in the concept that technology is doing even more to change society than either Benjamin or Nichols could have forseen from their respective places in the 30's and the 80's. Indeed, many of the things they hoped to see eliminated, like the 'male gaze' that 'objectifies' women (which is totally cemented into place by the ubiquity of internet porn), and the freedom of the 'proletariat' from 'capitalist fascism' (which is actually creating an environment where corporations must become even more creative in their methods of chaining their customers to them out of the need for economic survival in the face of unfettered piracy) are actually being reinforced via the freedom provided by mechanical and cybernetic reproduction.

Beyond Immedacy: Devolution...?

After last week's discussion, the concept of the Holodeck was proffered as the ultimate expression of Immediacy, by which I mean the ability to be totally and completely immersed in a fictional or virtual reality where any technological apparatus is completely and utterly hidden from the participant's perception.

I occurred to me that Immediacy doesn't end there, however. 'Being There' has never been enough for humanity and almost every individual, consciously or unconsciously, places their own 'spin' or personality on the subject material no matter what the medium. When reading a book, we put faces on the characters and dress them in our mind's eye as we would like to see them (sometimes even in the face of a complete description given directly in the text), we interpret their motives as good or bad and we often try to imagine what we, ourselves might do differently in certain situations.

This desire remains even when watching a film, which may show us directly what a character looks like and even what their motives and outlook are by the exaggerated body language of the actor, but restricts exploration of the fictional world to those areas where the director decides to place his camera and often leaves us with a lack of closure at the end of the film as to the further lives and experiences of the characters. At times, the feeling of helplessness as you watch a specific character do something incredibly stupid can be intense as you place yourself in their shoes and think 'all of this could have been avoided if I were that character' and 'no way would I go down in a basement, by myself, with no lights with a serial killer on the loose.'

Computer games give in to this impulse, in a limited fashion, allowing you to do what you want within the restrictions of the programming. Table-top Role Playing Games give even more freedom, the story being almost entirely free-form and unrestricted by anything but the imagination and the need to 'step-out' of the story to consult rules or roll dice, but lack the immediacy of a 3D rendered environment and automated rules handling by the computer.

Our theoretical 'Holodeck' is the ultimate form of immediacy, of course. You are 'there' for all intents and purposes and your actions are only restricted by what the virtual reality environment around you restricts you to in much the same manner as 'real' reality. What's more important about it, however, is not the level of reality it can recreate, but the level of 'unreality' it allows the user to indulge in. Here is an environment in which all your personal feelings, frustrations and peccadilloes can be set free to roam about in a world entirely of your own creation. And you can live there.

This can be entertaining, to be sure, and when you watch Star Trek the Next Generation, you see a bunch of enlightened folks doing proper things like reliving a Sherlock Holmes mystery or indulging their musical interests and then politely unplugging themselves when reality needs attending to. All very nice and orderly, but considering the main uses film, games and internet are put to today, this idealized idea of what the Holodeck would be used for in the future seems fairly naive.

What about those base aspects of humanity that are only given free reign through some sort of virtual reality?
Think all minorities are inferior beings and want to indulge your whip-wielding domination fantasies on them? Want a world of women (or men, or animals or zombies, whatever) who are debased before you in every manner you can think of and are devoted only to your pleasure? Want a world where Christians are hung up on crosses with their heads lit on fire like human torches while you fiddle in your coliseum, lord over all you can lay waste too? Want to be God? Or the Devil?

You can do these things today through film, video games or the internet and one might argue it has coarsened the human condition considerably as is, even within these Hyper-mediated mediums where reality can tug at your sleeve to remind you that it's 'all a game.' Imagine the effects on the mind of a person who can completely immerse themselves in their base desires with no interruption from reality, living in a world of the Id, in which the thoughts and desires of other human beings are completely subservient to their own. Nietzche' greatest dream and fear come true in one fell swoop.

Imagine a world of such people. All the millenniums of cultural evolution, all the lessons of morality and need for social norms, all of that gone out the window as our brains are restructured not only by technology (as many of the books I've been reading suggest) but by the reality we choose to live in. What kind of people come out of the other end of that?

So, the question is an age old one of 'just because we can do a thing, should we do it?' We have seen so many instances in history, particularly the last 100 years, where mankind's ability to create technology far outpaces his ability to understand its ramifications and responsibly use it. This is even truer today, when technological innovation comes at an exponential pace but our society is even more fractured and divided than ever before. And given the ability of technology to shape our thoughts and behavior, shouldn't we stop and try to understand that process a little better and try to predict the ultimate results before jumping feet first into the 'latest thing' to come down the technological pike and just 'see where it takes us?'

Another age old question, this time on morality and values, is brought to mind as I think about this. There is a strong movement in western civilization towards perspectivism and moral equivalency, basically 'there are no useful morals, no justifiable judgments, no need for values, just a need to be free to do whatever feels good to the individual.' This is considered by the secular progressive movement to be the only way to world peace and human enlightenment. But in the face of such transformative technology, where one's own desires are God, isn't a strong set of values and morals to guide the user absolutely imperative before entering such a world?

How can one fight the Id if there is no Superego to balance it out? And how does a person without a basic set of societal values interact with the rest of the world of the real, when the world of the unreal reinforces their most base instincts? And will they want to live in that world at all or just lose themselves in 'The Id Universe, where [Fill in the Blank]s want him (in the most perverse ways) and [Fill in the Blank]s want to be him, except for those [Fill in the Blank]s who serve him and never revolt at his violent abuse because they know their place.'

Things to consider as we move into a new age where the lines between humanity and technology are rapidly blurring...