{"id":813,"date":"2012-05-05T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-05T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/05\/warren-ellis-meditating-on-accelerando\/"},"modified":"2012-05-05T01:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-05T01:00:00","slug":"warren-ellis-meditating-on-accelerando","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/05\/warren-ellis-meditating-on-accelerando\/","title":{"rendered":"Warren Ellis meditating on Accelerando"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Very interesting. Warren Ellis thinking about\u00a0<\/span>Accelerando.<\/i>\u00a0Which if you haven’t read it, you should go read\u00a0<\/span>right now<\/i>\u00a0:). -egg]<\/span><\/p>\n

The Manfred Macx Media Diet<\/a>:\u00a0<\/span>
A not-fully-baked consideration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Manfred\u2019s on the road again, making strangers rich.
It\u2019s a hot summer Tuesday, and he\u2019s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he\u2019s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it\u2019s not just the bandwidth, it\u2019s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he\u2019s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He\u2019s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it\u2019s going to be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I re-read\u00a0<\/span>Charles Stross\u2019<\/a>\u00a0ACCELERANDO at least once a year.\u00a0 More often, I\u2019ll return to just the first three chapters once every few months.\u00a0 Published in 2005, and written in serial form from 1999 to 2004 \u2013 and you can grab the whole thing for yourself,\u00a0<\/span>free, from this link here<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 ACCELERANDO is a sprawling (yet massively condensed and concentrated) piece of radical hard sf about the deep computational future.\u00a0 It\u2019s also about Manfred Macx, \u201cventure altruist,\u201d staying ahead of the memetic curve with an exotic set of information-processing hardware.\u00a0 Let\u2019s run a bit of that opening again:<\/span><\/p>\n

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he\u2019s arrived.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s doing that with, essentially,\u00a0<\/span>Google Glasses<\/a>\u00a0and some wearable computers to beef up their utility.\u00a0 It\u2019s what I\u2019d do today with a smartphone.\u00a0 In fact,\u00a0<\/span>I last did it on Thursday<\/a>.\u00a0 Macx\u2019s kit is based around the glasses.<\/span>
I got asked a question on Tumblr yesterday \u2014 which I\u2019ll get to in a later post \u2013 that set me to thinking again about Manfred Macx, who can\u2019t do what he does without processing vast amounts of information each day.\u00a0 So I\u2019m cropping out the bits of ACCELERANDO (with apologies to Charlie, obviously), to illustrate how this parallel-future character goes about his business, and what a fictional set from 2004 says to us in 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n

His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like to think that this bit is\u00a0<\/span>Bruce Sterling<\/a>\u00a0at age 70.\u00a0 That\u2019s a man who processes a\u00a0<\/span>lot<\/em>\u00a0of press releases.<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I might be the only person I know who doesn\u2019t use IM at all.\u00a0 That said, this book is pre-Twitter, and I can certainly get a \u201cplease RT\u201d vibe off that\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock \u2013 he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I\u2019ve probably gotten into the concept of\u00a0<\/span>agalmics<\/a>\u00a0and how it relates to the\u00a0<\/span>attention economy<\/a>\u00a0before now.\u00a0 Attention Philanthropy is the takeaway, and how this site mostly works \u2013 using whatever profile I have to direct you to works of interest.\u00a0 How much text do you take in every day?\u00a0 Is it even possible to quantify it by bytes anymore?<\/span>
Also: I watch no videoblogs at all.\u00a0 The only informational video I get is watching Newsnight on the iPad.\u00a0 I should probably review the field again.<\/span><\/p>\n

his glasses remind him that he\u2019s six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do you ever feel like that upon waking?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Six hours behind the moment.<\/em>\u00a0 Sleeping took you off the road to the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he\u2019s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kick that one around.\u00a0 It contains the point that he\u2019s not just\u00a0<\/span>taking in<\/em>\u00a0information, but processing it and excreting\u00a0<\/span>more<\/em>\u00a0information.\u00a0 Also, extruding it out on to a public space where people can fiddle with it.\u00a0 (Of course, Charlie still has comments enabled on his site.\u00a0 I am less sanguine about that sort of thing.)<\/span>
The point is crucial.\u00a0 If we\u2019re not\u00a0<\/span>doing something<\/em>\u00a0with the information we\u2019re taking in, then we\u2019re just pigs at the media trough.<\/span>
What is also happening here, of course, is that he\u2019s doing the work of a public intellectual.\u00a0 \u201cCritical creativity,\u201d as I think Umberto Eco once put it.\u00a0 Only without the requirement of space in a newspaper or magazine, of course, which is what the internet brought us.\u00a0 And, as the net trends towards microblogs and status updates, it is also what we\u2019re taking away from the internet now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he\u2019s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list \u2013 the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m reminded of Bruce again, here, and the fact that his Twitter account is locked.\u00a0 20,000 people are\u00a0<\/span>allowed<\/em>\u00a0to follow his account \u2013 in actual fact, the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favours.<\/span>
It feels like there\u2019s a lot to unpack in that couple of sentences.\u00a0 The patents he mentions go into a special \u201cFree Intellect Foundation,\u201d which is a more careful way of basically just flinging a complete idea out into the wild.\u00a0 Agalmia: gift culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aah, when we thought there\u2019d be a trackable reputation economy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Cory<\/a>, what damage you wrought on the poor innocent heads of the socially optimistic.\u00a0 Charlie himself ended up\u00a0<\/span>taking down Klout last year<\/a>.<\/span>
In other senses, of course, this\u00a0<\/span>does<\/em>\u00a0exist.\u00a0 Checking Likes, Instagram and Tumblr hearts and even +1s.\u00a0 Your reputation\u2019s only as good as the last piece of content you gave to a social network.\u00a0 How much time do we spend assimilating content and spitting the tastiest bits back out into the world in order to gain reputation as a gifted regurgitator?\u00a0 Where we\u2019re adding no more to each piece of information than the identifying DNA in the smear of saliva we leave on it?<\/span><\/p>\n

The metacortex \u2013 a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) \u2013 is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I kind of want to mention\u00a0<\/span>Weavrs<\/a>\u00a0here \u2013 I still have to find the time to train the one I spawned last year, but (with all respect to the developers) I doubt I\u2019ll ever be able to make it do what I want.\u00a0 Intelligent Agents are going to be a pipedream for a while longer, I suspect.\u00a0 Which makes me sad.\u00a0 But there\u2019s something here \u2013 Weavrs and other software instances like Google Alerts can enact discovery, and bring us information we wouldn\u2019t necessarily have the time or awareness to grab manually.\u00a0 This makes me want to spawn new sets of Google Alerts.\u00a0 I only have a couple running right now, for hauntology and radiophonics, which I set up a couple of years back.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Do I know you?” he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.
“Amsterdam, three years ago.” The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.
“Annette from Arianespace marketing?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not really in the flow of what I\u2019m trying to talk about here, but: facial recognition software yoked to a contacts system hooked into a well-maintained calendar.<\/span><\/p>\n

His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Six hours behind the moment again.\u00a0 But this is (in part) the same experience as picking up a smartphone with notifications enabled.<\/span><\/p>\n

“What\u2019s life coming to when\u00a0I<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0can\u2019t cope with the pace of change?” he asks the ceiling plaintively.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Manfred is thirty when he says this.\u00a0 I\u2019m forty-four.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Very interesting. Warren Ellis thinking about\u00a0Accelerando.\u00a0Which if you haven’t read it, you should go read\u00a0right now\u00a0:). -egg] The Manfred Macx Media Diet:\u00a0A not-fully-baked consideration. Manfred\u2019s on the road again, making strangers rich.It\u2019s a hot summer Tuesday, and he\u2019s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-d7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}