A post for today

I'm in Vienna, preparing for a talk on the technology of Long-Distance Relationships at the Paraflows conference (powered by monochrom). It's great brain-candy to go to a bunch of talks where interesting people present interesting things. Day One included talks by Heather Kelley and Kyle Machulis on new directions in game design (for one, using your own vital signs as game inputs--stuff like mindball, or taking your heartbeat as the meter for a rhythm game). It's very cool stuff, all stuff that I'm deeply interested in.


But given today's date and the attendant craziness we've been feeling as a country lately, I feel compelled to step a bit outside the normal run of topics. So, that post I'm cooking about games-that-teach will have to wait. Instead, I'm going to give you words from a man from long ago, words worth remembering. 


First, Here's his thoughts about discrimination against immigrants or believers in strange religions:

At one time I promoted five men for gallantry on the field of battle. Afterward in making some inquiries about them I found that two of them were Protestants, two Catholic, and one a Jew. One Protestant came from Germany and one was born in Ireland. I did not promote them because of their religion. It just happened that way. If all five of them had been Jews I would have promoted them, or if all five of them had been Protestants I would have promoted them; or if they had been Catholics. In that regiment I had a man born in Italy who distinguished himself by gallantry; there was another young fellow, a son of Polish parents, and another who came here when he was a child from Bohemia, who likewise distinguished themselves; and friends, I assure you, that I was incapable of considering any question whatever, but the worth of each individual as a fighting man. If he was a good fighting man, then I saw that Uncle Sam got the benefit of it. That is all.

I make the same appeal to our citizenship. I ask in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man's quality of citizenship, to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or birthplace. [italics mine]

dictated but not signed

I was sitting in a bookstore, blizting through The Best Technology Writing 2010, and came upon Anne Trubeck's piece, "Handwriting is History." It's a searching, historically minded piece in the best way, one that recalls McLuhan's musings on the effects of alphabetical type, and Kittler's notions on the 'discourse network' of 1800 that prized handwriting as the ineffable expression of one's character. It also includes the requisite depiction of traditionalists as stuck in the mud. I'm not going to argue from a traditionalist viewpoint, but more one of neurodiversity.

Trubeck describes the desired goal of writing technologies as "cognitive automaticity," the ability to transmit ideas wholly formed from our brain to the page, so that we don't forget our poems about Kublai Khan's pleasure domes and so forth. But I'm not sure that's always the case.

History

It's sometimes hard to describe my interests in a concise way, (though I have tried listing them in the past.) To put it plainly, I'm interested in the many ways that people relate to technology, both as individuals and within social structures, and the ways that they have done so in the past-- then, we might have an insight in to how we might in the future. 

It's easy to say that technology drives social change, but it's a much more interrelated, dynamic process. Things start to get really interesting when you're looking at the macro-structures behind inventions and their conditions of possibility, because you start to examine all of the non-material aspects behind technology. Sometimes all the materials are there to make something, but there's no economic means of support for research and development, or it's not conceivable given the mindset of the time.  I'm personally fascinated by the mental universes of people in the 1600s who were doing pioneering science, but in crazily magical ways (like Helmont or Newton, who did private alchemy experiments and believed that God that went bowling with comets.) In a more modern vein, Eleanor Saitta has a call for papers up that asks what ideas of the last few decades will be incomprehensible to future generations--an interesting question.


Or, you have situations like a war where both sides have pretty similar tech and forces, but one side completely wipes the floor with the other (my favorite examples are the 1940 Fall of France, or the 1895 Sino-Japanese War). Surprising results like that are really useful, because they show you things you otherwise wouldn't know. In both those cases, the (superior) ideas of the winning side were embodied in effective organizations, and that won wars. (In the science-fictional realm, Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Superiority" is a fantastic example of a materially superior force hamstrung by a dysfunctional organization and priorities.)

 I think that it's worth it to examine nearly-forgotten artifacts of past media and technology because they give us a ton more examples and case studies of socio-technological relations and forms of interaction than we'd have if we only paid attention to what exists today. Given the accelerating rate of technological change over the past 100 years, It's a dangerous trap to assume that anything about our era is 'normal' for the range of human existence or to project our own patterns too far into the future. That's where history comes in. By paying attention to weird strange things in our past, we're better protected against weird, catastrophic things in the future.


For more information:
Athanasius Kircher
Edward Tenner
Dead Media Archive

Dispatch from Alsace

Greetings from Europe. I've been seeing a ton of World War II battlegrounds and fortifications, and reading a lot about the fall of France in 1940. I will be putting up observations, piece by piece, but for now I'll leave you with a quick thought:

If you want to know where Paul Virilio is coming from with all his talk about speed and warfare, read Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. Bloch was an influential historian, one of the guys who developed the Annales style of long-duration social history. (His most famous work investigated the folk belief that the touch of the French King could cure scrofula--basically the first historical anthropology.) He was also a reservist mobilized into staff work during the second World War. He witnessed firsthand the failure of the French general staff to grasp the increased speed of land warfare, but more importantly the increased tempo of operations that came with radio. Every time they tried to fall back and establish a defensive line, the germans had raced beyond it. They were able to identify opportunities and support breakthroughs far faster than any of the pre-war planning had anticipated. The defeat was strange, surprising, and demoralizing, especially since germany had no real advantage in men or material.

Defeats like those are surprising, and as Claude Shannon would have you know, surprises are always informative.

 Strange Defeat was composed after Bloch was demobilized, while he was working with the resistance. Sadly, he didn't live to see its publication--the Nazis shot him a few weeks after D-Day. It's a short, interesting book, and well worth the read.