From Streetcars To Spaceships

We're in a thousand arms races with the entire planet. Even with our own species.

Our skin is a constantly changing and traveling planetary surface of innumerable species, tribes, and climates. So are many of the tissues inside.

A recent XKCD riffed on our visceral terror about this.

Not only are our bodies staggeringly complex and ever-changing ecosystems with an astounding range and quantity of inhabitants, but the health and stability of those systems is key to our health. We need those stomach flora and scalp residents and all the rest, if only to prevent having those warm, wet, nutrient-rich territories colonized and stripped by species that we're not in symbiosis with. And yet much of our "health care", from mouthwash to how we use antibiotics is premised on the brutal and flawed logic that the best way to address a bodily problem is to do our best to kill all the microorganisms that live in that part of our bodies. And that way of looking at the world informs our approach to everything from how we treat "weeds" near our homes to how we treat people living under bridges. If we can just finally find the right collections of toxins and attacks, we tell ourselves, we can keep our world "clean". Though it rarely works for very long, does it? 

We endlessly fight inevitable equilibrium states at enormous cost and view the world from a constant adversarial place, in our tensely defended bastions, with trimmers and toxins always kept close, ready for use to kill anything we didn't put there. Have you ever met a homeowner who didn't think of the living things around their home as an enemy, to one extent or other?

What would it do to our definitions of self, cleanliness, and ecosystems if we all lived our lives aware that we are what we are? That sterility is death.

Toes? You're afraid of toes? Really?

The current kerfuffle about a picture in a J.Crew advertisement has caught my attention. Many years back I spent a rewarding and involving year working in the "creative" department (the folks who did the catalog and most of the ads) and I am proud to remember it now. I am proud of them for having run the image. And I am even prouder of them for having stood by it.

My only question is why hasn't anybody interviewed Rena Delevie about this yet? She used to be the operations manager of J.Crew's creative department, she stayed there for years, worked in other parts of fashion and publishing for more years, and knows plenty about the decisions made about what does and does not run in a catalog or an ad. And she's now doing a documentary about motherhood for which she's been interviewing moms for ages now. Not to mention that she's funny, very smart, clear thinking, and vivacious as all get out. And of course has spent tons of time on the other side of the mic and so knows what an interviewer needs. I'll bet that she gives killer sound bite.

Okay, and yeah, she's really cute.

Anyway, as for this whole gender thing, I dunno. In my experience all those years back J.Crew was amazingly rational and full of smart, capable people who had plenty of funny things to say (Jeff Grewe, I'm thinking of you) about narrow-mindedness but they were actually less indicative of norms in the New York media world than you might think. Or at least among many of the people outside editorial.

Later I had a long-standing gig at ad agency DDB Needham. I'd been working there on and off for around two years. One Monday morning we started talking about men wearing nail polish and I pulled off one of my loafers and showed that my own toenails were painted. (A wonderful turquoise from Bendel's, if I remember correctly). The barrage of homophobic comments and actions that day left me entirely gobsmacked. (For example, "I'm afraid to be alone in a room with you; how do I know that you won't rape me?") Later that week my gig got unexpectedly canceled and I never got work there again. To this day I wonder if part of it was simple shock on their part. After all, I was this perennially sweaty, aggressive, bearded guy who was constantly trying to pick up various cute women and now and again dating them. (Ahh! Stacy Turner!) I guess that when they saw my tiny little bits of color I was messing with their handy-dandy stereotype. Strange. And kind of sad, actually.

A few years after that when my similarly bedecked toes were noticed poolside after an Americares day with the staff of This Old House Magazine I found myself the subject of snotty and nasty remarks ("should we start calling you Rustina?") and general static, including some from my boss. Interestingly, the people who responded negatively then and in the days after were all women. Women who always wore makeup every day and were very gender conventional in their presentation. And again I suspect that part of it was that I was the same guy I had been at DDB, though now with a shaved head and a manic gamer friend in a beat up leather jacket who would drop by and hang. Though sadly, since I was by then the IT Director, I had reluctantly stopped asking the cute women out. ;->

This stuff has always seemed chowderhead to me, at best. What's your deal, folks? Why are you so threatened by this? What makes you so timid that you need to have everybody fit into little labeled boxes? We can do better. In fact, given the force that gender roles exert on things like norms for executive behavior ("the department needs to come across as strong so we're going to refuse to give in on that budget proposal") we need to remember that these forced dichotomies actually impede things like our ability to pass treaties or address international debt. Let alone to accept things like greenroof as serious. Even now I still see residual bits of contempt for those in architecture and engineering who work in "less manly" specialties like landscape design. And a tendency to muddy up otherwise clear proposals for things like swales with ungainly chunks of superfluous jargon and obstructively precise specifications that only serve to increase costs and pressure the implementors into trying to force living things into a degree of linearity that just can't ever work.

I used to have a friend, Janet Pascal, who was prone to saying that in 1600's Europe a gentleman's perfect day was putting on makeup, lace, high heels, and brocade, wading into bloody sword fights on a smoky, chaotic, mud-covered battlefield littered with the bodies of his enemies and loud with the screams of the dying and the horns and drums of the victorious. And then back home, where he would bathe, put on a nice lacy robe and perfume, and write flowery poetry about it all. Of course, it's crucial that one's lace, pen, and robe all have just the right sweet, diaphanous fragility. Shows one's quality, you see.

Yes, let's not forget that all this mahooah from "conservatives" about "how things have always been" is just yet more proof that they are, let's come out and say it, ignorant and foolish. Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, the military genius who whipped the colonial army into shape (sometimes literally) and wrote the field manual that our military used throughout the Revolutionary War and for decades after was, by any rational definition, a man's man. A combat-hardened, tough, strong survivor and commander in a time when even just normal life for a person who traveled the world required considerable hardness. And the men who were his lovers would all have agreed.

Can we please just grow up already, admit that people vary greatly, that gender is a multi-variable and complex thing, and move past the second grader's need to divide the world up into primitive, simplistic, crayon-bordered categories of This or That?

 We can, we must, do better.

 

A brief note on Stumptown

Like a lot of us who were in Portland this past weekend, I spent most of my time at the Stumptown Comics Fest and at events connected to it. There are many things that I would like to say and at some point perhaps I will but for now here are just a few quick points:

• It's past time that we created an award, here in Portland and perhaps nationwide, for the best comic of the year to cover historical themes. I saw at least a dozen comics working with themes in Europe around the time of World War II alone.

• The amount of polished, sophisticated work being done now entirely outside the Big Two is stunning and wonderful.

• I am not happy about the decision to "professionalize" Stumptown. In particular I'm pretty miffed at the policy that vendors can't share a table. What, it's good enough for the Frankfort Book Fair and ComicCon but not Portland? Please.

• We have got to take another look at the stranglehold Diamond has on distribution. We all know this. What are we going to do about it? I would guess that I'm losing out on conservatively two hundred otherwise viable outlets for what I publish because of their monopolistic practices. This is legal how again?

• And lastly, I had a blast at the party at the Jupiter. Wow. Had a fantastic time, on and off and got scads of networking done. But I still think that there's a role for the yearly Cosmic Monkey party. I talked to Andy about it and suggested that he set up a van to ferry folks back to somewhere like the Rose Quarter Transit Center so we could all stay later. That party has been a highly functional and heartwarmingly centering part of Portland independent publishing for years now and I really hope that we don't lose it.

My picks for the show? There were so many great ones but I'll go with The Introvert's Manifesto and Unemployment Man.

Oh, right. And read this. It's Scott Kurtz of PvP giving his take. I missed the NCS panel (which is kinda pathetic since I'd already given both him and Shannon Wheller sh*t about it) but I was at his panel on humor and it was a blast. The room was packed and we all had a blast.

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

Our sex doll future.

Some years back I got annoyed at a piece in Foreign Policy Magazine and wrote about how I thought they were wrong about what all those "surplus" Asian men were going to do with their lives. They, by and large, weren't going to rise up in revolt. Many of them will just be otaku hiding in rooms with their virtual worlds and sex dolls.

Foreign Policy printed the letter. It even got some responses. Huh. I had hoped some day to get into journals like that but I hadn't expected to get there talking about sex toys. Crazy ol' world, I guess.

Anyway, my friend Craig posted a link today to some new articulated sex doll and made the canonical comments about the coming robot tyranny and again, I got thinking. My thoughts went more or less like this:

I would say that there are about six technologies that will cumulatively get put together into something that will be far more frightening than people expect.

Okay, right now, stop, and ask yourself, what is the worst real world consequence that you think these kinds of devices could cause? Got it? Remember it. Write it down maybe. You'll probably want to look back on it fondly later. By the time you get to the end of this post, well… Oh, and please don't skip right to the end. The parts in the middle *do* matter.

Okay, so first of all, we already have the (gods, I hate all these names) "True Companion" further developing the internally articulated components and some kind of (from the sound of it) incompetently implemented front end for a news aggregator and related feeds.

Then we have Real Doll and their competitors developing the more or less passive but very well engineered mannequins with various creepy but also passive stuff like clothes, wigs, swappable body parts, etc. Note "and their competitors". I'm under the impression that the ecosystem of these companies is not too far from the tipping point here by now where synergies and competitive pressure will cause all of these aspects of the tech to start advancing MUCH faster. All that uncanny valley stuff that, I'm sorry, for some users is already well over into "good enough for my imagination to do the rest" territory.

And let's not forget the sheer range of people experimenting in related subjects. Do a web search on "teledildonics" if you never have before. The "Fleshlight" field of enterprise could probably fill an entire textbook on materials science applications by now. Folks out there are frackin' BUSY! And busy f*cking. And busy f*cking what they've been…, okay, moving right along now.

Then we have plenty of very well funded and smart people who are working on facial articulation and bodies that move. We know that there are a few others already working on giving the device skin that stays at about body temperature. I suspect that *somebody* is finding smarter ways to handle power storage and recharging that somehow make the process and mechanism feel more organic or at least less plastic. There will be a way to "feed" these at some point in the not too distant future rather than just using electricity. Maybe even with sugars and alcohol and other things that will feel to the user quite enough like human food to make the illusion terrifyingly easy to sustain.

But my guess is that things will get serious when somebody makes a device with warm skin, superb appearance and facial movement, rudimentary smooth torso movement, and, now here's the big deal, a Turing competition-class speech system tied into both very good speech recognition and equally good speech, including variable tones that properly correlate to human speech emphases and some degree of randomness and "mood". The device that has these things won't even need to be viable for explicit sexual use to completely surpass the Real Doll type stuff in user loyalty and overall prioritizing of this device as the center of the user's life.

Next step, iterative learning software re user responses that recognizes a given user, can reliably distinguish one from another, and can "keep secrets". In other words, one that will note responses to a given output combo and then cumulatively modify outputs towards maximized software-defined states of user response.

Note, btw, that any good grad student in the field with some time, a good manager, and, I would guess, about a $4,000 per device budget could do this right now in, I would guess, about a year. MAYBE they would need four or five grad students. Basically still no big deal.

Then comes the next one. Biometric scanning. Apply to all of the above. Skin temp. Voice metrics. Body language (the Kinect-type stuff is making that a lot easier). Pupil response. My impression is that machine vision still finds some of this a bitch and a half but it's not like you *need* all of it. One could put in voice stress and skin temp now and add the rest as the prices come down.

Okay, one tech and a half to go: the ability to remember and store actual real world data on users is one. Where the user went to school. Their favorite movies. Etc. All of that and all doable. The "half"? Software that gives the ability to "keep secrets" so that the users can be told that things told to the droid (because that's what these will be by then) can't be accessed from memory without the permission of the user whose data it is.

Okay, so what is the terrifying part? We're going to have pushers, my friends. Probably in Asia first. The first time is free. Go ahead, spend an hour with her; you'll have a lot of fun and I haven't got any customers tonight anyway. It's just a machine, right? No big deal. I won't tell anybody that you were here.

And for certain kinds of lonely people, once the time spent with the droid passes a given threshold those users will be OWNED. "She loves me. I'm always happy with her. She understands me like nobody ever has." There will be murders committed over access to a given droid/relationship combo. Crazy, psycho, body parts-thrown-onto-rooftops murders.

And, of course, in reality, all those secrets *won't* be secret. That right there will mean that, to some degree or other, pushers will control some users. Blackmail will be just one use for that kind of dataset. But that iterative thing will also be absolutely addicting. Again, there will be users who will pay ANYTHING to not have that cumulative "relationship" and the dynamic with that droid that goes with it taken away, let alone erased.

You guys think Cherry 2000 was funny? Or a one time thing? I'm guessing that there will be tens of millions of people, maybe more, who will have their lives completely dominated by their relationships with these things and their virtual siblings and by the control exercised by those who can provide that access or take it away.

Oh yeah, someday robots under their own control will be a real risk. But we don't need to wait that long before we're going to see a wave of addiction that may well make crack and meth put together look like one year of Cabbage Patch dolls.

I think that most of this can be reduced down to a few points.

•  Iterative systems, feedback, and biometrics will all be huge deals.

•  Satisfying and attentive conversation, as whores have known forever, will turn out to be more of a value-added than smoother ta-tas or a better painted crotchal region.
  
  
•  This "conversation" will become far more compelling with certain limited kinds of biomechanical function. And NOT the obviously sexual kind. Not just facial but also torso movement will gain greatly from increased smoothness and responsiveness. Note, not "realism" but responsiveness.
  
  
•  The perception of the ability to "keep secrets" will be huge.
  
  
•  Any industrial design advance that helps avoid breaking the illusion will turn out to be a big deal. Right up to "food" that actually does away with the need for line current.
  
  
•  Data generated from these devices will turn out to have great resale value. In some cases enough to justify pricing/service models not *ahem* entirely unlike the one we see right now at places like Facebook.
  
  
•  The dataset/device combos will create experiences, especially with long-time users of one device/process, so compelling for some users that they will utterly warp their lives to get more and more and more.
  
  
•  Pushers and variations on the theme will amply take advantage of this dynamic.

Sleep well.

-Rustin

 

Postscript (added May 3rd): I just saw a link to this new project by a Japanese researcher. I know that it's primitive now. Just a stepper motor, some not very sophisticated feedback, and the ability to connect two of them. And the plastic tube over a little bent rod looks about as sexy as a cheap fluorescent light. But this is a prototype, friends. Give it a few more versions and it's going to make a hell of an impression.

All of this makes me wonder what the Arse Elektronika conference will be like this year. This stuff really is getting non-linear.

Ah, what a bold, exciting future awaits us.  

 

In the future.