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so yeah it's true I always spit itself by Southwest apparently he's become like psychically necessary for me to show up with the closing you benedictions even
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when personally I'd much rather be watching deadmau5 and Richie hot and talk about techno music really sorry to miss that but you know you can't do everything and this is you know it's
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like an exorcism like kind of a ritual cleansing so if you've ever been one of these sterling speeches at this event you probably know the routine I'm going to complain a lot you know and generally
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there's also some kind of weird gimmick in the speech so you know let me get the gimmick out of the way like first thing I'm in costume right I'm a costume this
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is my costume as the visionary and residence for the Center for Science in the imagination at Arizona State University obviously it's a Arizona State sweatshirt I'm I'm sporting here
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ASU if you don't know it it's one of the biggest schools and the American Southwest it's about the size of UT Austin here these sleeves are all blasted with laser cutter holes because
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yeah I've been messing with the hardware these are processing bubble packing holes for you code art fans in the audience that's why the patterns vary on each sleeve i also have a arizona bolo
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tie figurine here this is a 3d printed scanned bruce sterling are you okay you can't actually see it but i had my entire body scanned at the e merged
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conference in phoenix couple of weeks ago then I drove over here to Austin direct from Phoenix three peaceful days not in the stony depths of the American
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Southwest that's the theme of the speech this eras it's the southwest so I cut these laser holes and the design of fabrication workshop emerged 2013 and
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we'll get back to this venture later but first I want to talk about Austin as part of the Southwest is like a continuum of the Southwest because you know here we are and obviously it's the southwest and I am an
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austinite so I thought I would clue some of our guests in about Austin the nature of the city there's always you know a newbie wanderer at the event whose likewise it like this around here it's so strange the food the music okay well
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i lived in austin before south by ever came to exist so commonly i'm like forced to do this old-timer thing now when people confront me about it commonly they're anxious about the huge success of the event as i always a
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terrible that it no longer fits on your house as terrible harm been done by this huge influx of aliens you know every year well no not really i mean some harm is obviously done it's annoying to the
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locals and so forth but i could tell you about the actual harm that truly irritates Austinites the great Austin grievance and it's not a bunch of computer geeks at South by know the city
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got politically gerrymandered by the Texas right so that this city the left-leaning capital of the state would have next to no political influence
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Austin's political enemies just split the city out very cleverly so that any Austin congressional district and stretch all the way to the Gulf of Mexico or even to Mexico so what you got
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here in Austin is like a blue pond and a red sea it's like a West Berlin Austin is under constant cultural siege every
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author night knows this in their bones they know that if they ever stop being weird they will be doubtless in 30 days it's not all peach cobbler and microbrew
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beer around here okay now itself by Southwest occurs it's like that awesome scene and Lord of the Rings when the riders of rohan appear at the gates of Minas Tirith so you know austinites are
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not the only people who suffer by this kind of civil cold war situation raleigh is a lot like that I've ever been to raleigh north carolina and or burr is very like that if you want to know what Austin would look like without this kind
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of tremendous civil cold water pressure Boulder Colorado they'd all be Buddhists here very zen very yoga here unperturbed
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if you want to know what the West worst case scenario is for us and what would happen if a lesson actually conclusively lost Waco Waco Texas the defeated Austin
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you know Waco Texas used to be the Athens of the south west that was its name it was an intellectual center of Education of science art culture radical publishing yes in Waco but the fundies
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got Waco they just took it down they won conclusively Waco went down with all hands even a lot of Austinites don't know that stark truth it's it's a kind of subterranean tragedy they're also
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subterranean victories in Austin like the document war between Austin and Houston you got like Wikipedia gotta look that up its loss amazing so anyway I was driving over here through the
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great southwestern deserts of Arizona and New Mexico the real deal southwest I like it quite a lot it always has a calming philosophical effect on me very
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visionary very blue horizon out there and normally this is the part of the speech where I really start screeching and indignation but you know I don't have to because listen to these quotes from Al Gore
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when Al Gore was here what is Al Gore said our country is in very serious trouble but that does not mean I am optimistic our democracy has been hacked
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America democracy has never been perfect but more often than not the will of the people did drive policy Congress today is utterly incapable of passing any reform of any significance until they
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get permission from special interests now you know you've got problems when a guy whose party is in power is that mournful and upset and then there's this other politician who drops by this cory
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booker guy big on twitter he's getting hey sandy hurricane victims to sleep in his house and he says here we're losing truth we're losing authenticity we're
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losing the soul of our politics okay obviously i agree with all that because it's true but you know nevertheless i feel like these two politicians have stolen some of my best du mer riffs
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especially this guy who should have been president but turns out to be a futurist instead hey i'm a futurist I never tried to be President so you know last year I was up here yelling a lot from the
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podium all about climate change and industry consolidation and youth unemployment in Italian politics and they're all just as bad now I mean all
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four of those absolutely as bad the way repeat myself somewhere out in the stony elemental deserts of the southwest if it's clean the weather always bad the
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desert very matter-of-fact about the worst-case scenario has just been there and I was like this is the desert there's no water there's no soil if you're stupid you will die really fast
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here it's not malicious or tricky about these realities it's not like the desert is pretending to be a lush tropical island and then it takes all your water away by stealth there's just no water
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you know the truth is obvious in 10 seconds so you know after this junket at Arizona State being a visionary and resident so I'm out in Arizona visiting a certain desert canyon always wanted to
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see it walnut Canyon National Monument walnut Canyon extremely southwestern place happen to have a little civilization in it once from about 1100
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AD to maybe 1250 ad the most high tech guys in the southwest now the interesting thing about these ancient cliff dweller guys is that they were much much more high-tech than South by
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Southwest because if you're if you're in Austin for South white yeah it's pretty high tech but it's not absolutely the most high-tech place that anybody has ever heard of ever but if you're in
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walnut Canyon in 1150 ad these guys are totally amazing they've got like canals stone buildings advanced ceramics they are so far ahead of everybody they know
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they are absolutely the smartest guys anybody has ever heard of their the pinnacle of human achievement they're like the Stone Age Stanford they're like
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the MIT of black and white pottery now you know of course they're not high-tech compared to us today however compared to everyone around them at the time they're just amazingly progressive this canyon
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there in 20 miles long 400 feet deep I saw it it's very scary it's amazingly crooked and treacherous it's full of ambush spots if you ever try to invade
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that kid any child from walnut Canyon can sneak up the back way and just drop a big rock 200 feet down straight onto your head these narrow cliff trails are
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just tremendous barriers to market entry the bravest warrior you know Geronimo would not try a crazy horse would think twice people in the tech world are always bragging about their ecosystems these
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Walnut Creek guys they have an actual ecosystem in there there's like a hundred and seventy five different kinds of herbs and plants all kinds of hallucinogens cure-alls their worst
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problem is actually their best advantage they've got no water but they hacked it's a desert there are tremendous droughts so in response they just make these big ceramic pots and they fill
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them up with snow and they just hold on to it while everyone around them dies of thirst they've got urban water tanks and their little cliff community whenever it rains they just run out and top off all
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the jars they've got cloud storage in there imagine you're some desert Nomad you know every day Native American guy and you stumble across people who can do
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this they're not like you you have to follow the herds all the time they can actually store water they don't even have to move then have tents made of skin they've got solid stone houses you
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can make stone arrowheads but these guys make big stone building blocks they've got all kinds of cool features in there they've got like an ebay worth of stuff looms carpets do your skin sandals
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cornmeal tortillas peyote Kachina dolls anything you can imagine they've even got sea shells from Texas and parrots from Mexico they're living in this
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waterless deathtrap and that's why they're the richest most intelligent best organized people for hundreds of miles in every direction they've really just got it made and yes the moral here
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is that you're a lot like that only they manage to pull that off for 150 years and you're only 26 years old if I was going to compare you to the sinag what people in the southwest we'd have to
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imagine this is South by Southwest 150 now there's a further twist because these quiff drillings have been abandoned since the year 1258 II and the ruins still look great
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souvenir hunters ran off of some of the stone bricks but there's no major damage there if Sinagua people showed up in walnut Canyon tomorrow they could have their whole Stone Age society booted up
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again in six months plant the corn and beans water up the pots it's very simple resilient kind of society whereas you're a South by Southwest world very contingent and historically unique and
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frail now I've been to a lot of these events this one was okay that's normal when now it's gotten really big now yeah it's like Mardi Gras a lot of drunk guys now nobody could expect to see all of it
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you'd kind of need the CliffsNotes to understand South by Southwest nowadays but you know the well is by no means run dry there's plenty of wacky stuff going on tons of do-it-yourself manufacturing
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3d printing wearable technology disruptive medical stuff trips to Mars you know whatever you like and I look over the South by Southwest crowd I've seen a lot of them you look pretty good
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for a South by Southwest crowd and more foreigners around Koreans Germans Britain's even a neighborhood from London Hackney I was super impressed by that Hackney Hackney I mean that is
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unheard of global ambition by a district of a town it's like South Austin had its own presence at the London Olympics I'm going to take hag V a lot more seriously from now on Hackney is a force to be
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reckoned with I'll probably overlook the surveillance cameras and they're miserable immigration and visa policies and there was leap motion here that was google glass being demoed all kinds of
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wearables touchable spoke about sprinter bulls sociables what was missing I mean where was the empty stone box whereas they like the abandoned part the personal desktop computer lots of pads
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and slates and screens and projectors where are the computers where's the stone box I'm a futurist one of the problems of being a futurist you learn that things are temporary really stone
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boxes even our temporary plastic boxes very temporary I am temporary I'm a mortal human being it's not weird or amazing to have a human lifespan its ubiquitous its
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Universal death it's just somewhat taboo to dwell on the subject in public my parents didn't live particularly long I used to figure I should be a drop in dead around now dropping dead massive
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heart attack at the podium in South by that would be awesome imagine how that would look on wikipedia so it's kind of disturbing to me to realize that
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computers are dying not me computers are dying off and I'm in actually in pretty good shape I'm not Ray Kurzweil I'm not going to like outlive the Milky Way galaxy personally but I might well be
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hanging around for something like unconscionable length of time like maybe age 90 or something that would mean South by Southwest 57 and I'd still be tottering up here having outlived a
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personal computer this amazing device which might appear and even disappear during my own lifetime and it really seems to be going I don't think I heard any speaker at any panel here ever use
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the word pc where are they it's just vanished like the word computer in the name of apple computer why does nobody talk about him because nobody wants them that's why imagine somebody brings you a
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personal desktop computer here at South by there like bringing it in on a trolley look this device is personal it computes it's and it's totally personal just for you and you alone doesn't talk
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to the internet no sociality you can't share any of the content with anybody because it's just for you it's private that's yours you can compute with it
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nobody will know you can process text and draw a stuff and do your accounts let's get a spreadsheet no modem no broadband no cloud no Facebook Google Amazon no
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wireless this is a dream and machine because it's personal and it computes and it sits on the desk you personally compute with that you can even write your own software for it it faithfully
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execute Saul your commands so you know if somebody tried to give you this device is when I just made the pitch for a generally personal computer it's just for you would you take it even for free
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would you even bend over and pick it up isn't it basically the cliff house in walnut Canyon isn't it the stone box look I have my own little stone box here in this Canyon I can grow my own beans
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and corn I harvest some prickly pear with I'm super advanced hero I really think I'm going to outlive the personal computer now and why not i outlived the
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fax machine I did I was alive when people thought it was just amazing to have a fax machine now I'm alive people thinks it's amazing to still have a fax machine why not the personal computer
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why shouldn't vanish like the cliff people vanish why shouldn't it vanish like Steve Jobs vanished it's not that we return to the status quo ante don't get me wrong it's not that once we had a
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nomad life than we live in the high-tech stoned dwellings and we return to chase the Bison like we did before no we return into a different kind of nomads life a kind of Allan K world where
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computation is vanished into the walls and ceiling as he said many many years ago and then we look back in nostalgia at the personal computer world it's not that we were forced out of our stone boxes in the canyon we weren't driven
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away by force we just mysteriously left it was like the waning of the moon they they were too limiting somehow they computed but they just didn't do enough for us they seemed like a fantastic way
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forward but somehow they were actually getting in the way of experience all these machines at toris away from lived experience made a stare into the square screens or hunched over
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the keyboards covered with their arcane petroglyph symbols control dingbat that / RM this we never really understood
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that not really now well back in 2007 and I stood here I said blogs would be extinct by 2017 basically God there were 55 million blogs at the time Twitter was
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just beginning to ramp up it was hard to believe that platforms would come to exist that were faster and more nimble and more useful than blogging platforms it's only 2013 did you see any panels
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here on blogs lots of bloggers meetups big hot new blogging platforms for your personal computer lots of added innovative features where are they
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crickets chirping now I'm a blogger I'm not crying in my shiner beer about it I've got a Twitter account I've got a tumblr I know what Pinterest is I know they will all last let less less long
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than the heyday of blogs blogs are like stone compared to these lightweight micro blogging platforms it doesn't mean that tumblr goes away and the blog's returned it means that those who live by
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disruption die by disruption it means those who live by disintermediation die by disintermediation the fireborn are at home and fire so I'm not going to cry about blogs perishing there like
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stand-up comedy if I'm going to properly mourn something I will cry about centuries of paper-based literature being disrupted and disintermediated my subculture world I love so well xeroxed
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fanzines science fiction monthly magazines publishing houses independent bookstores newspapers magazines libraries novels I wrote them I really
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liked novels you may notice I'm not wearing a sweatshirt with the name of a novel on it I've got a sweatshirt from a think and do laughs it's fragile it's full of laser holes as it happens I recently
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wrote a new novel funniest novel I ever wrote it's an e-book you can go and look for it if you want it doesn't make much difference if you do or not we just don't live in a world where novels can
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be important in the way that novels used to be important nobody reviews them there are no paper periodicals that talked at great length about paper novels to people who spend their lives
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reading paper the bookstore chains have been disrupted they are collapsing I'm a novelist I myself then go into bookstores very much now they've become archaic depressing places they are stone
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cliff houses they are half abandoned if I don't go in there certainly my readers are not going to go in there I know where the readers with they're all on the internet or in social media just like me I'm super active on Twitter I
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don't write fiction on Twitter I scarcely refer to my novels or fiction on Twitter my Twitter followers they're not fans of my fiction writing the people who follow me on Twitter or mostly designers developers scientists
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and activists that's who they are I follow some novel us on Twitter I certainly wouldn't want to follow people who are only novelists I would never understand what was going on in real
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life now most of you in here aren't novelist I'm not complaining that novelists are disrupted and are very badly off although we are what I'm telling you is that you're more disrupted you are worse off whatever
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happens to musicians happens to everybody including you people like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution they put a foot wrong what really happened is that the digital
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revolution reduces everybody the state of musicians everybody not just us bohemian creative but the military political parties the anchor stores and retail malls academics subjected to
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massive open online courses it's the same thing over and over basically the only ones making money are the ones who have be legal stone castle surrounded with all kinds of regulatory thorns meaning the
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sickness industry the bank gangsters in the military contractors gothic high-tech if more computation and more networking was going to make the world prosperous we'd be living in a
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prosperous world and we're not obviously we're living in a depression I'm a cyberpunk writer I wanted to write a kind of visionary futuristic science fiction that was tied into real world
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tech developments I learned how to do that I did it I did lots of it but it was one of those situations where the operation was a success and the patient died the world's extremely cyberpunk now
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but the science fiction genre this particular form of a countercultural literature with its paper support structure of fanzines and conventions and specialty bookstores it was a
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casualty if you really want to be involved in futuristic tech development if you're sincerely interested in it why don't you just do it why write fiction about it just involve yourself in it
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network with the people who are doing it it's not hard why write a novel about it it's like writing an opera about it so I'm in a situation now where I have more
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influence on tech development than I ever did the fact that i'm standing here approves that so why don't science fiction writers write like their vast rambling trilogy's about say Google
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glass super interesting thing i could write fiction about google glass for a novelist i know rather a lot about it obviously i'd much rather just try one on of course i'd much rather try one on
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forget curling up on the couch with a book about the subject why just leave the stone box put on the glass and run around outside it's pretty clear run around with the timeline cards and the
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bundles and the system options and the custom options and the share entities and the share targets in the subscription and the updates on the Google mirror API I understand that just go ahead Larry and Sergey
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you don't scare me i read verge i read TechCrunch rhizome creators project hyper allergic why would anybody read a novel about google glass you could write
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one it's not impossible I've written a lot of science fiction about head-mounted displays but it's clear that nobody's going to be reading novels on Google glass how could you a novel
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would violate the design principles of visual images that show up on a network did a quick emotional social response and then vanish Google glass is just not a platform for literary expression it's
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a platform designed for shared visual experience and near real-time and verbal communications with a search engine that has voice recognition that's what it's for and those are okay things to do but
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they're just not paper-based analog media they're like nowhere near it their electronic their participative so if somebody's wearing glass they're not reading Bruce Sterling novels they might be checking out my tumblr because I
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started a tumblr this year I quite like tumblr its pleasant to see this lightweight microblogging platform they could just obliterate blogs as I was saying here six years ago I like it the
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tumblers full of expressive young people who aren't exploited by the sinister privacy threats posed by Facebook Google Microsoft Apple and Amazon people on
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tumblr or not livestock trapped in the data minds of the stacks swell you know and that's great and so forth but whenever I engage with tumblr there is an opportunity cost I'm communicating
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with images something I'll probably never do very well i'm not writing fiction which is my profession where i've had a lot of practice now i could probably go to Wolfram Alpha and have
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this situation put into a neat direct equation how many hours spent with google glass result in hours not spent in bookstores how many bookstore is
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closed as a direct ratio of hours spent with electronic devices I'm sure there's some direct relation ship there and it's not a dart conspiracy I happen to be quite the
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google glass fan in fact I'm even becoming something of a sergey brin fan I never paid much attention to Sergey before but but after Google glass Sergey really interests me he's filling the
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aching hole the grievous hole in our society left by the departure of Steve Jobs with jobs off the stage Serge's becoming very jobs Ian he wears these cool suits now has got much better taste
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in design than he did he's got these Google X moonshot things going on they're insanely great and so forth I hope Sergei's not taking a lot of acid and living off vegetarian applesauce but
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other than that well we have this American tech visionary millionaire who's a Russian émigré it's fantastic there's something very post Cold War very very genuinely 21st century about
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that it's sort of super Sergei's like my favorite out of control one percenter mogul guy right now now people might be upset about Sergei because he's taking this higher public profile these days
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he's got the self-driving car the immortality projects and the pet rocket ships or whatever it is this week yes he's very rich and powerful sure he is so was Steve Jobs okay and he's dead and
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he's like a secular st. imagine that Sergey Brin's jumping out of his vomit comet with his glass on him the shoot just doesn't open all the way down to the ground he impacts he dies just
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imagine reading the obituaries the dead sergey brin what a loss to mankind what a visionary you know he gave us so much a guru of organised world knowledge what
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a tragedy that we should lose sergey brin a man who will never be replaced yeah you'd all be cried in your shiner bock beer about that so you want my advice cut him some slack now while he's
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alive he's an extraordinary guide an extraordinary situation deliberately doing something extraordinary it's okay that it's risky and threatening now
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it's not okay that it disrupted literature and but Google already disrupted newspapers basically destroyed them single-handed that wasn't okay what happened when Android disrupted Nokia
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that wasn't particularly okay but I'm okay with disruption I've seen a lot of it I know how it works i participated in it I've personally known people who benefited by it I've known people who
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suffered by it I have seen disruption in music literature of yards entertainment publishing the Fourth Estate the military political parties manufacturing pretty much everywhere except finance
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health the law and the prison / military industry which is why they've got all the money now and the rest of us are pretty much reduced to disrupted global peons computers were really truly
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disruptive mobile devices are so radically disrupted that they even disrupted computers there a bigger deal than the bed did bookstores we've got guys who own cell phones at this world who can't even read and I'm very
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intimate with this spectacle I'm very keen on all its little ins and outs the thing that bugs me about your attitude toward it is that you don't recognize its tragic dimension this is something
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literature has always been very keen on that technology never gets around to acknowledging the cold wind moaning through the empty stone box when you're going to own up to it where are the dell
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pcs this is Arthur Texas Michael Dell the biggest tech mogul in Central Texas why is he not here why is he not at least selling his wares where are the dedicated gaming consoles you used to
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love you remember how important those were I could spend all day here just reciting the names of the casualties and you're lying to work it's always the Electronic Frontier nobody ever goes back to look at the electronic forests
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that were cut down with chainsaws and tossed into the rivers and then there's this empty pretense that these innovations make the world better this is a dangerous word but if we're not making the world better than
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why are we doing this at all now I don't want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical because when you say a thing like that at South by oh we're here to make the world better you haven't even reached the level of
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hypocrisy you're stuck at the level of childish naiveté the world has a tragic dimension this world does not always get better the world has deserts deserts are
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better people don't always get better you personally once you're over middle age when you're becoming elderly you don't get better every day when you are elderly you are in metabolic decline
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every day you get worse it's the human condition it's a simple truth it is fatuous to think that culture or politics or society or technology always
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get better it's just not true and it's certainly not true right now since the financial panic at worse across the board the austerity is a complete policy
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failure it's even worse than the panic we are not surrounded by bitterness in 2013 but practically every measure nature is worse culture is worse governance is worse the infrastructure
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is invisible declined businesses worse people are living in cardboard and Silicon Valley we don't have even much to boast about in our fashion although you have lost weight
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and I praise you for that because I know it must have been hard we're living in hard times we're not living in jolly boom calm times and that's why guys like
00:34:10
Evgeny Morozov who comes from the miserable country of Belarus gets all jittery and even fiercely aggressive when he hears you talking about technological solution ism there's an
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app to make that all better okay a billion apps have been sold where's the better pneus things do not always progress and the successes of progress
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become thorny problems for the next generation they don't stay permanently better are value judgments about what are better or temporary they are time bound when you over use the word better
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it's like a head fake it's a man truck you don't have a better ometer you can't measure the length and breadth and duration of the better pneus better is a metaphysical value judgment it's not a
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scientific quality like mass or velocity you can test it experimentally we don't know what's better we don't even know what's worse which is good every cloud
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has a silver lining Google doesn't want to be evil that they don't have an evil ometer they don't have an evil avoidance algorithm I can already tell you what an
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evil Google glass looks like nobody mentioned it but it's stunningly obvious you just take the four glass design principles and you reverse them you use software that was not designed for glass
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buggy abusive software stuff that breaks up or jams or just fails to display you grab fiercely for attention you disrupt the users day you send the user stale
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useless information you do freaky coding the brakes or hacks or pones the device and why do I know these things because they're already present and Android
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right now you don't have to see into the future to recognize this that's not a prediction all you have to do is abandon your naive pretense that every deployment of technology is necessarily in advance it
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isn't true if I'm a huckster in Ghana who is spamming you through google glass for me that situation is better I night your pal I'm an adversary I'm out to rob
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you the Russians they used to want to blow up Stanford they didn't want to send a sergey brin they were not our permanent enemies they were not always
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bad anything that's good for us is bad for them it's not true if you're fixated on betterness you might lose hope when good goes to the bad you might even lose hope when bad goes to the good because
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it leaves you at sea because you were living in illusion you were living in illusion so back to the southwest Arizona State University where we had an
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event called emerge emerge number two the future of truth love this future truth naturally it was an event about truth and so people at this event spent
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all their time making stuff up I was thrilled by this approach because they weren't doing it in any traditional science fictional way it was much more of a design fictional think and do lab
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kinda way which accounts for the 3d printing and the laser holes it was a way anybody in this room would have recognized especially if you were outside our stone box here at the convention center and you're out in the
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maker tip there in the dirt with the fold out tables under the tent fabric you may have noticed the flag inside that tent had like a declaration of principles I love those always love
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declarations of principles it's not that I obey Him I'm just glad to see them so those were principles from Joey ito who's that recently appointed head of MIT Media Lab great guy Joey ito always
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benefit from listening to him take him totally seriously ster also awesome mimi ito she's an anthropologist and impressively wise and kindly woman I think the world of her I
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would trust her with the kids in the car keys so Joey is complaining in an interview about how disrupted our world is he gets it favelas everywhere chaotic
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so he's going to media lab his way out of the situation he's invented some principles he says nine or so principles he says to work in a world like this number one resilience instead of
00:38:54
strength which means that you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure and principle number two you pull instead of push that means you pull the
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resources from the network as you need them as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them and number three you want to take risk instead of focusing on safety and number four you want to focus on the system instead of
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objects and number five you want to have good compasses not in maps and number six you want to work on practice instead of theory because sometimes you don't know why it works but what is important is that it is working not that you have
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some theory around it and number seven is disobedience instead of compliance you don't get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told too much of school is about obedience we should really be celebrating disobedience and number
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eight it's the crowd instead of the experts and number nine it's a focus on learning instead of education and he concludes we're still working on it but that's where our thinking is headed so I put that on my tumblr thought it was
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kind of nifty people went nuts the crowd loves that even if the experts don't love it obviously super popular set of things let me point out the difficulty with this approach although I respect it
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very much and I even understand it is like a description of my own practice something I've been doing for a long time what's the problem there the problem is that it intensifies the churn
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it doesn't cure it or stop it or help it it's creating part of the problem a world in which everybody did that would be a hundred times more disturb than it is right now and the ASU e-merge event had
00:40:37
those problems too mostly because it was doing the exact same thing just in a slightly different vocabulary and it had the benefits what was going on there we had a bunch of multidisciplinary groups
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together we're like trying to get reality the truth to emerge from the shadows of Futurity how can we make something emerge from frisky from from obscurity well instead of describing it
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or writing white papers about it we're gathering together and we're trying to personify it we're trying to experience it it's like experiential futurity public testimonies groups are getting up
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on stage they're there they're faking court trials they're conducting fake funerals there are dancers in costumes is like TEDx with cosplay and always
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look at as I why are these dancers here like why are we surrounded with dancers I want more dancers now I think we should have like lots more dances like a Mardi Gras of dancers there ought to be like plastic beads you know décolletage
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and these are lawyers philosophers journalists ethicists ethnologists humanities professors even some musicians have shown up god help them I pity them and they're gathering together
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with these Hardware objects the laser scanners the 3d printers glass making equipment leather making equipment and they're making things like making weird objects they're like trying to make
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objects that somehow personify a future experience here's my souvenirs my laser shredded ASU hoodie my bolo tie that's a 3d scan of my own body I really learned
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a lot I mean I'm intimate with lasers now I get them like i never got lasers before i understood lasers now without any danger of an education no PhD in lasers i'm just like very hands-on with
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them they've kind of like emerged from the shadows of laser dome for me now I know what they smell like and you know what's the difficulty here well I'm actually very much in favor of this
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I think it's a super modern thing to do it's like something anybody in this room could do and it's something that's very typical of our times however just because it's interesting doesn't mean it's good like this figurine is actually
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kind of tacky if you like took it and tried to sell it it'd be like this weird plastic Jim crack thing and this hoodies like full of holes obviously it's going to fall apart it's not going to serve the purpose of an actual hoodie it's
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more of a Dietetic prototype it's it's literally a stage costume and I can no longer use it for its original function it's been kind of it's been disrupted I mean it's just it's a thing with holes in it that like looks cool but doesn't
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really work it's like well it's like rubbish or it's like chin Dogen if you don't know what those are there's a japanese term for unyu sla's objects and objects that are like conceptual jokes
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but like a function or the cooler term which is cracked chicks and a crap kicked is what happens when you give somebody access the cheap means of production and they just start lawl catting with physical objects they're
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just emitting jokes as real things you know when they're like crap and they can't be sold and they basically have the same value as any other content of the internet that just happened to be made of plastic or butch were deform core or concrete or whatever you manage
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to drag into the means of production and other people didn't have crap chicks but they didn't have lolcatz either and we have both crab chicks and law cats we've got them in like enormous hordes at the
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Center for Science in the imagination at Arizona State University which is kind of a media lab without the media and of a media lab for humanities guys a very 20 teens institution I really wish them
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well I think they're like a new thing they're doing important work there I want to help them I'm on their side but I worry about the clumsy practices and the trashy aesthetics why don't we have
00:44:52
thoughtful practices and well-considered aesthetics I mean why we should at least aspire to that we shouldn't settle for like cheesy alpha roll out rubbish just because we know we can do it making objects which are objects but
00:45:05
they're not useful they're not user-friendly they're not easy to maintain they're not even cheap because although this was cheap it wasn't cheap to fly be in and put me up at taxpayer
00:45:17
expense in Arizona State University their conversation pieces because you know I could talk about laser halls all day their thought experiments because you know it's interesting to think about
00:45:30
skin and yourself and output in yourself there are kind of absurd props in an absurdist theater you like making a lawyer confront a 3d printer and actually print something and they're
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very modish in our very gadgets Cindric decade and we really kind of did it about the boxes and it's also in the southwest that's where it's happy it was
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happening in the state of Arizona the reddest of the red is like Phoenix as a center of the avant-garde and they're really doing new things there in Phoenix
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was once a dead City not just cliff dweller guys but a whole river valley of guys like tens of thousands of people settled the Phoenix River Valley and
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they went away and when they came the other settlers they recognized the ruins of this of this ancient civilization and they built another town on it that's why they named it Phoenix it was a dead town
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but dead canals that's a new town with the same water management problems and what we're seeing there at Arizona State and what we were seeing in that tent is like a new method of inquiry which is
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rising on the disrupted ruins of older methods of inquiry and in conclusion how can we get past the wow factor how can we really inquire with this how can we
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like treat it with moral seriousness I think the first step really the proper step is to accept that our hands are not clean we don't just play an experiment we kill
00:47:15
when you disrupt the stone box the stone box goes empty it's not merely irritated or disturbed it's dead it's dead media it's dad it's been killed and to be a
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Phoenix you have to admit your complicity in the barbecue fire it's your fire it's not somebody else's like yes we killed the past we didn't pull
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the trigger on it directly but it died for our benefit had died through things we did own up to that own up to that yes we burned it up no one is historically
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innocent yes we are carnivores at this barbecue yes it died we roasted it we ate it you know and the saving grace here is that we eat what we kill go on
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eat it you know don't pretend to be the child bride and white lace who thinks that babies are found under the cabbages you're not that young 26 years old you
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got to be slaughtering the hog of the 20th century roasting it over a bonfire live up to it come on to kill it and pretend that that was some kind of accident that is shameful you know to
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kill and eat it is fierce but it's honorable because you're taking the substance of the past and making it part of yourself you are giving it new form and allowing it to take flight the past
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is ablaze the sky is full of smoke but the Phoenix takes wing the Phoenix is a desert eagle the Phoenix is a bird of prey so thanks for your attention see
00:49:04
you next time you
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