♥ ¢¢ ♥ ♥

I’d like to talk about augmented reality. Specifically, I’d like to talk about augmented reality, the things you carry in your pockets, and the things you wear around your neck.

Primer

AR basics: It’s an extension of the mobile Internet (that’s the one where people are walking around with computers disguised as phones in their pockets). The mobile Internet is what happens when devices become untethered from power, ethernet, and phone cords.

photo credit: tranchis

Let’s talk about finding a restaurant.( Read more... )

1.

In 2008, Australian show A Current Affair broadcast an episode that included a brief hypnotherapy session. The segment was called Think Slim and the idea was that it would help viewers lose weight. This was found to be in breach of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice which specifically forbids broadcasting shows “designed to induce a hypnotic state in viewers”.

photo credit: rheanvent( Read more... )

There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An invocation said while waiting for copies of the meeting’s agenda to be printed so that if could be distributed, doodled upon, and then thrown away.

photo credit: Corey Holms

The computer was meant to herald an end to paper documentation but paper multiplied instead. Easy editing + cheap and fast laser printing changed the relationship we had to paper. Real world filing disappeared, as it became easier to just print a new copy if the document had gone missing. Perfection trumped conservation and every discovered typo meant a complete reprinting of all 7 copies of the 50 page report or proposal.

Think about what’s happening here. Documents are undergoing an transition from object to data. The paper copies become physical instantiations of the data but they’ve stopped being the data itself. There’s this sort of adolescent transition in progress, while we – the users of the data – aren’t sure how to treat it, so we end up with these bizarre hybrid entities that slide back and forth between digital and physical, all the while leaving behind recycling bins overflowing with the dead husks of stale snapshots.

A decade later, we’re slowly starting to come to grips with this. Very few of my friends own printers anymore – they feel like a costly burden. We prefer to avoid printing at all if we can, resorting to a trip to the copyshop only when absolutely necessary. The fact that we have to do this at all shows how much of the rest of the world that we’re interfacing with still fetishises paper. So we resort to hacks, using scanned signatures and fax-to-email services to generate much documentation, essentially resorting to forgery to navigate our way through the paper bureaucracy. Adolescence is still in progress.

If all these visionaries are right about the path that manufacturing is going to take, we are in for an even worse transition with objects. Just like with paper, the promise of 3d printers is a blurring between data and objects. Bruce Sterling calls these hybrid things Spimes. Data that gets instantiated in the physical world for a time, before being reclaimed, recycled and sustainably mined for future use.

Scenario: You buy a Spime with a credit card. Your account info is embedded in the transaction, including a special email address set up for your Spimes. After the purchase, a link is sent to you with customer support, relevant product data, history of ownership, geographies, manufacturing origins, ingredients, recipes for customization, and bluebook value. The spime is able to update its data in your database (via radio-frequency ID), to inform you of required service calls, with appropriate links to service centers. This removes guesswork and streamlines recycling.

Bruce Sterling – Viridian Note 00422: The Spime

Will Wiles of Icon Magazine spent some time talking about augmented reality, Tron, and the fictional source of many design and technological innovations on his blog. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last two paragraphs.

photo credit: rbatina

Returning to augmented reality, there is of course a great risk that it will flop, just as the first wave of virtual reality did in the 1990s. I remember being taken to the Trocadero Centre to try out the “Virtuality” machines installed there – the first in the UK. I remember it clearly because it was such a huge disappointment. AR strikes me as massively more practical, but no matter how sophisticated the technology, it still comes up against a fixed limitation – the human arm. Are people going to walk around holding up their mobile phones to navigate the world?

Rationally, I’d say no, but then I wouldn’t have guessed that people would experience real-life events through the tiny screen on their digital cameras or even their mobile phones – and they do, preferring to see an event through a technological surrogate. I wouldn’t have guessed that people would trust the information on their Sat Nav screen over the evidence of their own eyes and instincts, but they do. There’s no guessing what people might prefer to delegate to gadgetry.

Will Wiles – The Unreal Deal

The technological surrogates idea so interesting. I keep thinking about the image of the Obama’s first dance and all the people recording it, themselves being recorded. Ditto for all those people who have been on vacation, seeing the whole thing through the frame of a Polaroid/Camcorder/Flip/iPod Nano. Extra points for the parents ruining their kids’ fidgety fun by yelling at them to pose and smile when all the kids want to do is LOOK at the thing they are posing in front of.

Then I sheepishly think of the GBs of photos on my drive. It’s not that difficult to imagine myself getting distracted enough to make the mistake of Wiles’ Sat Nav driver. It’s not that I don’t trust my senses so much as I don’t trust my memory of directions. Not that I try to remember them much anymore.

A mobile phone with a good notes and maps application makes remembering seem obsolete. I can just look it up. I’ll Google it. I’m pretty sure I wrote it down, somewhere…

I feel like camera phones and GPS navigators are two sides of the same coin: the fear of forgetting. Cameras say, “We will capture this event and keep care of it.” Garmin says, “I will tell you where the path is, you don’t need to write down the directions.” This one thing is so important that it outweighs the many ways in which these devices are terrible.

New technology doesn’t win because it’s so much better than what came before. It wins because some subset of what it does is SO COMPELLING that we put up with the many ways in which using it is worse than the older alternatives. A real map is much, much better than Google maps in presentation, ease of note-taking, ability to quickly scan around, and layers of data available. But they are expensive, it’s hard to carry a comprehensive set, they don’t show you where you are, and they can’t be searched.

I agree with Wiles that the seeds of the future are planted in the stories that people grow up with. The second half of the notion has to be our powerful ability to rewrite expectations. We say that Stephenson, Gibson and Sterling et al. invented cyberspace which led to the Internet. But this thing both fulfils and falls terribly short of the consensual hallucinations that drove the imagination of the people doing the work that led to the Internet that we ended up with.

Where augmented reality apps are likely to get over the hump into ubiquity is when they figure out what it is that they can do that we didn’t realize we wanted them to do, and ruthlessly implement that.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.

photo credit: Smithsonian Institution

While this was happening, we got stuck in traffic behind a delivery truck. We were surrounded by them, in fact, and it occurred to me that I was on one (Greyhound offers a courier service). I started thinking about the insane infrastructure required to have something like FedEx. The need to rapidly get something from one place to another. The network of planes, warehouses, barcodes, computers, scanners, trucks, garages, boxes, and people all bent to the service of moving things around on our behalf.

FedEx’s business is in serious jeopardy. I wonder if they realize this.

It begins with letters, of course. FedEx is in essence a finely tuned premium mail carrier. That email put a huge dent in regular mail is old news. It’s faster and freer. When it comes to the transmission of information – one of the main uses of mail carriers – the Internet wins in almost every situation.

This doesn’t really matter to FedEx. They were never in the regular mail business. They ARE in the authenticity business and the object business, however. Both of these are under threat.

The Authenticity Business

This is how contracts between far flung business partners get negotiated:
You have a few calls to outline the deal and then someone draws up a draft contract in Word. This gets emailed out with track-changes turned on and then it goes back and forth electronically until a final version is agreed upon. This is promptly printed off, signed and faxed with the originals to follow by Fed Ex.

I have no idea why we still have to send the “originals” by physical mail. A nod to tradition I suppose. There is nothing about a laser-printed 30 page document with signatures on the last page that’s particularly more safe from tampering than an properly secured electronic copy of the same. If eBay, Amazon, Paypal and my bank can solve the authentication problem, it can be solved for contracts. For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

The Object Business

Once the Authenticated Document portion of FedEx’s business fades away, they’ll have to retreat into the molecule moving business. Here’s a need that, at least for the immediate future, doesn’t get demolished by the Internet.

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

It’s not everything. Objects with acute sentimental value, hand crafted trinkets, mementoes, these will all be things you want to keep. But even this category is smaller than you might think. It’s not that long ago that photos were on the “must ship” list. Now they’re digital and easily reprintable, if they’re ever printed at all.

With mature 3d printing we’ve ended up with a kind of teleportation. This is the kind of thing that gives philosophers of art nightmares.

Teleportation

Need a computer at your destination? We’ll fab you one and format it from your encrypted cloud-image. It’ll be ready at the airport with your rental car and a change of clothes, which we also printed to your specifications.

Need your bike shipped? Drop it off at a reclamation facility, we’ll scan it and credit you the materials, then for less than the price of flying it across the country, we’ll rebuild it over there. For a small fee, you can fiddle with the specs.

You want to ship books? Really? Who ships books?

Because of mass-production, we’ve been living among essentially interchangeable copies for quite some time. The next step is making them utterly interchangeable. Here’s my prediction: We are less than 50 years away from the shipping of objects being as quaint and specialized a practice as shipping sheets of paper with good-wishes written them.

Whoever rises to replace FedEx? Their slogan can be: “It’s already waiting for you.”

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

A little while ago, I got a new iPhone. You wouldn’t know it to look at it. It’s not an upgrade or anything, just a repair job turned replacement. It looks and behaves the same as my old iPhone except that whatever was wrong with the screen on the old one isn’t on this one. The process was painless – I went in, they looked at the phone, handed me a new one and then I went home and re-loaded all the data.

photo credit: .m for matthijs

A good back-up/restore scheme changes your relationship with your gear. It changes a computer from heirloom to container. The loss, theft or destruction of hardware is transmuted from a crisis to an expensive inconvenience.

This isn’t new. We’re used to disposable containers and windows. Glasses are only useful insofar as they hold water, TVs only insofar as they display shows. No one has ever cried because an Ikea tumbler got smashed. Dropping a plasma screen down the stairs is an costly stumble, but not a crippling one.

The new part is how much stuff and what kind of stuff is being turned into data. (Not to mention what kind of data is being turned into stuff.) I’m surrounded by people for whom the loss of a hard drive would be as burning down their house.

There’s the obvious list: music, movies, books, newspapers. The digitization of these things has provoked a crisis in every industry that’s been touched and it’s coming for more. Think music piracy was a sea change? Wait ’til you see the casual piracy of clothing, cars, plants, and animals.

Beyond the well-worn questions of intellectual property, authenticity, and how to keep creators fed, there’s a lot going on. Consider “personal data” for a second. Not insurance records and banking info, but all of the things that used to be family possessions, which have become files. Consider the twin marketing features of durable and disposable, mirror virtues that we keep cramming into single objects. Think about cloud computing, 3d printing, and nomadic restaurants.

I’d like to spend some time on these. Stay tuned.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

In adventure stories, one recurring trope is the ranger/guide. Wizened, possessed by wanderlust, removed from the main branch of civilization, they take the heroes through a patch of inhospitable land. Their years of living at one with nature allows them to see pathways invisible to the rest of the party. They consider broken twigs, scraped bark, and other obscure signs. Through this, the forest teaches them to track their prey. Sherlock Holmes displays similar abilities in and around London, thanks to years of tireless, idiosyncratic research.

photo credit: Daniel Raphael Cooper, the Sorry Shutter

Smart buildings are the means to make Holmeses and rangers of anyone with login credentials. The invisible becomes visible, charted and graphed with hourly break-downs, subdivision by demography, regression analysis, and an easy touch-and-swipe interface. This is what it means to make an environment that talks to us. With the right network and the right surveillance subroutines, the city becomes an enormous Baker Street Irregular. Or an enormous Ministry of Love, depending.

In 1998, when Kevin Warwick implanted a primitive RFID transmitter in his arm, he gained a different superpower – the ability to control the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading with his presence. The front entrance said “hello” when he arrived, doors opened and lights illuminated automatically. Control is too strong a word here – the building reacted to him because it knew he was there.

That’s pre-pre-alpha stuff. Just a dumb transmitter and a dumb receiver. Make it two-way. Connect it to the nerves (there’s been lots of work in that area already). Let a paraplegic homeowner open and close doors with only willpower. Let a blind person FEEL what doors are open without having to fumble around. Connect it to something other than doors. Why should air conditioning be based on objective temperatures? Why can’t the building feel that you feel cold and adjust accordingly?

Heart monitors and ambient sound detection let the elderly live independently for longer. Databar your house for parties. Mix and match everything we were ever promised about our homes of the future.

It won’t work properly. This is to be expected. There will be mis-configured firmware and competing disability-control standards. The genius of the Jetsons was that they lived in a future full of scientific marvels and technical wonders that routinely broke down.

It’s an old joke. If cars were more like computers, they’d have fantastical performance specs but they’d crash all the time. It’s all true, and we’re in the process of actually turning houses into computers. A set of houses in the midwest will be plagued by heating routines that mysterious spin up and then turn off the furnace. There will be user forums for trying to undo a preference setting that routes all your calls through the television. Homes will crash, they will lock up, they will need to be rebooted. But we’ll put up with it.

Here’s the part – more than anything else – that gets me. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discuses the way that we extend our identity into the objects that we feel we control. Game designers exploit this routinely.

It’s the same thing that happens when you drive a car. As you drive, you have a sense of the position of the car in space and how far it extends around you. This enables you to parallel park, drive in a lane next to other cars and pull into your garage without crashing. Your senses extend outward, encompassing the car and receiving feedback. As this happens, the car becomes part of you, an extension of both body and self. This is why people who’ve crashed say “You hit me!” rather than “His car hit me!” or “His car hit my car!”

Steve Swink – Game Feel: A Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation

Full text of “Drone Army descends on New Orleans” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

Drone Army descends on New Orleans

Contact with drones lost during drug wars, swarm slowly migrating north.

photo credit: l@mie

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

More security news
Louisiana Ambassador calls for funding assistance to deal with drone menace
Chinese government denies reports of Afghan uprising
“Pitbull” defence breeds approved for public purchase in Chicago

Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

Don’t miss these top stories on the network:
Opinion: Is it rude to sequence on the first date?
Hurricane Zeke makes landfall in Maine
Plan your vacation: 10 must-see “sunken city” diving tours

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Listen, Jerry can you get Louisa on the line? I’ve got an idea here you kids don’t want to miss. This’ll be a use of your VC dollars that’s way better than that ridiculous gene therapy tech that Kurzweil sold you on.

Here’s the deal: It seems like all of the buzz for augmented reality is around layering images in real time over the world or a video feed of the world. That seems cool, but it’s all very new and pre-alpha and I feel like there has to be more to the AR stuff than just jittery lines and awkward French maids. In fact, I think that there is the tech for an app, RIGHT NOW that could provide a polished user experience using current-gen consumer devices. I’d like to pitch that product to you today. Now.

photo credit: babel`µx

Here’s the background: On day 10 of Dustin Curtis’ 30 Day Flight he sits next to a retired Disney audio Imagineer. Calls him Mr Q. They have a conversation. In 1968 this Q guy designed the ambient audio system for Disney World. It was the first theme park that had music playing on the pathways between the rides. Over time it’s gotten more and more sophisticated.

Listen to this:

He describes how he wrote some software for “manufacturing emotion” with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

That’s Dustin Curtis explaining How Mr Q Manufactured Emotion

It’s a cool solution but it’s very 20th Century. Very infrastructural. It’s location dependent and expensive to reproduce. It asks everyone to hear the same thing. It doesn’t scale to the whole world.

Enter smart phones.

Jer, you know smart phones. Smart phones are your own private amusement park. They have headphone jacks, they let us load apps, they let us play sounds, they are location aware. We don’t need to install speakers throughout the city, people carry the speakers in their pockets. They’re listening to playlists and podcasts and these really ancient “we-don’t-know-from-new-tech-so-we’re-just-filming-plays” primitive stuff. Pre-modern stuff. Audio walking tours? Please, that’s Walkman stuff. Press play when you reach this sign post, whatever. We can reproduce Mr Q’s tech and we don’t need to lay a single inch of cable, don’t need to bolt in a single sub-woofer. We just need to paint in the sounds.

Pick an launch market. Somewhere filled to the gills with creative types who have iPhones, Palms Pre, and Android handsets. New York? Toronto? London? San Francisco? Call up some big names or some up and comings soundscape artists. Is Brian Eno available? What about DJ Someone-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of? Someone the kids are in to.

There’s two parts to this thing. The client sits on the phone, downloads a soundtrack – custom for the city – pulls from the location API, and mixes sounds according to the instructions. There’s cleverness sure, some audio gee-whizery secret sauce, all very patentable and proprietary that seamlessly pulls it together. As you make your way from uptown to downtown, the tone shifts gradually, like in Mr Q’s park but moreso. Mr Q is strictly last century, he’s amateur hour hacker hobbyist. It’s laying copper when we could be putting up cell towers in Africa. Disney doesn’t know from happiest place on earth.

On the server – wait’ll to see what we’ve got going there – it’s all very user-friendly, very drag-n-drop. We show you a map of the city and your uploaded audio files. You can paint-in areas, just like Photoshop, in fact we’re using one of those 2.0 cloud-based painting apps as a base tool. Colour your regions and associate sounds accordingly. We crowdsourced the names of neighbourhoods from Flickr to give you suggested outlines, if you just wanna throw something together, but the real artist can paint down to the nearest half-meter.

Oh yeah, of course it’s all socially networked. We’ve got Facebook integration and a Twitter feed and you can rate soundtracks and see what your friends are listening to and we’ll make a recommendation engine or just leverage someone else’s.

Financial model? We’ve got a financial model like you wouldn’t believe. Licensing opportunities for bands, official city soundtracks for the burgs that care about that kind of thing, pay-per listen, downloadable in-app micro transactions, the whole thing. Disney needs to talk to US. Why are they wasting time on a single soundtrack for the happiest place on earth? Why aren’t they selling Little Mermaid downloads for the girls and Pirates of the Caribbean for the boys? You know what I’m getting at: everyone’s happiest place custom-selected for the needs of the individual.

And that’s all 1.0 stuff. Pre-launch Beta. Let me tell you about what’s in the pipeline.

For one thing, imagine interactive soundtracks. We’ll throw up some time-of-day code in the 1.2 release, that’s easy stuff. Then we start pulling down weather data and incorporating that into the premium soundtracks. Maybe event-based too. Festival in progress? Why not throw in a caribbean undertone?

In the long run, as user adoption upticks, we see a sub-genre of tracks that react to what other users are up to. Who is nearby? Is a crowd forming? The app knows and revises the soundscape accordingly. We’re also looking at a game element – can you follow audio clues and visit all the right locations? Secret soundtracks, unlockable content, all the stuff that makes people crazy with desire.

That’s not it, there’s 3.0 plans too, stuff that’ll change your relationship with sound; military applications, fitness regimens all kinds of things. But before I get to that, you’re gonna need to sign the NDA.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

In 4 posts, we moved from smart homes as haunted houses you can patch to a totalitarian vision surveillance and crowd control. Which, frankly, strikes me as somewhat facile. I mean, it’s not going to be ALL jackboots and mind-control fungus, is it?

A few weeks ago, I talked about this with Snarmarket’s Robin Sloan. He’d been tossing around an idea for a more playful vision of buildings that know what you’re up to. I asked him to write it up.

photo credit: Tschäff

So, this is what it’s like to visit Databar:

You walk in and draw a tiny RFID tag out of a black top hat–there’s one hat for men, another for women. Stick it in your pocket, pin it to your skirt, tie it to your shoelace, whatever. Just keep it with you.

First glance: It’s a plain white space, shadowed to indigo and beige. Throw-lights in Nintendo colors show, by relative brightness, where the men and women are. Over there: a gaggle of girls framed by a bright splash of blue. Opposite them: a row of quiet dudes, talking in pairs, silhouetted in red. Other corners are a violet mix.

Above the bar, the drink menu scrolls and pulses like the NASDAQ ticker. It’s a warm night, and Dos Equis is in demand–almost $6 a bottle now. You could game the market and get a Stella at happy-hour prices. In fact, as you watch, people are doing just that; Stella climbs–$3, $3.50, $4. Little green arrows, just like on CNBC. You could watch those lines rise and fall all night. Some people do.

Later, after two Old Fashioneds (the first is $7, the second $9), the room seems suffused with a golden glow, and there are sparkles everywhere. It’s not the Old Fashioneds. There are chains of white Christmas lights strung all around the bar, connected to a master dimmer. The dimmer runs on a simple formula: (total number of drinks served in the last hour / the number of RFID tags detected in the bar). It tracks the crowd’s collective blood alcohol level, and right now, it’s dazzling.

Projectors spangle the walls with visualizations of the crowd’s ebb and flow. If you’re sharp you can see yourself enter the room, a little pinprick of light that migrates to the bar and back. The looping starling-flock patterns are mesmerizing. There’s one dot that everybody seems to be avoiding. Poor guy.

There are secrets to unlock. If you tag all four corners of the bar in the span of sixty seconds, you’re granted a special power: a cone of darkness. The lights all sense your approach–they sniff out your RFID tag–and dim to nothing as you pass. It’s an anti-spotlight, perfect for whispering secrets and sneaking kisses. It takes about eight powered-up people to cloak the entire dance floor in shadows; that’s when the party starts.

On your way out, you throw your RFID tag back into the hat. Until next time.

by Robin Sloan

I should note that Robin is working on a book. He’s got a Kickstarter project going and the more we pledge, the nicer each of our books will be. Watch his utterly charming video and maybe help him out!

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Ingredients

1. 15 Lombard Street is a meticulously researched manual for breaking into a London bank. Read about it on BLDGBLOG.
2. Augmented Reality. Hip and sexy new tech. Lots of active development and gee-whizzery. The whole industry is still essentially pre-alpha.
3. The construction method in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. Tagged tools, materials, and smart gloves tell unskilled workers what to do. The building more or less assembles itself.
4. WikiHow and Instructables.
5. The Anarchist Cookbook.

photo credit: Curious Expeditions

Recipe

What’s missing from AR is good, cheap, goggles. No one wants to go around with a flashlight on a lanyard Everyone knows this. The solution is under active development. It’s a matter of time before goggles let us overlay images on the world in real time, leaving our hands free to, you know, work.

The promise of AR (aside from sexy maids everywhere you look) is highly contextual just-in-time information. Could be automated, could be an operator looking over your shoulder telling you what to do.

“OK, pull the lever I just highlighted in red, then the one that I highlighted green.”

The idea of puppet-master is so centralized. So 19th-Century Crime. The real future is in the automated stuff. What happens when someone makes a Heist Layar? What happens when the getaway portion of the Heist Layar is build on top of someone else’s Traffic Avoider routines?

Distributed, crowd-sourced manuals for a break-in and escape. Researched by shadowy groups with Cayman Island bank accounts, released to the street. Hey mister meth-addict who just pulled off the greatest heist of the century, despite having no plan whatsoever: Need somewhere to launder your money? The manual has some ideas about what accounts you could use (for a fee).

It’s all very user-friendly. You pop on the goggles, plug in the earphones and go to work. There is a bright pathway lighting your way along with a little countdown telling you how long you have to get to the next node. The manual assures you that the patrol times have been precisely plotted. It ducks you into and out of shadows with alarming precision. Red areas outline the vision cones of every known security camera. You can see the gaps and thread your way between them effortlessly. You are wearing the clothes that the manual had you put on and a working counterfeit ID tag (the gear guided you through making that too). There are countermeasures in place, of course, but you’re running a 0-day version, updated overnight with data from an inside source.

You accomplices don’t even need to be witting. Inject the right instructions into other people’s rigs, have them hold open doors or block traffic to ease the getaway. You can recruit accomplices on Craigslist. Spread a crime across a wide enough range of people and the notion of accessory begins to look strangely outmoded.

“What? I’m just a courier. I got handed a package and I handed it off at the appropriate time. Of course my papers are all in order.”

“Surveillance of the bank? What are you talking about?! I was hired by a company to ensure that their security guards were all making their rounds at the appointed time and to note any deviations.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about officer, I just answered an ad and did what the rig told me. I thought it was a cleaning job.”

Now, take this tech and give it to suicide bombers.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Over the course of the last 3 posts, we proceeded from eco-feedback mechanisms to a paranoid vision of automated prisons and crowd control. It’s worth taking a moment to step back and consider the plausibility of all of this. How likely are these things? Would we do it?

photo credit: nolifebeforecoffee

Of course we would

To make grand architecture is to shape the world in your image, in the hopes that it will in turn shape people. This can be benevolently nudging the population in one direction, or forcing them into another, but that’s simply a question of degrees. To remake a space is to make an ethical claim on how that space should be used, by whom, and for what purpose. At every step along the way, builders have used cutting-edge technologies to bring their manifestos to life.

You can’t throw a rock in the Architecture section of a bookstore without hitting a tome that talks about patterns of architecture and how they make people harmonious or otherwise. See also the architecture of every religion, ever.

Security and crowd dispersal was at least one of the factors that guided Haussmann’s Paris redevelopment. In Iran, wide boulevards made it similarly difficult for protesters to assemble.

Henry Ford built an entire village in the Amazon Jungle on the strength of the idea that he could create a perfect society with the right kinds of construction.

Think all of this is too totalitarian? Too historical? Take a look at these contemporary Mega Churches (click that link, you will not regret it).

CCTV tech is rampant. Roads are giving you tickets automatically. In Britain, CAMERAS ARE ALREADY TALKING TO YOU.

The Elephant

Notice that I haven’t yet mentioned Nazi architecture. It’s because I didn’t have to.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Recap: We’re talking about Alain de Botton’s comment that buildings are forced to sit in silent protest as the people under their care take actions and enter into moods that violate the spirit that the architect was trying to infuse. While this is historically true, we are changing that relationship. Smart buildings will be able to talk back.

photo credit: Ian Muttoo

So far, I’ve focused on houses as places where this kind of interactive architecture might take hold. There is no reason to think that it might stop there. If anything, we’d expect large structures – designed to move masses of people instead of individuals – to be the early experimenters in crowd control.

Scenarios

After the planes hit the towers, all kinds of security mechanisms were proposed for airports. Applying facial-recognition to the already ubiquitous CCTVs was a popular idea until it turned out that the tech was not ready. Someday it will be. Forget cumbersome security lines, why not equip the entire building with highly sensitive chemical noses? A network of sensors can cross-reference the movements of travellers, looking for suspicious patterns. A system of bulkheads isolates potential threats until human security can arrive and confirm the arrest.

The airport knows how long you’ve been waiting and by how much your flight is delayed. The building can alter lighting, music and even air content to soothe worried travellers. Nothing dangerous, mind you. Simply a mild sedative to keep everyone orderly. Raising your voice at the check-in clerks? Well, why shouldn’t the building intervene?

Anything that seems like a good idea in an airport will seem fantastic in America’s overburdened, understaffed prisons. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon suggests a direction. So do South Africa’s armed ATMs. Why put human guards at risk in dealing with unruly inmates?

Schools aren’t precisely the same as prisons, but many of the same discipline issues arise. Hall monitors can’t be everywhere, but the hallway can. Truancy promises to become a thing of the past, there will be no opportunities to loiter in the stairwells. Rumours spread through the student body of a network of tunnels and maintenance rooms behind the walls, unmonitored. Everyone knows a friend of a friend who’s been there. Pranksters are expelled when they hack the fire suppressors one time too many.

In kindergarten, the rooms gently ease the class in and out of nap time. At certain private schools, anxious parents demand detailed positional reports for the teachers of their child. They pour over the data, looking for signs of favouritism, hints that they aren’t getting their money’s worth.

Churches? We are all god’s children, and a place of worship should use every technique available to the maker to help bring the flock to the right state of mind.

Casinos, malls, amusement parks, boulevards, freeways, undergrounds. There is no place in the world that would not be changed by an infrastructure that could talk back. The flavour of conversation will reflect the spirit of the times and the ambitions of the builder.

What will ours say?

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

I can’t get the idea of Buildings That Protest out of my mind.

Recap: This is the realization that with the growth of smart homes and internet of things technology, we are envisioning a future where buildings no longer stand mute, but become active participants in shaping our behaviour.

photo credit: vissago

Infused with Ghosts

They are haunted structures, populated by machine spirits. Some of the spirits will be part of the architect’s vision, or the builder’s, or government code. Others will be after-market add-ons, mandated by utility companies or offered by interior-decoration gurus. Some will be installed by the people living there. DIY renovators, house hackers. Some will be malevolent. Black-hat digital haunters, wall-paper spammers, zombie-house botnets.

There will be things running behind the walls and they are actually going to be called “house daemons”.

Haunted houses that you can patch.

I was trying think of a neologism for modifying your house in software. With the idea of hacking it up, I looked up the etymology of renovation. “1432, from renovacyoun: ’spiritual rebirth’”. Perfect.

Where will the control panels go? Will they be embedded in house shrines? Will we rebuild roman larariums? What is the Feng Shui of house spirits that you can commune with through the command line?

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

In Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, there is a passage where he considers the apparent failure of architecture as a device for making us better people.

photo credit: Mr.Tea

Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them.

…

Medieval devotional paintings may try to remind us of sadness and sin, they may seek to train us away from arrogance and worldly pursuits and render us properly humble before the mysteries and hardships of life, but they will hang in a living room without active protest while butlers circulate the fingerfood and butchers plot their next move.

Alain de Botton – The Significance of Architecture (from The Architecture of Happiness)

If buildings haven’t been able to protest in the past, it’s because we haven’t built them for it. They didn’t have the eyes and ears to notice, nor the power to do something about it. That’s beginning to change.

Witness the new power-use visualization devices, perfect accessories to your environmental devotional, and a means to give mute buildings a voice and opinion about your ecological footprint. This is going mainstream. There is stimulus money. Google is getting involved. Machines to raise your consciousness, machines to make you feel shame.

The Internet of Things expands. More devices are equipped with sensors and they can talk to each other about you. They notice that you spend too much time in front of the television. They wonder why you haven’t been on the exercise bike in days. They gauge the volume of your voice, the pheromones in the air, the sharpness of your movements, and know that you’ve been fighting a lot.

What to do with all of this information? Upload it to Daytum. Analyze it in iGoogle. Tweet about it.

Scenarios

A businessman programs in his New Years resolution. As he falls short of his best intentions, the house begins diverting power from the television, cutting it off completely for days at a time. Only miles on the exercise bike will restore the flow of entertainment.

A study links the colouring and lighting of rooms to the moods of the people therein. The methodology is weak and the conclusions disputed. It’s enough to sell books and spike sales in colour-shift walls. Thousands of complex algorithms are marketed, promising to cross reference sensor data with the latest pseudo-science. Fire-engine red for energy, passion, and late night deadlines. Sea blue to calm arguments and children. Alternating goldenrod and pearl for concentration and intelligence. A software patched is released in order to address reported strobing events which could occur under certain conditions “in a small number of cases”.

After the death of a child on a stretcher in a hallway, a special committee is convened. Battles erupt about patient confidentiality and data security. The Opposition makes headway in the poles by demanding the release of full waiting-room positional data. All new hospitals will have timers projected on to the walls above waiting visitors, counting up.

A small religious community commissions a planned community of morality houses. They are secretive and little is known about their practices. When reports do emerge, there are sensational headlines for weeks.

After the fourth shooting – the result of a toxic mix of firearms, frayed nerves, smart homes, and late night electronic intrusions – the Attorney General announces a crackdown on haunters, while urging new standards of encryption and security. “No one should be afraid in their own home.”</em>

The appeals process in the first gunman’s case drags on.

GE’s Houses That Talk

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Excerpts from “Floatopia: The Rise and Decline of a Libertarian Experiment” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).

photo credit: @rild

By some accounts, the Freedom Ship should never have launched. Plagued by enormous engineering challenges, delays in construction, allegations of corporate fraud, and fully three complete ousters of the executive team and board of directors, the sprawling utopian project seemed doomed from the start. But in a world of massive concentrations of wealth alongside sweeping climate change, it was perhaps inevitable that the vogue for private artificial islands would give way to something that would rise with the waves.

First conceived in the heady days of the Internet Bubble 1.0, decades would pass before the laying of a single section of carbon fiber hull began. When it finally did, controversy raged about alleged labour abuses, and ultimately the Ship’s status as a tax haven.

…

“The zombie ghost of collonialism” wrote one commentator.

But in the end, sufficient international outrage did not surface and the Ship launched, albeit with only 2/3 of the expected 100,000 residents and crew aboard. In this 3 part series, David Dockand offers an exclusive in-depth look at the Freedom Ship, 5 years into her ongoing maiden voyage.

…

Arriving at the Freedom Ship by air is a profoundly underwhelming event. After hours on a small plane or helicopter over azure waves, you see the ship, a sort of matte white rectangle. You land on the deck, and go through an airport that looks like any old airport with a Nautical theme. Constrained by physical necessity and the banal tastes of the ultra rich, the Freedom Ship is ultimately a disappointing wonder of the world. Looking at other centres of hedonistic excess, Las Vegas in the West or Dubai in the East, one can at least say that they were interesting to look at. But the Freedom Ship – in its creaky uniformity – ultimately looks like what it is, an enormous strip mall on a barge.

…

They are running out of money on the Freedom Ship. No one wants to talk about this, but everywhere you go, the signs are evident. Heavily reliant on tourist dollars, the often remote destination is difficult to reach and expensive to visit. As the world economy endures another downturn, visits have dropped sharply. The same forces that are emptying the malls of America are gutting enterprise on the ship.

…

Crime is a huge issue. Built on libertarian principles, the notion of how a society on the ship might remain stable seems to have been given little thought during construction and the early days. It’s as if the founders figured that all their political philosophies would be true and that society would work itself out.

…

After the shocking murder of Kitti Genere and her entourage, a police force was created, but because of the ongoing no-taxation policy, the force is perpetually underfunded and seems at best reluctant to police.

On the Freedom Ship, victims face many of the same issue that they face on cruises. Protected by private security forces with obligations to the ship itself, and the corresponding reliance on tourism for income, incidents are hushed up when they are reported at all. Victims find that the freedom from local jurisdictions cuts both ways. In an environment where it’s frequently unclear WHOSE laws should be enforced, often it seems no laws are enforced at all.

…

Perhaps the biggest blind spot in the creation of the ship was the rise of highly-organized, networked piracy. The Freedom Ship is a slow and easy target. It is also large enough that an attack can be occurring on one end without passengers noticing on the other. It is not uncommon for a crew of pirates to conduct a lightning raid on one of the 6 casinos, disappearing back into the ocean before a defence can be mustered.

…

One such attack occurred while I was on-board. We did not learn of it until hours after it was over, when we found that our table reservations had been lost in the chaos.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: Iguana Jo

Published as an article in 1982, the Broken Windows theory is the the idea that the little things are what make the difference between an orderly and a crime-ridden city. If you are diligent about cleaning up graffiti and vandalism, then people will be less inclined to cause trouble. Leave damage un-repaired and you send the message that no one cares. And then…

We suggest that “untended” behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

NYC Police Commissioner William J. Bratton was an adherent and applied the idea in his efforts to combat the crime wave that was sweeping New York in the 1990s. Malcolm Gladwell approvingly covered that story, making it one of the pillars of his argument in The Tipping Point. Despite people like Steven Levitt arguing that correlation is not causation, the theory still holds a lot of sway.

So much for the background.

It’s 2009 and the housing market is in free-fall. American resolve, strengthened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, redirected and solidified by the HOPEful rhetoric of Obama’s new administration is facing its first test. This is not an external challenge, a threat from the outside carried by insidious invaders. This is an internal failing.

Newsmagazines and pundits are proclaiming the End of Capitalism, or at least the need for Serious Reform. Everyone’s trying to figure out who to blame. Insolvent homeowners or the banks who lent to them. Over-regulation or under-regulation. Democrats or Republicans.

Underlying the whole thing is this nagging thread of doubt. What if American can-do can’t? What if the whole thing has been a bubble? What if the sun has finally set on the American Empire?

There are any number of people who’d like to see the United States fail. Al Qeada and their shadowy financiers, of course. Any of the forgotten domestic terrorists. White supremacists, survivalists, cults, and any number of far-right and far-left organizations. Not to mention the Chinese, Russians or countless James Bond-esque ultra-rich villains.

Somewhere in an office or a cave or a secret volcano base, someone is reading The Tipping Point next to the latest housing figures and a light goes on.

Maps are drawn up, sleeper cells are activated, secret Swiss and Cayman accounts are accessed, and the buying begins. It’s child’s play, really. A matter of ensuring the right density of abandoned housing.

In a lot of cases, the problem takes care of itself. Investment housing that no one actually wanted in the first place, places where no one wants to live. Half-finished bedroom communities and subdivisions. Detroit and the rest of the rust-belt. These areas will devour themselves. Just to be sure, agents buy a few properties for fractions of a penny on the dollar.

Other areas require some finesse. They are generally liveable, often quite nice. Here, it’s a matter of finding the homes belonging to people whose wages don’t match their mortgage payments and who are realizing that their debt outstrips their houses’ value.

It’s very easy to recruit agents to this cause. You don’t need suicidal maniacs, you just need people vaguely in favour of your aims who are willing to pick up the mail from time to time.

Once property is bought, it’s simply a matter of keeping up with property tax payments, knocking out a few windows, and leaving the building to die.

The American system is utterly unable to cope with this attack. The whole rhetoric of the need for things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is built on the assumption that homeowners will take care of their land. Even now, measures are being pushed through to protect homeowners who can’t actually afford their homes.

It’s totally legal. People are buying and selling property through normal channels. There is no investigation because there can be no suspicion. It looks like all the rumours of the end of American prosperity are true. Newscasters inadvertently act as force multipliers, broadcasting reports about America’s Decaying Neighbourhoods. Until it’s not news anymore. Until it’s just the way things are.

Some neighbourhoods do resist. Busybody homeowner associations form a kind of local immune system. They fight the tide, calling meetings, filing by-law complaints and fighting to keep their neighbourhoods safe, clean, and free of strangers. It’s exhausting work, and though some neighbourhoods succeed in staving off the damage, most families (worn down by those rowdy children) simply try to move elsewhere. There is nowhere to go.

It’s an engineered crime wave. As security forces helplessly patrol the docks and airports for dirty bombs and terrorist attacks that will never come, America rots from within.

A glimmer of hope: what if Broken Windows is wrong and the whole attack fails? Then the neighbourhood recovers, prices go up and a weapon becomes an investment. Our shadowy attackers sell the houses back at a tidy profit.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: kirainet

This’ll be the last explicit post about Cyborgs and Architects for awhile (here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Having set up and then blurred a division between adapting people for the environment and adapting the environment for people, I’d like to point out some examples along the sliding scale between these two attitudes.

1. Nadya Vessey, temporary mermaid.

   New Zealand’s WETA workshop built a mermaid suit for Vessey, a double leg amputee. I love everything about this story, especially the way it offers a glimpse of a future where enhancements are not merely restoring human capabilities but opportunities for creating whole new kinds of bodies, bringing aesthetics to cybernetics.

2. Steve Mann, pioneer in wearable computing.

   You can see the evolution of his setup here. He has also done a lot of interesting work and activism around ubiquitous surveillance.

   I remember in 1996 trying to convince a bunch of skeptical law students that wearable computing would change the way they practiced the law.

   Now they all have blackberries.

3. Kevin Warwick, cybernetic homesteader.

   In 1998, Dr Warwick had a chip implanted under his skin that let him control the building. The experiment brilliantly illustrates the blurring between architecture and cybernetics. Neither the smart building, nor the implant chip are worth anything on their own. But networked, the result is something special.

   His research continues.

4. Kisho Kurokawa, metabolist.

   In 1972, his capsule tower was built. A explicitly modifiable structure, the intention was that the capsules would be replaced and updated over time, creating a long lasting building through its very mutability and flexibility.

   Here was an environment that would grow and adapt to its users. Sadly, it seems like the maintenance part didn’t go as planned and now the whole structure faces demolition.

5. Minoru Yamasaki, modernist.

   Yamasaki is the architect of the destroyed WTC Towers, but I’m picking on him here for the disastrous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. A lot of ink has been spilled about what went wrong, but in the end, the environment that had been constructed failed dramatically, becoming a symbol for the failure of the well-meaning but flawed modernist “machines for living” mentality.

   “I never thought people were that destructive,” lamented Yamasaki.

6. Albert Speer, Nazi.

   Perhaps one of the leading examples of the idea that architecture can control people, Speer designed the Zeppelinfeld, the enormous stadium featured in The Triumph of the Will. Nazi architecture was predicated on the idea that it should not only serve the people, but also influence their mood and behaviours.

   For a smaller scale (and more benevolent) take, see also police commissioner William J. Bratton and the fixing broken windows theory.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: ElDave

In 4 Jonah poked some holes the Architect half of the division I’d set up. I’d like to spend 5 looking at the Cyborg’s story.

In the first two Terminator movies, Arnold is cast as the classic cyborg, a nearly unstoppable man-machine. Incredibly durable and adaptable, he takes freely from his environment, arriving in the present literally naked and acquiring the equipment he needs along the way. He is supremely self-reliant.

Except.

Except that in order to show up in the present, there needed to be a working time machine. In order for him to even exist, there needed to be Skynet and enormous factories full of vats connected to assembly devices.

This is the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Sometime in the 90s until 2006, the U.S. Army replaced “Be All You Can Be” with “Army of One”. Advertising for the campaign featured hardcore-looking soldiers with all sorts of high tech gear. The implication being that to join the Army of the 21st century, was to become a stupendous badass. (Sure there was some noise about the “one” being an acronym for “Officers, NCOs, and Enlisted” but who listens to acronyms?)

They certainly are. Consider the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. 18 U.S. soldiers died. Between 130 and 2,000 (that is not a typo) Somalis died. Brutal.

The U.S. Army is probably the most cybernetic military force, in their tendency to prefer increasingly high tech solutions to combat problems.

But a high tech military is supremely reliant on the support staff and logistics that comes with deploying and maintaining the equipment. The logistical operations of the army are dizzying in their complexity. Just getting all of the gear needed into the field is an overwhelming (and expensive) proposition.

The fact is that cybernetic beings can’t be self-reliant. It takes an enormous amount of institutionalized medicine and technology to make a working cyborg. The moment to moment self-reliance of the cyborg can be seen as a kind of infrastructural debt that must be paid back either at another time or by someone else. That someone else can be a willing participant, as in the crew of technicians building and maintaining Robocop between mission, or a victim, as in the hapless bikers who give Arnold the clothes he needs in Terminator.

In the penultimate issue if Warren Ellis’ run on Iron Man, Tony Stark has just taken the Extremis serum and is discovering his new powers.

“Maya, I can see through satellites now,” he says.

Which is all well and good. So long as there are satellites.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

photo credit: slworking2

Impromptu guest post! I’m taking the liberty of reposting this comment about 3 by Jonah from still crapulent.

This cyborg-architecture tension relies on defining architecture as a discipline dealing only with static structures, however. I’m (clearly) not up on my architectural theory, speculative or otherwise, so I don’t know to what extent this definition has been problematized, but it seems to me to be deceptive.

Why must we restrict “architecture” only to stationary built environments? Why do we think of the camper van primarily as a vehicle, as opposed to a building? Are there other productive ways of thinking about architecture and mobility? It is certainly relevant to thinking about the architecture of temporary structures, or does it somehow cease to be a matter of architectural consideration when it becomes a collapsable, portable building?

On the flip side, walking houses, floating castles, fortresses on wheels (baba yaga’s chickenleg house, the castle in the sky, howl’s moving castle, etc.) abound in myth, fantasy and sci-fi, but what about modern cruise ships, themselves larger in size and occupancy than the majority of stationary buildings one encounters? Or a space station, which is necessarily mobile, or for that matter, any large (existing or projected) space cruiser? Vessel v. domicile? The Nostromo? The Death Star?

Obviously in -many- of these cases there is still the an imbalance in the issue of investment of effort/resources/capital at work, but it hardly applies across the board, or at least applies variably enough as to complicate the dichotomy being set up.

On a non-terrestrial, or further a non-resource-providing plane, need the homesteader not be nomadic?

Originally posted as a comment by stillcrapulent on Quiet Babylon using Disqus.

Quite right.

I still think there is still some room for me to make a parallel between the self-reliant cyborg and nomad v. the infrastructure reliant building-dweller and farmer. After all, most of Jonah’s examples are pretty fantastical. Sort of edge cases for the blurry line between self and environmental intervention.

But I can’t really have it both ways, can I? Not given that I spent 2 calling the extremely nomadic Apollo program an example of architectural thinking.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.