The mother of all interviews

Roughly once a month, every month for the last several years, I’ve sat down with one or another blogger, student, filmmaker, or journalist to conduct an interview on the subjects I think and write about here. I’m often amused, and always flattered, by the way these things turn out, and sometimes they even prove to be quite useful in terms of introducing figures or provoking lines of inquiry I hadn’t previously given much attention to.

I’m generally pretty ambivalent about pointing to these things here, though. On the one hand, a good conversation undeniably does draw out different emphases than a simple blog post. It can pose entirely new questions on my own part, lead to new ways of framing a situation, and even occasionally cause me to question the line I’ve hitherto adopted on a given topic. In this sense, such interviews aren’t even metacommentary: they’re a totally valid, maybe even an organic part of my thinking around something, and providing the links to you is only being thorough.

But I can also be a little reticent about doing so. Looky here: Magazine X interviewed me! It just strikes me as, I don’t know…unseemly?

In the case at hand, I have no such reticence. Tish Shute has just published what is perhaps the most extensive English-language interview with me that I can remember, and it’s chock-full of ideas about augmented reality, virtual worlds, Usman Haque’s Pachube project, the networked book, the networked city, and what to do at the end of the world.

I do warn you that it runs to some 12,500 words, and god knows that can be a lot of me to take in one sitting. Nevertheless I do think you’ll enjoy it. There’s, at the very least, a lot to argue with there. : . )

Many thanks to Tish for her patient, painstaking construction of this interview. Even if I sometimes got the sense that we were coming from some fundamentally different assumptions about things, her questions were never anything less than thought-provoking, and I had a great deal of fun trying to answer them. I hope you feel the same way about reading same.

Of books and unbooks

I’m not sure precisely what’s driving it – maybe it’s the bracing, clarifying, liberatory aspect of a severe economic downtown – but I sense an absolutely titanic percolation of creativity out there in the world just now.

Each day seems to bring word of another genuinely good new idea or way of framing things, something truly worth reckoning with. I’m frankly jealous that so much of this is going on at a moment when – ironically enough, and for the first time in a decade – I’m mired inside the kind of structure that doesn’t lend itself to such investigations, but the optimist in me hopes there may still be one or two ways to contribute to and participate in what is shaping up to be a great fructification.

The unbook is exemplary of the kind of ideas this moment in our lives seems to be turning up. It’s clearly come steam-engine time, in that a bunch of different people (with predictably diverse instincts and agendas) have been converging on this idea for a while now, but I give props to Jay Cross and Dave Gray for naming the idea and therefore giving it immediacy. Sometimes, as I of all people know, tagging something with a gimmicky name is just what needs to happen before the idea at its core can assume concrete form in people’s minds.

To my mind, anyway, the unbook is a container for long-form ideas appropriate to an internetworked age. By building on some admittedly dorky but highly useful tropes of software, mostly having to do with version control, open-endedness and an explicit role for the “user” community, the notion allows such works to usefully harness the dynamic and responsive nature of discourse on the Web, while preserving coherence, authorial voice and intent.

This is precisely what Nurri and I have always had in mind for The City Is Here For You To Use, which is shaping up as something of an unbook avant la lettre. It’s why we’ve always insisted on keeping you in the loop as to the book’s fitful progress, it’s why I take every opportunity to test its ideas here, it’s why I make explicit the fact that your response to those ideas is crucial to their evolution and expression. And it’s why, even though the process is inevitably going to result in a static, physical document as one of its manifestations – and hopefully a very nice one indeed – we’ve committed to offering a free and freely-downloadable Creative Commons-licensed PDF of every numbered version of The City, from zero onward. You buy the book if you want the object. The ideas are free.

The important part is in acknowledging two points which have usually been understood as contradictory, but which are actually nothing of the sort: firstly, that the expression of ideas in written form has something to learn from the practices that have evolved around the collaborative creation of dynamic, digital documents over the half-century-long history of software; and secondly, that certain ideas require elaboration in the reasonably strongly-bounded form we know as a “book,” and cannot meaningfully be shared otherwise. A third point, concomitant to the second, is that despite recent technical advances, screen-based media still cannot, and may not ever fully be able to, deliver the extratextual cues and phenomenological traces that support, inform and extend the meaning of written documents. (Cory, I love you, but I’ve heard you discount these very real pleasures more than once. Don’t you know you can have your cake and eat it too?)

Well. As Dave Gray points out, “An unbook’s community is a very real part of the unbook’s development team.” I wouldn’t necessarily have used the phrase “development team,” for the obvious reasons, but the point stands. Your voice is a part of this book we’re writing, and not the least significant. What do you think?

The City Is Here: Table of contents

Goaded by Mike Kuniavsky’s publication last week of an outline to his forthcoming book, here’s a table of contents for The City Is Here For You To Use. It’s a little unusual, in that it takes the form of a skeletal argument, or maybe even an essay; I hope you enjoy it. Of course, you should also consider this an alpha version, subject to change. (If any of this whets your appetite, do consider pre-ordering the book here.)

1
Twentieth-century urbanism struggled mightily to establish the rudiments of an empirical, human-centered practice – one capable of identifying, understanding and supporting the processes that give rise to lively, vibrant cities.

2
We’ve learned that the dynamics which bring such communities into being and allow them to flourish are peculiarly sensitive; the configurations of favorable material circumstances, enlightened policies, and empowered citizens on which urban vitality depends are inherently contingent, and must remain (or be held) within surprisingly delicate tolerances. The introduction of any disruptive factor is likely to move a given ensemble across a variety of thresholds, with significant implications for the way that place is formed and the ways in which it can be experienced. The disruption we will be examining in this book is technological.

3
In recent years, a class of networked information-processing technologies has emerged which permits the built environment, and discrete objects in it, to sense, process, store, communicate, display and take immediate physical action upon information. The result is a highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials made explicit and superimposed on the city – something we might think of as network weather.

4
This weather is already exerting pressure on the delicate parameters that between them do so much to condition the life of our urbanized places. We can see both the urban milieu and the array of choices available to people moving through it beginning to evolve in response.

5
In many ways, the technologies involved remain distressingly opaque. Understanding how they work in concert with one another (or fail to do so) requires specialist knowledge that tends not to be bundled alongside their appearances in the world. In order to build effectively with these systems, therefore, and use them most sensitively once deployed, we need to unpack the specific details of their capabilities, affordances and governing logics.

6
When considering the impact of informatic technologies on urban form and experience, however, the relevant unit of analysis is not the technology itself, but rather the local technosocial assemblage into which it has been laminated. Such constellations of protocols, practices, activities and cultural assumptions operate in mesh to produce a given effect, and this makes any one component very hard to dissect out, consider in isolation or successfully transplant.

7
Nevertheless, some general trends are observable. A previously mute and disjointed streetscape is being replaced by one comprised of addressable, queryable and even scriptable objects;

8
An architectonic built up from static and relatively inert forms is being replaced by dynamic structures and surfaces;

9
A visual environment which asks little more of us than that we spectate is being replaced by interactive façades, screens, and displays;

10
Above all, those of us moving through the urban environment have ourselves been richly provisioned with sensors operating on a variety of channels and at the most intimate scale.

11
As a result, where previously human and other processes in the urban fold were lost to insight and to history, the contemporary city’s rhythms and processes speak themselves.

12
The bottom line is a city that responds to the behavior of its users in something close to real time, and in turn begins to shape that behavior.

13
This has profound implications for a variety of practices that, between them, are arguably constitutive of metropolitan experience: the way the city is disposed in space, as well as the way we find our way around it;

14
…the way in which we move around and through it;

15
…the way we make use of it as a platform for conviviality, to socialize, experience solidarity and the simple pleasures of the company of others;

16
…and the way we bring goods and services to market.

17
We need to be clear that significant threats to liberty and autonomy inhere in any adoption of these technologies. They can all too easily be used to apply differential control over who gets to use space and under what circumstances, with little or no effective recourse in real time.

18
There are other inherently and significantly problematic aspects involved any time we re-engineer urban practices of long standing, that have matured to the point that they already work usefully well, around technical processes which are not, have not and do not. We need to take particular care to avoid the introduction into everyday life of failure modes which do not currently exist.

19
Only by reckoning with these constraints and limitations will we formulate a robust urbanist practice for the twenty-first century, a Newer Urbanism capable of fully embracing the potential of networked informatic technologies while turning them to our own various ends.

20
This will require a new way of conceiving of public objects as informational utilities…

21
…new agreements regarding the use of public space…

22
…and perhaps even a new conception of the practice of citizenship.

23
None of these strategies will be sufficient on its own, and the list is far from comprehensive. Ultimately, successfully managing the challenges of the networked city will mean understanding it not just as an ecosystem but as a single conjoined process unfolding in time. And further still, as a deeply seamful process, presenting all who encounter it with a million gleaming hinges: apertures allowing you to reach in and withdraw useful intelligence, to tweak its performance to your own present necessities, or to plug its outputs as inputs into yet other running processes. Now, as never before, the city is here for you to use.

This rarely kills That outright

Whether they’re entirely conscious of it or not, technodeterminists of various stripes love to invoke The Hunchback of Notre Dame in explaining the impact of emergent media on the world around us. “This will kill that,” moans Hugo’s miserable archdeacon Claude. “The press will kill the church; printing will kill architecture.”

It’s that kill that really sells the line, and moors it in memory: so dramatic, so decisive, so brutal. And so we’re told that the telephone kills the written word, that video kills the radio star, that the recordable audio cassette kills the recording industry. U.s.w., u.s.w., u.s.w.

But radio didn’t die, not right away, just like email hasn’t (yet) killed the Postal Service and the Kindle hasn’t entirely done away with the printed book. These are entirely different kinds of propositions, serving different populations and different purposes through different apertures.

At the same time, though, you’d have to be blind not to notice the shifting of their relative fortunes in the world. How to account for these shifts more accurately, less reductively, less like a douchey futurist would?

I’m beginning to think of the set of interfaces through which we engage meaning and interact with the wider social world as a mediating stack, with distinct many-to-one, one-to-one and one-to-many layers. The precise composition of this stack is going to be different for each of us, varying widely by where we live, how much time, money and effort we can afford to spend on its composition and maintenance, and (especially) when we came of age. So where my grandmother used radio, TV, newspapers, phone calls and written letters to bind her world together, I tend to use the Web, email and IM. And – here the technology really does tell – where she didn’t have access to a one-to-many channel at all, I have WordPress, Twitter, and (in edge cases) a variety of burst-email and -SMS options available to me.

The important thing is this: the grandeur always lives at the top of the stack. Right now, it’s vested in “social media,” just as it was in blogging ten (!) years ago, in television forty years ago and in newspapers sixty years before that. What each new media technology does do is knock away one or more of the social and economic props on which the success (and ultimately, the viability) of other channels in its layer depend. With the introduction and mass adoption of anything new, those channels move further down the stack. They become less central to the production of consensus culture, more a niche proposition, almost certainly less glamorous. But if a given way of doing things offers something that no other mediating technology can – whether for reasons of exceedingly low cost, low barriers to entry, or robust simplicity – it will never disappear entirely.

What we’re seeing right now with newspapers, I think, is simply that they may be dropping off the bottom of the stack. The struts of their justification have been eroded in too many different ways, from too many different directions. Newspapers are a threefold proposition – they inform, aggregate eyeballs for the benefit of advertisers, and furnish the container in which a shared civic community can be seen to form – and each of these value propositions has now been near-fatally undermined by some other channel. The rising price of pulp and delivery fleets is merely a convenient excuse to pull the plug.

So some given That may indeed about to be killed, after all, but not by This – not, in other words, as any Hugoesque single-bullet theory would have it. It’s more like the achingly protracted death of a thousand cuts, inflicted from near as many different directions, and only because everything That could offer was already being done and done better by a swarm of other things. The distinction may appear trivial, but I believe it offers more useful insight into the process by way of which mediating technologies eventually get subducted and disappear from daily use.