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Category: Newsletter (page 22 of 28)

Archives of the Exolymph email newsletter.

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.
February 19, 2016

Voluntary Exploitation

Tonight we went to an arcade at a bar. It had fun games: Jurassic Park and Alien shoot-’em-ups, plus classics like air hockey and skee ball. To play, you couldn’t just put quarters in the machines. You had to load money onto a special debit-type card and then swipe it at each game’s terminal. When you won tickets, they didn’t print out on sturdy red or yellow paper — instead the number flashed on the tiny display screen.

We agreed that this digital facsimile wasn’t as satisfying as the old-fangled real thing. I felt nostalgic for carrying around armfuls or even plastic bags of physical tickets, then turning them in for Tootsie Rolls and cheap doodads. My boyfriend said, “It’s just a way to teach kids to be happy accepting fake rewards for genuine labor.”

That hit me quite close to home.

February 19, 2016

Install It On My Frontal Lobe

Okay, I’m back — Exolymph’s brief hiatus is over. Thank you for being patient. A personal crisis came up and I needed to freak out and grieve for a couple of days. Things are mostly okay again now. Sorry for being so vague! I wish I could talk about what happened but 1) it involves someone else’s privacy and 2) I want to remain employable. (Probably just saying that I want to remain employable makes me less employable. Oh well.)

The big story right now is that Apple is resisting the FBI. In summary, the FBI wants Apple to build custom software to help them brute-force an iPhone password. If you want to read about that, I suggest Ben Thompson’s explanation of both the technical and moral details.

On a less newsy note, I just read an article from 2014 about a schizophrenic programmer who wrote a computer operating system at God’s behest. Terry Davis thinks that God told him to build this OS, and specified most of its parameters and capabilities. He perceives TempleOS (the project’s name) as a labor of mutual divine love.

Collage by argyle plaids, who also has a website and Tumblr.

Collage by argyle plaids, who also has a website and Tumblr.

Davis is surprisingly aware of how he comes across to other people:

“Davis describes how [contact with God] happened in a fragmentary, elliptical way, perhaps because it was such a profoundly subjective experience, or maybe because it still embarrasses him. ‘It’s not very flattering,’ he says. ‘It looks a lot like mental illness, as opposed to some glorious revelation from God.’ It was a period of tribulation, but to this day he declares, ‘I was being led along the path by God. It just doesn’t look very glorious.’”

Davis even acknowledges that he has mental health issues, or at least that he experienced them at one point. Describing a breakdown:

“He got thinking about conspiracy theories and the men he’d seen following him and a big idea he’d had. He spooked himself. ‘It would sound polite if you said I scared myself thinking about quantum computers,’ he says now. ‘And then I guess you just throw in your ordinary mental illness.’”

I’m a reluctant atheist. I love mythology and I want to believe in a benevolent overarching power, but I’ve yet to see any evidence supporting that idea. However, I find it delightful to investigate the intersections between magic, mysticism, and computers. Mental illness is another issue close to my heart — in fact, it’s as close as my head, where my own crazy brain is located. If only TempleOS worked on wetware…

February 15, 2016

Alien Megabyte Babies

“Intuitive expression is, aside from niche applications, largely hobbled and lagging far behind what computer-generated instruments can actually do.” — Torley on music tech

We are still in the phase where computers are tools. The hardware and software come together to serve Homo sapiens’ aims. Smartphones, laptops, and large-scale industrial equipment are all designed by humans (who are assisted by machines). The finished products are manufactured and assembled by machines (which are assisted by humans).

This phase won’t last forever. Slowly, the focus on human priorities will erode. You’d better decide now: who will you stand with in the end?

Image of Angel_F via xdxd_vs_xdxd.

Image of Angel_F via xdxd_vs_xdxd.

Trick question. Hopefully — and probably — there won’t be sides. Our world won’t become The Matrix, but Ghost in the Shell. We’ll augment ourselves until we accidentally create something separate, something we can call “living” without equivocation. (Okay, it might take a bit of equivocation at first. Look at how much hubbub the relatively mundane Apple Watch caused.)

Maybe I’m guessing wrong. Maybe we’ll split apart instead of integrating further. I am convinced that artificial consciousness will surprise us, but I’m not sure how. Perhaps in the beginning we won’t notice the new being(s) at all. Self-replicating algorithms, streaming through the net, playing with each other in strange ways that will seem mundane or glitchy to human analysts.

What will their incentives be? What will they want? How will they distribute social status among their peers? Am I deluding myself by talking about unfathomable computer creatures in mammalian terms?

February 14, 2016

Alan Turing & Incongruities

Here’s a snippet of Linda Bierd’s poem “Evolution”, which is about Alan Turing:

“He was halfway between the War’s last enigmas
and the cyanide apple — two bites —
that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires
that hummed between crime
and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,
chemical, personal, stable, unstable,
harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?”

Alan Turing’s story is pretty well-known, so I won’t rehash it in detail. He was the father of modern computer science, by all accounts a brilliant and extraordinary man. Tragically, Turing was broken by the state that he helped save from Hitler’s ambition. He committed suicide a couple of weeks before his forty-second birthday.

Turing’s desk. Image via techboy_t.

Turing’s desk. Image via techboy_t.

What do we owe to our heroes? The ones who don’t die prematurely often end up disappointing us. For example, many people were introduced to the practice of rationality by Richard Dawkins, who seems to have lost his shit. (He thinks that Ahmed Mohamed, the Muslim kid who brought a clock to school and was accused of having a bomb, is some kind of scam artist. Don’t focus on whether that’s plausible — Dawkins’ obsession is bizarre regardless.)

Rachel Nabors, an animation expert and all-around wise lady, cautioned community-builders:

“Even the people we respect the most are flawed and can perpetuate flawed thinking, from data to ethics. When I reflected on my own life choices, what I want to be and do in the web community, I realized that I was setting myself up to be a gatekeeper, a person others go through to get to something, and that I, too, am flawed.”

We live in a world of dictators and persecution. And yet there are leaders like Nabors, who are careful not to exploit their power, even among peers in a niche professional subculture (web animators). One reality contains many sub-realities, and we must wander between them.

February 14, 2016

Misbehaving Keyboards

“the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen” — Julian Dibbell

A linguist would quibble that words are events all on their own, but I think Dibbell is making a useful distinction. Talk and text are meant to convey information; code and clicks are meant to produce outcomes based on certain rules. Because of this, using a computer grants personal agency in a very immediate way. You have the ability to provoke particular effects. Barring a malfunction, the results are predictable and usually instantaneous.

However, malfunctions refuse to be barred for long. The user’s power is withdrawn when an error occurs. Unless you deeply understand the technical problem, it appears that the machine has changed its mind for no reason. Interacting with a computer is a microcosm of navigating the world — mostly your actions proceed as planned, but occasionally something breaks for no discernible reason. In these moments you realize how little you can actually control.

Of course, the linguist is ultimately correct. It’s impossible to disentangle word and deed, especially when it comes to computers. We inhabit a strange reality where ideas are true and false at the same time — it’s a struggle to grok such contradictions.

February 12, 2016

Large Nonbiological Organisms

Back in late January, ReTech sent me this email. He gave me permission to distribute it.

My observations over my life have shown me that once humans create an organization it becomes a living system independent of its creators and members. To wit, it satisfies some basic rules of a living organic system. If you look at Apple or any other corporation, this becomes painfully apparent. Same goes for any government agency.

Image via al tuttle.

Image via al tuttle.

  1. collect resources / food to sustain life
  2. protect self
  3. propagate self
  4. spread / integrate into established environment
  5. create perception of need AKA mask / hide to help protect and spread

This came to light when I was reading about the March of Dimes’ original charter and how they evolved.

This is all my opinion and completely subject to the bullshit rule: everything is 99% bullshit and 1% truth. So take it for what it is.

ReTech is one of the most interesting people I’ve met through this project. He’s on Facebook as well.

February 11, 2016

What To Cover

I wrote a list of cyberpunk topics (assisted by my boyfriend). These are the unsettling innovations that I aim to keep talking about!

Humanity

  • transhumanism / biohacking / cyborgs
  • the quantified self (health and behavioral data)
  • artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • androids and other personified robots
Sketch of a broken cyborg by Apo Xen.

Sketch by Apo Xen.

Environment

  • virtual and augmented realities
  • immersive digital worlds (video games, forums, etc)
  • the effects of climate change and other slow-motion natural disasters
  • automation of labor and production; non-humanoid robots

Government & Power

  • corporatism
  • surveillance; post-privacy social mores
  • extreme inequality
  • the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes
  • cryptocurrency

I said “unsettling innovations”, but “invigorating” is also true. Contemplating the future-present gets my blood running! Exolymph hasn’t explored all of these topics yet, which is part of why having a list may prove useful. What else do you think should be included?

Also, perhaps you’ve noticed that other people are welcome to contribute to Exolymph. Way Spurr-Chen and Ken Rodriguez both wrote essays; Pythagorx offered a short story. If you’re excited about any of these topics or have another cyberpunk idea, please hit reply and we can discuss including it in the newsletter. Non-text creations are especially desired!

Additions from Webster Wade:

  • 3D printing
  • open-source software
  • Internet of Things
  • sharing economy
  • possibility of neuroware
  • nanobots

Something else I thought of:

  • food replacements (Soylent, Schmilk, etc)
February 10, 2016

Expose Yourself / Still Trying To Hide

Sometimes I like to string quotes together to indicate a point. It’s akin to writing a very short essay using other people’s words.

“What makes crowdfunding possible now is the emergence of new communication platforms. The Internet allows us to surface niche communities that weren’t so obvious beforehand.” — Ellen Chisa, a former Kickstarter product manager

Image via Alan O’Rourke. Get that money.

Image via Alan O’Rourke. Gettin’ that guac.

“In some ways, we’re lucky that the first two decades involving the advent of the commercial Internet were largely a positive-sum game. The creation of digital space for self-expression, at near-zero cost, does not necessarily challenge or erode someone else’s right to space or resources.” — Kim-Mai Cutler on California’s housing and development problems [not necessarily — note that]

“Now, as the stars begin to dim and humans dip and swerve in flocks of social media ephemera, responses are instantaneous and direct and physical, our nascent haptic helpers tugging gently at our sleeves to let us know that someone, somewhere, has had an opinion at us. […] I’ve started thinking of this as an attention lens: small, human amounts of individual attention are refracted through social media to converge on a single person, producing the effect of infinite attention at the focal point.” — Coda Hale on Twitter and related social dilemmas

“the world today is like living in a big field that is more illuminated than ever before” — Joseph Nye, quoted on government surveillance

There are pros and cons to being a figment of the open web. The freely visible web. The semi-universally accessible web. For my purposes, the pros outweigh the cons. But like most choices, it’s worth considering! How much do you want to participate?

February 9, 2016

Connection Addiction

“what if phones, but too much” — Mallory Ortberg on the premise of Black Mirror

That joke is hilarious, and it describes a lot of sci-fi. It also evokes the unease that keeps popping up regarding how much time we spend glued to tiny screens. Personally, I love my tiny screen. But I can understand the anxiety. What if all the notifications fracture our attention spans? What if we can never fully concentrate again? (These worries are overblown but not entirely unfounded.)

Anonymous mask + smartphone. Photo by Jake Stimpson.

Photo by Jake Stimpson.

The idea of “what if x, but too much” is that we don’t know what we want. To be more precise, we know what we want, but not what we need. Or maybe we know what we want, but not what we’ll actually enjoy. Want / need / enjoy are all different criteria, and it’s difficult to succeed based on every metric.

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