Landgolier, I would suggest you, y'know, actually read the book (or any of the excerpts from it available hither and yon on the Web, or even any of the interviews with me) before comparing it to dot.com hype or Friedmanian ya-ya.

I'm perfectly willing to take a hit aimed at the tone or substance of something I've actually written, but you're way off in left field if you think Everyware is a piece of techno-utopian drivel.

There are important consequences to the fact that we now have methods to generate an enormous volume of data about each individual's public behavior, without that individual even necessarily becoming aware that such data has been collected, and storing it indefinitely in a global, distributed container. That's what the book is about, not any misguided cheerleading for the notion that we live in unique times.

Case in point, to take something relevant to being a messenger: don't you think it changes something serious in the power dynamic between a messenger and the company they work for when a dispatcher can pinpoint precisely where the messenger is at all times, via some combination of GPS and cell-tower or network access point triangulation? What does that make of the messenger's ability to tweak one of the last degrees of freedom remaining to them?

What a pretenious BS statement. "Functionally illiterate"? Writing is a form of communication whose purpose is to convey ideas. Therefore a "good writer" in my opinion, is one who can effectively and concisely convey that message. I'm not knocking this guy's blog. I found the thesis interesting and the writing sytle entertaining. It's just that I spent 3 years reading grad student papers written in that style, which more often than not, I found it o be a poor substitute for the writer's inability to effectively communicate an idea. Many students would write in this overly verbose style because they labored under the false impression that passive sentence structures, frequent use of nomilizations, unecessary modifiers, and overuse of a thesaurus made them "sound smart."

Now, before I get flamed, I am not knocking the article. There is a time and place for that type of writing, which, when done properly, can be very poetic and can be appreciated in its own right, apart from the message it is trying to convey. I think that article was one of those instances.

I do however, take issue with the sentiment that people who do not appreciate that writing style are "functionally illiterate." Has the thought ever crossed your mind that in most instances, people are reading for content, and do not want to slog through a 5 page essay whose ideas could be effectively communicated in one?

I just cannot abide by pretentious statements like the one quoted above. If everything you write sounds like Hawthorne or a sociological discertation, chances are that you do not effectively communicate.

What's a nomilization?

I wasn't talking about your book, which I would happily read if I had all the time in the world. However, I don't, so it's going to have to go to the bottom of the pile marked "stuff which may or may not be good, and which deals with subjects not directly related to my fields of interest." There's plenty of other pop market STS stuff and other foucauldian detritus in that pile, and I should get around to finishing it off about 18 months from never. I was commenting specifically on your statement that I quoted. However, to start with your book's title, how can you talk about the dawning of an age and not be talking about the uniqueness of the present?

I did buzz though the Wired thing, though as soon as they started in about wearable computing being at all a significant phenomenon I started laughing so hard coffee shot out of my nose. That was probably a good cue to stop drinking coffee for a minute, though, because I probably would have blown it through my sinus cavity into my brain when I got to the part about the latest way to do cute but useless things with cell phones in Ginza.

Look, I think panopticism is a mildly interesting subject, but I stopped getting fired up about it when a company I worked for was involved in a consumer data buy from one of the big firms that collects all this scary 1984ish information about everything everyone does ever. We got our hands on the best data out there, and it was about 50% hot garbage. I know you used to work for a spyware company, so you're probably as aware as I am that the signal to noise ratio for this stuff is incredibly low.

Dutret, do you remember anything else about that essay? Sounds like Joe Masco

A nominalization is when you turn a verb or adjective into a noun, usually as a direct object. This generally necessitates that you use some form of the verb "to be," which creates a passive sentence structure where an inanimate object, concept or thing is the subject of the sentence and is simply "being" rather than doing something. Here are some examples.

There was considerable erosion of the land from the floods.
vs
The floods considerably eroded the land.

The instability of the motor housing did not preclude the completion
of the field trials.
vs
Even though the motor housing was unstable, the research staff
completed the field trials.

Our discussion concerned a tax cut.
vs
We discussed a tax cut.

Their cessation of hostilities was because of their personnel losses.
vs
They ceased hostilities because they lost personnel.

Nominalization: turning a verb or an adjective into a noun

discover -> discovery careless -> carelessness
move -> movement difficult -> difficulty
react -> reaction different -> difference
fail -> failure applicable -> applicability
refuse -> refusal intense -> intensity



There are only a few instances where it is really necessary to use a nominalization. Nine times out of ten, an author can reform the sentence so it has actors/actions rather than "things" in a state of "being"

[vs--Nine times out of ten a sentence can be reformed by an author into one involving actions]




----My mother was an english teacher, and i was schooled by penguins with rulers that made me diagram sentences-----




[edit]. There are some times when you intentionally want to use a nominalization, such as to distract attention from an actor.

The victim was brutally slain
vs
The defendant killed the victim


Nominalization are often incorrectly used by the media coupled with personifications... e.g.

Another cylist killed by carelessness of SUV
vs
A man who carelessly drove his SUV struck and killed the cyclist


Here is a rough paraphrasing of a paper i remember grading:

The complexity of the issue of foreign policy is obfuscated due to misconceived notions of politicians regarding the appropriateness of being consistent.

Not really it was some zeitgeisty overly academic cultural criticism from the 60's(obviously) about how the human condition had been fundamentally changed by the advent of nuclear weapons and birth control. All sorts of stuff about how peoples now lived with the constant awareness that they could **** whenever they wanted and it all could end at any minute. Society specifically the dynamics of interpersonal interactions would never be the same. I think it was in some journal and I think I found it while researching for a scathing critique on the pervasive acceptance of freudian dogma in the humanities. Not something I really care about beyond bull****ting on while drunk, bored at work, or formerly an easy A.

skanking biker, thanks.

Landgolier, a big part of my argument in the book is that you know that data is garbage, and I know that data is garbage, but that won't stop people from trying to make (crude) inferences from that and taking action on the inferences they make.

You've got people like good ol' Ray Kurzweil out there telling people "the singularity is near," any number of organizations willing to build and sell systems based on the assumption of seamless and perfect data capture and useful machine inference, and suckers by the boatload lined up to buy them because they promise to make life "safer" and "more convenient." (Not infrequently, the suckers in question are municipalities, etc., with Homeland Security money burning the proverbial hole in their pockets.)

What's ten times as scary to me as genuine panoptical surveillance is panopticism the way we're actually going to get it, which is unusable, overpriced, taxpayer-underwritten systems that are manifestly ate up like a soup sandwich but treated as if they were infallible.

I like the English language, too. That's why I would prefer that it not be made to do such vapid tricks.

's not possible to really address functionality if there's no understanding and/or consensus as to what the function is...in this case, I'll say that the function is to be able to understand the emotional excitement of the author...so, I called your literacy dysfunctional...how was he sucking the life from his literary interpretation of his OWN experience?

as to your 'education'...if you went through all that school and continue to think that having gone through all that school makes you automatically more 'functionally literate', then I'm sorry that you spent so much time being unaware of your surroundings

That doesn't sound like "now is special" so much as "now and the foreseeable future will be much different," which isn't the same thing. I think it can be reasonably argued that society and the "dynamics of interpersonal interactions" have changed permanently because of those two developments, but that people our age aren't as acutely aware of the change because we don't remember a time when human civilization couldn't be destroyed in a matter of hours.

Admittedly this is a bit more plausible in the case of nuclear weapons, and admittedly I haven't read the piece and I have only your description of it to go by, so I could be wrong about all of that.

Incidentally, this:

...is the first time one of your posts has made me laugh, and not at you.

I've noticed the 'nominalization' is very common in two places.
1) Academic sociology papers.
2) New-age books.

No, really. The skateboarder having an experience with increasing 'wall-ness' of the wall is just like your ever expanding consciousness having an elevated 'being-ness' with 'one-ness' and 'all-ness'.

Just sayin'.

That's something different known as adjectification, a process by which nouns are turned into adjectives. It was invented by hitler as a means of impressing eighteen year old freshman girls.

They are pretty much the same. Saying that we are right now at the beginning of a new age and everything is changing is saying that now is special. Humans have been stagnant since the industrial revolution or agricultural revolution but now we are moving into a brave new pomo world of free sex or constant surveillance or everyone being an investor or... Rejoice and help craft the new age. The now is very unique under such a claims, which is precisely why they are so seductive. It's exhilarating and comforting to think that everything is changing and what we decide about these changes will affect generations to come. However the fanfare is normally for naught is replaced by some new revolution in a couple years time.

I'm not entirely sure I agree.

On the one hand, I totally endorse your skepticism about claims that a particular moment in time is somehow the one nodal point that changes everything. I think you're spot on about why that myth is so appealing to people. And I also happen to believe that in any objective consideration, a whole lot more changed technosocially between, say, 1850 and 1900 than has changed since then.

Having said that, though, historically, some moments really were pivotal, at least for some domains. 1914 and 1989 come to mind. Those genuinely were civilizational inflection points - Eric Hobsbawm calls this interval "the short twentieth century." (We're still a little close to be able to tell, but I'd argue that the era that began in 1989 came screaming to a halt in September 2001.)

There's even an argument that we find ourselves in a unique moment of human history, though that one feels a little self-congratulatory to me, and even though I don't have the math to find the hole in the argument, I tend to believe it's there.

So maybe it's one out of every hundred or even thousand times that the proclaimers of a New Epoch are right. But when they are, man would I hate to have not paid attention.

So, what will you do about it?

The thing is, you're not going to stop progress towards those hideous futures, any more than we could stop the atom bomb, genetic engineering, cloning, or the car usurping bikes. People will push and push and push for reasons banal and sublime, and there are enough of us, and enough cats out of the bag, that it's inevitable.

Besides, the most instructive lessons are often the ones that involve the most suffering. Surely you don't think someone's going to, say, not push towards nano-surveillance drones because some futurist said it's bad, right?

Edit: if you ask me, we're heading for another 'Dark Age', and it's worst in the U.S. We have religious nutsos actively attacking science on every front, and people are losing their will to think for themselves. Europe, from what I understand, has similar problems with fundamentalism, and fascist revivals in response to Muslim cultural encroachment. It's definitely looking ugly for the near future. Pendulum swings....

Well, obviously, I tend to agree. (Have you read Chris Hedges' American Fascists, btw?) But I've got just squeakingly enough faith in people that I thought if they were presented with accurate information on ubiquitous information technologies, in a reasonably accessible way, then hopefully they'd make wise decisions about what to embrace, and how. And some days I still manage to believe that.

the argument adam linked to is silly

and would be equally true at all times


not to mention the common assumption
that because of the causes of our existence
we could only ever be born at one time anyway,
not at time chosen randomly across the existence of the species


second i hear what peeps r saying
about the likely hollowness of complex (in language, concept, and both) explanations
of personal or shared experience

allowing for hollowness though is reasonable considering my limited access to verifiable knowledge

this is to say my bs detector is broken to the point that i wouldnt know what one might be

also now is special that is what makes it now

i'd be perfectly able to understand the emotional excitement of the author had he conveyed any emotional excitement. i don't feel that he did so, nor do i feel that that was his aim in the article. in addition, the point of the article wasn't that this is his OWN experience, but that it is a shared experience in a shared role in a shared environment. the focus of the article is "the messenger" in a communal sense, not an individual sense.

regardless, i'm not going to be baited into a personal pissing match with you.

we used to call that sword fighting when i did it with my brother as a kid

i agree with this fully. advances will always be made that can be used in a variety of ways - some positive and some negative. generally whether the uses are ultimately positive or negative won't be clear to most people without examples to support the reasoning. the reasoning will of course exist prior to the proof, but people won't heed it without the suffering that schnee mentions.

i did that on my birthday after a lot of whiskey

winning is a matter of being more ruthless than your opponent

if im ever in brklyn lets have a match

spend some time finding a reliable second

ill post an ad on craigslist to find one in nyc

since flying mine out would be too expensive

No, it isn't. It's saying that now is different from then. That only makes it special if you ignore tomorrow, which is not something that futurists or other announcers of new ages are often accused of doing.

I hardly think there's anything postmodern about suggesting that human behavior will change when the consequences of satisfying one of humankind's more primal urges are changed or removed.

Whether or not you approve of the philosophy or ideology or vocabulary of the people pointing it out, it happens to be true that the last several hundred years (and especially the last hundred) have seen many profound changes to the way human beings live and interact and perceive things. And these changes have not been of the cyclical, pendulum-swingy variety, as in a land where serfs may toil in the fields for Christian overlords in one century and toil in the fields for Muslim overlords in another but the toil never changes.

Claims that actually make a case for the uniqueness of now might very well be seductive for that reason. Indeed, they have been seductive for that reason: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" But the claims you describe make no such case, for reasons I've already gone into.

It may be exhilarating, but the entire history of the human experience and even a basic understanding of human psychology argue pretty strongly against it being comforting.

The fact that fanfare inevitably dies down is only instructive about fanfare.