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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.

June 19, 2016

Optimism (or Lack Thereof) with Civilization Fiction

I interviewed the mysterious curator behind Civilization Fiction via Tumblr chat (that was a new one). Civilization Fiction is a collection of fascinating images of futuristic cityscapes. The blog’s sidebar admonishes, “The trick is not to mind that we’re all just still-warm worm food.” (Luckily that’s never bothered me.)

From the archive grid.

Here’s our Q&A, lightly edited and condensed for readability.

Exolymph: Is this an aesthetic you’ve always been interested in?

Civilization Fiction: I’ve been collecting photos and concept art of skylines and futuristic cities for five years now. When I discovered Tumblr it was a great source of pictures for me, and it was the right platform to share my collection as well. What I’m looking for is the mood and feeling of being slightly lost or lonely in the setting of a huge metropolis.

Exolymph: Your sidebar says, “The trick is not to mind that we’re all just still-warm worm food. Bring back optimistic sci-fi.” Do you view the images you collect as optimistic? What about the economic trend they represent?

Civilization Fiction: They are somewhat optimistic because they show progress, especially in technological and economic regards. I’m not much of a tech person, but I’m interested in new technologies, especially in terms of how people use them. That’s also why I called the blog Civilization Fiction — it’s stressing the life with new technologies.

Artwork by novaillusion, recently posted by Civilization Fiction.

Civilization Fiction (continued): The “we’re all just still-warm worm food” line is my way of accepting death as an inevitable consequence of life. It is optimistic in the sense that we’re supposed to live our lives as compassionately as we can, because it’s the only chance we have to be good and nice company for each other. It doesn’t really matter if a Star Trek-like utopia is scientifically plausible when it manages to inspire people to hope and work for a better world.

Exolymph: Do you feel optimistic about the state of the world in general?

Civilization Fiction: I’m afraid not. However, I try to be optimistic and still hope for a brighter future. After all, we only have this world and a single attempt at life, so it would be a shame to waste it and not try to make it a better place.

Exolymph: Can you elaborate on your worries?

Civilization Fiction: While I see a lot of potential in many technologies, I see them also wasted. The internet is a prime example: it can be (and is) used for worldwide communication and education, but as far as I’m aware, most of the data sent is selfies, pornography, and marketing campaigns.

And I expect that when AI technologies are achieved, they won’t first be applied to medical problems, solving world hunger or anything like that, but rather to make a profit at the stock market. That’s just my take on human nature and I really hope the future proves me wrong.

Exolymph: Me too… But I have similar worries.

If you frequent Tumblr, I recommend following Civilization Fiction, and the collection of images is worth perusing regardless.

June 16, 2016

International Labor Economics, Ugh

The “Bread and Roses” Lawrence textile strike of 1912. Photo via Library of Congress.

In recent musings about Las Vegas, I called myself bourgeois. Refresher: according to Karl Marx, the bourgeoisie are the capitalist class, prone to consumerism — also often associated with snobbery and intellectual affectations. Think New Yorker readers.

I bring this up because commenter gaikokumaniakku said, “There are a lot of folks who thought they were bourgeois, and then they woke up one morning to another rejected job prospect and realized that they were lower-class.” I agree with Scott Alexander that class does not solely hinge on money, but the point is a good one.

gaikokumaniakku also asked what I think of the term “precariat”, which is a play on “proletariat” (opposite of the bourgeoisie). The precariat are people without financial reserves or job security. Macmillan Dictionary’s BuzzWord blog published this in 2011:

“New, international labour markets, significantly expanding the available workforce, have weakened the position of workers and strengthened the position of employers. Increasingly, workers are in jobs which are part-time and/or temporary, have unpredictable hours, low wages and few benefits such as holiday or sick pay. This means that employers can follow what demand dictates and simply [fire people] if work is not available, and are also not obliged to pay anyone that isn’t actually working.”

I find it plausible that globalization is a big part of this. That’s been an ongoing trend: jobs once located in [country where labor is expensive] disappear offshore to [country where labor is cheap]. Workers don’t have the same freedom of movement that employers do, so they can’t easily respond to market changes. Larger companies especially, which rely on many people’s labor, can shift operations to wherever costs the least.

Demonstrators in New York City during the 1913 May Day parade. Signs feature Yiddish, Italian, and English. Photo via Library of Congress.

Priest and professor Giles Fraser wrote a Guardian editorial on this very topic:

“In this era of advanced globalisation, we believe in free trade, in the free movement of goods, but not in the free movement of labour. We think it outrageous that the Chinese block Google, believing it to be everyone’s right to roam free digitally. We celebrate organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières for their compassionate universalism. But for all this talk of freedom from restriction, we still pen poor people into reservations of poverty. […] At present, globalisation is a luxury of the rich, for those of us who can swan about the globe with the flick of a boarding pass. The so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is globalisation for the poor.”

The other macro factor that might be creating (and provoking) the precariat is technological unemployment. The machines are taking our jobs!!!!! Ahhhhh!!!!! My guess is that we’ll adjust to new levels of productivity, like we did after the Industrial Revolution, but the transition phase will be very painful. (I basically stole this theory from Ben Thompson.)

Beyond that, I don’t have any particular insights. If you do, hit reply and let me know?

June 14, 2016

More Slim Jims; Less Soylent

Noir cyberpunk artwork: The Fat Man by Samuel Capper

The artwork above is Samuel Capper’s The Fat Man. Note the figure’s left arm, the one pointing at the screen. I love the unabashed grotesquerie of this image — so often cyborg bodies conform to the ideals of celebrity magazines and mainstream porn.

I’m not saying that fatness is inherently grotesque, but that within the context of modern beauty norms, obesity is viewed with contempt. It is radical to combine the triple chin and robot arm in one character — this implies a future in which sophisticated body mods are available, but the pressure to be thin and “fit” is either gone or disregarded.

I also love the allusion to The Maltese Falcon, both in the portrait’s title and its style. (Sydney Greenstreet’s character is dubbed the Fat Man.) Cyberpunk is often cited as a genre with noir roots, but aside from Blade Runner the visuals have often tended more toward space-age sleekness than old-school back-alley grime.

Give me more nastiness, more cigarettes, more computers held together with duct tape. More Slim Jims and less Soylent. And more body diversity — but I want that from all media.

June 13, 2016

Suicide Mortgages for the Digitized Self

"My suicide mortgage is 80% paid," meaning 80% of the digital self-copies you pledged into slavery have earned their deaths

@ctrlcreep on Twitter.

This idea of a “suicide mortgage” that @ctrlcreep came up with is fascinating. They expanded the concept on Tumblr:

“Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. […] Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep […] Under suicide mortgages, [exploitative] corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.”

The appeal of this system to the “buyer” of the mortgage — who is a fully digitized person, which is why they’re unable to die in the first place — is that they might get to be the first copy deleted. However, intuitively, as the pool of copies working together gets smaller, they earn less, and it takes longer to buy the next euthanasia permit. Eventually the mortgage isn’t sufficiently useful anymore, and maybe each remaining copy arranges for its own suicide mortgage. The original digital self’s clones proliferate again.

Of course, there’s a hole in this idea: why use digitized selves for labor in the first place? In a future where we’ve figured out how to upload humans, we’ve certainly also figured out how to make artificially intelligent algorithms and scripts and programs, etc, etc. Maybe there’s some kind of draconian intellectual property regime that makes it more expensive to use AI than digitized human laborers? That seems fitting.

I’m sure there’s a startup in this imagined ecosystem trying to disrupt the suicide mortgage financiers. Let’s root for them, I guess.

June 9, 2016

Las Vegas & Self-Doubt

From a very long essay that probes human nature and coordination problems, here’s a passage about gambling, random initial conditions, and the resultant perverse incentives:

“Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought ‘Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.’ People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: ‘Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!'”

I’ve been to Las Vegas. It is perhaps the most surreal, dystopian place that I’ve ever seen. (Obviously there are much worse cities with equal aesthetic impact, but I haven’t personally visited them.) I guess that’s what you should expect from a metropolis developed by mafia cartels?

The Vegas sky blares with neon lights; the inside of every building is coated with cigarette grime. Elderly immigrant women stand on the sidewalk, wearing yellow shirts that advertise escort agencies, and slap their fliers against their palms. The drinks are huge, just as neon as the billboards. The casinos all have different exterior themes, but inside the slot machines are the same.

Walking up and down the Strip, every kind of advertisement is incessant, and you can spend copious amounts of money as pointlessly as you want.

Photo by Matthew Straubmuller.

Of course, I have to wonder — are my objections to Las Vegas’ tourist culture classist? Plenty of people enjoy it. They go there on purpose, spend their money on purpose, and come back next year. Yes, the city is ecologically terrible — all that decadence in a desert is obscene — but San Francisco features a greater number of miserable humans camping on the street. Let she who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.

Maybe the reason why I don’t like Vegas is that it caters to people who aren’t bourgeois intellectuals, which is the snobbiest possible way for me to describe myself, but still pretty accurate.

Maybe I’m unconsciously writing all of this as a way to signal “virtue” as perceived by members of my ideological tribe. I’m not into conspicuous consumption, so I’m “good” by the norms established in my social sphere. Never mind how odd my own conspicuous information habits look to other groups.

The larger point of the passage I quoted at the beginning is that people follow their incentives, even if their choices seem silly or tragic when analyzed from a great height. Sometimes incentives are really obvious, albeit in an absurd way — whoever builds the most ostentatious casino will profit — and sometimes incentives are expressed through social compulsions that don’t make 100% sense.

(PS: Schelling points are “focal point[s] for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do” — more on Wikipedia.)

June 7, 2016

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Sponsor: Bret Bernhoft

I’m thrilled to announce Exolymph’s first sponsor! Bret Bernhoft is creating an experimental futuristic character called Ruby Leander:

“In 2034 (age 18), Ruby decided to have transhuman implants ‘installed’ into her physiology. Devices/technologies that will follow her throughout the rest of her life. […] She was hired into a new policing program/effort dedicated to sniffing out impurities, forgeries and/or attempts at sabotaging/misusing modern technologies.”

Read the first installment of Ruby’s story and learn more about Bret on his website.

Exporting Japanese Currency & Culture

Artwork by ThvnderKat.

Thomas Vallance of Virtual Mech (website currently under maintenance) emailed me the following contribution. Lightly edited for this venue.

While the information is flowing I would contend that the gatekeeper is merely a man. Matt Pearce hasn’t spent a considerable enough time sitting by Satan’s eye to say such things. [Vallance is referencing Pearce’s comment about the Panama Papers — “Nobody loves a gatekeeper” — which I quoted in a previous dispatch.]

The euro continues to subdue smaller state currencies — this is true for most except Japan, who has a more powerful running economy than its larger counterpart China. In fact, they contend with economic giants like the United States, Britain, and Europe. This leads one to question; how is it that a nation so small outweighs those with populaces and landmass well beyond their own? Asia in general should be posting a considerable yield, yet we turn to little Tokyo for our Eastern trade opportunities. And that’s the kicker, the yen clocks in so high that unless you speak their language you won’t get a foot in the door.

Not surprisingly, the yen is growing more powerful. Where is China’s great and powerful yuan; is it just another case of outsourcing? An example: when I spoke to my local paper about advertising the comic I am currently writing, they didn’t respond. When I dropped into their office to ask why I hadn’t received a reply, I was referred to an advertising group in Malaysia (they don’t even have the same first language). This off-handing of all queries to Asia, specifically in Japan, seems a common trend, if not an absurd one. You want to ask questions? Just translate them into an Asian language.

Yoshide Suga reported on emergency call numbers as they currently experience 7.3 earthquakes in Kumamoto. Sendai Nuclear Power Plant has reported “no irregularities” — meanwhile US markets will eventually crash under the pressure from China.

I am presently reading the Japanese version of The Godfather, Yakuza — it details their overarching presence in Japan, one that has seemingly spread well beyond their border. I find it interesting that the Yakuza is quite well known while the Triad hardly appears on our radar, apart from niche features.

Back to Sonya again. The Triad is actually pretty well-known in the Bay Area due to its influence on San Francisco’s Chinatown.

I can’t speak for Vallance directly, but I think he’s reflecting on some of the oddities of globalization. The interactions between various national economies are exceedingly complex, but fundamentally human-defined, whereas the natural disasters capable of disrupting everyday life come from deeper powers.

The unleashed energy of nature, pressure built up over centuries — it’s easy to liken it to rage, but an earthquake is more like a cat stretching. Just instinct, just built-up tension following the path of least resistance.

June 5, 2016

No Transhumanism Without Technology

“Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.” — Wikipedia

“To whatever extent transhumanism is a concept with meaning, we’ve all been doing it since we started writing things down.” — Aboniks

The difference between a notebook and Wikipedia, or Wikipedia and Google Glass, or Google Glass and a brain-integrated all-of-the-above combination, is mainly the level of convenience. The other big difference is that instead of having to memorize information or track it down yourself, anonymous strangers will contribute directly to your knowledge repository.

Are those strangers trustworthy? Well, most of the time… maybe it’s more accurate to say “an undetermined percentage of the time”. PR nonsense worms its way onto Wikipedia. Is the Google algorithm impartial? Of course not — it’s biased toward making money for the company. But absorbing tainted information via tainted processes is nothing new. As far as I know, that’s the only way.

Cyborg self-portrait by Dan Sakamoto.

The Aboniks quote from the beginning dates transhumanism to the invention of writing, but I think you could go farther back, to when we started using tools of any kind. What is a stone axe but an extension of the bearer’s arm? The people who wielded obsidian hatchets were very early cyborg prototypes.

As long as humans have been using technology, we’ve been augmenting our neurological and physical capabilities. Like so many aspects of human thriving, technology requires that we rely on each other. The people who make the hardware, whether it’s a paper book, a mainframe, or a biochemical plant. The people who provide the information and source the materials, the designers who create the interfaces by which we access and manipulate our external selves.

I find it terrifying to rely on other people, because I can’t control them, and yet that’s the human condition. That’s how we reach the future, by mutual building. (With an unhealthy dose of the profit motive, I suspect.)

June 2, 2016

Pornbots Lacking Self & Gender

Warnings: 1) Could be NSFW if you work somewhere stodgy. 2) Discusses cissexism and sexual assault.

Image via Mona Eberhardt.

Wikipedia says of the gynoid, “A fembot is a humanoid robot that is gendered feminine. It is also known as a gynoid, though this term is more recent.” (Hold on, I’m going something with this.) The article elaborates:

“A gynoid is anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form. Though the term android refers to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, the Greek prefix ‘andr-‘ refers to man in the masculine gendered sense. Because of this prefix, many read Android as referring to male-styled robots.” [Emphasis in original.]

I disagree with the Wikipedia editors’ conflation of “female” and “has tits and a vagina” but I must leave the depth of that argument for another day. Suffice it to say that a gynoid is an android — a robot designed to mimic Homo sapiens — that has tits and a vagina. Its overall appearance matches the shapes we code as “womanly” (or, disturbingly, “girlish”).

But a gynoid with no self-awareness, no sentience, cannot have a gender. Because gender is an inner experience than may be communicated to the world, not something that outside observers can impose on a body, however much they might try.

Screenshot of a gynoid by Sophrosyne Stenvaag.

Screenshot (?) by Sophrosyne Stenvaag.

Is it wrong to fetishize gynoids and treat them as fucktoys? If the gynoid has consciousness then yes, it’s just as immoral as any other sexual abuse. But if the robot is simply a well-engineered physical manifestation of porn? Can you rape a souped-up Fleshlight?

I think not. There’s no self in that container to traumatize. So it wouldn’t be wrong because of any harm done to the device — a gynoid with no mind or soul is a gadget like your phone or your Roomba — but could be wrong because of the effect on humans who also have bodies coded as feminine.

If someone gets into the habit of treating a gynoid as a sexual object, will they pattern-match and treat people they perceive as women with the same violence and disrespect? It is by no means conclusive that regular pornography has the common-sense effect of making viewers more sexually violent. There’s no consensus on whether video games encourage IRL aggression either.

I’m sure we’ll find out eventually. For better or for worse.

(I told my boyfriend that I was going to write a thinkpiece about gynoids instead of a political thinkpiece and he said, “The lady robots?!”)

May 31, 2016

Meandering Digital Meta-Anxiety

The infamous Skateboard Academic on Twitter.

Sometimes I make grand declarations: “Fundamentally, I am a cynical optimist.” Imagine that accompanied by a sweeping gesture. But it’s not true, of course. Fundamentally, I ride the tides of the media I’m absorbing on a given day, and whether I’ve remembered to take my meds or not.

(A cynical optimist believes that the world is gradually improving over time, but that human beings are selfish above all else. I do believe both of those things. However, like most ideological posturing, at core it’s probably just my way of signaling a certain set of sympathies.)

“You are what you eat.” I am what I consume, information and images included. And so are you, meaning that I’m feeding you right now, if we stretch the metaphor a bit. The phrase “media diet” is kinda played out by now, but you know what I mean.

Does this seem disjointed?

Photo by Dave Bonta.

Well, it is disjointed. That’s how I read nowadays so it’s also how I write. I came back to this browser tab after detouring through Facebook and Slack. It’s okay, I suppose. The ideas are still here. Or at least I don’t know about the ideas that have been sacrificed.

“To the days beyond this one which are still perfect” — that which is unborn is unspoiled. It’s easy to expect so much of the days that haven’t come yet. But I worry, too. I’m sure Y Combinator and everyone who hates Y Combinator will find a way to make their basic income experiment contentious, for example.

Here in the US, those of us in the Blue Tribe are increasingly frightened by Trump as the election trundles onward like some perverse version of Manifest Destiny where meme magic conquers every plot of land and the fucking alt right gets to decide who can sharecrop.

So the days beyond this one are not only perfect — the possibility also exists that they’re horrific. And we’d obsessed with both dialectical futures.

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