I wonder if his reasoning is that it is unfair to poor (mobile users, or those who have limited data plans) if some threads should suddenly auto load 100’s of videos or applets? (Along with the insidiously addictive salivating dog nature of the pinterest neverending scroll)
Why don’t they ban nonsense?
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Politicians attempting to legislate technology never ends well…
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They choose weird things to focus laws on, like no cloning humans for example, I think at even the slightest hint that this could eventually be accomplished politicians forbade it, but no laws about creating new types of weapons. Creating a law now that ensures A.I. is limited in the years ahead, or perhaps preemptively forbidding inevitable mass produced microdrone killing machines, you’d think that might be something that might be somewhat in place before twitter scrolling laws…
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"Alright, what should we do today… Hmm… Let’s see… Fix healthcare, Improve veteran benefits, adjust regulations to make it easier to find cures for diseases, decre- ooh what’s this shiny thing here on Pinterest?
- Hours. Later.
We need to ban this!"
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Boring…
Boring…
Too controversial…
No one will care…
Oooh, this one’s trending. And we can pass it fast and see results in time for the next election. Bingo!
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This is a reading that Wiliam Gibson made at the 2008 literature festival in Rome.
Is a translation made thanks to Google’s machine learnig algorithms, so we thank the technology that allows us this today.
I hope it has been translated at its best and good reading, it will not be wasted time, I promise you.
The original text in Italian here.
The flow of silence, the insistence of oblivion.
by William Gibson.
click here for the entire reading, it's a fairly long text.
Thank you for welcoming me to this Rome of the 21st century, a place that I have not had the pleasure of visiting before, although I visited it once, in the guise of a younger man, in one of its many previous versions. Rome: an ancient and at the same time infinitely contemporary human settlement. And we know how we use the history of Rome, or any other place: we need to distinguish ourselves from every other species on this planet. Time moves in one direction, memory in another, and we are committed to building artefacts to contrast us with the unstoppable flow of oblivion. In reality, we oppose the flow of silence. We erect stones: the stones speak, even after all these centuries. Against the pressure of silence, oblivion, against the absence of memory, we deploy various types of information principles. The first elements of information, perhaps, were bits of ocher-colored clay, the bison reproduced in the minimum necessary resolution. The stylization of cave graffiti has not lost its effectiveness in any way, even after all these millennia, what screen of today’s world can we say the same thing within a decade? And those bison will be recognizable, unaltered, on any platform, any information media we should have. Echoing against the silence, emerging from the primeval darkness thanks to an impulse that each of us felt, as a child, drawing. Echoing in this thing that we have always produced, this immense and incredible mechanism that preserves information in its interstices, a global, communitarian memory, one of our prostheses to which we have begun to work even before working on wood, on stone, on steel or genetic materials. I have not the slightest doubt that during my life this mechanism has grown more creeping, more powerful, almost all-encompassing. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetfulness and the possibility of silence were hindered with less precision. I know this because death was then a less constant presence. Because there was no REPLAY button. Because the soldiers who died in Flanders died in black and white and did not run as living beings ran. Because the attic of the world was still in disorder. Because in the Virginia valleys of my childhood there were still old people who remembered a time when recorded music didn’t exist. It is rare that we are struck by how incredible it is to hear a dead man sing when we listen to Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel. But in the context of the longest life of the species, this is something that was made possible only a few moments ago. Something that our ancestors might have even considered monstrous … which surely the Victorians did when they first tried the gramophone. Thinking about it now, the gramophone or even the camera, were fractures, convulsive fractures with respect to a previous way of considering “now” and “after”. Shatter the silence, shatter oblivion, in new ways. And any modality preceding those, is precluded to us. Blocked. Cut off at the very moment of the fracture. Today our “hour” has become at the same time inexorably short and virtually eternal, and all as a consequence of the REPLAY button.
While the ability to remember becomes more and more shared, history is considered even more clearly as a theoretical concept, a construction subject to revision. If as a species we have dealt with curbing the flow of time with the creation and updating of external mnemonic mechanisms, what will happen when all these mechanisms, as far as I think I can imagine inherent in their nature, will end up merging? The omega of all human existence could be a single moment actually lasting endlessly, an infinite Hour. We could have very few choices on the subject, given that the accessory memory modes that we have created during our evolutionary path have become autonomous, evolving in our own direction. We have never designed our technological path, and where we are heading thanks to technology, I believe, coincides with the direction we are taking culturally. The inventors of agriculture-enhancing technologies, which lead to food storage technologies, had not imagined the cities that those same technologies would have ended up generating. These are things we don’t plan. We accept things as they come. But we also follow the flow of memories. We do not close ourselves in an inner silence. The deeper changes that come from technological innovation are often completely involuntary. We are not promulgating laws on how to reach that digital age, at that digital point. We do not take that direction after necessary reflection. We simply move in that direction. Social change is technologically determined. We often do not issue laws on new technologies in progress. They just emerge. Through the markets. And the markets find out for themselves how to use things. Now we literally map everything from the human genome to the last surviving examples of American work clothes of the fifties not yet worn, and our search engines investigate with increasing precision. And that’s how our story is changing. Emerging technologies reveal an evolving past. What belongs to us today, the best we have been able to put together, is frighteningly, or mercifully, fragmented. With an exponential increase in computer power, and an equally exponential drop in their cost, our today will change. The unknown land will dispose of its mysteries like never before, and in that digital age new ancestors will appear to us. I imagine that, in that Hour, art will be seen more and more as an act not of creation but of curating it. And it is likely that it is the only possible art, in that Hour. In the realm of timeless media, the gesture may prove impossible, or, rather, the only possible gestures may prove to be those of accumulation, of ostentation, of recontextualization. My colleague Bruce Sterling said that the century that has moved away has been a century of “isms”. They were based, he thinks, on the fundamental and fatal misunderstanding that philosophy has the upper hand over design. It is not so. He says that in a world completely able to control its material bases, ideology is nothing more than a thin veil. Technology in the broad sense: the ability to transform resources, the speed with which new possibilities can be opened and realized, the varied and diversified forms of command and control … technology, not ideology, will be the legacy that leave us the previous century.
Guided by an increasingly rapid increase in the power of computers and connections, and by the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and localization technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute transparency of information, in which “Orwellian” scrutiny is not more hierarchical activity, from top to bottom, but an activity made democratic again. As individuals we lose more and more levels of privacy, just as, ultimately, it happens to companies and states. This is probably intrinsic to the very nature of information technology. Some objectives of the initiatives for a conscious government information will be finally realized simply by the progressive evolution of the global information system … but not necessarily or exclusively to the prerogative of some government. This fruit of the emerging system seems an inevitable result of the migration of whatever we do with information towards what we once called cyberspace (and which I now call “here”). If George Orwell had known of Bletchley Park, and of the pioneering work that Alan Turing and other wartime coders did, and had had some inkling of where they could lead, perhaps he would have imagined his Ministry of Truth equipped with punch cards and pneumatic ducts, to better sift the last vestiges of freedom of a shrinking population. And we could also try to imagine the East German Stasi with a computer so that their system would not end up being overwhelmed by the invincible weight of paper cards. But somehow it does not work, it is unequivocal that the East German system belongs to the communication paradigm preceding that which Orwell had understood so precisely. No extrapolation from the information system era can produce anything like our present situation, nor can it produce imaginary scenarios of even the slightest likelihood. If Orwell had equipped the Big Brother with the tools to trace patterns of behavior thanks to artificial intelligence, the result would not have equally described our situation or the one to which we are heading. That our even bigger brothers, for the sake of national security, scour the seas of data, even wider and more transparent, can bother us, but this is something that companies and people have already had to do, and with they will always have more to do. The collection and management of information, at any level, will be exponentially authorized by the nature of the system, so the system will be global, transnational and, in an entirely new, non-hierarchical version. Transparency is the absence of silence and oblivion. It becomes difficult for anyone, just for anyone, like never before, to keep a secret. In the era of the appearance of the blog and the news coming to the net, escaping all control, the discovery of technologies and tools for automatic disclosures and extrapolations in evidence of links contained in a large amount of reservoirs of classified and non-classified data, the truths can to be already revealed or to be destined to come to light sooner or later. It is something that I would like to bring to the attention of every statesman, political leader and company manager: the future will eventually lead you to the open. You will not be able to keep your secrets. The future, by handling unimaginable transparency tools, will have won over you. In the end, what you have done will be under everyone’s eyes. However I say “truth” in the plural, and not in the singular, since the other aspect of the new ubiquity of information seems as crazy as it is transparent. Despite the number and powers of the tools used to derive models from information, every meaning changes form based on the context, with the interpretation that comes to support the projects of those who find themselves dealing with them. A world of information transparency will also necessarily be a world of delirious multiplicity of points of view, crossed by a seeding of false information, misinformation, conspiracy theories and a high rate of madness. We may also be able to see more clearly what is happening, but this does not mean that we will also be promptly in agreement. Orwell did the work he had set out to do, he did it effectively, excellently, he devoted himself to the meticulous creation of our most famous dystopian vision. I heard that since he had gone so far with all that rigor and courage, there was no longer any need for us to do it. I like to think that the statement contains some truth. But the territory of history has its own way of modifying the most elementary of conjectures even starting from scenarios constructed with great precision. Dystopias deal with reality as much as utopias do. None of us has ever lived … except, in the case of dystopias, because of the inevitable and natural vicissitudes of life, in some extremely unfortunate place. Which doesn’t mean that somehow Orwell was wrong, but rather that he was right. 1984 remains one of the fastest and most condensed journeys to the heart of the different real aspects of … 1948, the year in which it was written. If you want to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirror of our darkest fears, we will see many things revealed. But don’t exchange those mirrors for maps of the future, or even of the present. My unique and infinite digital moment, in which nothing is forgotten, in which no information is silenced, may not be our future. It requires health and energy and a planet that is still able to support us. And the dreams of science fiction writers always travel through the great design of time along strange trajectories. But my greatest dreams have always been those of transparency, the preservation of memory and the end of silence.
Thank you.
(Text read by the author at the 2008 Rome Literature Festival)