Will the Objects Win?

version

version

Well-known member
Been knocking around the idea of technological determinism recently. The sense that things and processes have a will of their own can be a potent one, but do they really? Do you feel the pull of objects? Is there an opposition between you and your appliances? I remember Luke saying he views these things breaking and malfunctioning as an ill omen.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
the objects win by being pieces of landfill crap too

eg I bought a sun hat last spring in case we had a summer - we didn’t - and this olive green wide-brimmed polywhateverthene arrived and on opening stunk of such a strange plastic wrapping smell I couldn’t even be fucked washing it, just binned it instantly

no matter what said ‘object’ will be bought again sold by the sun hat kings, shipped, couriered, dropped off, worn, thrown away, a possible attempt at recycling, ten thousand years later the brim is sticking out of an estuary somewhere linking the North Sea

even if you avoid said objects entirely, their presence and existence is all around you
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
He died young so its the one text of his to stand out in bibliographic sources

It has superb range and gets at the agency of objects as succinctly as anyone has just apply said framework of ‘design’ to anything contemporary

Avoids falling into a range of anthropology traps the discipline set itself through ropey colonial ‘ethnographies’, you could even apply it to toys and play eg action figures
 
version

version

Well-known member
When people talk about things like automation, do you feel it's just happening or do you feel there are people consciously making sure that it does? Is the fact it's so spread out with so many involved in making it happen obscuring the fact it's a decision being repeatedly made at various levels? If someone were to refuse and go out of business due to the competition adopting it, are they a victim of the process or the other people operating in their market? Do any of them have a choice if they want to remain active and if they don't, who's making the decisions?
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
version said:
When people talk about things like automation, do you feel it's just happening or do you feel there are people consciously making sure that it does? Is the fact it's so spread out with so many involved in making it happen obscuring the fact it's a decision being repeatedly made at various levels? If someone were to refuse and go out of business due to the competition adopting it, are they a victim of the process or the other people operating in their market? Do any of them have a choice if they want to remain active?
Click to expand...
Its interesting from my perspective because SF is one of, if not the, leading locales for AI and software at large, and based on my experience, trends like this are mostly led by combos visionary technologists and venture capitalists, provided they can work together. There are definitely people envisioning, and to an extent effectively living in and creating, the future.

Every other person I talk to here is working on, or has worked on, some conceivably revolutionary tech idea.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
Aye but you drove a self driving car as if automatic gearboxes aren’t cheating enough ;) - see Jeremy Clarkson’s mate crashing a few times as an example of even less techy objects and human error

Car heads in general and I’ve owned enough vehicles now to have a stain on my carbon footprint but the petrol head car magazine reader is so tragic - yeah this blah blah cost 180k with a part-ex of my old blah, when you frequently need a tank and a dodgem just to visit so many stops on work and living rounds organising logistics

I fetishised certain vehicle models as a nipper, Bugatti, Lotus, Scimitar @woops knows, due to their rare presence and design, Audi Quattros from rallying days of yore with Finnish drivers get a pass too

Point is these objects wouldnt be designed today because of the software used to shape form. It’s all bollocks. Not much can match a Morgan‘s panel lines and electric doesnt necessitate ugly but nothing is built to last now so renew, replace, repeat sale, on and on, landfill, landfill
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
Less landfill, watches are a strange world too - my vanity timepiece is solid throughout 10 atmospheric pressure zones, has a 1tb memory, takes my pulse and can shock me back to life in the event of any cardiac incident, delivers gross shit pizza via gimp-pay app, if I’m lost in somewhere like the Namib desert I can order rank pizza there too and hitch back ya woot

Fuck off. Nothing worse than a watch gimp drone on trying to pimp their gear, find it the most depressing register of whatever watches bring to a person’s life beyond status and telling the fuckin time (which you can always ask another human for out and about)
 
version

version

Well-known member
Clinamenic said:
Its interesting from my perspective because SF is one of, if not the, leading locales for AI and software at large, and based on my experience, trends like this are mostly led by combos visionary technologists and venture capitalists, provided they can work together. There are definitely people envisioning, and to an extent effectively living in and creating, the future.

Every other person I talk to here is working on, or has worked on, some conceivably revolutionary tech idea.
Click to expand...

The way some talk about 'The Market' comes off like they think of it the way others do the tides or bird migration. A natural phenomenon to be tracked and studied. Sometimes they're even the people consciously shaping it, like Andreessen in his "techno-optimist" manifesto claiming the things he lays out are inevitable and will go on indefinitely but that people like him also have to intervene to ensure that fact.
 
0

0bleak

Well-known member
WashYourHands said:
the objects win by being pieces of landfill crap too
Click to expand...

I guess we've always had that problem.

prehistory/early civilization/mythology

Of course it could be something as simple as written language forming a concomitant part of a societal organisation revolving around centralised authority - which is inextricable from some form of hierarchy, and the most primitive social dichotomy is between the sexes. And the most primitive...
www.dissensus.com

0bleak said:
There are things on the Peruvian coast that are more definite examples of cradles of civilization that date back to 3 thousands BCE - big stone built pyramids and temples.
Thousands of pyramids - some have been buried over time by the desert and/or deteriorated when not built of stone.
There's at least one pyramid possibly going back as far as 6000 BCE.
Some of the first ones may have been for trash management.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top