The election's over: let's think of something mind-un-numbing
The morning's long when you have no meetings to attend, papers to grade, business email to answer. Here's 90 minutes of mine ...
9:00 AM:
Illustrative distraction. I recalled that I hadn’t updated d2.bookmark.html, my
12-year-old home screen of personal bookmarks on any browser I run from my own
PC, to point to my November ’06 diary page. I did so, worried that Word’s html (and
I shudder to think what the admission that I diarize in Word html will do to my
reputation as a hip old geek) would screw up all subsequent links, confirmed
that the links seem OK, clicked back to my October diary page to be sure, saw the Bruce
Sterling “spime” link and didn’t quite recall the definition, started rereading
the Wikipedia entry, googled “spime
sterling” clicked the first result, a pointer to the spime entry on del.icio.us, and found Sterling’s 2004 SIGGRAPH talk “When
Blobjects Rule the Earth”, which I’m about to read on BoingBoing. This all took about 4-5 minutes
to do, and slightly longer to annotate, and then I found myself in
In my grand vision, there's a
history of the relationship of objects and human beings. It goes like this. Up
to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had. and made, four
different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in
order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products, and
Gizmos.
The lines between Artifacts,
Machines, Products and Gizmos aren't mechanical. They're historical. The
differences between them are found in the material cultures they make possible.
The kind of society they produce, and the kind of human being that is necessary
to make them and use them.
- Artifacts are made and used by
hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
- Machines are made and used by
customers. in an industrial society.
- Products are made and used by
consumers, in a military-industrial complex.
- Gizmos are made and used by
end-users, in whatever today is -- a "New World Disorder," a
"Terrorism-Entertainment Complex," our own brief interregnum.
. . .
A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre,
baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I'm carrying
here, this is a classic Gizmo: It's a cellphone, a web browser, an SMS
platform, an MMS platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus
a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an
education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I
can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It's
not a Machine or a Product, because it's not a stand-alone device. It is a
platform, a playground for other developers. It's a dessert topping, and it's a
floor wax.
. . .
The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that
we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism
for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of
person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a
"Wrangler." At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here,
my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.
The most important thing to know
about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have
histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with
a story.
Spimes have identities, they are
protagonists of a documented process.
They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.
10:17 AM: wow. And it all started with an Infocult link. That Bryan, he’s a spime-wranging guy …
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