The Garden

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I don’t believe that technological innovation has been as profoundly important to us as we have been to it. It was we who had the idea that we wanted our horses to go faster, and no doubt it was also we who first thought to put those wheels on them. And then we wanted better typewriters, and fewer filing cabinets, and calculators that didn’t have to start each time from nothing. We wanted it, and we talked about it, and it was our words and our ideas that were taken up by people with ideas themselves on how to do it.

But let me get this straight. Am I saying that these people were not geniuses, not inventors, not the owners of these ideas? Clearly they were intelligent, at least in a few areas, and they were great engineers of those ideas. Personally I would say that they were not the owners of these ideas. But they likely have copyrights and patents: intellectual property.

Societal regulations for unique ideas and products may say differently. Societal regulations are, like us, unable to think of everything.

Societal regulations have never been interested in how taking note of how quickly and how strongly a product takes hold. Given that people appear to be naturally cautious, could that not be an indication of how strongly the idea was rooted to begin with? The fact that Facebook takes off in Harvard University, for example. It is clear that Harvard University was a good environment for producing Facebook. Might it also have been a particularly alienating and lonely environment, and might that have caused a lot of people to talk about needing friends, talk about what kinds of friends they wanted? Might it also have been a community of particularly systems-oriented people, particular about the conditions they needed for friendship, wanting simple procedures and choices?

The news media and the social media and the fishing (storage and search) media have spent a lot of time telling us that they had provided us with a service and did not know how to make money from us. They spent several years in this state, oh poor us, oh poor us. They first collected up our data. Used it to give us advertising. Sold the data on. Used it to develop new versions of their technology. Launched “business class” preferential paid options. Made business collaborations with hardware and software producing companies.

Pushed out competition. Finally some came to us cap in hand. We must ask you for a service fee. And we gave it to them, feeling guilty that we had got so much from them without paying for it. It is important to remember that the value of a free product is particularly high.

It is so often the case these days that you can access your subscription news media if you log in to your Facebook account. There is no longer a question of conflict of interest – once you get inside you will find your Facebook all over the place. The relevance and importance of news is measured by how many people access it, access increases toward the top of the site, the top of the site is where important news is, the more important the news the more people will access it, the organisations with access to the most information are the social media and fishing media sites. Press releases and product reviews sounding like a long lunch date.

And you will go to another newspaper and find the same story. My assumption is always that they are simply sharing stories. But I consider that I might be wrong here: they may not be sharing anything. Good news media needs good networks. It may simply be that behind every good news media editor is a press release. A well written and informative – even entertaining press release that needs no editing. For what is editing? “nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary “points” confused with singular “points”, badly posed or distorted problems…”1 a press release will contain little to correct.

We’ve recently found ourselves reassessing the business ethics of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate. It had become increasingly clear that Murdoch’s media was crossing the line between ethical and unethical business, but we learned that the line between ethical and illegal business had also been crossed. A great opportunity to go back and look at the ways in which we became accustomed to and accepting of misbehaviour. What is more surprising is the liberties that our online masters can take with our information, our data.

Publicly announcing it, constantly shifting the rules, and then putting out a press release about just how much money they expect to make from it. It’s awesome.
Awesome too is how much bad business creep there is in the media world. Apple products have constant problems with cables, for example. They have been designed to death, but at the expense of durability, they have very short lives and they generally can’t be kept for the next model. The Apple phones, another example, are built not only for a short physical life but also for a short desirability life, until the next sexy model (no co-incidence there) appears on the stage and catwalk (no co-incidence there) in the hand of the boss (sigh).

Design has been revolutionised by Apple. It has been stripped of “durable” and “sensible”, and “makes economic sense”. However did they do that, it’s simply brilliant. sigh.

Considering our strong views on environmental issues we are really quite circumspect about our own wastefulness. But then, considering our strong interest in technological advancement we are incredibly unaware of just how much it is led by us. It is maybe time to get a little more arrogant, strut around like a Startup CEO, start acting like the boss, make the big decision not to buy the product that gives you an erection, read the small print on everything, and talk back to the media. All of it.

1 Marks: Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, 23.

Landscape with Souvenir

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Technology and innovation, that’s all we seem to hear about in the online newspapers, the “news media”, particularly their value and societal worth. That’s not surprising given that these online newspapers are constructed from technology and constantly being innovated. They would have us believe that their presence is newsworthy. They had profitability in their paper media until they went online – they went online with a business model that at first was not successful, and so their profitability and the success of online commercial business are tied together.

In the meantime, “social media” also became socially successful whilst still struggling with commercial success, and so the two media joined up.

One of the characteristics of electronic information is speed, and speed is what we are being dealt. Technology and innovation interests – the makers of technology, assisted by the news media and the social media – try to speed us up. Rushing us toward an evolved life, changing our perception in tiny but very fast increments. Any social issue or social change that is now “in the news” is one that has a strong backing of people with the ability to get into the news, to make the news, to write the news and to re-write the news to fit in their issue. Which means that media people, and tech and innovation people, and social media people, are indeed extremely powerful at present.

They can run their issues like campaigns, and they do. One method that we are being particularly assaulted with at present is using the data on our online habits to feed us with a kind of information that you could almost call “familial”. It is no secret that the news and social organs of the web would like to lead us to things we want to buy. So if we put the word cow online, cows will appear online. And if we are being particularly naïve, innocent or careless, we will not hold some scepticism about the presence of all these cows but will merely accept them happily. So we have the impression that we have choice, and that our online environment is familial. Really we are being manipulated in a particularly silly and obvious way, by our online hosts and their magic tricks.

Of course, news media have always disguised promotion, advertising and press releases as news. Social media is doing nothing that is more exploitative than what dating companies or dodgy motivational products have always done. Technology and innovation businesses appear to have better designed and valued products than in the past.

There is a creep, a slow but insidious drip, a flooding, a dividing up of the internet. At present it is in the interests of those businesses to smother you in attention. Once they have your commercial measure there will be no great reason to continue with this. Once they have the measure of you you are not going to change substantially and require more attention. Once the “online DNA” has been figured out, there will be no courting of your information. There will be formulaic and systematic programming. And it is likely that our online world will suddenly and shockingly slow down. But that’s not much of a guess.

That’s pretty normal business practice.

Not much is new, a great deal of this technology and innovation is smoke and mirrors, very simple ideas cloaked in DESIGN and EXPENSE. A great deal of it is semantic change; the same as before, but given a different meaning. Because it is cased in technology and innovation, in a box or a program or a service, it can be licensed, it can be patented and copyrighted, it becomes intellectual property. Not our property, though. I believe we will have less ability to ask for change, in the online world, once it gets through this frenzied adolescence.

What I start to feel as I read and read through this fast-paced activity online, is that we are being fooled. And foolish. I don’t believe that technological innovation has been as profoundly important to us as we are told. It’s true that we have changed; our perceptions and understandings and capabilities have changed. But I don’t believe that technology and innovation caused our perceptions and understandings and capabilities to change. I believe that our perceptions, understandings and capabilities caused the technology and innovation.

We love people who Think Different. And we know where Thinking Different is supposed to lead us. To Apple. Apple, in its Think Different campaign, used people like Mother Theresa and Ghandi to express its meaning of “Thinking Different”. Now after the death of Steve Jobs we can understand that included in that lineup is Jobs himself. But I don’t believe that Jobs changed us. I believe that we changed Jobs. It was us that he used, after all. It is we who created Gates, and Zuckerberg, and all our self-made Visionaries of the New World. We had already changed, that’s why they were able to make all that money from us.

I don’t agree with the way corporations are dividing up our Online world amongst themselves. I don’t agree with the open discussion of how those same corporations plan to divide up our Moon amongst themselves. I believe that we are being a little too polite here, and a little too accepting of the press releases that pass for intelligent discussion. I don’t want to have to go to them and ask them to stop what they are doing. I would like them to figure it out for themselves.

Don’t you wish that too?