Vue lecture

Unstill life

9 avril 2023 à 15:06

Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave was unmarked. To make room for new commercial development in 2023, the church was razed and occupants of the cemetery were respectfully and quietly disinterred, and moved to a working cemetery elsewhere in town. In the midst, efforts were made by the coroner’s office to discover the identities of the bodies from unmarked graves before they were to be reburied. Mary’s was among them.

The difference with Mary was that her body appeared to be unchanged: a bit dusty under bits of casket lining, with light flecks on her dark skin. Except for that, she looked like she had died yesterday. When they removed her body from the casket in the hospital morgue where she was taken for DNA sampling, she was still flexible. I asked the pathologist what would account for her perfect state of preservation. The pathologist said she had no idea. Even the best embalming jobs age in the ground.

When the pathologist was out of the room, I reached to lift one of Mary’s eyelids. Before my fingers touched, both lids opened, slightly. I called out, “Come here! Come here!” Nobody came. Then both eyes opened. Her body shook as she tried to breathe.

“Code Blue! I yelled.

She was alive. Somehow, alive. After what, eighty years? At the time we didn’t know.

I was ready to do CPR when she started breathing and tried to sit up. “Hang on,” I said. Let me help.” As I did, she was becoming warm. She stood up and looked around.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:15 AM. The dream was too interesting for me to completely awaken, so I dropped back in. As a half-conscious dreamer, I often do that. For the next hour, I followed several different story threads. Each visited what happened in the eighty years of Mary’s suspended life. The Cold War. israel. Civil rights. Rock & Roll. Space travel. Disco. Hip hop. Rap. Digital everything. One of her questions: “What’s television?”

I thought about the backstory of her own short life: a child in the twenties, a teen during the Depression, a young adult during The War. What interesting stuff happened in those years? Was she in love, maybe with a guy who went off to fight? What work did she do?

I thought about the science questions. How was it possible for someone to lay undead for so long? Who else in that cemetery, or any cemetery, might still be alive? Was she a one-of-one, a one-of-some, or a one-of-many? Though not a horror story, it did recall Poe’s The Premeture Burial, in which the protagonist’s undead state was “catalepsy.” I imagined in this thread that the story might be one Michael Chrichton would like to write, if he was still alive.

Dreams have no more detail than one gives them, and being a white guy from New Jersey, born after Mary went cataleptic, I didn’t have much to furnish any storyline about Mary’s life, past or present. But I could still think of questions to address. What perspective and wisdom could Mary bring to our time? How would she cope with finding nearly all the people and things she knew were now dead and gone? What would she marvel at, and what would appall her? What would she be, or mean, to the rest of us?

No surprise that I would dream of a resurrection on Easter morning, even though that wasn’t in my head at the time. So, might Mary (not hard to guess from what corner of my unconscious that one came from) be a Jesus for our time? Hmm.

At 6:15, I finally had to get up and do my business, and the dream ended there. Still, “This has to be a book,” I told myself. But I have other books to write, ones that have sat half-written for years. And writing fiction isn’t my thing. So I decided I’d blog it instead. And here we are.

She is alive now, on this page, and in your mind. All she needs is for someone to finish her story.

The image above is courtesy of DALL-E, the artificially creative image generator. Took four tries to get this one. Since DALL-E seems to know only how to make grotesque faces, I made sure the woman here is looking away.

ESC

ProjectVRM

Doc Searls

2 décembre 2022 à 15:55

VRM Day had an extraordinary outcome this time: a movement to end surveillance capitalism.

The movement began with a talk by Roger McNamee titled Saving us from Big Tech: the Gen Z Solutio n. It was the latest in the Ostrom Workshop‘s Beyond the Web salon series, which on this occasion took place live and in person simultaneously in the Computer History Museum‘s Boole room and on the Web via Owl and Zoom, through the Workshop at Indiana University, where people also participated in a room and virtually. You can see the first hour of the talk here.

The conversation with Roger was super-energized, continued well past the scheduled hour, and onward through breakout sessions on each of the three days that followed at the Museum during IIW, and since then on Signal and Zoom. The conversation informally called itself “Roger and We,” and it vectored toward what it says on the t-shirt design above, drawn on a whiteboard during the third of the IIW sessions: End Surveillance Capitalism or ESC. (Also implying ESCape). One of us at the session created this graphic—

—and used it to create this t-shirt at Zazzle.com:

He’s bought a number of them, so far, because when he wore the first to Thanksgiving dinner, other people there also wanted one. In the spirit of freedom and openness, please feel free to use the same graphic (which, if you drag it off, is quite large ), or something like it, to make one or more of your own. Or run with it any way you please. Movements work that way.

This is where I pause and thank Shoshana Zuboff for making surveillance capitalism a full-sized Thing. Also to Brett Frishcmann and Evan Sellinger for explaining what it does to all of us, personally.

Where this goes is up to the group, which is small, growing, and gathering weekly in virtual space while corresponding asynchronously as well. It’s still small but growing.

To succeed, its fire needs to be so large and hot that profiting by tracking people will fail because neither people nor regulators will put up with it. It is also sobering to know that similar efforts to end surveillance capitalism have faltered in the past (which is still now), in spite of the simple fact that spying on people without their clear invitation (not mere “consent”) or a court order is wrong on its face, regardless of the purposes to which that spying is put.

We talked about lots of other stuff during VRM Day, of course. For example, Don Marti led a session on the W3C’s Private Advertising Technology Community Group, which he encouraged everyone in the room to join. (Please do.)

But the main outcome was ESC.

Now, some background for those not familiar with ProjectVRM.

From its start at the Berkman Klein Center in 2006, ProjectVRM has had (says here) “the immodest ambition of turning business on its head — for its own good, and for everyone else’s as well.” Perhaps ESC will be the thing to do that, after sixteen years of encouraging countless other efforts, some of which are listed here. (There is no easy way to keep up with all of them.)

If you’re interested in joining this cabal, write to me (the email is doc @ my last name dot com). You can also follow along on the ProjectVRM mailing list.