April 15, 2020 On Technology What’s Inside That Giant Cross? By Steven E. Jones Cellular cross in Tampa, Florida. Photo: Steven E. Jones. The apotheosis of the combination of religious iconography with cellular technology may be the cell tower disguised as a cross. There’s a striking example near my university in Tampa, Florida, on the grounds of the New Life Tabernacle Church. The cross stands out at the edge of church property near the northbound lanes of Interstate 75. At about a hundred fifty feet, it’s much taller than the palm trees along the road, and it glows bright white against the blue sky. From the highway, the cross looks bright white and thin, almost delicate. Up close at the cell site, which is located between a grassy soccer field and a retaining pond, the steel poles look grayish and a little weathered. The tubular upright is enormous, bolted together in three large segments and slightly faceted. I know that the top is packed with antennae, amplifiers, relays, and cables. Standing close to the tower and looking up, I can see large ventilation holes in the upper segment and a small lightning rod sticking out from the very top, too fine to be visible from the highway. (Tampa is supposedly the lightning capital of North America.) Read More
July 19, 2018 On Technology The Radical Notion of a Smartphone-Free Campus By Christopher Schaberg There’s a scene in Don DeLillo’s story “Midnight in Dostoevsky” that reflects on the current omnipresence of digital media and the relative oasis that the college classroom can be. Here we are in a laughably self-serious logic seminar, where the wizardly professor, Ilgauskas, utters one-line axioms before the small group of anxious, if intrigued, students: “The atomic fact,” he said. Then he elaborated for ten minutes while we listened, glanced, made notes, riffled the textbook to find refuge in print, some semblance of meaning that might be roughly equivalent to what he was saying. There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats. We sat and listened or sat and waited. We wrote with pens or pencils. Our notebooks had pages made of flexible sheets of paper. I don’t want to wax nostalgic for an earlier era when college students dutifully shunned digital technology or didn’t have it to begin with. I do want, as my university often encourages me, to meet my students “where they are.” But sometimes the imperative to digital mediation overwhelms me and makes me wonder about the threshold of these different ways of being: analog and digital. But of course, it’s never that simple, never a clear-cut binary. Read More
December 13, 2017 On Technology The Dignified Bot By Jacqueline Feldman Amme Five months after I moved to New York City to pursue a career in writing, I was offered a part-time job composing the dialogue for a chatbot. Called “bots” for short, these are software programs that talk back, answering customer-service questions or performing simple tasks within texting applications or online pop-up windows. In the contract’s phrasing, I would “design” the bot’s “personality.” The office was lit by fluorescent rods, and the windows opened onto walls of brick. As I researched models—Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa—I found myself applying a feminist critique to the personalities I encountered. They were demure, or disturbingly flirty. The design of these helpers implied an odd nostalgia for the all-female secretarial pool. I decided that the bot I wrote would call itself “it,” not “she,” in keeping with its identity as inanimate technology, and that it would convey characteristics beyond a slavish deference to society’s hierarchies. I wanted to equip it with dignity. One obstacle to my bot’s liberation seemed insurmountable. Because it responded automatically, as bots do, it was obligated to answer every question put to it. As a conversationalist, it could not ever remain silent or disengage from the conversation, as humans occasionally choose to do. So I was intrigued when I heard of an unusually mulish system of machinery named Amme, the elusive subject of a beguiling small book, The Amme Talks, published this summer by Triple Canopy. While my bot existed only through speech bubbles, Amme was idiosyncratically corporeal. Created in 1992 by the German artist Peter Dittmer, Amme operated on and off through 2007. Ten years afterward, “the work has been somewhat forgotten,” Dittmer wrote to me recently. “It is also large and expensive to build.” The latest model, Amme 5, comprises six sleek tables shaped like dominos, each equipped with two monitors, a keyboard, and, at the far end, a tall transparent box containing a glass of milk. Between these vitrines drove a robotic arm that terminated in pincers, like a crab’s. At one end of the setup hunkered a console stocked with a tank of milk. While Amme had a chatbot component, replying to humans’ queries in their language, “she” could also effect movements in the physical realm. (Amme’s name is a feminine noun in German, meaning “wet nurse,” and the gender has been carried over.) Using the arm she could spill one of those milk glasses, or not. The unpredictability of this gesture, governed by rules inscrutable to the human spectator, gave the impression that the system possessed the power of choice. At other times, Amme “urinated,” by spilling water rather than milk, or “bathed” the onlooker by causing water to squirt onto the box wall. She occasionally displayed images or played sounds such as this voice-over, in German: “Foxes are like fat.” I found myself enticed by the thought of a talking machine that put into play games of its own. Read More
May 23, 2017 On Technology Salvation Mode By Zack Hatfield The forgotten joys of the screen saver. When I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” a short story whose narrator runs with madness through an endless labyrinth, a remote feeling of déjà vu eased into one of bizarre, welcome recognition. The house’s infinite doors, its emptiness, the dizzy futility—Borges seemed to be describing a popular screen saver from the nineties. Surely you know the one, the Windows maze, that redbrick warren of untold pivots summoned by the computer monitor when no one was around. The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death. How fitting would it be, I thought then, if we all ended up trapped behind a pane of glass roiling with pixels? My instinct was only reaffirmed by a childhood friend’s widowed grandmother, who held onto the conviction that her husband was trying to communicate to her through her Dell’s wispy screen saver. She spent her evenings careful not to disturb the cursor, basking in her lover’s strange séance. If screen savers still have an eschatological tinge for me, it’s also because of their own demise. We no longer need them now, when our phones nudge us at all hours, our inboxes bloat, and dystopian headlines scorch themselves onto our consciousnesses. Our laptops, when we look away from them, have optimized screen protection with a bland and dreamless sleep mode. What we abandoned with the death of screen savers—themselves testifiers of disuse—was a culture that could accept walking away from life onscreen. Read More
May 11, 2016 On Technology This Faithful Machine By Matthew G. Kirschenbaum Picturing the literary history of word processing. Len Deighton in his high-tech home office in London. “The first application of the MT/ST in a literary setting was by the British spymaster Len Deighton’s assistant, Ellenor Handley.” When did individual writers begin to use word processors? As I began work on a literary history of word processing, I found it difficult to establish a time line. Sometimes writers kept a sales record—a word processor or computer would have represented a significant investment, especially back in the day. Other times, as with Stanley Elkin or Isaac Asimov, the arrival of the computer was of such seismic importance as to justify its own literary retellings. But most of the time there were no real records documenting exactly when a writer had gotten his or her first computer, and so I had to rely on anecdote, detective work, and circumstantial evidence. Read More
August 12, 2015 On Technology Don’t Be Evil By M. G. Zimeta Google, Alphabet, and Machiavelli. Santi di Tito, Niccolò Machiavelli, sixteenth century Yesterday, Google submitted an SEC filing announcing a major restructure. Larry Page, the cofounder and CEO of Google Inc, will become the CEO of a new corporation called Alphabet Inc; his fellow cofounder Sergey Brin will become Alphabet’s President. As an Alphabet subsidiary, Google will be responsible for around ninety percent of the umbrella company’s revenues; business analysts have praised the restructure for introducing financial transparency. In practical terms, Google will continue to operate as Google—business as usual for ordinary users. And yet. So far, the announcement of the Google’s reinvention has prompted many ordinary users to compare it to the One Ring, Skynet, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and Canary M Burns. I have not yet seen it hailed as the return of King Arthur, nor heralded as the advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, Shangri-La, Vaikuntha, or the New Galactic Republic. Perhaps it’s just me; perhaps I should read more, or develop a wider circle of friends. Or perhaps the eschatologists on social media tend to be the paranoid pessimistic ones, and all around the world there are non-Google employees tearfully, joyfully, celebrating the coming decades of peace and prosperity for all. Read More