Your New Car is Watching You: Two Weeks in a Rolling Computer

A while back at my Tractorpunk blog, I wrote about why we should choose, if we can, to buy an older vehicle and learn to make our own repairs. I'm more convinced of this now than ever.

We had two lovely weeks in Canada recently, touring Nova Scotia, taking hikes with Anna Hergert, who runs the walking firm Tide Rollers and Mudlarkers. Anna was available off-season for some extended quality time with us. It's our second vacation hiking with her.

When we were not exploring the ocean floor of the Bay of Fundy, we were driving a rented Hyundai Tucson we picked up at the airport in Bangor, Maine. The small SUV was spacious, tastefully minimalist but comfortably appointed inside (I cannot abide busy-looking interiors). The glass dash looked very impressive. But that is where the problems began. 

As we drove along one day, a little chime sounded. An icon of a steaming cup of coffee (or maybe King Cole tea...we were in Canada) appeared on the center screen that had been clocking me in kilometers per hour. It said "Consider taking a break."

Was I driving poorly? We were on back roads, as is our wont. They are curvy and sometimes potholed. We had to move over the center line sometimes, when we could on the relatively empty roads. Yet every 45 minutes or so, I'd get that annoying message. This is part of the what the firm calls a "Driver Attention Warning System." 

Once I had it light up just after leaving a Tim Horton's where, rest assured, I had taken a cappuccino-and-donut break. I never figured out how to turn off this feature, though I did bring the owner's manual into our B&B and read it carefully.

We got the lane-departure buzzer to stop, as well as an auto-steering feature that was more scary than helpful. We never could banish the "take a break" annoyance. After much searching, we reset our speedometer to metric units, but the dizzying array on of-screen choices in the SUV meant we never found out how to turn off the coffee-cup warning. I began to talk back to the car. "Perhaps Hyundai should take a long walk off a short pier" was one bit of advice I can type here. At the very first, I'd liked the new Tucson enough to consider it as a replacement for our 2006 Honda CRV, if it ever (God forbid) bites the dust.

No longer. I will have no car that scolds me. I will also have no car that makes mistakes of the sort the Hyundai made. 

The vehicle has multiple sensors for reading the road, including speed-limit signs. Sadly, the sensors did not know how to translate these properly on the dash. For a brief period we went on the Trans-Canada Highway (speed limit 110 kph) the dash told us we could go 180! It was reading the metric signs as mph and translating them into kilometers. We had a chuckle. Then I thought about the clueless drivers I see in the US daily. I'm certain some would have put the pedal down and then explain to a Mountie "but the car said I could go 180!"

I fear where this trend might go. New vehicles are already watching us. A piece from the BBC noted how carmakers collect data from us constantly in new vehicles. It can be sold to your insurance company without your permission in the United States. When you buy a new car, be sure you know how to disable this. That said, the window for saying "no" may close. The BBC notes that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in a February 2026 report, calls for biometric technology in all new vehicles to monitor eye and head movement for signs of distracted driving. You can read the text of the report here. I do not support this at all for adults, unless they are guilty of a DUI and subject to monitoring when behind the wheel. 

The rest of us should have the right to disable such devices. Besides, the very glass dashboard of the Tucson was designed as to distract drivers. We had to pull over to adjust the AC or heat, as the fan control was tiny and required a touch. My Honda has three large dials, like this. I can find them in the dark without looking down.

On an economic note, cars are now so wired with sensors for lane-departure, automatic braking, and other features that I fear they won't last as long as my old Honda. The HVAC controller? Under $100 to buy. The infotainment console in my wife's 2017 Mini S convertible? $10000. It works great, but we are selling that car soon. My wife's "new" 2008 Volvo XC70 AWD wagon has none of that business in the dash.

The Honda's predecessor, a 2004 model, died in 2020, when a kid rear-ended me. I'd had that 2004 CRV for 14 years. I went right out and bought a 2006, mainly because it had side airbags. I do a lot of the work myself. No advice provided by the car. No screen of any sort. Keeper.

Back to our monitored future. Want to turn this business off in a Hyundai? A simple Web search will tell you how. Or maybe if you have young, easily distracted drivers in your family, you want it on.

Your call. But do one thing: tell those who make cars and laws that you do not want them spying on you. 

 

 

 

Another CCCC, Another Rejection of AI

At face value, the latest rejection of AI in writing classrooms from the Conference on College Composition and Communication does not sound like a radical document. It calmly frames the issue in terms of students' and faculty members' rights to choose how to teach and learn. 

It's also out of touch with how so many universities are being run. Once again, as I did last year, I will issue a brief rebuttal. One of the issues below could be easily addressed. The other? Not so handily.

• Realities of how classes get scheduled and listed
  
  If students have the right to opt out of AI in any course they take, it would create chaos for instructors. Those like me who scaffold AI into assignments do so in ways not possible without these applications. Students would not know until they saw a syllabus how (or if) AI would be employed in a class.
  
  The resolution claims that "Professors should additionally respect a student’s choice to refuse AI. To do this, it would be ideal that they have assignments that students can choose from that do not involve generative AI and that do not isolate the students from class discussions and activities."
  
  My podcasting assignment requires the use of ElevenLabs software. Would I then give students who refuse a second option? My classes are small. I could do that. But what happens in large courses that enroll many dozens of students?
  
  One work-around would be for registrars to flag courses that use AI. Then students could exercise their rights to chose accordingly.
  
  
• The reality of who teaches writing and who makes the decisions
  
  The document rightly notes that "Generative AI is but the latest version of this neoliberal approach to efficiency and expediency," but then it does not give instructors advice about how to counter this trend with senior administration that follows neoliberal principles. The authors rightly note as well that we work in "a profession that has long dealt with labor issues and that continues to rely considerably on frequently underpaid contingent, adjunct, and graduate student labor."
  
  So how, exactly, would such at-will employees say "no" when a university requires AI literacy in its curriculum? Here I'll speak bluntly: the tenured faculty on the committee that drafted this resolution should have known better. That sort of Ivory-Tower elitism in 2025 led me to leave the CCCC.
  
  NCTE leadership understands well the contingent nature of writing instruction and the realities of who now has the power of the purse at our institutions. 
  
  Perhaps these same authors can fight for better governance at colleges and universities, so the voiceless and underpaid have more of a role in shaping policy? Perhaps more tenured faculty could teach more writing-intensive classes? Such teachers do have more power to refuse AI and shape policy around its adoption on campus.
  
  It seems my old profession (well, I still pursue it part-time) is lost in the fog, as industry lays plans for orbital constellations of data-centers and AI apps pop up on our phones without our asking. This will not end well for CCCC, which doesn't bother me. But it does bother me that many teachers of writing may be hurt in the process.

Update, July 2026: I have rejoined the NCTE as a retiree, and I now receive their journal aimed at K-12 language-arts teachers. I changed course partly because NCTE distanced itself from the radical stance of the CCCC by issuing a pragmatic framework for educators who may not be able to say no to AI initiatives. 

Image: Creative-Commons "The campanile at UC Berkeley shrouded in fog." by Daniel Parks at Flickr

A Conversation By Economists About AI

I had the pleasure of attending a "Sharp Viewpoints" event on my old employer's campus, where Dr. Kevin Hallock, university President, hosted two economists with expertise in AI, UVA's Anton Korinek and MIT's David Autor.  The subject, AI and The Future of Work, should concern us all.

I hope not to misrepresent what I heard, but all three experts on stage consider it inevitable that AI will continue to advance rapidly and that it will disrupt careers in fields such as Finance, Computer Science, and Accounting. These have been popular majors for my former students. The scope of the disruption and what happens to wages, as AI takes on more white-collar tasks, remain to be seen. Korinek cited a ninefold increase in the capacity of AI systems annually, from a 2.5x increase in efficiency times a 4x increase in capabilities. 

Korinek warned the audience that we have a small window of time to prepare for resultant changes without chaos in the economy, though Autor felt that if we were to see a gradual loss of a profession, which he called "generational," our economic health could be sustained. He did warn that nothing on the scope of 10% of jobs lost annually could be tolerated without an upheaval. 

Both speakers likened gradual change to, say, automating trucking. The industry would slowly shed human drivers over time, because prior investment in vehicles and warehouses can't be profitably junked overnight. As older drivers retire, however, gradually fewer young people would enter the field and robots would take on the work of moving cargo on the highways. 

As for me? Whoever or whatever does the driving, I still prefer trains for 90% of the hauling, with a truck doing the final leg of the journey. 

The mood was cautiously optimistic, but I'm no optimist. My dad loved being a long-haul trucker. He was not as happy when he ran a wholesale produce company, though that enabled him to put away some money for when he retired. He preferred "the Road" to the security of a desk, and he passed that love of highway travel on to me.  Driving have him a purpose. Yet dad, in retirement, did not begin to write poetry, learn Greek, or play golf. He watched TV and was bored while living on his social security and investment income.

Something the speakers did not address to my satisfaction: if we do have a future without nearly as many jobs for humans, what do many people without side interests or hobbies or talents do with their time? I'm not a good model: I've stayed more busy than ever since leaving full-time employment.

I ask my question, a Humanist's response, assuming that some sort of basic universal income would arise; Author prefers not a monthly dole but a universal basic investment fund for every citizen, beginning at birth. 

Without it, I suspect we'd have some sort of Butlerian Jihad of the mass unemployed, to smash the data centers, and frankly, I'd support smashing them if the alternative meant vast numbers of destitute folks existing alongside a tiny elite empowered by AI. Our speakers did note how this sort of future could emerge, endangering democracy. I'd argue it already is emerging under the broligarchs of Silicon Valley and our current Administration.

Yet with income for all in a jobs-free future, we might have a lot of folks on a dole, not hiking or painting but watching TV and not contributing to our civilization. In my darkest hours, I also think we already have that, without a dole in the US. 

It's better to have a purpose. I didn't hear much discussion of "what does it mean to be a human?" in last night's one-hour chat. Of course, that sort of discussion has been going on among philosophers for millennia, even before Socrates began to question people at Athens' Agora. 

Both Korinek and Autor did fear a rise in inequality, as wages might fall while AI-copiloted productivity rises. That said, everyone agreed that we will have new jobs emerge, some of them related perhaps to newly found leisure time. Autor reminded us that 100 years ago, 38% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today under 2% do. But a person in 1926 also could not image the types of careers many of us now have. Nor did they have our concept of leisure time. A video-game developer's career would have been as alien as a Man from Mars.

Fair point, but when (according to them, not if) AI and humanoid robots replace most human labor, including game design, what will most of us do to find a purpose?

What will colleges do? Korineck, bless him, as well as Hallock, upheld the value of the Liberal Arts for coming to grips with essential and enduring questions. Autor, while nodding to the value of liberal education, said he'd be more "crass" to note that a college degree also means more income and professional training. I don't disagree with him, yet marrying some careerist coursework to a passion for something seems wiser than choosing a "safe" major in a field that bores you.

The even left me unsettled. If the future they predict comes, I'd begin by having students read Plato's Republic and The Federalist Papers with me, for two explanations of what a society can do to organize itself against chaos.

If you want to see a video of the talk, UR recorded it. Thanks to Fred Hagemeister at Richmond for sharing the link.

Giantism and The Moon Race

The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?

I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.

What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s. 

I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.

At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.

The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date. 

Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there. If we think small about getting there (to stay this time) we might do better than SpaceX's giantism.

By the time we make that next giant leap, we may also have national leadership that is not anti-environmental yet still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and human exploration / settlement happening beyond orbit.

It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time. 

Are Humanists All Like This? Tyler Austin Harper's Strange Ideas About AI on Campus

 I'm fond of The Atlantic; I've subscribed for more than 4 decades. I also enjoy Tyler Austin Harper's articles; his 2024 piece on extreme fishing really moved me with its stories of combat veterans risking their lives at night, swimming out in deep water to find offshore rocks, all to catch striped bass. Austin tried that sport himself; his participation added vividness to his journalism.

As a professor, he is likewise a participant when writing about education. Thus he should know enough about students to avoid the impracticable, even ludicrous, ideas in his newest article, "The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI." The title drew me right in, as I too am concerned that institutions of higher education do not comprehend the scope of AI usage by students or what that may portend for their learning. 

So much damage has already been done, before LLMs arrived to thwart the critical-thinking skills we faculty hold so dear. We live in a time when phones and social media have sapped the attention spans and reading comprehension of all ages, and when students from taught-to-the-test K-12 US education lack the ability to construct narratives around the content they do encounter in class. Instead, they often ask me for a rubric and or checklist. When I ask "tell me what you think most interests you from our topic," I usually get blank or anxious looks.

Harper's piece begins in this territory, with worries we share. Soon, however, he turns to a "solution" by Megan Fritts, from U Arkansas at Little Rock, calling for a ban on AI use in the Humanities classroom.

That stance seems not too different from the CCCC Chair's address I rebutted here some time back. I canceled my NCTE membership this year in response to that extremist stance by the organization's leadership.

Yet the similar philosophy that Fritts embraces proves not radical enough for Harper:

Shunning AI use in classrooms is a good start, but schools need to think bigger than that. All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus?

Harper's drive to "abolish" includes: 

• Getting rid of WiFi, laptops, and phones on campus
• Making all writing assignments be done in labs without Internet access 
• Making all students live on campus
• Ending accommodations for neurodiverse students if they include AI (human helpers would fill the gap, as they did before) 
• Penalizing heavily any students caught using AI for academic work, including expulsion.

I began to check to see if he were writing for The Onion, ending with a call for wax tablets for all written work. I can imagine such a  policy at my employer, leading to a 95% drop in applications. I can also imagine new AI-friendly schools, many for-profit, rushing to fill the gap.  I can envision ADA-based lawsuits by neurodiverse learners and their parents.

I won't go on more except to say that Harper's draconian and neo-Luddite solution is not a realistic answer.

Instead I'll end with a question that Fritts asks near the start of her article, as she and others on an AI Committee wrestle with the signature pedagogical challenge of our time, "If this robot can write these books better than we can, then what are we doing here?" Well asked. 

Unless we faculty can add value to AI-written content, maybe we don't deserve jobs any more. I've wondered that since the "Theory Wars" in English and related fields of the late 80s and early 1990s. Poorly aping French Post-Structuralist Theory, faculty in PhD programs ruined the lives of many a graduate student and likely turned off legions of potential undergrads who might have studied literature. I saw this in dozens of cases at Indiana University's PhD program. 

At that time, we lost the thread of meaning--and damn the Deconstructionists who managed to deconstruct meaning out of our field. But the meaning destroyed was not only in texts that lacked narrative cohesion under the scrutiny of theory; the meaning lost included the joy (or jouissance, if you read Barthes) of studying literary work and finding connections to improve one's own life.

Fritts takes us back before my field's epistemological disaster, when she notes that "the aim of our disciplines is the formation of human persons." If we start there, enshrining that principle as the most important one that a college or university (in any discipline) can answer, we have made a good start.  

Image: OpenArt, Cambridge University in Ruins 

AI: Sorry, You May Not Always Sit at My Table

Ethan Mollick's book Co-Intelligence is a dangerous document. There, I said it. We read the text for our campus digital pedagogy cohort for Fall, 2024, and at first I was quite excited. The book promises to provide guidelines for wisely adopting AI, yet from the get-go I had issues with the author's less-than-critical acceptance of generative AI.

Let's start with Mollick's four, and seemingly absolute, rules for working with AI:

1. Always Invite AI to the Table.
2. Be the Human in the Loop.
3. Treat AI Like a Person (But Tell It What Kind of Person It Is).
4. Assume This Is the Worst AI You Will Ever Use.

I'm not much trouble with these save for number 1. I've been reading Wendell Berry, a techno-selective if ever there were one, and I am pretty certain how he'd react to generative AI: Hell no.

Why? Mollick's rule number one flatly violates Berrys notion about adopting new tools.

It also flies in the face of what Howard Rheingold, reporting for Wired eight long years before the iPhone 1 debuted, found out about the Amish. In "Look Who's Talking," he describes how the Amish approach any technology. They experiment to see if it violates:

a body of unwritten but detailed rules known as the "Ordnung." Individuals and communities maintain a separation from the world (by not connecting their houses to telephones or electricity), a closeness to one another (through regular meetings), and an attitude of humility so specific they have a name for it ("Gelassenheit"). Decisions about technology hinge on these collective criteria. If a telephone in the home interferes with face-to-face visiting, or an electrical hookup fosters unthinking dependence on the outside world, or a new pickup truck in the driveway elevates one person above his neighbors, then people start to talk about it. The talk reaches the bishops' ears.

Thus the Amish man who recently had a long chat with me about the virtues of PEX-based plumbing systems. He, like other Amish (and me) are techno-selectives, not utter Luddites.

Rheingold's piece had an enormous intellectual influence on me. It made me wary of new tools, though I admit falling without reservation for virtual worlds. I've come to regret that uncritical acceptance of a technology that not only fails the test above but also fails with a clumsy UI and poor use-case in education.

Maybe in consequence, I grew wiser about smart phones, doubting the corporate narrative from the start; today, mine is nearly always off. I don't use it much for one social media platform, less so for texting, have silenced all notifications, and never at all watch time-killer videos. Pop culture generally seems too ephemeral for my remaining years on the planet, and I don't want to discuss TV shows with friends. If something looks non-violent and well written, I still wait years before watching a series, methodically. 

Influencers? I find them in books. Berry is one. I bought heavily into the concept with which Rheingold closes his piece, "If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?"

I don't consider online community, including virtual worlds, much of a substitute for the real thing. Even gaming with old friends on our Monday Nerd Nites seems a pale shadow of a good in-person meeting. Only recently I began to read Berry, and he corroborates much of what Rheingold discovered.

So for Mollick's rule one, I plan to say "no" a lot. What do we gain by always using AI for any intellectual task? In Berry's 1987 article "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," he lays out nine rules for adopting a new tool:

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Generative AI fails most of these, in particular anything to do with localism and energy use, but number nine reminds me of the unforeseen outcomes of ubiquitous mobile telephony: families in restaurants, not looking at each other, all intent on their screens and being somewhere else. That would seem perverse to anyone of my parents' generation or earlier.

So how do we NOT give into Mollick's notion that we must always bring AI to the table, dinner or otherwise, even without a good use case? I plan to be writing about that in the new year as I continue researching AI's role in the writing process, where I do cautiously let it have a seat.

Image by Duncan Cumming on Flickr

The Illusion Is Real To Me

This post began with some musings at Wagner James "Hamlet" Au's blog, New World Notes. Au has also covered the utopians and skeptics of virtual reality in a piece at Wired, "VR Will Make Life Better--Or Just Be an Opiate For the Masses." Some proponents of the Occulus Rift 3D viewer are claiming that a virtual world good enough is as good at the life we lead without goggles and a fast internet connection.

Since this issue involves both of my blogs, I hope readers will excuse the cross-postings. I have also been thinking about how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is very much invested in Occulus tech and why the picture of him, striding among a crowd wearing Rifts, chills me to the bone.

Here was my reply at New World Notes.

Even a happy virtual life would neglect the agons of a happy real one.

Yesterday I labored a few hours on a farm tractor I'm selling, checking for issues and eliminating possibilities in the electric system. I used a lot of stored knowledge in the wetware of my brain to trouble-shoot. I was in a place without reliable wireless, so double-checking hunches with the phone was not possible.

Then I went to work on the fuel system, turning wrenches and skinning knuckles until I had the likely culprit. At night I went online, into a flat virtual community, to check my assumptions. This weekend I'll clean out the fuel tank, blow compressed air through all the fittings, and restart the old diesel.

Simulating all that with an Occulus might eventually be possible. Doing so might even feed me if my virtual farm supplied RL income. But you know what?

Virtual is still FAKE. Always will be until someone really does achieve the Singularity. Hence my consideration of SL and more advanced forms of virtual worlds as just something nice for entertainment, like a novel or film but more immersive.

As for the possibility that our RL world is a Matrix? Let me quote a famous fake person, Conan the Barbarian. I only slay groundhogs and cold beers, but the rest is apt:

"I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

Abandoned Tech: The Saturn Rockets

Location: Day-Dreaming about a 1985 Mars base

image source: Encyclopedia Astronautica's entry about the Saturn V rocket

What might have been, had Richard Nixon been a different man, possessing an optimistic vision that matched his calculated-but-brilliant realpolitik demonstrated by the opening to China and the bombing of Hanoi's government to the negotiating table.

I've been thinking of this occasional series since I began shaving with my grandfather's safety razor. It still works great and costs me very little, months into my experiment. Now I own two of these antique Gems (the trade name that fits well). They demonstrate that corporations seeking new markets often over-engineer products and make dubious claims about their improvement. I wish government could do better, but history shows otherwise when it comes to manned space travel.  Odd for me to propose such flights of fancy. I call myself a Neo-Luddite, though as one friend pointed out, I'm better described as a "Reform Luddite" more interested in appropriate technology than in getting rid of technology or curbing its use drastically.

I hope to explain why this Neo-Luddite thinks the US needs its manned program badly, and why it needs NASA for the sort of deep-space ventures that both Presidents Bush and Obama championed.  Both Presidents had NASA contractors scramble to re-invent something we gave up nearly 40 years ago: a heavy-lift rocket suitable for deep-space exploration.

When Nixon canceled the last three missions of the Apollo program, it put the world's most effective--then or now--space transportation system on its way to the scrap heap.  It's a myth that the Saturn V rocket's plans were scavenged from NASA dumpsters, though as Dwayne A. Day noted, records were lost or destroyed along the way. In any case, once the assembly lines for the Saturn IB and V shut, engineers moved on, and the tooling got dispersed or scrapped, there was no practical way to rebuild the mighty F-1 engine or other components without reverse-engineering from a museum piece at huge cost.  Rocketdyne did, as Day notes, save their records and record information from Engineers involved in the F-1 program. Much of the rest of the Saturn, however, would not meet modern standards for alloys and other technologies. A similar rocket today would weigh less and have the benefits of computer-assisted design. That's my hope for Dragon's proposed heavy-lift rocket.

But what if Saturn and its mighty engines had stayed in production, to be incrementally improved or parted out to new NASA and private vehicles?  Most of the pieces for a Mars mission were in place by 1970.

Boeing, in 1968, studied the technology needed to go to Mars by the mid-80s: a Nerva nuclear third stage lofted into orbit by a Saturn V, followed by assembling a Mars spacecraft there. Instead, we got Skylab, then an expensive and tragically flawed pickup truck to low orbit called the Space Shuttle.

Our nation badly needs unity now, and my optimistic side favors a multi-year mission scientific mission to Mars, using the International Space Station if possible to assemble our Mars ship, all this with the aim of resolving the questions about past or present life on the Red Planet. Such a program, paid for by deep cuts in defense spending and, yes, more debt, would have pay-offs in the hiring of technicians and engineers whose work would develop the sorts of spin-off technologies that came from Apollo, including the small computer on which I am writing this post.

We need deep space missions, not merely planting the flag but searching thoroughly and with tools greater than those carried by the Martian rovers. Finding out if we are alone or not in our solar system would, I'd hope, make the texting masses look above the horizon again. NASA's lead can help private industry follow, not to do science but to pioneer, as the pioneers came in the wake of Jefferson's expedition to the Pacific.

And if profit is to be had in space, profit that requires humans to live there, the masses will do more than look up.

They'll go there and we'll become an interplanetary species.

Dream On: Space Travel Musings, 2012

Location: Chair-bound, looking up

There was a time when pundits predicted hundreds of thousands would live in Earth orbit or further up the gravity well by the year 2000. The Dream did not last much beyond Richard Nixon's cancellation of the last three Apollo missions, but from time to time it crops up again.

The latest incarnation comes from the Space Island Group's vision for their company. To quote:

By 2020 more than 20,000 men and women will be working aboard these orbiting Islands, and 10 million more high-paid specialists will be supporting them on Earth. That 20,000 number will double each following decade. . . .SIG's larger stations will grow their own food, recycle their air and water, and have their own onboard engines and guidance systems. Water mined from asteroids by "Space Island" will be converted into hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel by sun-powered converters, letting these Islands travel throughout the inner solar system. Metals mined from asteroids will let the stations grow without bringing materials up from Earth.

What will Space Islanders find on these asteroids and on the planets they visit? Will they find life where its now least expected? Will they find remnants of past visitors? What incredible structures will they build in space, freed from the gravity chains of Earth? 

 I want so hard to believe this possible, as I did in the 70s when I read Gerard K. O'Neill's book The High Frontier.

Why do I feel gun shy? It could be that the last time a visionary group promised me world-changing wonders, it was Linden Lab and the potential of Second Life. Like Spooky Mulder in the X-Files, perhaps I do want to believe. But as with the childish hopes for Apollo's legacy and adult ones for virtual worlds, I do feel the pull of SIG's promise.

And, frankly, reject it. These sorts of wild projections only lead to a new generation of disappointed teenaged geeks. At the same time, one can be a bit more optimistic about goings-on for the High Frontier:

• Space X's plan to launch their Dragon Spacecraft to the International Space Station
• China's upcoming Shenzhou 9 mission
• Sir Richard Branson's plans for the maiden voyage to suborbit for Spaceship Two
• Planetary Resources' deep-pocketed plan to mine an asteroid.

As I watched live at NASA, however, the Space X launch was aborted, just as the ignition sequence began. We will have many such disappointments, and worse, on our way to what NASA liked to call "our destiny in space."

At least the spacecraft did not blow up, and Space X's team worked quickly and professionally. Today, they got the rocket into orbit and I wish them stunning success in reaching the ISS. As a firm that operates more like a Silicon Valley start-up and less like a huge government agency, Space X gives me some guarded hope that they will, with marginal improvements, get their next launch right.

That such events are happening in the midst of a global economic downtown actually gives me a bit of hope that, if matters improve, we may see the first glimmers of a new technological revolution. Because as cool as the Internet is, we remain chair-bound or fixated on our palms.

Neither are the places for heroes, explorers, and world-builders. I'd prefer to dream on.

image credit: Wikipedia's entry on the L5 Society

Mobile: Shiny? Yes. Hyped? Yes. Fad? No.

About the image: Got your own SL meme? Thanks to Hamlet Au for alerting us to this hilarious meme. Have a crack at adding your own caption here.

Location: Before My Crystal Ball

The other day at VWER, a colleague who should know better claimed that tablet-based computing is a fad on campus, the newest and shiniest object for technologists and administrators. I disagree, even though I have long resisted using a tablet.

This summer, my work will focus increasingly on mobile. I'm not going completely back to Flatland. I'll be finishing some work on Usher, both at SL and Jokaydia Grid, given that I might run the simulation again in the Spring of 2013. Yet I'd be nuts to devote much time to these platforms, given the energy generated by the technology that students and colleagues are actually using already.

It's something of an apples-to-watermelon comparison, when looking at virtual worlds and mobile computing. That said, I remain convinced that SL in particular is a "legacy app" because of its limited return on investment. Readers of this blog may have to get used to a few new directions here, but I'll continue to cover my and colleagues work in virtual worlds.

As for this post? I don't think the SL evangelist is teaching on an actual campus today. Here's why.

Reason 1: Students have mobile hardware on them 24/7

When Second Life was being hyped in mainstream media, students were not carrying technology, by and large, that ran it well. As I noted as early as my first class with SL in the Spring of 2007, if an application did not run well on wireless and on a laptop free of an AC adapter, it might as well not exist for students.

In the five years since, that gap has widened as SL and the promise of public virtual worlds remain down in the Trough of Disillusionment. Gartner analysts predict 5-10 years for mainstream adoption.

Meanwhile, after diving in to the Trough in the 90s, e-readers began climbing out. Media tablets are past the Peak of Inflated Expectations, but they remain two to five years from mainstream adoption. Part of that involves standards. No one knows who will dominate the tablet wars that are surely erupt as Windows 8 devices roll out. I don't really care, as I'm still a novice even with my iPad 2. Microsoft has deep pockets and, despite my disdain for their OS before Windows 7, they can build great hardware; my MS two-button mouse is King Mouse, even when I compare it to the sleek Apple cordless I use at work.

Even as tablets begin to jockey for market share, the mobile experience has gone from students' ways of contacting each other socially to the default device for using the Internet. These devices are already "always on and always on you," to quote from Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, a text I'm devouring on my iPad. One after another student tells me, in brief e-mails sent from iPhones, that their laptops are being reserved for times when they have to "type a paper." That means Word, and that means print.

I'll blog more about the reading experience on a tablet later.

Whoever gains (or in Apple's case, maintains) dominance and establishes the standard matters less to me than the fact that SL and OpenSim do not run well, if at all, on tablets.  Unity 3D does for iOS and Android. I cannot make content for that platform yet, and may never do so, but I'd like to try my hand at exploring others' work.

Concurrent to all this churn, we are  moving to tablets on our campuses for consuming media. If Moore's Law holds true, these devices will become better and better at creating content.

One does not wish to be on the wrong side of history, and I think SL evangelists are clearly on the wrong side, unless they are early in their careers and have a Plan B for research and teaching.

Reason 2: Mobile apps directly relate to classroom work

Save for simulations, as I've noted at length here, there are few compelling reasons to use a virtual world of any sort in the classroom. Many of us don't even need a "world" for a class: we need one or two sims and good content.

The bigger world of SL helps this teacher only insofar as it gets me together with colleagues to share ideas. For some social-sciences or writing courses, I could see the advantage of studying a lively online culture, though IRB reviews could be a nightmare for publication. For language classes, live contact with speakers of other languages would be good.

Otherwise, why DO we send students in-world?

For mobile technology, especially e-texts and note-taking apps, the advantage in a classroom setting, traditional, online, or hybrid, are immediate. Students need not lug heavy books to class, work, or bed. The devices link them directly to research sources. Virtual worlds, in comparison, are clumsy add-on apps that do not play with other applications well. Hence the notecards, LSL minefields, database failures, and other peculiarities that keep VWs from becoming mainstream in the near-term future.

Meanwhile, students working with a colleague in Physics are walking around campus at night and pointing their iPads at the heavens. On their screens, Sky Safari. It is intuitive and easy and can be done on the prowl with our campus wireless. Don't try that with a virtual world.

Reason 3: "Fast, Easy Fun"...We got it wrong before

We will all have characters in MOOs. We will all study literary hypertext. We will all have avatars in immersive 3D virtual worlds.

We'll all pilot flying cars on our commutes, too.

None of these technologies were easy for mainstream users. Some were fast, and to me all of them could be fun.

Remember Linden Lab's marketing push a while back, given Philip Rosedale's pitch that SL should be "Fast, Easy, Fun"? Hamlet Au nailed the challenges Linden Lab faced then. I would claim, based on my experience in OpenSim, that the challenges are even higher for mainstream faculty.

Not so for tablets and smart phones. They are fast and easy. Changing apps is a lot easier for a noob like me than was changing my outfit in SL.

And used judiciously, they are fun.  Too many users are addicted to them, but that's beyond a faculty member's control.

Mobile devices as "Flavor of the Month"? Hardly. More like "future main course."

Technologies Overengineered, Ruined, or Abandoned: An Occasional Series

Location: Staring at the Shaving Mug

I'm getting ready to shave again. Some time ago, I switched from an expensive and over-engineered Sensor razor to my grandfather's 1920s Gem Micromatic razor.  I wrote about my reasons here and I still love it. With only one small nick in two months of fun, shaving has again become a manly and pleasant ritual, not a forgotten act as I prepare to do other things or--shudder--try the rapid task-shifting that some mislabel "multitasking."

Given the lack of news about virtual worlds, other than that reported well by other bloggers, and my lack of teaching there, I'm going to diversify the blog again.

I'm looking at an idea that James Howard Kunstler has popularized for a while, one that preceded my meeting Jim and getting caught up in his ideas. Jim is about to publish a new nonfiction book about the diminishing returns of technology. The idea of technologies done well and then forgotten has long captivated me, though I suspect that my Neo-Luddism has taken a different and more tech-friendly turn than Jim would make.  Both of us agree that "new" does not always mean "improved."

I plan to cover, in the next few weeks, several technologies that have been, in my opinion, perfected but then "improved" further or worse still, abandoned.  Here are some candidates:

• Apple's iMovie software
• The Saturn I and V rockets (you know I can't resist space stuff)
• Light local rail networks of the 20s-60s
• The fast-food restaurants of the 1950s and 60s
• The Leatherman^tm Pocket Tool
• The returnable-bottle soft drink
• DeWalt and Porter Cable power tools, after Black & Decker acquired them
• The Volkswagen Jetta TDI, Honda Civic, and Mazda 3 series.

I have personal experience with all but the Saturn rockets (pity!), Honda, and Mazda (near pity!).

My series will be opinionated (go figure) and open to critique and amendments. 

Got some other candidates for tech done well, then messed up or left to rust?

Ballardian Fate for Virtual Spaceport?

 
Location: Spaceport Alpha

I'm a space-program junkie...I wanted to see a Kubrick-style future like that of 2001 so badly that it afflicted my childhood.  Those who are not what Eric Strobel calls "Children of Apollo" and remember our young American gods in space suits cannot imagine the sadness of seeing humanity withdraw into the inner spaces of our networks and, yes, "places" like Second Life.

Update for 2/16/12: I located Strobel's article from SpaceDaily about those whose early impressions were profoundly shaped by the Space-Race years. Today we Children of Apollo "are uneasy; feeling vaguely cheated that the nation that went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base in a single lifetime seems likely to go no further in their lifetimes. This sense of uneasiness is aggravated by the distinct potential of a less-than-mediocre future."

Now a virtual tour of that elusive future, SL's Spaceport Alpha, is threatened with closure. I loved sending students there, but part of me knew that these were not the technological dreams of their generation. Kudos to Hamlet Au for running this story, but he's a techno-optimist. I'll pour some Neo-Luddite tea for readers about this.

The potential closure moves me in some profound ways because it rubs an old wound. Since 1969, being a space-junkie has been a lonely addiction. I do not believe that government programs will give us that long-heralded "Third Industrial Revolution" and the Space Age is, in fact, in its final act. As a Peak Oiler, I fear that we won't be able to travel 100 miles easily on earth in 100  years, so going even 100 miles up will become a whispered legend.  The International Space Station will deorbit, the Russian and Chinese programs wither as energy crises consume all our ingenuity. Meanwhile,  climate change will bankrupt us even as it wrecks our coasts.  I don't think the US will ever, in my lifetime, build a new launch system beyond, perhaps, a few initial missions. Congress, public apathy, and national bankruptcy will see to that.

It might have been different, with solar-power sats and asteroid mining in the 1980s, had Americans not lost their reach. But we did. We might have made money up there and opened that final frontier. We are left with comsats and sub-orbital space tourism, plus a space station that is little more than a floating janitor's closet for the folks who service it while doing little useful science and no exploration at all. The wonderful unmanned missions carry the torch of exploration, but they do little to make us a spacefaring race living on many planets. This is the goal all Children of Apollo share.

And even Space tourism? So far it is a stunt for the wealthy....despite Richard Branson's good intentions, it remains bungee-jumping in a private rocketship. One lost rocket and it will end, too.

I hope that the fate of US space artifacts--physical proof that we are pygmies after an age of giants--is not as squalid as that of our old Russian enemies. Their space shuttle complex, storing the Buran orbiter, collapsed in 2002 after budgets for maintaining the building vanished. Under snow load the huge building came down and obliterated the relics of that project. What remains of the complex for building space shuttles now? "The former orbiter manufacturing plant was reportedly converted to produce buses, syringes, and diapers." (from an Aerospaceweb article).

Syringes and diapers.

Unless we get that long-awaited signal from space that shows us that we are not alone in an indifferent universe, I recommend a new monument in Second Life.

We need a J.G. Ballard "Memories of the Space Age" Museum, with decaying shuttles lashed to rusty gantries that sprout Spanish Moss.

Until I see humans climb to the heavens in any number, I fear that our space fever-dreams will prove as ephemeral as those of Spaceport Alpha. Our current techno-fetishism of thumbing our little phones is, compared to the Big Science of the 60s, pitiable.

It involves a downward glance, not the horizon-defying gaze of the rocket men.

To quote a Gordon Lightfoot lyric, "the Space Shuttle ends where the subway begins. There's a tear on the face of the moon."

I heard that in the 70s, reading it as a lament for the end of Apollo. And now we may lose the first virtual monument to that Golden Age of space travel. So, ISM, as the book jacket for the Arkham House edition of Ballard's Cape Canaveral stories proclaims, "Hail and Farewell!"

Neo-Luddite Reflections on Razors and Shaving Nerds

 Location: Becoming an Aqua-Velva Man

Although I made a great leap forward a few weeks ago, by disconnecting our land line and getting a cellular phone, I compensated by becoming a throwback in matters of personal hygiene.

No, I still bathe and brush my teeth daily. I mean shaving: I reverted to my grandfather's Gem Micromatic safety razor, after misplacing my Gillette Sensor two-blade. For some time, at the prompting of another friend who questions technology on a daily basis, I was considering "going retro" with my shaving. Moreover, I got angry over the war of escalation in price and numbers of blades per razor (it's spawned a parody of Moore's Law: 14 blades / razor blade by the year 2100!). I dislike electric razors, having used one for nearly a decade in and after high school.

So it was back to 1920 for me. I'm also skilled with my grandfather's razor (a pristine version is pictured here); in his last years, I shaved him weekly with it, causing nary a nick. And for 30 years I have used his shaving mug and a brush, after finding shaving creme expensive and wasteful.

Being a thick-bearded man of Lebanese descent, I wear a closely cropped beard and have done so for--gasp--33 years. I only shave my throat and cheekbones.  This reduces nicking, but I was unprepared for the excellence of a technology nearly 100 years old. Simply put: nothing modern touches a good blade in a safety razor, excepting a straight razor that I won't dare try even with my steady hands.

As usual, an innocent interest of mine lands me in the midst of fanatical collectors. All things nerdy spawn Web sites, so I give you:

• The Internet Museum of Safety Razors: My Micromatic is on the Gem page, if you are so inclined. I rather miss these "Internet 1.0" sites...the museum site was last updated in 2004, alas.
• Badger and Blade, with a shaving wiki!
• Classic Shaving (.com). Of course.
• Lee's Safety Razors: this is my favorite of the lot. 

I think I'll be buying a second "travel" razor, given that my daily is a family heirloom. Somewhere in the afterlife, my dad and grandfather, clean shaven of course, are having a good laugh and saying "what is the matter with you, boy? You crazy?" Dad was a typical "new and improved 20th Century guy." "Old" meant "toss the damn thing out," to him. My grandfather was more like me, questioning why things change just to make more money for a company already producing a well designed, effective product. But even he would laugh at me for being so sentimental about an everyday object that had served him well for many decades.

No, this is not some trend, in my case, spawned by Mad Men. It's the return to an appropriate and sustainable technology after Gillette made shaving ludicrous and most gear has become disposable.  You may have noticed that some stores lock down their razor blades to prevent theft. At a dollar per cartridge, it's easy to see why. Single-edged blades are just as sharp, last longer without clogging, and cost half what a Sensor razor blade ran me.

Shaving has become fun again. It's more of a mindful and meditative ritual now, which is what using technology should be, in my opinion, to keep one from taking it for granted. I'll soon have a '65 Mustang ragtop back on the road, an old favorite car of my wife's, and from driving her other classic, a '68 Chevy C-10 truck, I can tell you: you do not multitask with antique technology. Eyes on the open road or your precious throat.

Besides, old-school shaving has all the doo-dads that make antique technology so fascinating: I love wiping the blade clean amid the wafting scent of aftershave, as I prepare myself for the daily grind. I had stopped using aftershave, but now, with such a close shave daily, it refreshes my skin. Moreover, when shaving with antiques one must pay attention to the razor or risk a cut. I'm very good at it, but the focus is zen-like: hai karate!

Well, back to slapping my cheeks with Aqua Velva and repeating old jingles that my truck-driver father used to belt out on our road trips:

Ladies jump from fire escapes
To get away from hairy apes.
Use Burma Shave!

That's not quite the historical slogan, but it was good enough for me to kindle a life-long interest in the manly art of a good, close shave.

James Howard Kunstler Talks Back to My Class

This week, in Duncan Crary's and James Howard Kunstler's weekly Kunstlercast, Jim responded to questions from my Eng. 216 "Invented Worlds" students about his novel World Made by Hand.

Jim Kunstler

Set in Washington County, New York several years after an economic collapse in America, the novel upended my students' notions of continual technological progress.

They cannot imagine a world where the screens go dark and stay dark, where chatting to friends involves talking over a fence, and where getting a meal means a trip to the garden or root-cellar.  While I tend to agree with them that Jim might underestimate human ingenuity in the face of a prolonged energy crisis or economic downturn, I likewise think my Millennial students and their Boomer and Xer parents are a bit naive about progress. They don't see clearly, or often enough, how every technological innovation brings with it unintended consequences, even as it fails to deliver every miracle we might expect (I'll shine your flying car if I'm wrong).

World Made By Hand and its sequel, The Witch of Hebron, are bracing speculative fiction, and I'm glad Jim found time, between gigs as far afield as Sweden and Australia, to be a gracious and receptive respondent.

The podcast can be found at iTunes podcast listing (search for "Kunstlercast") or from the Kunstlercast site.

Now, if the reader will excuse me, it's time to get some wood I split and fire up the wood-stove. I'm not kidding. For now, at least, blogging and wood-splitting exist side by side. In 20 years, I suspect our world is going to look more like Kunstler's and less like William Gibson's or even the banal utopia of the sofa-bound YouTube addict.

Facebook's UI and Second Life

Location: Facebook Account

The user interface is laggy at peak times, even on a fast connection. The ability to customize it is so limited that several Facebook users have recommended third-party products to improve my social networking experience.

This all sounds very familiar, doesn't it?

A couple of months in with Facebook, I can only say that I like it because it let me re-introduce myself to a few old friends with whom I've lost touch. I'm going to have a beer with one of them as soon as we can agree on a day and time.

On the other hand, I get a lot of spam from folks who know me and think I actually care about the little happenings of their daily lives. So other than the "stay in touch with old friends" business, what is the appeal?

Now that Google has launched Google+, its latest attempt at a social networking tool, one wonders how much traction it will get. Facebook enjoys the sort of reputation that Second Life had...in 2006. That can, of course, change quickly, as the former owners of MySpace discovered.

We'll see how Google does...ah, yes. Just blocked the FB apps "smiles" and "causes." I can smile in person and am involved in several environmental causes already.

Treasures of an Arcane and Monastic Craft: Scholarly Editing

image credit: Encyclopedia Virginia site, University of Virginia. Fredson Bowers, standing, works with Matthew Bruccoli  at a Hinman Collator.

This entry began as a reply to a recent post by Tateru Nino about the preference for physical or e-texts.

Somehow, I stupidly fumbled my posting and it vanished into pixeldust. That is, frankly, an apt beginning for this post, where I state my preference for reading physical text. Now, with a few days behind me, I've had more time to think about why.

For a brief time in graduate school, I considered heeding the siren-song of textual editing, a small but valued part of academic publishing. My mentor and PhD advisor at Indiana, Professor Don Cook, was a noted scholar in this field. Along with a band of similar-minded editors from universities, Don worked on editions of the works of William Dean Howells and other American authors. Sanctioned by the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, the CSE imprimatur of "an approved edition" meant that these books were felt to represent the best possible edition available.  By comparing a proposed edition to an author's corrected manuscript or perhaps a first edition, the new text would embody, as closely as possible, the words and arrangement an author wanted.

Debates raged about what to do when someone like Scott Fitzgerald rearranged Tender is the Night completely, making a new version that many readers detest. Which text do we follow? Scribner's first edition or Fitzgerald's rewriting? When new editions appeared and an author assisted, how to tell which changes reflect an author's work, and which that of a lazy typesetter?

A Life Defined by Books and Bookishness

In the end, I chose another path. I am an awful and easily bored proofreader, racing on to the next paragraph and, only later, coming back to tidy up the mess I have made. Yet the crystalline purity of a CSE edition has always been a strong lure as I've built my personal library over the years. I'm also the sort to hunt down a good hardback copy of a book I love and then donate the paperback I used for teaching or that was my first encounter with a life-altering text.   Let's see what those might be...pressed to answer right now, I'd cite Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Adams' The Education of Henry Adams, Abbey's Desert Solitaire, Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, Eco's The Name of the Rose, Wharton's The House of Mirth, Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, O'Connor's Wise Blood, Faulkner's The Hamlet, and anything by Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.

Not a one, except Nooteboom's shorter travel essays, would feel right on a screen. I like my "reader's" copies with my marginalia, as well as my second copies which I return to reread for pure pleasure. Most of the latter are hardbound. Blame this fetish on my work with scholarly editions.

Perhaps we can enter a world in which a fine printed edition can coexist, as a luxury item, alongside a reasonably correct e-text. Don Cook predicted that book collecting would become ever more of a niche activity but it would be enriched by computers. He envisioned luxury editions printed to order, for under $100, on great paper and perhaps with a choice of illustrations.

Monks in The Alderman Library

The work of scholarly editors continues electronically and without the bulky collator, but there was still a wonderfully Medieval feeling to the craft in the 1980s. Before tablets and dedicated e-readers become mass market consumer items, I had the sense that this arcane craft was already waning, though its practitioners remained tenacious, rather like the monks in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Once in the Alderman I peered over the shoulders of a foreign ambassador and his wife as a curator of rare books showed them Faulkner's carefully typed and corrected (his handwriting was very precise) manuscript for The Sound and The Fury. I love Faulkner's work for two reasons, first because he invented an entire fictional world; hence the relevance to this blog--Faulkner was a consummate world-maker. Second, he was the first writer who challenged me to read and read again, each encounter taking me deeper into a landscape that, while Southern, was nothing I knew. Yoknapatawpha County might as well have been Burroughs' Barsoom.

So seeing a Faulkner manuscript was like being shown the Shroud of Turin.

There's a romantic idea that the types of projects with such treasures transcend the "and now this!" culture of online communities. Neil Postman coined the term for the culture of television, but in fact it's more true than ever for the torrent of Tweets or Facebook status updates. In fact, the meditative work of comparing editions and manuscripts to remove errors that creep in is an act of passive aggression against the very spaces such as the one I use to compose this text.

It's with a bit of a shiver that I look at the photo of Bowers, a senior colleague of Don's, and Matthew Bruccoli, a contemporary of Don's for whom, many years ago, I wrote a few short bibliographic entries for a scholarly reference work. I know exactly the section in the Alderman where they are working.

I studied there as an undergrad, more than 30 years ago, and in 2002 went back to that part of the library to work on my own editing project of Antebellum Southern Humor, The Spirit of the Southern Frontier (have a look, but it's a bit of a ghost town). I was able to teach with the site twice, so I think the grant money was well spent, and the student who helped went on to her own PhD. There is a great feeling of "standing on the shoulders" of, if not giants, one's intellectual ancestors when working in such a place.

For a while at least, this aspect of monastic life continues. As our culture, the part that cares about serious reading anyway, passes from difficulty to difficulty, I think that we'll end up thankful to men and women who spent many quiet hours preparing good editions.

Peak Oil: Should I Be Glad?

One of the most interesting of invented worlds is that of America's auto-utopia of continuous driving. We redesigned...well, ruined...our cities to make them safer for driving and parking cars. What would we do if it cost hundreds of dollars to fill up? Already, filling up my full-sized pickup truck runs $100, the first time I have ever spent that much on fuel. A tank of gas will last over a month, however, given how infrequently I use the vehicle for farm work. I purchased a locking gas-cap, too.

Others drive similar vehicles daily, and they are suffering, often casting about for easy targets to blame. What if geology were the culprit?

It seems that even Exxon-Mobil has come around to seeing that the days of cheap oil are over permanently. I follow Bloomberg's energy-price listing fanatically, given my belief that the data about Peak Oil are correct and we're a year or two from this issue becoming part of the popular lexicon.

As with Climate Change, the transition to public consciousness took a while to realize.  There are a few doubters who believe in an infinitely renewable supply of "abiotic" oil, but the science is just not there.

The next time some guy wishing for $1.00 gasoline to fill the fat tank in his Chevy Suburban blames the President or even OPEC for high gas prices, try this. Hand out a little card with this URL from Energy & Captial:

http://www.energyandcapital.com/aqx_p/26311

When investors start recommending Peak-Oil portfolios, one realizes that the transition to a "new normal" is well underway. I've know "it's over" for a long time, and my proof came in a Guardian story based on a Wikileaks report.  Though the Saudi official who warned US diplomats later denied making alarming remarks about his nation's supply of oil, everything said seconded Matthew Simmons geological evidence for a permanent decline in the Saudi oil reserves.

Meanwhile, Jim Kunstler keeps up his own litany of doom about an America unable "to make other arrangements" than what his loves to call "happy motoring." Jim's prognosis is gloomier than mine, but neither of us know the timing of the disruptions that a permanent decline in the global supply of oil might cause. I suspect, unlike Kunstler, that many Americans will still own cars, but they won't define our lives and places of living as they have done.

Gas prices are dipping, for now. I doubt that will last, given global demand for oil.  And whether global supply permanently peaked in 2006 or whether it will in 2016 (my bet is somewhere in that range) we'll enter a new era of human history. The automobile age, barely a century old, will become a short aberration in a longer story, as driving returns to being an expensive luxury.

A Week of Digital Stories Starts With "The Last Text"

Location: On the virtual set

My students have a pizza-and-film-festival event tonight, showing their digital stories that were the final project for my course on the history and culture of cyberspace.

All week I'll feature student stories, but today I'll begin with my own, done to test the technology I expected students to use. Speak shout outs to Ken Warren of Richmond's Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and my Writing Consultant, Korine.

As one might expect if you know me, some student-composers explored dystopian, Neo-Luddite, and cyberpunk themes. I hope they were not being so dark to pander to the professor, since this project gives them freedom to create anything as long as it relates to our course themes.

Doing a story with iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is a laborious process. I decided to do one myself; it took 10 hours to gather or take the photos, more to put them with a narrative. I did record it in one take, the only part of the process that was quick.

Here's my piece, inspired by the utter addiction to constant contact I see around me. Perhaps we should pay more attention to events beyond the horizon of the self, before that is the only horizon we have remaining.

No Exodus to Virtual Worlds for These Millennials

Location: Glued to Keyboard, Working (not Gaming!) on a Fine Spring Day

On reading Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World, once again the types of Millennial I teach are nearly uniform in their disdain for a cultural migration to use avatars in our lives and work. I think my students represent a majority view of career-driven and affluent US college students. I’m told that our campus is not that unique.

Dare I claim a surprising Neo-Luddite response in this rejection of virtual worlds?  Irony of ironies: as a decided Neo-Luddite, I see occasional use of virtual worlds as an environmentally sustainable alternative to academic conferences, expensive brick-and-mortar training, and even some forms of cultural tourism. Our driving is wrecking our planet's ecosystem. The less we do, the better, and I welcome all forms of telepresence as alternatives to "commuting to the office." We're more likely to power our grid with alternative technology, or at least clean the point sources at power plants than we are to tidy up billions of tail-pipes emitting poisons.

But enough of my fears; there are plenty from the students for one post. The finest negative response came from this writer; it is nuanced in a way many others are not and I think it shows what I’ve intuited among the Facebook: Yes, Games: No mainstream of Richmond students.

I don’t ever see myself using a virtual world, but that could just be because of my current situation. In college, I am constantly surrounded by my friends and love talking to them and spending time with them face to face. I don’t picture myself wanting to spend ten hours a day online in a virtual world, instead of laughing out loud and talking to my real life friends. In addition, my opportunity cost of spending more than two hours a day online is too great. I would be failing all my classes because I would be giving up time to study to be in a virtual world. I cannot afford to essentially waste my time not being productive. I also do not like the idea of anonymity online. People can create avatars that don’t look anything like them and pretend to be someone completely different. While people can be misleading on Facebook, I know I only communicate with my friends, people that I know in the real world. Virtual worlds can be very private and people do not meet the people in real life with whom they are making alliances and friends with.

Here are a few other voices from their class blogs, almost all negative:

“I do understand that there are many people today who are already deeply involved in virtual worlds. I am not one of these people. Perhaps, because of this, I am biased against such worlds. I would much rather spend my time talking with my friends or furthering my education (getting my parents' money's worth).”

“In my experience, games (even MMOs) are something that is outgrown.  I know many of my friends (myself included) who played consistently throughout middle and some of high school and then left due to lack of extra time or lack of interest.”

“An overwhelming majority of college-aged kids view virtual worlds as time wasting, unproductive, and nerdy addictions reserved for the socially inept.”

“I’m sorry, but I will never spend hours interacting in cyberspace, nor will I allow my children or my children’s children to join the exodus to the virtual world.”    

“The current generation (The Millennials) is almost entirely preoccupied with social networking. ‘Facebookers’ as we are sometimes called, we would rather use virtual realities to connect with old friends from back home, not to escape the confines of daily life. So instead of being active users, we may participate maybe once or twice a week, giving us no reason to participate in the exodus.”

“What he describes is something so artificial and unnatural. There are many gamers out in cyberspace right now who want to escape their lives and transform into something they are not, however I am not one of them. The main issue is of avoidance and denial. When you assume these fake identities then you are essentially in denial of your own life. I don’t think its healthy not to deal with the issues present and escape to a virtual world.”

One contrarian voice notes “I think that our bias as successful college individuals also blinds us from other populations that use games to escape from their circumstance.”

This is my opinion as well. My students cannot imagine the modern version of Emerson’s “quiet desperation” of many individuals who seek escape, or those who see themselves empowered to do things not possible in real life. Those may be artists working in a new medium, explorers of simulations not possible here (to one blogger, I cited Ancient Egypt or the interior of the human heart as examples).

Another student was kinder to Castronova’s ideas:

We all want to be challenged and overcome obstacles in order to feel good about ourselves. Additionally, we want to have fun, to simply enjoy our existence and be happy. As Castronova puts it “helping people find happiness may involve something other than giving them the things they currently seek” (88). This is what these online games promise.

One student who feels good about virtual worlds stands apart from the rest and says a great deal about what they don’t see:

I could jump into a virtual world right now.

No, really. All I'd need is a secure income. I could be there 24/7, easy.

As I looked around the classroom when this question was asked, I had the feeling I was the only one who felt this way. Some of you are probably shaking you're heads right now, thinking "You're crazy," but I'll tell you why I can do it.

For one, I'm used to it. Sitting in front of a screen for hours is easy to me. When I'm not at class or with my friends, I'm plopped in front of the screen. Furthermore, I'm used to synthetic worlds. Being in a fake world with filled with real people who don't look like themselves is normal to me. I don't find it weird.

Secondly, just about everyone is already engaged in a digital world, whether they realize it or not. We've really already migrated over in Facebook. My best friend once told me, "The more friends you have on Facebook, the fewer you have in real life." And as someone who has over 400 Facebook friends, but less than 10 real friends she can actually trust, she would know. She's in her own world where she has lots of friends that are easily accessible no matter where they live, where she thinks other people care about what her status is, where all her photos are of her looking perfect, and where she only has to care about what she wants to.

Here’s how I answered a different student, and my response could have been to them all:

Your comments echo many in the class. I understand your disdain, but the number of generalizations is enormous here. I applaud you for admitting your bias.

Before we judge these individuals, we might try better to understand them. As noted in class, Richmond students are, in many cases, from sheltered and loving families who provide support and care.

It is very different beyond the campus gates, even for many in your age-group; in fifteen years, as a virtual worlds researcher, I will be most curious to see how the Millennial generation regards escapist entertainment online.

I disagree with Castronova's thesis; I think virtual-world use will increase among all age groups, but there will be no exodus. Usage will be as a casual and occasional escape or for limited professional purposes such as simulations for technical or military training and meetings.

Reality will instead become more and more difficult, under the strains of environmental damage, political gridlock, resource scarcity, and economic stress, and we'll learn to take better care of the real again as we strive to fix the things generations before yours broke.

My biggest hope for you Millennials is that the researchers who wrote Millennials Rising are correct: yours is the next "Great Generation" able to collaborate, remain cheerful, and solve problems without the slack and cynicism of my Gen-X peers or the narcissism and greed of the Baby Boomers.

Maybe if your peers stay in Reality instead of making the exodus, you can accomplish great things. Maybe you'll even use Facebook to organize your efforts!

Living in Gibson's Future? Close Enough to Be Scary.

Location: Midpoint of Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis
image credit: Barclay Shaw

The students in my first-year seminar may not understand, for a book published before they were even born, how William Gibson's Neuromancer not only shook up the genre of science fiction but also helped spawn a revolution in how those building the Web and its applications regard information

When I created a Second Life account in 2007, I left it an open question, in the "first life" tab for the avatar, as to whether Gibson's future would be realized in SL. Now I have the feeling that my question needed a broader scope: has Gibson's future been realized in both the worlds of, to use his dichotomy, meat and mind? If anything SL tries hard to be Gibsonian but fails: no one is as immersed as Case is in the novel, nor, for that matter, Molly and Armitage in their own part of futurity.

Mostly, however, Gibson got things close enough to scare me. As Egypt's government shuts down Internet access and cell-phone services, I recognize an eerie parallel to Wu's idea of a Master Switch that did not exist in 1984, when Neuromancer appeared. Gibson envisioned a more open Net than we have or that Wu believes we might get, but Gibson conceded that the "spiral arms of military systems" (52) would be forever beyond the reach of loners like Case.  They still are.

Yet using free public software, a million disenfranchised loners have united to topple Egypt's government, and at the time of writing this they may get their wish.  The keepers of those spiral arms, the Egyptian government, like their counterparts in Iran a few years back, know that their foes need cell telephony and Facebook to organize.

The rest of the world can only sit back and watch the chaos and, in Saudi Arabia, the government may be patting itself on the back for shutting out Facebook not so long ago.

But if Gibson were actually prophetic, then other aspects of his future should be closer to our door than the streets of Cairo.

Zaibatsus and Archologies

Put a Fuller Dome over many exurban gated communities in the US and Western Europe and you'd have the residential component of Neuromancer's way of life for the megacorporations: happy corporate employees going to their desks and conference rooms to plan and build a world to maximize a company's return on investment. Shopping and entertainment are only at a small remove, along the suburban sprawl, from the home cocoons. Only cheap oil has meant that workers drive to various destinations, instead of living and working and shopping together in the same place.

What would an arcology look like? There is one very Gibsonian building at the Web site of Yanko Design.  Called NOAH (New Orleans Arcology Habitat) it evokes the end-times of a next Big Storm and the sense of heroic futurism that the megacorps might project in a post-governmental world.  The comments on the proposal fascinate me: techno-dread and triumphalism characterize the remarks.

Following the logic of governmental minimalists and libertarians in the United States, whose voices are loud these days, a future where self-defining communities evolve into self-governing ones may not be so far-fetched. At the consensual level, it may already be as close as one's neighborhood covenant.

But the coming of Corporate Man (and Woman) has concurrently meant an increased stratification of wealth in US communities. Bruce Sterling once quipped that the 1980s dawned not only as the first American decade that seemed like science fiction but also a return to a neo-Victorian world with social-Darwinist conditions for citizens. How did that vision, crystallized in Neuromancer, pan out?

What follows is less critical than it might seem. In fact, as I'll note, I'm not sure it's ever been otherwise, except for its sheer scale. In 2007, the 1% of American citizens controlled 43% of financial wealth and 35% of net worth. The title of the report where I gathered this, "Who Rules America," gave an ideological slant that made me a little doubtful about the lack of bias by Professor Domhoff, so I found another source.

The US Census Bureau's report,"A Brief Look at Postwar U.S. Income Inequality" paints a picture not unlike Dumhoff's:

The long-run increase in income inequality is related to changes in the Nation’s labor market and its household com- position. The wage distribution has become considerably more unequal with more highly skilled, trained, and educated workers at the top experiencing real wage gains and those at the bottom real wage losses.

There's more at the Census Web site. I become a little less convinced, then, that Dumhoff is riding a hobby horse of leftist angst. One should pause before numbers like these from Domhoff: "Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, [1983-2004] fully 42% of it went to the top 1%."

Even so, the distribution of wealth before 1983 was not one of which I'm proud, given my belief that a large and politically active middle-class of property owners, such as all those returning GIs in 1945, can be an excellent shield against the sort of governance (and lack of it) Gibson portrays.   Citizens like the GIs who built the neighborhood were I now live, of modest ambitions and demeanor, have historically been  eager to protect their families and thus they've supported strong policing and orderly neighborhoods. Except for the turbulence of 1968, America has never had Egyptian-style chaos in the streets: Egypt has no middle class any longer, by all accounts.

Sadly, after 2008 and the financial meltdown, many more Americans have been thrown out of our middle class. Each foreclosure and failed company could take us a step closer to a neo-Victorian form of income inequality that characterizes Cyberpunk's view of the future.  And I doubt that all of the millions of dispossessed will leave their bank-seized homes peacefully. 2011 may be an interesting year.

Console Cowboys

But housing, like travel to Case, is a "meat thing." On the mind front, the lone cyber-cowboys of Gibson's world have not emerged. Wikileaks' revelations took a team of dedicated "hacktivists" to accomplish. At the same time, another aspect of current hacking comes straight from Neuromancer.

The cyber-attack on Iran's nuclear installations may have set back the nation's bomb-building program for some time. In a world like Gibson's, a zaibatsu might have stopped a rogue nation, given the failure of the US and Soviet governments after Operation Screaming Fist.  In our actuality, Israel and the US and who knows else might have launched the attack.  Thus we've moved further along than Gibson's world, technologically.

The Soviet computer centers Armitage mentions had to be attacked with Special-Forces hacker-operatives sent in on microlight gliders. In our world, Iran's systems are tied to the global Internet. So are ours, and both China and the US are quietly jockeying, behind the scenes, to develop cyberwar teams. If our nations ever go to war, Internet services and all its dependent systems--power grids, air-traffic systems, banking--will become legitimate domestic targets.

Street Samurai

On the "meat" front, our Molly might be named "Mike."

Burly men doing legitimate (and, at times, dirty) deeds for whatever Blackwater is now called, and firms like it, does not quite have the sex-appeal of Gibson's razorgirl.

At the same time, for this reader it would have been impossible in the early 80s to imagine Mercs, and that is what all "private security contractors" are, Mercenaries, enjoying the cultural acceptance they now enjoy. Many of my fellow citizens get a bit queasy on this subject, but for the past decade the US government has relied on Mercs to do jobs we do not wish to task to our armed forces or that require manpower we simply do not have in uniform without drafting college-aged kids.

In the 80s, except for Soldier of Fortune readers, the use of mercenaries by our government would have stirred widespread outrage. Now, if I may risk a generalization, with a 24/7 new cycle the attention of the public appears to move faster than it did 26 years ago, to the latest tragedy, scandal, or political circus.  Meanwhile, private security companies have limited accountability to US or international law. They are true Gibsonian figures of the "interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art" (44).  Put in "law" for "art" and you have our situation.

Meanwhile, poor Molly. I don't think Gibson meant her to become a meme, but she has.

I'm glad we don't have razorgirl mercs walking the night cities of our world, but Molly can be found elsewhere: she's the badass sex-object of a hundred video games and action / adventure films. Hollywood understands male lust for these tough babes with guns and blades. Molly scares and attracts the boys, and I'm sure that more than a few male readers empathize with Case when he gets to enjoy her pleasures.

Naturally, one recent attempt to cast a film based upon the book would have featured Milla Jovovich as Molly: Resident Evil's killer star would get to put on the mirror eye-inserts. It's that way in any number of films or games where the strong woman is just as much a sex object as any gatefold playmate.  As my students will see when they get further into the book, there's that dark and disgusting desire out there to have a "meat puppet."  That technology is perhaps the most frightening of the book and, like organ-markets and stim-sim sets, it remains possible but not part of our lives.

We have Microsoft as a multinational, not microsofts that one puts into a skull-plug to learn a new skill. And the best we can do for Stim-Sim is the current 3D craze. Merge it with a Wii or Kinect, and we may approach something like watching through Tally Isham's eyes in her latest episode.

Better Living Through Bioengineering?

When students on campus trade Ritalin to do better on exams, yes, we live in a cyberpunk world. My students are afraid of our "street" and, whipped up the ladder by well meaning parents and educators like me, do their best to avoid it whatever the emotional cost.

At least, if any of us do wind up on the streets with between two and three million American homeless, we do not have to cope with illegal dealers in pituitary glands or black clinics in the worst part of town, ready to roll us for our kidneys.


In scope if not depth, Gibson was spot on about the culture of body modification, when teens have elective cosmetic surgery and their parents get Botox regularly. A single earring was a novelty on a man in 1984, and potentially a dangerous one. Now tats and piercings are common.

A dermatologist, who helped my mother with a degenerative eye disorder that required a monthly Botox injection, told me he'd given up on really iffy surgery that could land him in court. Instead, his income came mostly from vanity, that ready fix of Botox to keep the bathroom mirror lying to his patients every morning.

Verdict: Close Enough to Scare Me

Image Source: Unknown

In the end, we don't, and probably never will, have orbiting colonies of Rastas or French spas run by a maniacal and inbred family. I doubt that our planet has enough fossil fuels that are cheaply available to sustain enough wealth to make dreams like Richard Branson's, of cheap space tourism, happen. If I'm wrong, I'll be too old to get the ride to orbit I've wanted since I saw a Gemini launch in the mid 1960s.

In other regards, however, I'm happy to say that Gibson got a great deal wrong. May it continue to be so, because what he predicted correctly has been frightening enough.  Ours is a harder-edged world than it was in 1984, when the Cold War raged on.  And the technologies of interconnection empower lots of individuals. Al Quaeda, not the Panther Moderns, uses the Internet but the violence engendered is still the stuff of nightmare.

So, Bill, thanks for all of the bad dreams. You really invented a genre and, in some ways, a world.

Work Cited:

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.