Machine Visions 044: Connections - Warren Ellis

From Warren Ellis' Machine Visions Newsletter:

MACHINE VISION 044: Connections

Been writing short stories.  One of them, LICH-HOUSE, was written for a special publication of the Institute For The Future.  I believe it will eventually end up being placed online for free reading.  It’s part of a project also contributed to by Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Ramez Naam and Rudy Rucker.  I just did a Skype interview for it tonight.

(Yes, I now turn Skype on from time to time.  I need to get better at that.)

Liminal space.  Broke ground on a possibly-comics-related thing the other night.  Spending a lot of nights staring at the wall and thinking.  Which is kind of easy, these days, as I get very little email, and very little inbound in general.  Which is also a thing to think about.  The nature of shifting connectivity.

(Incidentally, if you, like me, let your Gmail inbox build up to massive, ridiculous, proportions, then a service called mailstrom.co is great for sorting it out.  Smartlabels, in Gmail Labs, needs a bit of tuning, but it redirects some only-occasionally-useful email out of your inbox.  I’m not an inbox-zero person, and I use a shitload of labels in general so I can see what’s going on at a glance, but it feel like I have a bit more control when the front page of my Gmail contains only emails received in 2013…!)

I used to be connected to lots of things.  Now I am connected to almost none.  I also fell out of the habit of blogging.  I get sent no music for SPEKTRMODULE (there’s a new one, by the way – I’m almost weekly at the moment) – it’s all music I buy or find.  I don’t even get good stats from the host any more – they made the stats premium, and I’ll have to pay more to get the old stats package back.

So I can’t grab the CSV to stick into the lovely Panic Status Board appfor iPad.  This app so radiates the sense of Informational Power that you want to use it to watch over everything ever.  My iPad sits in a stand next to my laptop as a second screen.  It’s actually great as a glanceable, even when it’s just monitoring Twitter, email and a few feeds.  If I had the time to work out how to make it do more, I would.  I think Rich Stevens is testing it to destruction right now.

But it is a thing.  It is a thing that speaks of connectedness, of Total Awareness.  On the site today, I spoke of “Bigend-Packerism,” from Hubertus Bigend of Bill Gibson’s last trilogy and Eric Packer from COSMOPOLIS.  Both characters’ practises centre around total awareness of their ecologies.  From one aspect, they’re rogue foresight strategists.  Bigend needs to find The New Thing before it has fully eventuated.  Packer, at one point in COSMOPOLIS, says, looking at his Informational Power Screen, “why am I seeing things that haven’t happened yet?”  They are both, not coincidentally, surreally wealthy. 

This little app on this simple consumer toy that sits on the stand next to me: it’s an emulation of that kind of complete connectedness.  Anything I do is going to be a cheap copy of that kind of practise.  And, yes, it’s entirely fictional.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not seductive, nor that it’s not a weird ideaspace echo of something happening somewhere else.  Information when contextualised by the appropriate intellects is the means of production.  Panic Status Board confers the pleasant but entirely fake feeling of being a captain of informational industry.

Ellis' post on Status Board for iPad which goes alone with this newsletter.