Do things matter?

The internet is stupid. Kitsch with a sleek interface is still kitsch, even when it takes more kitschy technobabble to differentiate the currenty, Web 2.x kitsch from previous iterations of the same themes. The only things more stupid than the internet are the people who use it, and their dim understanding of the technology which supports their interactions is reflected in their limited vocabulary. Also, they don’t understand irony.

Enter the “Manifesto for Networked Things” (PDF link via BoingBoing), by Julian Bleecker, who coins without shame the unfortunate second-order neologism ‘blogject’.

“Blogject” is a neologism that’s meant to focus attention on the participation of “objects” and “things” in the sphere of networked social discourse variously called the blogosphere, or the social web

As Bleecker immediately points out, this term ressonates with Sterling’s far more elegant term spime, which are searchable objects that can be tracked through time and space, and record their own histories and interactions with other objects. So a blogject is a species of spime, distinguished by the fact that it blogs. Bleecker prefers not to use Sterling’s term because, as he says, the semantics of ‘blogject’ are “immediately legible”. Well, its syntax is prima facie atrocious, but are its semantics any better?

“Bloggers” loosely defined, are participants in a network of exchange, disseminating thoughts, opinions, ideas — making culture — through this particular instrument of connections called the Internet.

Although this comes off a bit heavy handed, I appreciate his understanding of blogging: it is a kind of internet-mediated social interaction that reflects our contributions to and interactions with a community. The internet not only facilitates these social interactions, but it unlocks many of the constraints of space and time such that entirely novel modes of interaction are possible, thus allowing for a expanded conception of participation. It is really the idea of participation that Bleecker is after.

The first-order consequence of the Internet of Things is a network in which socially meaningful exchanges takes place, were culture is made, experiences circulated through media sharing — only with objects and human agents. Whereas the Internet of Non-Things was limited to human agents, in the Internet of Things objects are also active participants in the creation, maintenance and knitting together of social formations through the dissemination of meaningful insights that, until now, were not easily circulated in human readable form…The Blogject capacity for producing effects is powerful because it has always been pervasively, ubiquitously, everywhere tethered to the far reaching, speedy, robust network of social exchange and discourse that humanity has constructed.

I am in full (and admittedly jealous) agreement with Bleecker here, and his examples are entirely convincing to someone who is already behind the machine participation project. However, agreement isn’t enough to justify these claims. Lets look at his arguments.

The first two of Bleeker’s three characteristics of blogjects seem to collapse into a single characteristic: blogjects are “self-describing”. They know where they are, where they’ve been, and who they’ve interacted with. And this knowledge is more than just passive properties that need to be queried and retrieved; blogjects are agents. The third of Bleeker’s characteristics is that blogjects assert their knowledge to others; channeling Heidegger, we might say that they make their presence an issue for others. And in so asserting, they become social agents- bloggers- and thus enter the class of interactive, social spimes.

But has Bleecker really differentiated blogjects from spimes? A spime is trackable and searchable, and stores its spatiotemporal history; insofar as spime access is conducted over the net, we might naturally think of all spimes as blogjects. It would seem almost silly, given Bleecker’s radically interconnected picture, to ground the distinction merely on whether the information runs over the Internet. But resting the difference on assertion in some ways just begs the participation question- what, exactly, is the distinction between making information available to others, and genuinely asserting that information? Bleecker is explicit that ‘assertion’ should not be cast in mentalistic terms- “Things could not care any less about their Turing Test report card.” Rather, the participatory force of a blogject arises out of its “ability to affect change”. But this is just two ways of saying the same things. The smoke detector clearly affects change. It gets me out of my house in the case of smoke. Does Bleecker want to claim it participates? Hooking the detector up to the network so I get text-messaged in the event of a fire may be convienent, but hardly changes the basic structure of this interaction. I don’t mean this as an attack; I actually hope he bites this bullet, because thats what I’ve been claiming for years. But if we can’t ground the difference between supposedly ‘passive’ spimes and ‘active’ blogjects, I see no reason to burden ourselves with extra terminology, when spime does so nicely as is.

Bleecker has other reasons for drawing this distinction, which stem from his somewhat cloudy notion of ‘space’. He explicitly intends this notion to be literal- he is talking about the “physical, geospatial world”. The idea, I suppose, is that spimes are merely trackable objects, so email and DNS servers would count, whereas blogjects are trackable, interactive objects that share our space. It is literally in the sharing of space that we can ground the distinction and make sense of the troubling notion of interaction. So the information blogged by the pigeons matters to our physical world, and it is this sharing of space that enters them as participants into our social world. Your email, on the other hand, which likewise shares searchable tracking information, fails to share our space, and so fails to count as a participant.

It is worth noting how similar these premises are to Dreyfus’ (2001) discussion of the internet, and yet how radically different his conclusions are. For Dreyfus, the internet undermines the need for shared space in grounding genuinely social interactions; for Bleecker, the internet enables the sharing of space.

I am much more comfortable talking about ‘environmental space’ as opposed to ‘literal physical space’ in these conversations, just to avoid the whole Dreyfus issue. Environmental space is just the space in which we act when we act together, and that can occur both in the real world and on our blogs and message boards. We interact in these environments, complete with human and machine agents, with many of the same normative standards and expectations. Is video surveillance really any different from snooping my inbox? Both my real world and internet interactions are projections of me, and I worry about any attempt to render me so schizophrenic.

But then, my interactions with the pigeons (insofar as I do interact with them) is conducted not in the real world but solely on their blog, which grounds the way we interact. In many ways, the internet is more real to me than northwestern Canada or whereever those pigeons happen to be sending info from. Furthermore, Google is clearly a participant in the sense Bleecker wants- it actively participates in shaping our understanding of the internet- but it is something of a stretch to say that it is an agent in our physical world. Of course, it has all sorts of access to the physical world, but its interactions with that world are not what make it matter to me. What matters are my interactions with it.

Saying that we don’t need the term ‘blogject’ or that space isn’t really necessary in the way Bleecker suggests isn’t meant as a devastating criticism, or to in any way undermine his project. But I think there are methodological issues that need to be patched up before we can really begin to see the impact of a radically networked world.

11 Comments

  1. “The internet is stupid. Kitsch with a sleek interface is still kitsch, even when it takes more kitschy technobabble to differentiate the currenty, Web 2.x kitsch from previous iterations of the same themes. The only things more stupid than the internet are the people who use it, and their dim understanding of the technology which supports their interactions is reflected in their limited vocabulary. Also, they don’t understand irony.”- is that Bleeker or you? Seems like it would be you, but you didn’t use quotes…

  2. In answer to your first question, no. No a lot.

    Also, Bleeker seems to be infected with the same insipid inability to understand the divide between the empirically existing and the mentally/conceptually significant that plagues modern epistemology, let alone the phenomenology of mediated social interaction. But that’s just a gripe. More to the point, jargon tends to only get in the way of making a point. ‘Spime’, ‘blogject’, etc.–these are just ways to sound edgy. More more to the point, when exactly was there an internet of non-things? There seems to be no principled reason for talking about the difference between passive and active bits of internet technology. It’s all tool, all the time–my clothes are passive, my glasses active, my coffee cup active, my table passive, my microwave active, my alarm clock active, the stoplights… who cares? (Well, you.) This is another way of sneaking agency into the tools. See also “This car practically drives itself.” Now a live AI trolling your message board–that’s what will be novel.

    Is a mechanical address-reader a “mailject”?

  3. I don’t think Bleecker, at least in this manifesto, is too concerned about empiricism or phenomenology. He is interested in what social objects do together. I also don’t think this is a project in epistemology, although it has many of the tones and worries of an epistemology paper. I think, rather, that some epistemological concerns are driving his conception of social participation and our interactions with things, which is where the real heart of the paper is. But his positive theses are valuable without the epistemological overtones. In fact, it seems to me that the ‘plague on modern epistemology’ of which you speal is just the mistake of thinking that our social relations are necessarily epistemological relations. They aren’t.

    I should clarify about the active/passive distinction. Bleecker doesn’t put the argument in those terms, although he does talk about agency, so it would be troubling if he didn’t draw the line somewhere. I raised in my comments a version of your worry, but I should be more careful about how my argument worked. A spime is simply a trackable object; a blogject is a trackable social object. Given how Bleecker’s approaches the topic, I was concerned that the social dimension of blogjects doesn’t really add anything over and above the simple notion of a spime.

    But spimes do have certain characteristics that I think are worth preserving beyond ‘edginess’. As discussed above, they are self-describing. The tools you list aren’t self-describing, which makes us more aware of their instrumentality. Spimes assert their presence. As you know, I think that resting the question of agency on assertion is a bad move, and I am inclined to go back to Quine and talk about query and assent, which builds the interactivity into the fundamental social relations. Assertions are solipsistic in a way Bleecker definitely wants to avoid. But you definitely query Google, and it is nothing but stubborn dogma to insist that this query is metaphoric or trying to ‘sneak in agency’.

  4. Well I’ll hold off on my criticisms until I take a look at the article proper. I should mention that the “plague on modern epistemology” is actually just most of the field, at this point… qualia, semantic scepticism, Davidson, these are all symptoms. But: onward.

    If by ‘stubborn dogma’ you mean “obviously true” then I wholly agree. This is however part of our ongoing disagreement over how to use the term ‘agency’. I would further disagree with you that this is not phenomenology (that is, the study of how things appear to us). It most assuredly is some form of it–what, we might ask, is the characteristic Being of a spime? What is one’s relation to other objects, to agents, to information, etc. Without the involvement of social things like us, aliens, Decepticons, and so forth, you’re just not going to be able to tell a convincing story about how non-causal terms get into our descriptions of spimes or t.s.o’s (trackable social objects). Describing objects as social already ges you inside the phenomenological realm. There. A nice softball for you.

  5. I should also mention for posterity that D&D is also discussing this paper. Amongst the mixed reviews are links to so-called ‘mote research’, like this and this. Interesting stuff.

  6. Just a short comment or two. Blogjects? Spimes? The words matter and I don’t think you can call new words “lingo” as if to dismiss them. I’m not trying to sell you a car and calling a gear shift lever a fanklewonker. I’m trying to describe something that I believe is different enough from current mechanisms for communication that it needs a new word, at least to get the discussion going. This isn’t “machine-to-machine” communication — that was something else that operated in an entirely different practice idiom. I’m not talking about valves in power plants communicating to a control panel somewhere — this is a kind of communication that is potentially legible to a wider social audience. So, that’s why I made up a word. And there’s a difference between the “Blogject” and the “Spime” that is important. Bruce Sterling is writing a work of science-fiction right now about Spimes that will, I’m sure, say lots about what Spimes are and provide a kind of technical manual and design guide book for people who want to toss the idea around and maybe even make Spimes. I don’t want to co-opt his language so thoroughly that I go and makes “Spimes” in my lab before he finishes writing about them and shares his thinking with whoever wants to think about Spimes. So, there’s that — sort of an authorial tip of the hat to Sterling. I mean, my building Spimes seems like it’d be about as collegial as hearing a researcher describe some work he was engaged in and then rushing off and doing it myself before they had a chance to run their idea through a bit.
    So, I guess that’s in response to the sense that maybe a Blogject is a Spime. I’m not sure how that could be, generally speaking, as both are ideas in flux, but that’s okay. If it turned out somehow that a Blogject was a Spime, and in some taxonomy of Things, Blogjects were like the wrinkled ancestors of Spimes, that wouldn’t surprise me. I just wrote the word on a piece of paper, discussed it with people electronically and in person and it became a meme unto itself. Who knows? Sterling’s book may have a bit about Blogjects that are the wrinkled, mummified ancestors of slick, gleaming Spimes.
    I don’t know what you mean by plague on modern epistemology or any of that stuff. I mean, I understand systems of knowledge, and I understand philosophy generally — but, obviously, we’re not in conversation around that topic. I wouldn’t even know what to say in response. So, if I’m “insipid” in this realm, it doesn’t surprise me as I’m entirely an outsider to most plagues except the coming H5N1.

  7. I should start by saying that I am extremely sympathetic to your project; I apologize if I came across as disrespectful. As for my readers, well, thus is the nature of the internet, as I said in my opening paragraph.

    But I don’t think you quite addressed my critique. My point wasn’t merely to dismiss your terminology, but to suggest that you hadn’t quite done the job of distinguishing the blogject as a unique kind of thing. Accepting that you shouldn’t just co-opt the terms of others, there is still the substantial philosophical issue of explaining how we can understand these bogjects as participants in the way you suggest. For instance:

    “I’m not talking about valves in power plants communicating to a control panel somewhere — this is a kind of communication that is potentially legible to a wider social audience.”

    This distinction is still opaque. Are social participants just determined by the size of their audience? The internal checks and balances of a power plant could potentially have devastating effects on a wide population if something goes wrong; clearly you can’t just dismiss these machine-to-machine communiques as socially irrelevant. My challenge to you was: why draw this line at all?

    Moreover, I am definitely a blogger- I have a T-shirt and everything- but my audience is tiny. Does that make me somehow less a participant?

    My point is this: you are making a very strong claim, that certain non-human, non-biological systems can be considered social participants. This claim isn’t justified, but assumed in order to talk about the specific sorts of social things you find interesting. Thats fine, but its still a bold move, and for someone like me whose interested in the philosophical implications of such a view, it leaves me somewhat unsatisfied.

  8. Good point, and point taken. So, Making Things is really important to me and i think there’s intense value in describing a thesis through the articulation of words and material. So, basically, that means that I hope to have “sketched” my ideas in paper and now it’s time to go into the lab and hold a few workshops — and make some things. It’s hard to keep writing in the distinctions, I guess, and I’m now onto creating instances of Things that reveal their distinctions in their activities.

    I’ll probably do another Networked Things workshop at the EPFL end of May, and hopefully one in Oslo this winter and, if all goes well, I’d like to do a Networked Things class here at USC in the Fall. Plus — there’s the summer to make Networked Things.

    I don’t mean to deflect the question entirely. But, in my mind, the valve that talks to the control panel is a great instance of what a Blogject is not. The valve connected to the control panel has no voice to social practice outside of its power-plant idiom. Compared to the Pigeon that Blogs, the valve effects in terms of social practice is indirect at best, and by most measures negigible. I’m saying that not because valves aren’t important, and this valve may in fact be crucial to keeping a large city of citizens warm, or with electricity or whatever. And those are important things. But, the valve is illegible to everyday, pedestrian practice. And because most people can’t really grok valves in power plants, or aren’t interested in what valves in power plants are doing, they are less legible as meaning making apparatuses than, say — sensors flying in the air above our heads that disseminate current environmental conditions, or images of the conditions of traffic on the 405 freeway, or such all.

    And I guess that i’m also saying that non-human, non-biological systems can definitely be social. That’s a longer conversation!

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