(2004-08-18) Sterling Blobjects Rule Siggraph

Bruce Sterling's talk at Sig Graph - "When Blobject-s Rule the Earth". Neologism by Karim Rashid. Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not Sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one... But they (Blobjects) haven't started ruling the Earth yet. Because they're still too primitive. They're not sustainable, so they're merely optimizing the previous system. They are a varnish on barbarism... Up to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had. and made, four different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products, and Gizmos... Gizmos are made and used by end-users... An end-user is the historically evolved version of a consumer... Blobject-s tend to be a subset of the class of Gizmos... A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a Mass Market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project (Platform)... The true signs of a Gizmo are that it has a short lifespan and more functionality crammed into it than you will ever use or understand... Now, I could redesign this Gizmo to make it into a simple Product. But then this Gizmo would become a commodity... So there are good reasons why a Gizmo is almost impossible to use. It's because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos... The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "SpIme," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler.".. A true Spime is going to get ahead of the curve by bringing you inside the tent of the designers and developers and engineers, and the sales and marketing people. Wranglers are the class of people willing to hassle with Spimes. And it is a hassle. An enormous hassle. But its a fruitful hassle... This is not a vision of utopia. This is a historical thesis... Are there dark sides to this vision? Oh yes indeed.... Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens... We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely... We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. (shades of Bucky Fuller)