Interactions - July/August 2009

July + August 2009

interactions

shocked if humanity comes out the other end of this century with any level of organization above that of clans and villages. It’s not just carbon emissions and global warming: It’s depleted soil fertility, it’s synthetic estrogens bio-accumulating in the aquatic food chain, it’s our inability to stop using antibiotics in a way that gives rise to multiple drug resistance in microbes.

Any one of these threats in isolation would pose a challenge to our ability to collectively identify and respond to it, as it’s clear that anthropogenic global warming already does. Put all of these things together, assess the total threat they pose in the light of our societies’ willingness and/ or capacity to reckon with them, and I think any moderately knowledgeable and intellectually honest person has to conclude that it’s more or less “game over, man.” That sometime in the next 60 years or so, a convergence of extremely bad circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-inten-sive civilization on this planet, for something on the order of thousands of years to come.

So with all apologies to Bruce Sterling, I just don’t buy the idea that we’re going to consume our way to Ecotopia. Nor is any symbolic act of abjection on my part going to postpone the inevitable by so much as a second, nor would such a sacrifice do anything meaningful to improve anybody else’s outcomes. I’d rather live comfortably—hopefully not obscenely so—in the years we have remaining to us, use my skills as they are most valuable to people, and cherish each moment for what it uniquely offers.

Maybe some people would find that prospect morbid, or nihilistic, but I find it kind of inspiring. It becomes even more crucial that we not waste the little time we do have on broken systems or broken ways of doing things. The primary question for the designers of urban informatics under such circumstances is to design systems that underwrite autonomy, that allow people to make the best and wisest and most resonant use of whatever time they have left on the planet. And who knows? That effort may bear fruit in ways we have no way of anticipating. As it says in the Qu’ran, gorgeously: “At the end of the world, plant a tree.”

Tish: The concept of autonomy is clear in the title of your next book, The City Is Here for You to Use, and it’s a consistent theme in your writing. While you have in the past (notably in Everyware) discussed the possible constraints to presentation of self and threats to a flexible identity posed by ubiquitous computing, your next book signals optimism. What are your grounds for this optimism?

Adam: It’s not optimism so much as hope. Whether it’s well founded or not is not for me to decide. I guess I just trust people to make reasonably good choices, when they’re both aware of the stakes and have been presented with sound, accurate decision-

support material.

Putting a fine point on it: I believe that most people don’t actually want to be jerks. We may have differing conceptions of the good, and our choices may impinge on one another’s autonomy. But I think most of us, if confronted with the humanity

of the other and offered the ability to do so, would want to find some arrangement that lets everyone find some satisfaction in the world. And in its ability to assist us in signaling our needs and desires, in its potential to mediate the mutual fulfillment of same, in its promise to reduce the fear people face when confronted with the immediate necessity to make a decision on radically imperfect information, a properly designed networked informatics could underwrite the most transformative expansions of people’s ability to determine the circumstances of their own lives.

Now that’s epochal. If that isn’t cause for hope, then I don’t know what is.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Adam Greenfield is head of
design direction for service
and user interface design
for Nokia. Previously he
was a rock critic, coffee-
house owner, bike messenger, psychologi-
cal operations sergeant in the U.S. Army
Special Operations Command, head of
information architecture for Razorfish
Tokyo, and instructor at NYU’s Interactive
Telecommunications Program. Greenfield
lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Tish Shute is the founder of
Ugo Trade. Her career in
new media and technology
began with work in motion
control photography, robot-
ics, and special effects for
film, television, theme parks, and aero-
space. She continues her interest in innova-
tion and paradigm shifts as an entrepre-
neur and writer interested in sustainable liv-
ing, ubiquitous computing, augmented
reality, and virtual realities in world 2.0.
Shute holds master’s of philosophy in cul-
ture and media from NYU’s Department of
Anthropology, where she pursued her inter-
est in the uptake of new technology from an
academic point of view.