That’s the terrific cover of a new edition of George Orwell’s 1984. It’s part of a series of new Orwell cover designs by David Pearson.

Via Dread.

When the technocracy feels compelled to deliver urgent care on a grandiose scale, the outcome is pretty much foreordained:

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation.

Optimistic predictions by RAND in 2005 helped drive explosive growth in the electronic records industry and encouraged the federal government to give billions of dollars in financial incentives to hospitals and doctors that put the systems in place. …

RAND’s 2005 report was paid for by a group of companies, including General Electric and Cerner Corporation, that have profited by developing and selling electronic records systems to hospitals and physician practices. Cerner’s revenue has nearly tripled since the report was released, to a projected $3 billion in 2013, from $1 billion in 2005.

I believe that’s what’s called a money-extraction surgery. Sounds like it was a great success.

Next patient: education.

This 40s-era Encyclopaedia Britannica film, unearthed by the Atlantic‘s Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg (great name for Google; not so hot for Twitter), provides a nice coda to some of the recent posts and discussions here at Rough Type — the ones about media, the ones about labor, and the ones about the disembodiment of property.

Writing, as fate would have it, in the first wholly disembodied edition of Newsweek, Tom Wolfe ponders the disembodiment of property, from factory to trading floor to data center:

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that stocks and bonds are “evaporated property.” Everybody thought of that as such a witty aphorism, but Schumpeter meant it as a lament. “Substituting a mere parcel of shares for the walls and the machines in a factory,” he said, “takes the life out of the idea of property.” The new owners, i.e., the stockholders, lose the entrepreneur’s, the founder’s, will “to fight, economically, physically, politically, for, ‘his’ factory and his control over it and to die if necessary on its steps.” Instead, at the first whiff of a problem the shareholders bail out and sell their share of the ownership to whoever will buy it on the stock market… and couldn’t care less who it is.

That was how stocks and bonds evaporated property. What the quants had in mind was a quantum leap (so to speak) forward to the next stage: evaporating the stocks and bonds… not the property—that was long gone—but the very stocks and bonds themselves and making some real real money.

By 2000, the game was over.

Onward! Onward! Faster! Faster! At a thousand, two thousand, three thousand banking operations, investment funds, and exchanges, quants kept adding computers and servers and servers and computers row above row above row on floor-to-ceiling racks that stretched on infinitely like the stacks of the biggest library in the world… wrapped in miles of white fiber-optic cables that interconnected the machines… But these stacks were by no means quiet as a library’s. There were aisles between the stacks so that someone, presumably someone from IT, could get to any machine, every cable connection, if he had to. But any human being who entered, even an IT guy or a quant, was engulfed, oppressed, unnerved, spooked out by an overwhelming droning sound and an X-ray-blue fluorescent light that made your skin look posthumous. The droning seemed to create a pressure upon your skull. Sometimes the drone would rise slightly, then lower… and rise… and lower. It made you think this enormous robo-monster was breathing… If you were knowledgeable enough even to be allowed to enter one of these huge server rooms, you knew that most of the droning came from air-conditioning units high as a wall… that ran constantly to keep this concentration of machines from auto-melting because of their own ungodly heat. In some gigantic facilities they let the heat rise into plenums and piped it from there to heat the entire building. You could know all that, but the robo-monster would ride your head so hard, you would turn anthropomorphic in spite of your superior brain… The robo-monster—it’s breathing… it’s starting to move… it’s got me by the head… it’s thinking with its CPU (Central Processing Unit) mind, thinking in algorithms, sequences of programmed decisions along the lines of “If A261, then G1432, and therefore B5556 or QQ42—” spotting discrepancies, making buy-sell decisions, even deceptive looks-like-a-buy feints to trick competing robo-brains into making foolish calculations. The monster’s human… No, he’s not human… No human brain could possibly think or act as fast, as accurately, as cunningly as a robo-brain.

Photo from Wycombe Museum.

Edge has a fascinating, discursive new interview with the renowned philosopher-of-mind Daniel C. Dennett. As someone who has a deep distrust of the popular metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer, I was struck by something Dennett says near the start:

“The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain’s a computer, but it’s so different from any computer that you’re used to. It’s not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it’s not like your iPhone except in some ways. It’s a much more interesting phenomenon.”

Normally, the explanatory power of a metaphor comes from describing a thing we don’t understand in terms of a thing we do understand. But this brain-as-computer metaphor now seems to be diverging from that model. The computer in the metaphor seems to be something very different from what we mean when we talk about a “computer.” The part of the metaphor that is supposed to be concrete has turned into a mystery fluid.

The brain is like a computer!

Cool. What kind of computer is the brain like?

It’s not actually like any computer that’s ever been invented.

So what kind of computer is it like?

It’s like the unique form of a computer that we call a brain.

So the brain is like a brain?

Yes, exactly.

It sounds like it’s time for a new metaphor.

The new explanatory metaphor Dennett is proposing, or at least playing with, doesn’t sound much at all like a digital computer, even if there’s computation of some sort going on:

“We’re getting away from the rigidity of that model, which was worth trying for all it was worth. You go for the low-hanging fruit first. First, you try to make minds as simple as possible. You make them as much like digital computers, as much like von Neumann machines, as possible. It doesn’t work.”

The new metaphor, like the brain itself, is much more interesting:

“Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain. I now think of these as cells within cells, as cells within prison cells. Realize that every neuron in your brain, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They fended for themselves, and they survived.

They had to develop an awful lot of know-how, a lot of talent, a lot of self-protective talent to do that. When they joined forces into multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated. They became part of larger, more monolithic organizations. … [B]ut in the brain I think that (and this is my wild idea) maybe only in one species, us, and maybe only in the obviously more volatile parts of the brain, the cortical areas, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral, a little bit like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral, and they recover their wild talents very fast.

Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems.”

A pack of feral pigs going rogue in a jailhouse: Now, that sounds a lot like my brain. Much more so than does an iMac running Microsoft Office.

As Dennett acknowledges, one of the main reasons we need to rethink the old brain-as-computer metaphor is that it doesn’t mesh well with recent discoveries, made by scientists like Michael Merzenich and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, about the brain’s “tremendous plasticity”:

“The way the brain spontaneously reorganizes itself in response to trauma [or] just novel experience is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don’t have an architecture that can explain how that could happen and why that is, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think in terms of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what’s in it for them?

Why should these neurons be so eager to pitch in and do this other work just because they don’t have a job? Well, they’re out of work. They’re unemployed, and if you’re unemployed, you’re not getting your neuromodulators. If you’re not getting your neuromodulators, your neuromodulator receptors are going to start disappearing, and pretty soon you’re going to be really out of work, and then you’re going to die.”

Yes, the metaphor is mixed. But wouldn’t it have to be?

Our understanding of complex, mysterious things always proceeds from metaphor to metaphor. The moment a metaphor changes is an exciting moment because it opens new perspectives that the old metaphor foreclosed.

Photo by jennystiles315.

Speaking of the physical manifestation of informational goods, the numbers for 2012 just came out and, according to Nielsen Soundscan, U.S. vinyl album sales leapt another 18 percent, the fifth year in a row of muscular gains. Here’s the data (in millions of units):

That’s what I call a steep curve. I think we’d all agree that, based on a simple extrapolation from recent trends, the vinyl format should return to its rightful place of dominance in the music business no later than 2037.

Photo by acidpix.

Maria Popova shares some pages from an enchanting Sixties-era British schoolbook about maps and globes (the above image is an excerpt). She muses:

But besides the educational value and the sheer vintage gorgeousness of the artwork, these illustrations also remind us of what we’ve lost along with everything we’ve gained in the past half-century of technological progress — the pride in telling direction just by your shadow in the sun, the awe of gazing at the night sky and knowing that you share the North Star with millennia of fellow explorers, or even the simple joy of spinning a globe with your index finger. (Whatever happened to globes, anyway?)

How true is this, I wonder? It strikes me that I haven’t seen a globe in a while. Have they gone away, another dead medium? (I used to own a globe. What happened to it? I don’t even remember discarding it. I hope that I, like some weary Atlas, heaved it manfully into a landfill.)

Do they still have globes in elementary school classrooms, or have they been replaced by Google Earth?

We rely on (flat) maps a lot more now, but, condensed onto diminutive screens, they reveal to us ever less of the world, and they often situate us at the center of things — a pleasant, pre-Copernican illusion. Maps have become more directional, less geographic — certainly less evocative. I don’t know, but I wonder if that changes the way people imagine the world and their place in it.