This post, along with seventy-eight others, is collected in the book Utopia Is Creepy.

1. On this earth

Last fall, Facebook released its first television advertisement. The ad was titled “The Things That Connect Us.” It was intended, Mark Zuckerberg announced, with characteristic humility, “to express what our place is on this earth.” It opened with a shot of a red chair levitating in a forest. Some music welled up. Then came the voiceover:

Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair and, if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together.

Doorbells. Airplanes. Bridges. These are things people use to get together, so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things that people share.

The Universe. It is vast and dark. And it makes us wonder if we are alone. So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind us that we are not.

If Terrence Malick were given a lobotomy, forced to smoke seven joints in rapid succession, and ordered to make the worst TV advertisement the world has ever seen, this is the ad he would have produced. It even ended with a soaring shot of The Tree of Life:

Despite its all-encompassing silliness, the ad was revealing. Its emphasis was entirely on the physical, on the real. Other than a brief image of a couple sharing a set of earbuds, a viewer would hardly have known that we are in a Digital Age. The ad showed people eating and talking and sitting on chairs and walking across bridges and pushing doorbells and sitting on chairs and watching lectures and lying entwined on lawns and waving flags and sitting on chairs and climbing trees and reading paperbacks on porches and having difficult conversations in kitchens and sitting on chairs and dancing and drinking and watching basketball games and climbing trees and gazing at tiny insects drifting through beams of muted sunlight and sitting on chairs, but there was hardly a computer or a smartphone in sight. Everyone was deeply engaged, deeply in the moment. All the objects of the world were luminous. Everything was shining.

In retreating into a gauzy, pre-digital myth of civic and social bliss, “The Things That Connect Us” sought to position Facebook squarely in the mainstream, to portray the social network as a slice of homemade apple pie. Facebook, the ad told us, with considerable defensiveness, wasn’t revolutionary or disruptive or even particularly new. It was just the latest link in a long chain of human-fashioned objects that have allowed us to “open up and connect.” If the point weren’t hammered home hard enough, the ad even included an image of an old dial phone sitting placidly on a desk in the magic hour:

You see: Facebook is just the new Ma Bell. Nestle yourself in her ample lap, rest your weary head on her matronly bosom, and be wrapped in the comforting embrace of friends and family. Have a Coke and a smile.

2. Home invasion

Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home. The announcement came with all the trappings of a Silicon Valley Big Deal: the enigmatic invitation, the fervid PandoInsiderCrunch rumor-mongering, the haltingly portentous Zuckerberg presentation, the synchronized puff piece. But the product itself was a pretty paltry piece of work: essentially, a Facebook-themed Android skin. Big whoop.

Far more interesting than the product was the series of three ads released to promote it, and the most interesting of those ads was the one entitled “Dinner.” “Dinner” is set in an ugly, underlit suburban dining room. An extended family sits around the table, picking at ugly suburban food. The spinster aunt — the one with, you know, the ugly glasses and the ugly ill-fitting sweater and the ugly haircut and the ugly flat voice — launches into an interminable tale about going to a supermarket to buy cat food for her two cats. Everybody starts squirming. The young, attractive woman sitting next to the spinster aunt gives the spinster aunt a quick disgusted look, and then turns her attention to her smartphone and the other, better home that is Facebook Home. She swipes through a series of photos, and the pictures come to life around her: there’s her friend bashing joyfully on a drum kit in an ugly corner of the ugly room; there’s a troupe of ballerinas dancing across the ugly table and the ugly sideboard; there’s a happy snowball fight and a plow that drives by and flings pretty snow onto the ugly family. The attractive young woman smiles and double-taps a Like as the spinster aunt drones on.

“Dinner” has already spawned much commentary. “Ugh,” wrote Robert Hof at Forbes. “Facebook Home makes it a whole lot easier to be rude to your family and in-the-flesh friends, who are often, yeah, so boring to a cool person like you.” Evan Selinger, at Wired, saw a deeper corruption of social ethics being celebrated in the ad’s “propaganda.” “Dinner,” he wrote, tells us “that to be cool, worthy of admiration and emulation, we need to be egocentric. We need to care more about our own happiness than our responsibilities towards others.” He brought in Kant, who challenged us to ask ourselves “what right we have to be self-absorbed while expecting others to rise above indifference.” Whitney Erin Boesel, at Cyborgology, offered a different view. On the one hand, she wrote, the ad combines “the best of Silicon Valley ‘play ethic’ with good old technoutopian neoliberalism: traditional social bonds constrain us, but technology liberates us, makes us more independent and self-sufficient, and enables us to express ourselves more fully and freely.” But, on the other hand, the attractive young woman can also be seen as enacting a rebellion against the “well-recognized social obligations” symbolized by the family gathered around the table: “It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power.” I have trouble seeing the ridiculed spinster aunt as a face of power — and the rest of the family members come off as utterly powerless, the underemployed, futureless denizens of the class formerly known as middle  — but Boesel is right to point out that the ad is not just about being a thoughtless creep but is also about escaping from an oppressive situation. “Sometimes rudeness is also resistance.” The asshole is the hero.

What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself. “Our place on this earth”? Doorbells? Bridges? What a load of crap! The earth sucks! Things are boring! People are ugly! Go online and stay online! Chairs, mawkishly celebrated in “The Things That Connect Us” as bulwarks against the meaninglessness of the universe, as concrete means of connection and hence liberation, become in “Dinner” instruments of torture. They trap us in the distasteful world of the flesh, the hell of other people.

Has another company ever come out with a high-concept, big-production “brand ad” and then, just a few months later, turned around and utterly trashed it? I don’t think so. What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, “sincere” and “insincere” are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising. Despite their glaring differences, “The Things That Connect Us” and “Dinner” actually draw from the same source: the well of nihilism. I’m sure Zuckerberg never gave a thought to the fact that the two ads are contradictory. He knew it was all bullshit, and he knew everyone else knew it was all bullshit.

“Have it your way,” wrote Wallace Stevens:

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

One wants to see the levitating red chair as a Stevensesque symbol of the redemptive imagination. But it’s not. It’s the same chair that the ugly spinster aunt is sitting on. It’s the same chair that the attractive young woman with the smartphone is sitting on. Facebook gives us image without imagination. Everything is beyond redemption, which is what makes everything so cool. Have it your way.

3. Two poles

“Home is so sad,” wrote Philip Larkin:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes.

Home and Away are the poles of our being, each exerting a magnetic pull on the psyche. We vibrate between them. Home is comforting but constraining. Away is liberating but lonely. When we’re Home, we dream of Away, and when we’re Away, we dream of Home. Communication tools have always entailed a blurring of Home and Away. Newspaper, phonograph, radio, and TV pulled a little of Away into Home, while the telephone, and before it the mail, granted us a little Home when we were Away. Some blurring is fine, but we don’t want too much of it. We don’t want the two poles to become one pole, the magnetic forces to cancel each other out. The vibration is what matters, what gives beauty to both Home and Away. Facebook Home, in pretending to give us connection without the shadow of loneliness, gives us nothing. It’s Nowheresville.

I have a brief review of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s new and surprisingly gloomy book The New Digital Age in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s how the review begins:

The New Digital Age opens with a Panglossian overture. The computer revolution, write the authors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, has “barely left the starting blocks.” Soon we’ll be blessed with “integrated clothing machines” that not only wash, fold and shelve laundry but “algorithmically suggest outfits based on the user’s daily schedule.” Robot barbers will give us haircuts that are “machine-precise.” Nasal implants will alert us to oncoming colds. When we sense that our kids are getting spoiled, we’ll be able to transport them, via holographic projectors, to a Third World slum for a stroll among the destitute.

Those fortunate enough to be among the world’s “super-wealthy” elite will have it even better. Attended by “human-like robots,” they’ll zip overhead in “motion-stabilized automated helicopters” while popping bespoke pharmaceuticals to keep mortality at bay. Should one of their internal organs go bad, a mechanical surgeon will swap it out with a synthetic replacement. Their loafers will be outfitted with “haptic devices” that give their feet a friendly pinch when they’re running late for a meeting.

And here’s how it ends:

As tech industry VIPs, Schmidt and Cohen deserve credit for probing the dark side of progress. In the wake of the Boston bombings, their warnings about the Net’s dangers have gained chilling salience. But it’s hard to know how seriously to take their speculations, which, lacking analytical rigor, come off as a hodgepodge. Writing as enthusiasts rather than critics, they’re quick to present technological trends as destiny but seem indifferent to the subtleties of politics and culture that shape the behavior of people and the course of history. Clumsily written and slackly argued, The New Digital Age feels less like a coherent treatise than like the hurriedly assembled notes from a series of brainstorming sessions.

Chronicle subscribers can read the whole review here.

Photo by James Cridland.

“The mainframe is the eternal computing platform,” writes Rudolf Winestock in a pithy essay about the circular path of computing’s history, from time-sharing on central mainframes to time-sharing on central clouds. The “PC is dead” storyline has been around for a while now, but what’s really dying is the practice of “personal computing,” at least if we take that phrase to imply personal ownership of the means of computing—processors, software, data.

The desktop computer won’t completely disappear. Instead, the outward form of the personal computer will be retained, but the function — and the design — will change to a terminal connected to the cloud (which is another word for server farm, which is another word for mainrack, which converges on mainframes, as previously prophesied). True standalone personal computers may return to their roots: toys for hobbyists.

The original mainframe era provoked, in the mid-60s, a revolt by the young against the central, corporate control of personal information. The reduction of the self to a string of numbers stored in a database—a database that was a component of the military-industrial complex, no less—seemed to pose a threat not just to privacy but to individual autonomy, to freedom. It was viewed as a form of imprisonment. “I am not a number” became a rallying cry that rang through popular culture.

We haven’t seen much resistance to the new mainframe, or mainrack, era. In fact, most of us, and particularly the young, have been actively complicit in the shift away from personal computing and toward the corporate central-processing station, as Winestock makes clear:

Users love the web apps coded by rebellious hackers who’d never have fit in during the Stone Age of computing. Without any compulsion, those users volunteered their data to web apps running on mainracks that are owned — in all senses of that word — by publicly-traded companies. … Demanding the ability to export our data and permanently delete our accounts wouldn’t help even if we could do it. The data is most valuable when it is in the mainrack. Your Facebook data isn’t nearly as useful without the ability to post to the pages of your friends. Your Google Docs files aren’t as useful without the ability to collaborate with others. Dynamic state matters; it’s the whole point of having computers because it allows automation and communication.

To quote Woody Allen: We need the eggs.

But there’s another reason, I think, that today’s internment of the self in centrally stored data has not spurred the kind of protests we saw a half century ago. In the 60s, the reduction of the self to computable numbers found a tangible, ubiquitous symbol in the punchcard. To hold a punchcard with your name printed across the top was to see your being reduced to a series of binary punch holes, a series of inscrutable ones and zeroes. Like draft cards, punchcards served as concrete touchstones for protest. Ordered by some faceless bureaucracy not to fold, spindle, or mutilate the cards, one felt a moral obligation to fold, spindle, and mutilate them. To tear up a punchcard was to liberate oneself from, as Mario Savio famously put it on the Sproul Hall steps, “the machine.”

The machine’s interface—its outward representation of the numeric self—is no longer the cold, bureaucratic punchcard. It’s the avatar, the selfie: the lovingly curated, intangible image of the I. The cloud, and particularly its social-networking mechanism, personalizes depersonalization. It allows us to design our own representation of the numeric self. Behind the scenes, it’s still all ones and zeroes, but whereas the punchcard brought the binary code into clear view, the avatarial image hides it. The apparatus of control wears a new face, and that face is our own.

Why are these guys smirking? Because they’re the founding members of the Glass Collective, the new “investment syndicate” that Google has organized “to provide seed funding to entrepreneurs in the Glass ecosystem.” Which means that they’re thinking about the prospect of gaining continuous access to your field of vision.

McLuhan offered a dark prophecy about Glass a half century ago:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

That’s alarmist, sure, but even though Glass is a logical extension of the ever-present smartphone screen and its hidden location sensor, it also represents a crossing of the bodily proscenium. It is, as they say, in your face. And before we allow those fellows up there to mount our brows, harness our gaze, and whisper sweet somethings in our ears, it would probably be wise to consider exactly how they’ll benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves. When profit-seeking investors and companies start augmenting our reality in a very intimate fashion, how exactly do rights and responsibilities shake out?

It’s time, in other words, to get beyond abstract references to “augmented reality” and start talking about augmentors (that would be them) and augmentees (that would be us). When Silicon Valley talks about the benefits of radical transparency, it’s always talking about augmentees and never about augmentors. It has, collectively, an army of lobbyists and PR functionaries actively resisting attempts to put limits on the transparency of augmentees as well as attempts to make the operations of augmentors more transparent. What does such an imbalance of power mean when it’s our very gaze that’s being tracked and manipulated? Does our gaze warrant explicit protections? Is our gaze our own, or is it now a tradable commodity? When it comes to data collection and sale, does reality augmentation begin with the default of opt-out or the default of opt-in?

The Glass Collective is a collective of augmentors. They can be expected to act in their own interests. We augmentees have yet to even think about ourselves as augmentees. If that doesn’t change – and soon – the defaults will, once again, be set without us.

The Digital Public Library of America, which I wrote about last year in the MIT Technology Review article “The Library of Utopia,” will be launching later this month. I had the opportunity to discuss the ambitious undertaking in a new Digital Campus podcast with newly appointed DPLA director Dan Cohen, DPLA technical advisor David Weinberger, and host Amanda French. You can find the MP3 here.

There’s a great deal of excitement surrounding the DPLA launch, but there’s also some wariness, as I described in the article and discuss in the podcast. Some public libraries, already under budget stress, worry that the arrival of a “national” public library may make it even harder for them to protect their local funding. Why invest in local initiatives, particularly ones involving online services, when there’s a central portal for searching collections and performing other library functions? Weinberger argues that the DPLA will strike the right balance between providing a central portal and acting as a platform that local libraries can build on. That’s the hopeful scenario, but as we’ve seen over and over again on the web, there’s a centripetal force at work that often leads to the consolidation of traffic at high-profile central sites.

The DPLA leadership is sensitive to this tension, sometimes to the point of defensiveness. In announcing his appointment, Cohen wrote, “The DPLA will in no way replace the thousands of public libraries that are at the heart of so many communities across this country.” Yet the first sentence of the DPLA charter reads, “The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all.” It’s hard to see how the DPLA will be able to fulfill such a broad mission without treading on the turf of local public libraries. Beyond its impact on libraries, the way the DPLA’s dual role as portal and platform plays out promises to provide a case study in web dynamics.

Who can get the goods to the customer the quickest? The answer to that question may well determine the future of online retailing. This past week, Google announced its first public test of Google Shopping Express, which promises same-day delivery of merchandise ordered through the search giant’s online store. Ebay, Wal-Mart, and other merchants are also testing same-day delivery services, as they look to gain an edge on the online retailing behemoth, Amazon.com.

But now Amazon is getting ready to launch a secret weapon that promises to shake up not only the Delivery Wars but the entire retailing industry and maybe even the world of commerce. By the end of this year, Amazon will begin testing what it calls SuperPrime Prior-Day Delivery in select markets, according to a top company executive who spoke to me, via email, on the condition that I not reveal his name. With SuperPrime, customers will receive their order a full 24 hours before they place it.

The Amazon executive, whom I’ll call J, describes prior-day delivery as a “massive disruption bomb.” In an exclusive interview with Rough Type, J answered a few questions about the game-changing new service.

Rough Type: Prior-day delivery? That’s mind-boggling. How are you pulling it off?

J: It’s funny, because we’ve already started testing SuperPrime with some of our own employees here in Seattle, and their immediate reaction was that we’d solved the problem of time travel. That’s not a problem we’ve solved. We’re still working on that one. SuperPrime is all about predictive algorithms. We’ve found that by combining the information we gather on a customer’s behavior with some basic neurological data, we can model their purchasing intentions so precisely that we can predict what they’re going to buy a full 48 hours before they actually make the purchase. So we ship the order overnight, and they receive it the day before they place it.

RT: So it’s Big Data.

J: This is way beyond Big Data. In house, we’re calling this Mammoth Data.

RT: You mentioned neurological data. How exactly does SuperPrime work?

J: As the name suggests, we’re introducing a new premium level to Amazon Prime. When a customer signs up — we haven’t set the pricing yet, but I can guarantee that it’ll be affordable for most households — we send them an Amazon SuperPrime Hoodie that’s outfitted with an array of sensors. We ask them to wear the hoodie for two hours, with the hood up, while they go about their business. They then plug the hoodie into their smartphone or their Kindle, and it automatically uploads some scans and other neurological readings to what we’re calling Amazon Brain Cloud, or ABC. We combine the brain data with the behavioral data we’ve collected on the customer, and that enables us to make the purchasing predictions with something like 99.99% accuracy.

RT: Incredible.

J: We’re massively excited. One of my colleagues said this is Amazon’s moonshot, but a moonshot’s already been done, so I think of this as something more than a moonshot. To me, it’s a sun shot. It’s like landing a human being on the surface of the sun. It’s that big.

Photo by Rhys Asplundh.