Book Review 68: Rapture of the Geeks

This book is about the future of technology and the evolution, coevolution, and possible merger of humans and computers. Some futurists and AI (artificial intelligence) experts argue that this merger is imminent, and that we'll be raising Borg children (augmented humans) by the year 2030. Others predict that supercomputers will equal and then quickly surpass human intelligence as early as 2015. We are accustomed to using computers as powerful tools, and we resist any invitation to think of them as sentient beings—and with good reason: Computers, even computers as powerful as Firefly, still just kind of sit there, patiently humming, waiting for instructions from programs written by humans.

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Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ by Richard Dooling is a disappointing book.  I had high hopes for a book about the singularity and the powerful role technology has for our future as a species. What I read was more of a rambling introduction of the singularity, punctuated by pointless and inaccurate Microsoft rants, and a narrative that appears designed to show us just how clever the author is. It’s the only book I’ve read in the last 10-years that I seriously considered abandoning half way through. I don’t recommend it.

There are some interesting observations in the book. It’s all focused around the idea of the Singularity, popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil.  The Singularity is the point at which computer processing power surpasses cerebral processing power and what the means for the human race. If a desktop computer can process data as fast as the human mind, does that mean computers are finally smarter than people? Can we then download our selves into computers and live forever?  These questions are more than just philosophical; they are likely to be serious, practical ones in a few years due to the advances in the computing power and the decline in computing cost.

If futurist Ray Kurzweil is right, by 2020 a computer with the computational capacity of a human brain will cost $1,000 and will be sitting on your desk. "

Page 77

This will raise the question of when do we stop being human and become a machine. At what point does a person become a Cyborg? Is it when they wear a Bluetooth head set? Is it when the have a prosthetic limb? Is it when they can control that limb with their neurons? Is it when they stop remembering things and instead rely on Google or their smart phone? The border between human and robot narrows each day.

The ancient Greeks used to ask, "How many grains of sand make a heap?" Start with one. Add another. And another. Is it a heap yet? We'll soon be asking the same thing about brain components. We have no problem thinking that someone with a hearing aid, cochlear implant, or a pacemaker is still human, but Steven Pinker takes it to the next level with a hypothetical that poses questions we may face within ten years:

"Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?''

Page 79

There is also an interesting and brief discussion about whether or not AI even makes sense. There’s and advantage to using people instead of machines.  

IBM has the scratch to pursue silicon brain making, but most governments and corporations probably would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to duplicate a human brain. As roboticist Hans Moravec put it, "Why tie up a rare twenty-million-dollar asset to develop one ersatz human, when millions of inexpensive original model humans are available?"'' Or as rocket scientist Wernher von Braun put it in a different context: "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor."

Page 81

For all the interesting discussions that sneak into the text, there are other passages where the author starts to raise an interesting point and then squanders it in excessive snarkiness. Here’s one example about the nature of idleness.

Several hundred years before the first click on the first hyperlink, Pascal wrote: "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." Little did he know at the time, but he had already built a primitive fossil of a machine (his calculator), which would one day lead to the mighty PC, which in turn would make it possible for us to sit still in a room for weeks, playing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, drinking Mountain Dew Game Fuel, and eating Snickers bars.

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The silly gamer commentary doesn’t do anything to further his point.

Some of those types of comments seem mildly entertaining, but there are so many of them, they lose impact.  Here’s another example where his point gets lost in the silliness.

When you're in a panic to make an appointment and you can't find your car keys or your billfold or purse, do you instinctively begin formulating search terms you might use if the real world came with Google Desktop Search or a command-line interface? Whoever created the infinite miracle we glibly call "the Universe" Is surely at least as smart as the guys at Bell Labs and U.C. Berkeley who made UNIX. The UNIX creators wisely included a program "called Find, which enables you to instantly find any file on your system, especially any file in your "home" directory. Another command-line utility, Grep, enables you to find any line of text in any file on your entire system.' Mac OS X uses Spotlight to do essentially the same thing with spiffy visuals, and even Microsoft finally included "Instant Search" in Vista. So why can't the creator of the universe come up with a decent search box? Why can't you summon a command line and search your real-world home for "Honda car keys," and specify rooms in your house to search instead of folders or paths in your computer's home directory? It's a crippling design flaw in the real-world interface.

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This passage is interesting in a few ways. First, the comment about the “crippling design flaw” is an interesting way to look at things, but it takes too long to get there, and in context, if feels too forced and clever.  The passage also takes the opportunity to snipe at Microsoft unnecessarily. And all that obscures the point he is making and the story he is telling about technology.

And that brings me to commentary on Microsoft.  

Roughly 88 percent of scanned consumer PCs are found to contain some form of unwanted program (Trojan, system monitor, cookie, or adware).
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Funny too how these infection rates hover at near 90 percent, which matches the percentage of computers running the Windows operating system. One might safely conclude that virtually all computers running a Windows operating system are infected if they are also connected to the Internet; it's just a question of whether the spyware compromises performance to the point where the user notices and becomes annoyed. Often the only cure is to erase your entire hard drive and reinstall the operating system. The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group also estimates that 80 to 85 percent of incoming e-mail is spam. An innocent Windows user might be tempted to inquire how Moore's law will soon produce computers that are smarter than people, while expensive, "intelligent" software programs running on today's latest, greatest hardware are still unable to stop spyware, or e-mails with the subject line "Visit the giant penis store',"

Page 122

It used to be all you needed was a computer and an Internet connection. Nowadays, an unprotected PC hooked to the Internet can be infected and hijacked within minutes, which means that now you need $200 worth of programs-firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware-before you can safely connect to the new, evolved, and improved Internet.

Page 123

The author loses credibility for a couple of reasons here. In addition to being full of cheap shots, there are a number of things that are just technically wrong.

1. Cookies are not malware. Does your PC remember remember your password or user ID?  You’re enjoying cookies.
2. System Monitor? Really?  A tool so you can see how your system is doing? Now, I know he describes these at “unwanted programs” and not malware, he does go on to describe them as infections.
3. A few sentences later he refers to all these elements as “spyware” which simply isn’t true.
4. He cites a survey showing 80-85% of incoming email is SPAM. while it may be true that 85% of the email on the ‘net is SPAM, the vast majority of that never gets to a user’s inbox. SPAM filters, even in 2008, were already quite effective and diverting it. Further, he buries this in a MSFT discussion. SPAM affects Linux and Apple users just as much.
5. He goes on to say you need to spend $200 to keep a Windows machine safe. Even in 2008, when he wrote the book that wasn’t true. There were plenty of free, high-quality tools to protect users that didn’t require them to spend anything.

It’s hard to take him seriously after such a discussion.

It’s a shame because there are some interesting points he tries to make in the book. His overly clever writing and anger at Microsoft significantly diminishes the quality of the book. There are plenty of other books out there for those who want to learn more about the Singularity.  Check those out instead.

Fixing Tron Legacy (Includes some Spoilers)

A couple days ago I reviewed Tron Legacy and pointed out some of the problems with the story. I really wanted to like this movie.  It's beautiful.  The look of the movie really resonates with me.

In today’s post, I’ll propose a way to partially fix it. Of course, I don’t pretend to solve all the problems here; I’m a random amateur and not a professional screen writer. And I’m not constrained by budgets or anything like that, so I have a little more freedom.

I should note that this post includes spoilers for Tron Legacy. If you plan to see the movie and want to be surprised, skip the rest of this post.
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In Tron Legacy, CLU was created by Flynn and charged with pursuing perfection within the system. He goes beyond that role and becomes an evil dictator within the system assuring that it runs perfectly. Ultimately he wants to leave the digital world and move into the real world for some reason. He even has has a sycophant and entourage for some reason. The only way he can break into the real world, though, is by getting Flynn’s disk so he has the information and skill needed to make the leap through the portal separating the two worlds

I’m not sure what they mean by perfection; the world of the grid with its nightclubs and rebels certainly doesn’t seem perfect. That’s kind of the point of the movie, though -- perfection is unknowable.

To fix it, we need to slightly change the nature of CLU. To begin wihth, CLU needs to be more Borg and less Klingon.

Beyond that, CLU was created by Flynn in Fynn’s image. We need to treat CLU as part of Flynn. In the movie they tell us that Flynn stopped fighting CLU because it made him more powerful. Maybe they were already going down that path.

If they are parts of each other in the Grid, then CLU has the same performance skills as Flynn. He can execute the same tasks, perform the same actions, and know the same things. He basically download Flynn’s knowledge at time of creation. But because he is a program, and not a user, he lacks one thing -- creativity. CLU cannot develop new skill or tactics. He can’t envision how to do new things. Code can only do what it’s been told. It can’t learn form new thoughts from its own experience.

Flynn can learn. He can create new ideas. Afterall, he’s human. He’s a user. He’s the maker. The one thing CLU can’t do, Flynn can.

The problem for Flynn is that they are inhernetly connected. They are still, in some respects, one. Anytime Flynn comes up with something new -- an original approach, a new idea, a unique way of seeing the word, CLU learns it too. Flynn can try to fight CLU, but CLU knows everything about fighting that Flynn knows. Anytime Flynn learns a new skill, or thinks he has the upper hand on CLU, CLU suddenly has that skill as well. Now, not only are they continually evenly matched, anything new that CLU learns in battle with Flynn, he can now repurpose into his other efforts. Fighting CLU only makes CLU stronger and makes “life” for other programs even worse.

That’s why Flynn pursues a lifestyle of zen. He needs to keep his mind at peace. He needs to push aggressive thoughts out of his head so he doesn't risk giving new skills to CLU.

Qora becomes more important in this context. She’s a program but with the spontaneous creation story of the Isos we already know she’s different. She’s a program that can learn and can think. Flynn needs to work on educating her without simultaneously educating CLU.

She’s underutilized in the movie. Most of what she does in the movie has noting to do with her Iso nature. That’s what they should exploit more. She can be the one to tell Flynn’s sone more about the history of what happened in the world. She can become more of a guide than she is in Tron Legacy. She can be more of a random factor -- a glitch in the grid.

We can keep the final conflict between CLU and Flynn the way it is. Ultimately the way to defeat him is to join with him -- to reintegrate with CLU.

As part of the bigger picture, the entire grid can be shaped by the conflict between Flynn and CLU. The arrival of Flynn’s son is what breaks the stalemate -- he’s a user not constrained by the limitations of code. He can team with Qora who is not necessarily constrained by the limitations of code, but it largely constrained by her lack of vision. She doesn’t know the world outside the grid. Her intimate knowledge of the grid, and a her abilities, combined with the rogue nature of Flynn, who is not constrained by “knowing”something is impossible is a powerful tool.

I think we can grow Qora’s role even further and make her more like Neo from The Matrix. She’s different and can ultimately break free of the grid, see it in a different way, and finally break free to a different world.

Those structures may not solve all the problems in the movie and the may be a bit derivative of other stories, but they would make Tron Legacy a better movie than it is.

Have you seen Tron Legacy? How would you fix the story?

Book Review 58: Count Zero

She nodded, her mouth full. Swallowed. “A little bit. I know that a lot of people don’t work for Maas. Never have and never will. You’re one, your brother’s another. But it was a real question. I kind of liked Rudy you know? But he just seemed so ...


“Screwed up,” he finished for her, still holding his sandwich. “Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good . . . And Rudy never did it.”


Page 205

Count Zero is part of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy of novels that also includes Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Each book can stand on its own, however.


I always have mixed feelings about Gibson’s books. Often it feels like a chapter or two is missing towards the end. Count Zero is a little different. It’s much better paced than than most of his novels, and he seems to tie up most of the loose ends by the time the book stops. That makes this one my favorite Gibson novels.
Gibson’s strength is the world he creates. While the characters often lack depth or seem cliched, the environment they inhabit is fascinating. Gibson’s advanced weapons, early take in the Internet, post-governmental capitalist society, space travel, and advances in computer technology are a fantastic playground for his characters to run around in.


In Count Zero, the various story lines include an amateur hacker who gets in over his head, a discredited gallery owner seeking a mysterious artist for an uber-weathly collector, and a mercenary hired to “rescue” a researcher from a medical facility.


Medical advances are used as both liberators and prisons in this book. Although even when the liberate, they still seem to imprison.

Herr Virek communicates with people through virtual reality technology. His body had been failing him for some time.


“Please.” He patted the bench’s random mosaic of shattered pottery with a narrow hand “You must forgive my reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stockholm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marley. Sit beside me.”


page 16


"I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the world’s most expensive invalid. I was touched. Marly, at your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from which they unfold.”


And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.


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While the wealthy can benefit from thing to supplement their biology, corporations also use technology to keep employees from leaving. The mercenary in the story discusses with a medical team what they will do once they get an employee away from his employer.

"Cortex charges, that sort of thing?”


“I doubt,” said the other man, “that we will encounter anything so crude, but yes, we will be scanning for the full range of lethal devices. Simultaneously, we’ll run a full blood screen. We understand that his current employers deal in extremely sophisticated biochemical systems. It greatest danger would lie in that direction .


“It’s currently quite fashionable to equip top employees with modified insulin-pump subdermals,” his partner broke in. “The subject’s system can be tricked into an artificial reliance on cer-tain synthetic enzyme analogs. Unless the subdermal is recharged at regular intervals, wit employer—can result in trauma.”


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The stories take place in a highly capitalistic society where everything can be bought and sold. In order to move the story along, Gibson has to take those obstacles out of the characters’ way. He throws loose-walleted sponsors at the characters to address this concern.

“Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!”


“Very well. You will be paid a salary. You will be given access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to purchase. let us say, substantial amounts of real estate—”


“Real estate."


“Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost certainly be given. Otherwise, you will have a free hand. I suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such as this, is of crucial importance.” The famous smile glittered for her once more.


She took a deep breath. “Herr Virek, what if I fail? How long do I have to locate this artist?”


“The rest of your life,” he said.


Page 19-20

In the hacker thread, he is aided by a major organized crime organization.


Our mercenary is able to draw on the resources afforded him by his employers.


One thread has characters chasing a character called The Wig. One thing I like about his story is the casual way Gibson discusses the power a smart, skilled hacker can wield.

Silicon doesn’t wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes, and in fact he was usually worried about his gear falling behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was twenty-two) or taxes (he didn’t file, although he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he’d declared his gross).


The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going some where. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.


Page 155-156

I like Count Zero because I think I understood what happened in the end. Gibson wrapped up many of the loose ends in the plot and I didn’t feel frustrated when the book suddenly stopped like I do with many of his novels. Count Zero didn’t disappoint me. Of course, when I went back and read the Wikipedia article about the book, I discovered that I missed a great deal of the what was happening in it. It some respects it seemed like Wikipedia had a chapter I didn’t. I guess I’m lucky I’m not taking a test on it. But I'm not sure that matters.


The bottom line is that Count Zero is a good book, and one well worth reading if you have interest in the Cyberpunk genre. It includes Gibson’s fantastic universe and has what I thought was an unusually tight ending.
Now I suppose I should reread all three books in the trilogy to see if they make more sense as a set.


You can read more of my book reviews here.

Book Review 41: Spook Country

William Gibson has a long history writing CyberPunk novels. He deftly creates dystopian worlds with technology and network connectivity that we can barely dream about today. His futurescapes of Japan and San Francisco are terrifying and fascinating places to live.

In his groundbreaking Neuromancer, Gibson coined the term "Cyberspace" long before most people had even conceived of the Internet.

In recent years, though, his interests have taken him in a different direction. Now he writes about the shadowy realms of today. His latest novel, Spook Country, continues in that vein.

If you like Gibson for his take on technology, you should read it. It's not as fantastical as the technology in his earlier novels; it's deals more the technology we encounter today, or will encounter in the next 5 years.

Also unlike his previous novels, Gibson ends this one well. The book ends over several chapters, as opposed to a rabid attempt to close the plot in the final 10 pages, like he usually does. I know what happened at the end of this book and I can't always say that about Gibson stories.

Gibson does a great job of creating and image and feeling of place.

AFTER THEY'D HAD a look at Alberto's memorial to Helmut Newton, which involved a lot of vaguely Deco-styled monochrome nudity in honor of its subject's body of work, she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget.

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In my various trip to SoCal, I have the sense in the morning that it is a place full of potential and a place that actually seems nice. It's not until around 11:00 AM that I remember why I dislike it.

At various points in the book, he comments on the music business, since the main character is a former pop star.

"In the early 1920s," Bigend said, "there were still some people in this country who hadn't yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That's less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a 'recording artist'"—making the quotes with his hands—"took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn't reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her"—and here he bowed slightly, in her direction—"was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media."

Page 103

There are pacing issues with the book. An editor could chop off the first 100 pages of it and have little impact on the story. Some of the sections are interesting pieces, but they could easily be handled elsewhere. Mostly is a game of patience.

One could argue he is building the tension, and it keeps the reader waiting to see what happen. For me though, it wasn't a suspenseful period of, "Ooh. I wonder what's going to happen next." It was more a case of, "Oh, come on. Won't something happen already?"

Gibson fans should read the book. And those who like to see novels as an expression of technology should read the book. And after the first 100 pages, it gets better. I find it difficult to recommend it for the casual reader, though.

There are a few more things I want to comment on, but here is the SPOILER warning. If you haven't read the book and want to keep it a mystery (it is a spy thriller after all) you may want to stop reading. I won't go into details of the plot, but some of my commentary may reveal things about the characters you would rather discover on your own.
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Still with me? Okay.

My biggest frustration with this book, is that the neither the protagonist nor the antagonist is a main character. We follow former pop star turned reporter Hollis Henry as she writes for some mysterious new publication that might or might not exist, as she begins work on a story about locative art. We follow Tito, a young man of complex ethnicity as he straddles the world of organized crime, espionage, and elaborate practical jokes. We follow Russian translator Milgram as he is led about the city (he's not fond of more rural areas) by his captor.

Nature, for Milgrim, had always had a way of being too big for comfort. Just too much of it. That whole vista thing. Particularly if there was relatively little within it, within sight, that was man-made.

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And for the most part, even though the characters all eventually converge on Vancouver, BC, they don't really do anything. They have small parts to play in the story, but don't have a definitive role. They don't advance the plot. They don't do something at a pivotal moment that changes the outcome.

As readers, we are observers observing observers. The main characters are all witnesses to parts of the story, but that's all they are.

At any point, the characters could have done something to change the story. They could have taken action that would alter the outcome or just generally muck things up. But they don't. And it's not like they opt out of having an impact at a particular decision point. There is no one fork in the road they could have taken. Rather, they followed the actual antagonists around a large parking lot. They could have ambled off in their own directions but it never occurred to them to do that. They don't even question their paths.

And perhaps that's the point. It could be that Gibson is saying we are all just witnesses to the real games being played by shadowy figures in the underworld. The characters the reader identifies with are just there to do their job, and see everything else unfold around them.

Early on, the book is about locative art.

Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of café au lait. 'Cartographic attributes of the invisible," she said, lowering the bowl. "Spatially tagged hypermedia." This terminology seemed to increase her fluency by factor of ten; she scarcely had an accent now. "The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these."

Page 22

Gibson does a nice job in exploring this concept. Artists work with programmers to create virtual reality overlays of the world relying on GPS technology. The art allows a viewer to look at a scene though a helmet and see what the artist has done to the world. For example, you look at the a normal street without the viewer, but if you put the viewer on you may see it overlaid with the scene of a celebrity's death.

"A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject. That's what every Elvis sighting is about, literally."

All of which reminded her very much of how Inchmale looked at these things, though really she believed it too.

"What happens," she asked him, "if the celebrity self dies first?"

"Very little," he said. "That's usually the problem. But images of this caliber serve as a hedge against that. And music is the most purely atemporal of media.'

"'The past isn't dead. It's not even past,'" quoting Inchmale quoting Faulkner. "Would you mind changing channels?'

Page 102

This is compelling because while it seem a bit out there, we are already doing that today. Gibson likens all immersion in digital worlds to virtual reality.

"We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can't just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We'll have internalized the interface. It'll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you'll just walk down the street…" He spread his arms, and grinned at her.

Page 65

"The artist Beth Barker is here, her apartment. You will come, you will experience the apartment, this environment. This is an annotated environment,Do you know it?"

"Annotated how?"


"Each object is hyperspatially tagged with Beth Barker's description, with Beth Barker's narrative of this object. One simple water glass has twenty tags."

Page 131

Websites like Flickr allow you to upload your photos and Tag them with searchable information and key words about the scene. Depending on your settings, other people can also tag those photos and even make notes on them.

You can also GeoTag your pictures and tie them to a location on a map where you took them.

It gets interesting when you start looking at it the other way. Take a look at the map on Flickr, and you can then choose a street and see all the photos people tagged as being associated with that street. People are now tagging and marking up the world in their casual internet use.

Google Maps supports its own initiatives. Most people know you can use Google Maps for directions, and see them from the traditional map perspective, from a Satellite perspective, and increasingly from a street level photographic perspective.

A lesser know feature is the ability to markup your maps. You can take Google Maps, pinpoint your favorite locations or directions, and make that available to others.

Everyone from news media to iPhone App developers are using this technology to highlight crime trends or to help you find all of the public restrooms in the area based on where you are at the moment. Google Maps mashups are popping up all the time.

This new era of locative computing, enabled by GPS, Smart Phone, and increasing common WiFi access opens up a world of powerful tools.

Spook Country swims in this world and spends a good deal of time on it, but ultimately, it has little to do with the story.

It's almost like Gibson already had the story in mind, but he also wanted to explore this new world. So he tacked it into the book because there wasn't a better place for him to explore it.

So instead of a book about some fascinating main characters, where new technologies and shifting paradigms of thought about location, art, and reality play a key role in the story, we get a decidedly low stakes tale of shadowy figures messing with one another.

And the results would have been no different had our main characters not even existed.

Gibson's strength is in writing about technology and explaining its potential in the world. He brings life to mundane topics of coordinates and servers and new types of art.

Unlike past novels, he does a great job bringing this novel to a close. The last 50 pages is paced well and cleanly. While the action happens quickly, the writing itself does not feel rushed.

My criticisms about the novel center of the first 100 pages, the lack of action by the main characters, and the large distraction of the locative art meditation. There may have been room for two separate books here, rather than squeezing all the disparate stuff between two covers.

Or I missed the point, and Gibson was actually using this structure intentionally to comment on the voluntary powerlessness of much of the population.

Resistance is Futile 02: Out of Memory Error

In the current issue of Wired (15.10), columnist Clive Thompson talks about the recent decline human memory. He suggests that reason people remember less now is because they don't need to.

That reflexive gesture — reaching into your pocket for the answer — tells the story in a nutshell. Mobile phones can store 500 numbers in their memory, so why would you bother trying to cram the same info into your own memory? Younger Americans today are the first generation to grow up with go-everywhere gadgets and services that exist specifically to remember things so that we don't have to: BlackBerrys, phones, thumb drives, Gmail.

But is this a problem?

In The Matrix, when people needed to learn a new skill, they could just have it downloaded into their mind. I'd like to be able to do that. Imagine the possibiliities of having a memory card slot in your head that allowed you to download new information or skills.

I've talked before about adding senses, VR goggles, Modafinil, and other ways the improve on biology. Biology and technology continue to converge.

But in reality, are we alread there? Sure we can't download the information immediately into the brain, but we can get it all on the internet.

It may seem obvious, but the problem is nothing more than an interface one. The Keyboard-Mouse-Ears-Eyes interface between the Internet and the brain is simply too slow and clumsy.

And that's the realm where improvements will come in the next few decades. Either the interface will be improved, or it will be replaced.

To expand the idea even further, at what point does the body itself superflous?

Book Review 08: What is data?

The deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit had sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

Page 1

Pokemon first made news in the US not for it’s addictive and silly characters, but because in 1997 it hospitalized hundreds of Japanese children. A scene filled the screen with flashes of light and induced seizures around the country. The phenomena is described as Photo Sensitive Seizures and inspired new TV regulations around the world.


The idea that seemingly meaningless visual input can cause the brain to misfire plays a key role in Stephenson’s prescient novel, Snow Crash.

The book began life as a graphic novel, but eventually the author turned to the more traditional format. It’s easy to see how the book would work as a comic. Stephenson describes the action and takes us into characters’ heads in ways the seem custom made for thought bubbles and six panel pages.

Stephenson wrote the book in 1991, when the Internet was something few people had heard of. There was no web and no point and click interfaces as there are today. No one could envision the DotCom nova that exploded 5 years later. The internet was still the province of email, FTP, USENET, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and MUDs.

In this dark and funny dystopian cyberpunk novel, Stephenson weaves a complex plot covering Sumerian creation myths, commercialization and fragmentation of American culture, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Neuro-biology, the nature of linguistics, media ownership, 3rd world refugee migration, and modern Pizza delivery.

The book is filled with big ideas, including:

• Nature of computer viruses
• Nature of biological viruses
• Language Acquisition
• Hardware vs. Software vs. Wetware
• How homo sapiens became human beings
• 
  The history of creation myths and biblical stories

While filled with cool technology, ancient mythology, and enough violence and gore to make Rambo uncomfortable, Stephenson still writes it with his tongue planted firmly in his cheese. The first character we meet is a pizza delivery guy. How do we know he’s important to the story? Well, his name is Hiro Protagonist.

Hiro Protagonist
Last of the freelance hackers
Greatest sword fighter in the world
Stringer, Central Intelligence Corporation
Specializing in software-related intel
(music, movies, and microcode)


I had trouble with some of the ancient history. I probably should have been taking notes while reading it, because I kind of got lost in Hiro’s discussions with the Librarian. Fortunately, in chapter 56, Stephenson creates an expository section where he explains everything we would know if we had been paying attention. There are some elements in the book I still don’t grasp; it will take another reading or two.

A weakness of the book may be Stephenson’s hesitation. He doesn’t push his point to its logical end.

The story is about the parallels between biology and information. He treats the computer virus as though it’s different from the biological. He draws parallels between binary code and ancient ways of viewing the world. Mythical characters become programmers, but only in the metaphorical sense.

“Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?”
“Sure.”
“You were forming new pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them – the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells – your bioware self modifies – the software becomes part of the hardware.”

Page 126


Juanita sighs, looks tired. “There won’t be any diagnosis,” she says. “It’s a software, not a hardware, problem.”
“Huh?”
“They’re rounding up the usual suspects. CAT scans, NMR scans, PET scans, EEGs. Everything’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with his brain – his hardware.”
“It just happens to be running the wrong program?”
“His software got poisoned.”

Page 199

But it’s almost an arbitrary delineation. Biology IS information. Taken to the next level, there is no difference between the biological and the informational. They are the same. That’s the point he’s hinting at but he doesn’t quite take us there. I don’t know if that’s intentional, or if it’s because he wrote the novel in 1991.

Since then, we’ve seen increasing convergence between technology and biology. From wireless headsets to the proliferation of portable computing to continual connections to the Internet to cutting edge limb replacement research, technology is a more integral and invisible part of our lives.

The book is not just big ideas, though. It’s also has some witty story telling. The pace is surprisingly quick. And Stephenson isn’t just focused on the technology. He brings out the emotion in his characters.

Some of the most moving sections on the story border on the cheesy and contrived, but are still a fun read. Chapter 65 tells a great story of the group camaraderie of strangers. And Fido’s story, which appears throughout the book, reminds us how being caring can pay unexpected dividends down the road.

In future entries, I may drill into some of the big issues. In the meantime, here are some topics for discussion in your next book group:

• The Raft is analogous to the brain with its quasi-organic growth and increasingly complex ties among constituent parts
• Biology is Data and vice versa
• How is the Internet like the Metaverse? How is it changing?
• What is the nature of language?
• Gargoyles are always connected. How is that like our culture today?

If you enjoy cyberpunk realities, dystopian futures, paleo-Christianity and ancient creation myths, or sword fighting, you will find something to enjoy in Snow Crash. It’s well paced, with a reasonably tight plot, compelling characters, and unexpected laughs. Readers can appreciate it based on big ideas, or on the engaging story. And I would look forward to a movie version of it, if I wasn’t convinced Hollywood would screw it up.

Book Review 07: Free Markets Gone Nuts

In Jennifer Government, Max Barry crafts a dystopian future where capitalism has run amuck. A person’s last name is the same as their employer or school. The federal government is little more than a contract enforcement body. Corporations and people have full reign to do pretty much anything they can pay for. The government will only investigate crime when the victim can afford to fund the prosecution.

And (supposedly) the language in a contract beats all.

The story opens when low level marketing employee Hack Nike finds himself promoted after a chance meeting. He signs his new contract without reading it, and only then learns what his new job will entail. To increase sales of a line of sneakers, he needs to kill 10 kids who buy them.

People will think the sneakers are so popular, that kids are killing each other to get their hands on a pair. Nike would then flood the market with the now coolest product on the street at a huge price, and make a different sort of killing.

Hack, though, is not entirely on board with this plan.

He shook his head angrily. What was he thinking? He wasn’t going to shoot anyone. Not even for a better apartment.

Page 10

But he signed a contract. His freelance and last-name-less girlfriend Violet encourages him to go to the police. He does, and they explain his options. If Hack Nike goes forward with the killing, the police will find him quickly, and if the families of the victims choose to fund it, he will be prosecuted and sent to prison.

Or, he can outsource the job to the Police and they will take care of it. For a fee of course. Hack signs another contract without reading it.

Things start happening quickly from there. Barry introduces us to Jennifer Government. Jennifer is a Government agent with a mysterious past and an even stranger tattoo. She is the classic cop who plays by her own rules, and who drags her more relaxed but supportive partner into the mess. She is more concerned about doing what’s right than doing what she’s supposed to do.

Barry does a nice job of setting up a complex plot with lots of twists and turns. The story quickly takes off and involves the highest level executives in the world, government structure, and lowly laid-off take builder Bill formerly-Betchell.

Billy Betchel built tanks. Big ones. They had caterpillar treads and cannons on the front and swiveling machine guns; they were …impressive, was what they were. When anyone asked what Billy did for a living, he said, ‘You know the Bechtel military yards, outside Abilene? I work there,’ and watched their eyebrows jump. It got so Billy started wishing his job was as cool as it sounded.

Page 20

Characterization is the weakest element in the story, however. Barry’s characters, while interesting, aren’t fleshed out individuals. They are just a few pages away from being clichés. We’ve seen these characters before:

• The down on his luck employee duped by his boss
• The rogue cop
• The partner who really wants to play by the book
• The pompous corporate executive
• The fired-up corporate protester
• The precious child in danger
• The independent person who doesn’t realize the deck is stacked against them until it’s too late.

Barry takes these characters and puts them in new situations that explore the extremes of libertarianism and unbridled capitalism. He attacks the extremes of free markets without saying anything bad about them. Instead he puts the story in play to see what can happen when anything goes.

The pacing of the story is a bit uneven. It starts off at a decent pace. Then it plods a little. Then it sprints. Then it plods some more. Then it sprints again.

While there may be pacing issues and some shallow character development, Jennifer Government is definitely worth reading. The story is complex and interesting. And the action sequences are tight.

One of Barry’s strengths is the action sequences. Many authors have trouble with these. They put a lot of characters in a scene and when the bullets start flying, it all becomes mud.

That doesn’t happen in Jennifer Government. Barry manages the locations, activities, and motivations of his characters well even when things get crazy. This is especially difficult since he tells the stories from inside the characters' heads and tries to hold on to their voices. But Barry deftly manages the locations and actions of multiple characters when they are quickly colliding.

Some of my favorite phrases in the book are those that give us some insight into the characters.

John Nike is an executive with Nike on the rise. He represents the ultimate free marketer and for Barry, represents the voice of the era.

The easier your job, the more you got paid. John had suspected this for many years, but here was proof: pulling down five hundred bucks an hour to sit in the afternoon sun on top of an L.A. office tower. He was wearing a brown suit and shades, reclining on a deck chair while a light breeze blew in from the bay. John thought he might have found the perfect job.

‘Hey,” he said to the foreman. ‘I’ve got an inventory sheet. None of this stuff had better go missing.’

The foreman looked at him. He was not so relaxed: he was getting paid much less than John and doing much harder work. ‘Nothings’ going to go missing.’

Page 146

‘By this action, the Government had proved that so long as it exists, none of us are truly free. Government and freedom are mutually exclusive. So if we value freedom, there’s only one conclusion. It’s time to get rid of this leftover relic we call Government.’

Page 212

‘Yes, some people died. But let’s not pretend these are the first people to die in the interests of commerce. Let’s not pretend there’s a company in this room that hasn’t had to put profit above human life at some point. We make cars we know some people will die in. We make medicine that carries a chance of fatal reaction. We make guns. I mean, you want to expel someone for murder, let’s start with the Philip Morris Liaison. We have all, at some point, put a price tag on a human life and decided we can afford it. No one in this room has the right to sit here and pretend my actions come out of the blue.’

Page 232

Violet, on the other hand, is the entrepreneur trying to be John Nike, but from the bottom of the economic ladder.

She took her fingers out of her mouth and looked at them. The nails were broken and ragged. There was blood and torn skin under them. She leaned over and spat, but the taste wouldn’t get out of her mouth. She didn’t know whey that courier girl had put up such a fight. Violet had only wanted her stupid jacket. People always had to make things difficult for Violet. They always had to screw her over.

Page 273

Jennifer is the cynic and remains highly skeptical of the world around her.

He smiled, but it was a strange, disconnected smile; it worried Jennifer a little. Buy Matsui was not running on all cylinders.

Page 88

Companies claimed to be highly responsive, Jennifer thought, but you only had to chase a screaming man through their offices to realize it wasn’t true.

Page 298

Hack Nike is really the only character who has a major personal epiphany. There are others who almost do, but Barry chooses not to explore those moments with other characters.

Still he felt upbeat on the cab trip back to Claire’s. He felt like he’d discovered something important. People like John Nike hadn’t been pushing him around for no reason, Hack realized: he had let them do it. He’d expected them to do it. Well, all that was going to change. He was going to take control.

Page 165

If you find yourself reading the book and getting a little bored, just keep reading. It will pick up again. And the story is worth it. If you want an entertaining story, told with a sense of humor, about a dystopian future, pick up a copy of Jennifer Government. Don’t expect a deep character sketch, and you will likely enjoy it.