Technology's Promise...

[mnasstro@orednet.org (Mark C. Nasstrom)]

 Subject: The Avuncular Overnight News  #151  Part 2
 
 >From From Now On
 
 Technology's Promise:
 Responding to the LA Times
 
 by Dave Mintz
 
 Note: The following article was written in response to the Los Angles Times
 article published Sunday, June 8, 1997. "Technology Remains Promise, not
 Panacea"
 
 Authors: Sandy Banks and Lucille Renwick
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 The LA Times article on computers reminds me that it is usually OK for a
 parent to criticize his or her child, but if another person criticizes
 little Joe or Judy, watch out. This article, and the others of its ilk,
 points out all the ways that computers have not "fulfilled" their
 educational potential.
 
 We may want to dismiss the criticisms with easy excuses, but if we think
 about the issues that are raised, and think about them without whining or
 raising our defenses, then we can honestly say that the article makes many
 valid points. We would go one further to say that the criticisms have
 sparked many vigorous debates among those of us who have been using
 computers with children for many years.
 
 If we were even a bit more honest, as users and believers that these
 technologies can and do provide important positive benefits for children,
 we would agree that we have not done a good job of presenting the issues to
 the public. Nor have we done a good job of organizing the computers to make
 positive educational changes.
 
 The LA Times published a two part series on the effects of computers in
 K-12 education; and the series' writers, Ms. Banks and Ms. Renwick, point
 to the lack of credible, wide-spread evidence that the vast sums of money
 spent on computers resulted in higher scores on standardized tests for
 students.
 
 Through a variety of examples and quotes, they demonstrate that teachers
 are generally not prepared to use computers in classrooms; they lack
 support and educational guidance, and, though the computers may be
 motivational and children may enjoy using them, the results have not
 resulted in better scores.
 
 They conclude that there are perhaps better ways to spend our educational
 dollars. In addition, the writers discuss the fact that high pressure sales
 tactics of hardware and software companies tend to drive the
 processes of placing computers into classrooms.
 
 The article is enlightening and points to real public engagement needs - if
 computers are to be used for educational change, then the educators who use
 them need support and time to learn and to apply the learning to be able to
 use them effectively in class. We need to have a clear consensus as to what
 "effective" means and what it will take to achieve it.
 
 We know from the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow (ACOT) studies and similar
 studies from IBM, that the computers alone make little difference. It is
 when the learning environment changes that student learning changes. When
 teachers use the tools to engage children in active construction of
 knowledge, projects that are related to standards for learning; and when
 instruction, curriculum and assessment are tied neatly together, then
 learning occurs.
 
 In the article there is a quote from a teacher who mentions that the
 learning that children do with computers is the same as when they use
 books, but it is more motivating. If this is so, then the use of computers
 must be wrong.
 
 Computers and books are different animals; both should be used, and each in
 their right place. Books should never be compromised for the sake of
 computers. But teaching and learning with computers is different.
 
 Computers provide students with an environment to model ideas and test
 theories. They are able to connect to resources, and to find answers that
 may not be in the books that are currently in the room. Computers assist
 students so they may model behaviors and learn more about them.
 
 When businesses adopted computer technology, a number of changes took
 place: Gone are the steno pools, as many managers often type their own
 memos and analyze their own data.
 
 Stores no longer close for extended periods of time to "take inventory,"
 rather it is done at the moment of sale. In the past, inventory once lived
 on the shelves of 7-11 stores for as many as 45 days. Store owners used
 their gut instinct to make purchasing decisions and there was no point of
 sale information.
 
 Today, using computer models and data from the store, 7-11 store owners
 make informed decisions that have increased sales per store by 2 to 3
 times. These changes require owners to operate in new ways and to learn
 from data and from models of customer decision making.
 
 The same is true about the adoption of computers in classrooms - using a
 computer with children in a classroom requires a different attitude, a
 different way of thinking, and different activities to be worth the expense
 and learning time.
 
 The article's conclusion is right - educators need support, time and
 opportunity to learn and to apply their learning. Many years ago, a
 colleague of mine, Julaine Salem, and I wrote that without the support of
 time - and lots of it - and without a place for teachers to learn, such as
 a computer for home use, and an assurance that each machine is up and
 running every day for every class minute, then schools might as well buy
 softballs.
 
 Computer technology needs support to be worthwhile - but so does a library,
 and so does a music program, and so does an art program and so does a drama
 program. And we know that a football team will not be successful without
 coaches, proper practice equipment, a stadium and knowledgeable, supportive
 fans.
 
 If the authors of the article were to look at Ms. Salem's research,
 conducted with students in the Los Angeles Unified school district in the
 mid 80's, they would have found that a program directed at specific
 educational needs would show remarkable gains by children using two very
 simple programs - BASIC programming and Logo programming.
 
 What Ms. Salem showed, and what we know from so many other educational
 areas, is that the way for computers to make a difference in children's
 learning is when they are organized to do just that.
 
 The school must identify measurable goals for the use of computers,
 determine what will be learned, provide training and time for teachers to
 understand how best to reach these established goals, and then provide the
 support to carry out the plan. When a school buys computers just for the
 sake of a high computer count, or when they connect to the Net, without
 evaluating the purpose in terms of student learning, they have little
 chance to show much gain.
 
 Rather, when a school or district determines what its educational goals are
 for students and then organizes the computers to meet those goals, we will
 see change. If the goals - verifiable, demonstrative goals -with measurable
 indicators of achievement, then it can be determined how the computers make
 a difference and make appropriate changes as the program is monitored.
 
 When the Los Angles Unified School District initiated the first computer
 program, the Computer Education Foundation Program in 1985, the computers
 were purchased for the specific goals of improving students' understanding,
 and for the application of geometry and writing skills. These were areas in
 which students did not do well, and areas that the computer might be very
 helpful. So the goals were set and the professional development for staff
 was geared to these two areas. There was a specific focus.
 
 That is the way that computers, like any other educational strategy, needs
 to be put in place. Once data is collected on student needs, and goals are
 established, then the next crucial step is the professional development for
 teachers that will provide them with materials, strategies and new
 understanding to meet the learning goals.
 
 Further, the support for teachers and students, once the computers are in
 classrooms, can be put in place. Teachers can receive support and can focus
 on the key goals, not on every new thing. If the goals are to improve
 writing, then that is the focus.
 
 Teachers need not worry about new ways to use computers for math or to find
 the neatest multiple- media reading program, or even how to search the
 Internet. The focus is on writing.
 
 In this way, the computers are never obsolete, as the Times article, and so
 many others have described. Today's computers may not be right for future
 goals, but a computer purchased today with appropriate software designed to
 improve students' ability to write, will not become obsolete - unless we
 never want students to write again.
 
 An educational goal for the students in my sixth grade class was to learn
 the math concepts of variables, negative and positive numbers and
 coordinate points. To meet these goals, in 1983, students developed
 programs in BASIC on $99 Timex Sinclair computers. Sixth grade students in
 1997 could do the same. They do not need a $4,000 multiple media computer
 connected to the Internet with a T1 leased line.
 
 If the educational goal is to have students learn a variety of scientific
 concepts, learn to analyze data and draw conclusions about the data, and
 demonstrate a number of other cognitive skills, then they may do so with
 much more sophisticated equipment.
 
 They could communicate with children and adults around the world to collect
 data on river water quality and to compare water samples and rain ozone
 factors in various industrial sites around the world. They may then compare
 the weather patterns and the pollution levels of manufacturing plants to
 determine why water quality is different in various parts of the world.
 They could read about such an experiment in a science book, and then write
 a report.
 
 Educators and students would argue that the first learning environment
 described would be far more engaging and, ultimately, more meaningful. But
 such a project requires a more expensive machine. However, as educators
 analyze their goals, they know there is a need for both kinds of machines.
 
 When students are preparing the local service club's annual 24 page, multi
 color holiday brochure with pictures and other visual images, then a Timex
 Sinclair will not do. But in preparing the written materials they do not
 need a $2,000 machine, when a $200 Dreamwriter or other simple text
 processor will do.
 
 The key is to determine what the educational goals are and then to organize
 the resources in such as way as to meet those goals.
 
 When a basketball team is 2 and 20 one year and a new coach is hired, the
 expectation is for continued growth, not a miracle turn around to a
 championship team in one year.
 
 The same is true with computers - pick reasonable goals, measure your
 success against those goals, communicate the results to the public, and
 build slowly as everyone on the staff learns new skills and applies them in
 the classroom. School district personnel also must assess and reassess
 every year to keep what works and improve on it, while getting rid of those
 strategies and practices that do not work.
 
 The writers point out that many educators, parents, and other interested
 parties seemed to think that just placing computers in a class or in a lab
 would somehow produce students with higher test scores.
 
 Learning requires good teaching. Computers can simulate multiple behaviors
 - a computer can become a musical instrument, and it gives learners the
 ability to manipulate graphical images, to edit and change words, to create
 animated objects, and to communicate with people around the world.
 
 Computers can be used by students to search for and analyze data or to
 write a report that uses visual images. But alone, a computer will not make
 students smarter, or better able to score higher on standardized tests.
 
 A piano in a home or classroom will not teach a student musical concepts or
 how to produce recognizable music. No matter how great the book, text or
 otherwise, the majority of children need teaching to learn from them. I do
 not know the statistics, but I would guess that it is hard to find research
 data that proves that a particular text book will improve a student's
 grades on annual assessments without good teaching.
 
 The criteria to judge the educational value of the use of computers is not
 against a text book, or against a music program or an art program or the
 marching band (where has it been shown that new band uniforms help children
 score better on math assessments?). Kids need all of these to thrive.
 
 All kids should have the opportunity to play a musical instrument, to
 conduct authentic scientific research in a lab , to play a competitive
 sport, to spend time deep in the stacks of a library, and to search the net
 to find a copy of a book on a computer in some other world computer.
 
 And these need to be done under the guidance of a teacher who has learned
 how to integrate assignments in such as way as to produce student learning
 that matches already determined educational needs and assessments.
 
 The article in the LA Times and the many other articles critical of
 technology use in the schools, must be used to keep educators honest. The
 sole determiner for buying and using computers should be to improve student
 learning.
 
 If a part of that improvement means to motivate students to come to school
 early and stay late, then let's state this, measure it, and share it with
 the public. If a step on the way to improved student communication is to
 have students collaborate on a research project where information is gained
 over the Net, then let's state this, measure it and share it with the public.
 
 Further, let's ensure that teachers have the learning time and the support
 to enable them to make the changes in their classrooms, and in their
 teaching styles to foster the growth and learning that we know computers,
 in whatever form we use them, can provide our children.
 
 When General Motors set out to build a new motor car, they spent over $3
 billion to study, plan and create a new way to work. GM spent thousands of
 hours studying car models and the design and manufacturing processes.
 
 They created not only a new car, but a new way to think about building,
 selling and supporting the manufacture of a car. They designed a team
 system for manufacturing and the structures to support team development.
 
 They understood that learning new skills and the application of those
 skills was a key, so now each employee spends no less than 7 percent of the
 work time in paid, ongoing training to upgrade manufacturing and people
 skills. Each employee must upgrade their skills and abilities continually.
 
 As the makers of the Saturn cars focus on established goals for design,
 manufacturing and customer satisfaction, they consistently seek to improve,
 using public opinion, manufacturing and repair data.
 
 We should do no less with the use of computes in classrooms, and we should
 communicate to the public what it is we do, how it is working and why it is
 important.
 
 Dave Mintz
 National Alliance for Restructuring Education
 National Center on Education and the Economy
 dmintz@ncee.org
 ===========================================================

 Subject: The Avuncular Overnight News  #153  Part 1
 
 >From IATH Research Reports
 
 Waxweb: Image-Processed Narrative
 
 David Blair
 POB 174
 Cooper Station, NY, NY 10276
 artist1@interport.net
 
 WAX's MOO Project is here
 
 http://bug.village.virginia.edu/     {{THE AVUNCULUS VOUCHES FOR THE LINK}}
 
 I prefer to describe my work as image-processed narrative, in which both
 the images and the narrative are processed. On the image side, this puts me
 very much on the side of video makers who insist upon a mediated image, and
 for whom the process of technique is always foregrounded in the artwork. A
 major reason for my choice of working method is that video imaging is
 something that I discovered and learned on my own; unlike many of my peers,
 I do not have an art school education. I actually began at the public
 library, where my desire to make plastic-image work was fatally informed by
 the discovery of works like Emshwiller's "Sunstone" and Paik's "Suite 212",
 both of which I found at the Donnell Media Center in New York City. Later,
 by luck, I learned that it was possible to trade work for access to
 equipment at Film/Video Arts, a media access center also in New York; and
 not long after, I heard of the free studios at the Experimental TV Center,
 in Owego, upstate NY, where I discovered the tools and traditions of
 image-processed video. It is natural that the method of auto-apprenticeship
 should combine with the process-oriented approach of Owego-style videoart
 to create a taste for images whose shape and meaning emerge through the
 process of attempting to learn how to make them.
 
 I studied fiction as an undergraduate in college, where I made the
 uninformed decision to become a director of narrative films. My models
 since high school had been "grotesque" fictions that often winked at the
 viewer while describing the processes of their own creation, a sort of
 fiction that has been given the name "metafiction", and was one of the most
 important precursors of the what is now generally considered
 post-modernism. My earliest instructors were the Firesign Theater, an
 audio-theater group that distributed their fictions by LP, and Thomas
 Pynchon, whose "Gravity's Rainbow" I had the good fortune to accidentally
 buy when it came out. Much enjoying the Firesign Theaters' methods of
 constant association to create continuity, and Pynchon's method of reading
 through primary sources in order to discover the narratives of history, I
 began my own process of creating artificial histories, whose general form
 was predetermined, but whose improvisational shape was determined by the
 accidents of discovery and creation that followed during the execution of
 the piece. At the level of narrative, this could enter in the astonishing
 accidents that occur that during directed random reading in the library (or
 any other meta-text). At the level of images, it could take place during
 the relatively unpredictable and uncontrollable shape-shifting that images
 take during machine-mediated creation. And at the higher levels of
 creation, it could take place in the strange accidents of synchonicity that
 bound the guided acts of narrative and image creation described above with
 the ordinary texture of my life, and the events of history around me.
 
 "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" (85:00, 1991), is a
 electronic-cinema feature created in this vein. This hybrid feature, which
 can be called a film both from habit, and because modes of distribution
 necessitated a transfer to 16mm , is made completely of electronic images;
 the majority of it's 2000 shots were either digitally post-processed, or
 synthesized using analog and digital techniques. The narrative was also
 processed. The availability of the cheap word processor, which its'
 cut-and-paste functionality, made it possible for me to write the script, a
 job that took place continually over six years in parallel to the various
 forms of image composition (the making of the pictures, and their editing).
 In fact, in Wax's case it is very difficult to separate the creation of
 narrative from this pictorial composition process, as it was artist-access
 to the Montage non-linear editing system, a device archly self-described as
 a picture processor, that made it possible for me finally compose the film
 (Wax was the first independent feature cut on a non-linear system). Though
 the edit machine was physically and computationally separated from the
 writing machine, the similarity of their processes (and the fact I
 connected the two places) made the visual work of writing differ only by a
 strange blur from the pre-verbal work of editing.
 
 This description of image-processed narrative indicates that Wax is a
 heavily associative film, and in fact it is something like a first person
 road film, where continuity is created by the main character's endless
 monologue as he moves from one associative node to another; since it a
 movie, and so time based, it acts in totality like a punning machine on
 wheels, with each click of the gear chain spinning off a variety of verbal,
 audio-visual, or proto-haptic pointers across human and unhuman time or
 space, creating a virtual web of associative connections for which you are
 the processor. ... virtual, semi-transparent links that follow first person
 You like a cloud of unknowing. As indicated, in heading towards this type
 of fiction, I was molded by writers who rhetoricized a spatialized fiction,
 made of fragments that existed like connected places or many-exited
 plazas.... e.g. Firesign Theater or Thomas Pynchon. Unfortunately, working
 with either the word processor or the non-linear editing machine, I was
 limited in the amount of backstory, multiple paths from a single point, and
 general sense of process that I was able to present to an audience. One of
 the research goals I have set on the way to my second feature, "Jews in
 Space", has been to discover ways around this compositional/ presentational
 restriction. A preliminary step along this path has been to embrace
 hypertext writing. Hypertext refers to computer assisted navigation through
 networked text. .... documents where touching a word leads you to another
 page, or another document, and you add these links as you see fit, between
 existing words and docs, or to new ones you write. Jay Bolter, in his book
 "Writing Space: The Computer. Hypertext, and the History of Writing", talks
 about hypertext as spatialized fiction, where nodes are places, and
 narrative is a process of travel by associative links between places.
 Bolter also writes software, and is one of the authors of the hypertext
 program I currently use, called Storyspace, which literally presents the
 written fiction as a spatial fiction, consisting of linked text-boxes
 arranged in a deeply recursive web, where travel through the fiction is
 much the same as travel from place to place, along a narrative topography.
 
 Unfortunately, since the expanded writing functionality offered by
 hypertext is still physically separated from picture composition tools such
 as digital video non-linear editing systems, as well as from
 image-synthesis and image-processing tools, research is still an
 appropriate mode at this time. This research travels in several directions,
 coincident with the construction of "Jews in Space", which in itself
 constitutes a type of research. The project's narrative will be a hybrid
 construction very much in the tradition of the encyclopedic narrative,
 collating huge numbers of historical and imaginary associations, often
 connected merely by the curved shape of the globe. To the end of this
 construction, the literal level of narrative research is the actual
 gathering and integration of external research and a large number of
 created ideas and associations. The technical aspect of this research deals
 with finding ways to amplify my usual ways of working. One direction I have
 already taken is to integrate hypertext writing with the use of on-line
 databases such as the digital Encyclopedia Britannica, a totally
 hyperlinked, Boolean-searchable version of the famous encyclopedia, which
 is available across the Internet. Now that relatively inexpensive
 local-area-network-style connections to the Internet are easily available
 through dialup, allowing home desktop use of visual point-and-click
 interface software such as Mosaic (see below for a description of Mosaic),
 such large-scale sources of meaningful content, easily reconfigurable by
 individual users, will increase in number and quality in the very near
 term. Local tools such as optical character recognition, which allows easy
 importation of scanned paper-based text into the computer, and easily
 constructed, quickly parsed databases which allow quick search, collation,
 and annotation of large individually-owned masses of text and other types
 of data, allow additional functionality when used in conjunction with
 hypertext software.
 
 However, construction of meaning from huge amounts of material continues as
 it has since even before the availability of cheap paper, as form of
 intellectual handicraft which in general resists mechanization.
 Unfortunately, there perhaps are no true association machines that act as
 true amplifiers of the creative composition process. Such machines could
 parse large amounts of inputted raw material, to present the author with
 processed associative clusters; the author could then select a few
 proto-compositional elements from the offered choices and use them as the
 beginning work of new plot sections, or reuse them in the machine as the
 iterative seeds of new associative processing. These sorts of association
 machines are necessary for the construction of very large scale
 hypernarratives, and are additionally theorized as the engines of story
 places, which will constitute a new medium of autogenerating single or
 multiple user machine-created hypernarratives. With the promise of these
 compositional tools in mind, a second, longer term research goal for this
 part of the Waxweb/Jews in Space projects involves a search for narrative
 and poetry machines, i.e. artificial intelligence tools for the automated
 creation of association or even narrative. Such tools would allow amplified
 imaginative use of the large personal and impersonal databases mentioned
 above, by assisting in complexifying the narrative associationism which in
 image-processed narrative can serve as a form of plot propulsion, while
 simultaneously creating more places for the viewer to travel in her
 enhanced story automobile.
 
 Unfortunately, these latter tools are not yet easily available to artists,
 though prototypes do exist in research laboratories. Similar limitations
 apply to many modes of desirable image construction, for example, the use
 of shared remote visualization across wide area computer networks to assist
 interactive creation of images at a distance; the modular construction of
 large, high resolution shared virtual worlds in relatively inexpensive
 workstations, plus other applications of virtual reality to electronic
 cinema production; and the use of artificial intelligence techniques for
 interactive image creation.
 
 Of course the simplest level of the research problem is shaped by the need
 to practically apply existing resources to produce results which at least
 imitate the above (current) unattainables. The simplest solution is always
 integration of existing resources in unfamiliar ways... i.e. hybridity.
 Fortunately, the growth of networked computing offers some interesting,
 on-the-way functionalities, which further shade the question in question by
 offering a new idea of what integration can be... not just the simultaneous
 operation of text and image composition tools, but a profound blurring
 between the modes of production and distribution.
 
 To this end, not surprisingly, I have continued to distribute "WAX" in
 order to discover new techniques of production. My catch-phrase for this
 working method is "multiple-media integrated narrative". Subtitles might
 include: How the Generic Brain-amplifier (networked computer) allows
 artists to cast the shadows of a single integrated narrative onto several
 media... or how Integrated tools allow the affordable creation of a
 multitude of Hybrid forms which together constitute a single narrative. One
 of the laboratories for the new feature has been the project of
 retrofitting Wax into what I call "Waxweb".
 
 Waxweb is a number of things. It started as a Storyspace hypertext, an
 experiment in large-scale hypertext I began in parallel with the
 preliminary construction of the hypertext script for "Jews in Space". Wax
 has no dialogue, but instead a narrator who delivers much of the story
 through voice-over; a fact which combined with the film's natural
 resemblance to hypertext, and its' need for audience assembly, made it a
 natural candidate for retrofit into a constructive hypertext... i.e. a
 hypertext that can not only be read, but also written to by its readers. To
 this end, I made what I call a base layer of 600 nodes (windows), roughly
 corresponding to the number of spoken lines in the film's monologue.
 Accompanying the text of the monologue are descriptions of the film's 2000
 shots, roughly padded with what might be called author's commentary. These
 are connected on a single "script" path, and surrounded with a simple
 indexing system, allowing transport around the film. The experience of
 reading this text-only hypertext is morphologically similar to watching the
 film (like hand-bones vs. fin-bones.. producing a certain type of aesthetic
 tension); pictures and sound are missing, but much extra information and
 near instant navigation have been added.
 
 Storyspace has a simple groupware functionality, which allows people in
 difference places to add hypertext nodes and links to a single document. I
 asked 25 writers scattered in US, Japan, Germany, Finland, and Australia,
 all connected by the Internet and equipped with the software, to add
 writings onto the base layer. For most people, the Internet is a text-based
 medium where reading and traveling are mixed up, where distance is
 pointless, and where things can happen in many orders and still retain
 coherence, so that it very much resembles hypertext. And in reverse, the
 visual interface to Storyspace looks very much like a network diagram, with
 text windows resembling subnets or individual machines, and hypertext links
 as their virtual intercommunicative connections, altogether creating an
 interesting fit between form, process , and content. I expected that the
 new contributors would act almost as an analogic poetry machine, creating
 unexpected narrative connections and material through their processes of
 reading/writing. If necessary, editors could go through the material, not
 deleting submissions, but adding indexes and other metalinking schema in
 order to give coherent shape to the material.
 
 Our tool needs were quite simple... Macintoshes, Storyspace (provided when
 needed through Eastgate's generosity), and dialup access to the internet,
 which in turn provided access to an entire set of virtual tools, such as
 person to person email, and a listserv based at the Institute for Advanced
 Research in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (headed by John
 Unsworth), which allowed an individual correspondent to send a letter to
 all Waxweb participants, creating an asynchronous discussion group. Files
 were shared through the use of a private "ftp" site in St. Louis, a
 harddrive space from which all participants could retrieve (or upload)
 files. For synchronous conferencing, where people had to be in one place at
 the same time, we decided to use MOO software, installed at Brown
 University... using the "telnet" tool, we all could travel to that distant
 machine and logon.
 
 MOOs are object oriented MUDs, and a MUD is multi-user dungeon, a piece of
 multi-user software originally created as a game in the style of the
 text-based Dungeons and Dragons adventure. Like that board game, they are
 both most often designed architectonically, as interconnected rooms. To
 play in a MUD, people travel (telnet) to a machine running the software,
 log on under archaic pseudonyms, and wage text against other users. The
 live, on-line intercommunication is what makes them unique... they are
 text-based virtual realities. While MUDS are fixed gaming areas, with fixed
 rules, MOOS are completely open and allow users to reconfigure the space,
 make new rooms, and even do a certain amount of Basic-style programming.
 The source code is also available, so that the software itself can be
 reconfigured at a deeper level by a programmer. MOO's can still have gaming
 aspects, but they are more often used as meeting, presentation, and
 workplaces, where you can be alone, or with many people.
 
 Coincident with our decision to use the HotelMOO at Brown, Tom Meyer, the
 "owner" of that MOO, introduced some interesting customizations. First off,
 he wrote a filter which converted Storyspace hypertext files to MOO-space,
 in the process of which each hypertext node became a room in the MOO's
 virtual architecture, and each link became a passage between rooms. Meyer
 also converted the room- construction commands native to the original MOO
 software so that they would more resemble hypertext authoring commands.
 
 Thus it became possible to put the Waxweb hypertext base-layer in a public
 place, so that anyone with telnet, regardless of their desktop machine,
 could literally read and write the Waxweb hypertext. Access to a Macintosh
 and a copy of Storyspace were no longer prerequisites; internet access was
 the only requirement. Visitors to the MOO were invited not just to read the
 ported hypertext, but to add to it using the online hypertext tools, and in
 addition to talk to one another. Traditional writing, hypertext writing,
 various levels of programming, as well as several types of synchronous and
 asynchronous text communication were all supported in this environment, a
 hybrid functionality resulting from the placement of a constructive
 hypertext in a virtual-reality environment. Though the easy-to-use visual
 interface of the Storyspace software was lost , a huge group of potential
 writers/readers was added; Storyspace still remained the main authoring
 tool for myself and the 25 original writers, because of the power and speed
 with which links could be constructed. I had expected this first group of
 writers to act in unison as a poetry machine, and continued to believe that
 the quantum froth of net contribution would show an unexpected
 autocatalytic ability, which could be amplified by the pattern-recognizing
 abilities of an editor, should that become attractive.
 
 Soon after Waxweb became a 600 room hybrid of text-based virtual reality
 and on-line hypertext, the project of adding Wax's audio and video was put
 forward in the context of an installation at SIGGRAPH '94, the largest
 annual computer graphics conference. Tom Meyer realized that the best way
 to realize this, and preserve the existing on-line functionality, would be
 to make Waxweb a dynamic hypermedia document on the World Wide Web.
 
 The World Wide Web (WWW) is essentially an Internet hypermedia document
 publishing standard established and maintained at CERN in Geneva, which
 allows the creation of a distributed, virtual, hypermedia library across
 the network. Documents can be defined in any ascii editor, as the heart of
 the system is a simple markup language called HTML (hypertext markup
 language). These markup codes define intra- and interdocument links,
 allowing navigation through document data distributed throughout the world.
 A reader in New York may click a link on her local screen-displayed page to
 bring forward another virtual, formatted page from Cardiff. Clicking a word
 link on the Cardiff page may bring forward yet another page from the middle
 of a document in California, which itself may consist not just of text
 residing on that California machine, but also of a picture from another
 machine in the same laboratory, and a second picture from a machine running
 in Southern Florida. In essence, virtual hypermedia documents are formatted
 on a user's screen, using data distributed throughout the world, a system
 which is true even to the level of a single page's composition.
 
 The ability to use the World Wide Web (WWW) is dependent on the type of
 connection a user has to the internet. If people have text-only,
 dumb-terminal style connections to the Internet provider, most usually
 through a telephone connection, they can still capably read hypertext-only,
 pictureless documents using Lynx, a DOS-commandline style of reader which
 runs on their provider's server, and shows links as highlighted text on the
 screen, chosen by using the cursor keys. If users have a LAN-style
 connection to the network, which allows them to use Windows-style
 intelligent terminal software, they can use a visual-interface "browser"
 for the World Wide Web, the most famous of which is Mosaic, an application
 created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Illinois).
 Mosaic is freeware; versions are available for almost all current
 platforms.... Mac, Windows, Unix workstations of various types, and even
 Amigas. The power of Mosaic and other browsers like it lies its ability to
 allow point and click navigation through links, plus the ability to easily
 view stills, audio, and video integrated in a single document. Files are
 usually transferred before being interpreted by the software, which means
 on even a relatively highspeed (ethernet) Internet connection, a small one
 minute digital movie will usually often take much more than a minute to
 transfer, at the completion of which the playback begins. Some viewers are
 beginning to offer playback as the data is received, a solution that allows
 viewers to see a low resolution version of stills as they arrive, and hear
 some varieties of digital audio (or video) in real-time.
 
 Mosaic-style browsers are essentially readers, and so do not offer useful
 on-line writing tools. Though a user can save personal annotations locally,
 there is no way to make these visible to others, and no real opportunity
 for synchronous intercommunication, all of which limits its usefulness as a
 workgrouping tool, though of course it is a wonderful platform-independent
 tool for the presentation of networked hypermedia, such as an audiovisual
 Waxweb. To keep the writing and intercommunication functionality present in
 a Mosaic environment, Tom Meyer's solution was to turn the WaxMOO into a
 virtual, dynamic World Wide Web document. This meant that the MOO, running
 on a distant machine, could answer requests for "pages" from a copy of
 Mosaic running on a local user's machine by sending out a representation of
 a MOO-room (hypertext node) in WWW format, and then closing connection with
 the browser until the next request. The "room" sent across the network
 would be displayed on the user's machine as a static, formatted page of
 hypermedia. This is quite different from the standard MOO command-line
 interface, which on one hand provides only text, but which on the other
 hand is constantly connected to the user, allowing real-time text-chat.
 
 Intercommunication through the Mosaic browser was achieved through
 modifications to the MOO which allowed it to receive commands in html
 format from a Mosaic browser, thus letting users gain access to the
 hypertext writing interface of the MOO by pressing standard buttons and
 filling out forms in the Mosaic browser. Since the MOO is by definition
 user-reconfigurable (meant to record the intentional traces of its' users),
 this interface allowed Mosaic users to make annotations that were made
 readable almost instantly for other reader/ writers. What was missing for
 the Mosaic users, unfortunately, was the ability to have a real-time chat
 with other users, or to use some of the other real-time functionalities of
 the MOO. However, the first solution to this problem was provided by the
 fact that users able to run Mosaic on their local machine could usually run
 multiple, similar, "smart-terminal" style programs in a multi-tasking
 fashion, and so could easily have a MOO chat-session active in a separate
 window simultaneous with the Mosaic-reading session. The text-only MOO
 would provide hypertext authoring functionality and intercommunication,
 while the Mosaic session would allow the user to view formatted hypertext,
 and embedded stills, audio, and video. The MOO reader could even be slaved
 to the Mosaic reader through the MOO itself, so that whenever the Mosaic
 users changed pages, the text only MOO-browser would change rooms to
 follow. As of this writing, Meyer is researching ways to integrate the
 real-time intercommunicative capacities of the MOO directly into the Mosaic
 browser. It should be noted that the quest to add a real-time datastream
 (such as a telnet session) to World Wide Web browsers is one of the highest
 current development priorities in the WWW community. A standardized,
 cross-platform implementation will open the way to such applications as a
 true, audio-visual intercommunicative and distributed virtual reality (as
 we shall see below).
 
 With this basic functionality in place, Waxweb was extensively reworked and
 reimported into the MOO. By late July, Waxweb consisted of 900 pages of
 hypertext with over 9000 hyperlinks. This included the main 600 pages of
 the film, plus over 200 additional pages containing a wide variety of
 material from earlier versions of the script; the other 100 pages included
 material by guest authors, and miscellaneous materials. Embedded in the
 main pages are 2000 color stills, one for each shot in the film; each is
 available in three sizes, resizeable any time by the individual user,
 dependent on interest or bandwidth requirements. The film itself has been
 split into 600 mpeg-compressed video segments, most less than a megabyte in
 size. Audio is available separately in aiff format, mainly in order to
 offer the soundtrack in four languages. Readers can choose to hear audio at
 any time in either English, Japanese, French, or German; there are over
 2400 audio clips at the site. The film's monologue is also available as
 text in each of these languages; if the users chooses a language besides
 English, this text will be automatically inserted on the appropriate pages.
 Waxweb supports kanji both for reading and writing, though a localized
 Japanese browser is necessary to see this text.
 
 Using standard World Wide Web programming tools, a push button interface to
 the dynamic MOO is available directly from the Mosaic browser. The first
 choice users have upon entering the site is whether to register as a user,
 or visit as a guest. Registered guests receive a password, and access to
 the authoring tools at the site. Registration is necessary in part for
 security reasons, and to encourage responsible participation and the site;
 but also it allows each user to have a small personal data file associated
 with her, which allows storage of bookmarks and configuration data from
 session to session.
 
 At Waxweb, hypertext links have their usual color-underlining; access to
 the audio or video is through hyperlinked icons at the top of appropriate
 pages. Associative reading has been made easy; 100 key words have been
 hyperlinked throughout the entire text, allowing users to browse, for
 example, though all sequential occurrences of the word "bee". Each of the
 film's 2000 stills have been sorted into 30 idiosyncratic categories, such
 as the group of all "round things" that appear in the film. Clicking on any
 picture in the main 600 pages will take the reader to an index page where
 these similar pictures are displayed on a grid; the user can then click on
 any of the similar pictures on the grid, arranged left to right, top to
 bottom as they appear in the film, to be taken to that page of the film.
 
 At the bottom of each Waxweb page is the main authoring interface. The
 first element of this is a configuration menu, which allows users to chose
 language, picture size, and video compression format, at any point in the
 reading. Beneath this is a simple comment area; users can type their name
 and a several line comment, press the send button, and the comment will be
 immediately added to any others listed, and visible to other users anywhere
 in the world. Following this is a bookmarks area; pages can be added and
 subtracted from a personal bookmark list, and users can go any of the
 bookmarked pages at anytime. This is an important compositional tool for
 hypertext authors, who construct links between spatially distinct pages,
 and need to store references during their writing. Next is the hypertext
 writing interface, which allows users to add hyperlinks and new pages at
 will. Users can choose a word on the current page as the beginning of the
 link; they can then createa new page, to which they are immediately
 transported. At this point, the user begins to use the actual writing
 interface, which is just beneath the hyperlinking interface. Text can be
 entered, as well as pointers to media (stills, audio, video) at other
 sites, which will then be published embedded in the user's new page.
 
 Turning back to the hyperlinking interface, the user then chooses a place
 on the new page to anchor the link begun previously; when the link is
 completely, the user is taken back to the original page to test the new
 link. An important point to note in this entire process is that the user is
 free to make new Web pages at will, and indeed to make as many as she
 desires. Though the WWW is easy to author for, it is often difficult for
 new users to find a place to take their writing or home pages; Waxweb
 provides a very simple solution to this public access problem.
 
 By early 1995, we will be implementing a new interface to the site, which
 will include the first large-scale implementation of distributed virtual
 reality using standard World Wide Web browsers. This spatialized interface
 will be based on the recently defined specification for VRML, or virtual
 reality modeling language, a subset of SGI's Open Inventor language which
 has been specifically designed for use in conjunction with the World Wide
 Web. VRML takes advantage of the ability that Web browsers have to
 auto-launch helper applications in order to allow viewing of datatypes that
 the browsers themselves cannot handle internally. For example, pressing a
 link to download a jpeg-compressed still image will cause most viewers to
 simultaneously launch an external jpeg viewing application; the downloaded
 data is directed to the external application, which then displays the
 picture in a floating window. VRML works similarly; pressing a hyperlink,
 such as an underlined word or a button, causes 3-D object data and a scene
 description to be downloaded from a WWW server to the user, while
 simultaneously a VRML viewer is launched to interpret the data. The viewer
 is coded for extremely fast, software-only rendering of the 3D objects.
 When the objects are loaded, visitors can use the mouse to navigate through
 the rendered 3-D space at 5-20 frames per second on a 486-based machine,
 dependent on scene complexity; the viewers will be available on all the
 major platforms, and are expected to be able to render 20,000 polygons per
 second. Most interestingly, any rendered object can also have a hyperlink
 attached to it, so that clicking on a linked object, no matter what angle
 you are viewing it from, can take the user back to text, to a picture,
 sound, or movie, or to another 3-D scene. VRML is a true hybrid of
 hypertext and virtual reality. It wasn't so many years ago that Jaron
 Lanier, in the virtual reality camp, and Jay Bolter, on the side of
 hypertext, both rhetorically claimed that the two types of interface were
 mutually exclusive, as virtual reality was meant to couple computers and
 communication so profoundly that language would be left behind, even at the
 formal level of programming; whereas hypertext advocates saw the advent of
 universal hypertext as key to an argument that saw computers as both
 practically and formally to be a type of language technology. Here, the two
 collapse into one another, to create a hybrid new form, which can again be
 recombined with other existing forms such as MOO's and Web browsers to
 create even stranger combinations.
 
 Since "Wax", the film, made extensive use of 3D objects in its'
 storytelling, it has been relatively easy to covert these objects for use
 in VRML. The spatial interface to Waxweb will consist of more than 300
 browsable rooms, filled with hyperlinked 3D objects from the film. The
 major limitation of the current version of VRML (1.0, October 1994) is that
 it does not allow objects to have behavior, so that all objects lie static
 in their spatial field. This is expected to change over the next year, as
 VRML 2.0 is developed with behavior specifically in mind, and, in parallel,
 a standardized solution is worked out for the problem of how to embed
 real-time datastreams in a Web browser. It is commonly expected that these
 two developments will allow visual intercommunication via distributed
 virtual reality; multiple distant users, connected to the Internet through
 standard dialup IP-connect (visual interface accessible) accounts, will be
 able to interact with each in a simple realtime 3-D virtual reality, with
 communal text and graphics spaces easily available, as well as time-delayed
 audio (real-time audio available only for high-bandwidth users). In the
 nearterm, one of the specific technical goals of the Waxweb project is to
 find a simple, relatively standard way to provide these functionalities in
 a visual workspace which can be used both to view and add to Waxweb, and
 also serve as a production tool for "Jews in Space".
 
 At present, Waxweb runs on a RS6000 server at the Institute for Advanced
 Technology in the Humanities at UVa, headed by John Unsworth. In early
 1995, the project will be establishing mirror sites for the media at UNC's
 Sunsite, with additional mirrors planned at servers in Berlin, Sydney, and
 other sites. Because the site is based on a MOO, it is possible to
 dynamically create pointers to media files based on a user's stored
 profile, or even the IP address by which she is entering the site. Thus, a
 user coming in from Australia would receive all text and interface
 information from the main server in Virginia, while simultaneously be sent
 to the mirror in Sydney for pictures, sound, video and 3-D files; since the
 WWW is by nature a scheme for distributed hypermedia, this dynamic
 reassignment would be transparent to the user, who would only notice that
 files loaded faster once the mirroring scheme was implemented. Besides
 respecting the network's bandwidth ecology, this mirroring scheme will
 allow a higher user load, as the main sever would be left in the main to
 running the MOO software and answering requests for text, rather than
 constantly having to "think" about sending 100k or larger files to multiple
 simultaneous users. An additional, extremely important advantage of
 mirroring is that it is possible for the media files to exist on the
 individual user's machine. With support from the New York State Council for
 the Arts, I will be pressing a multi-platform CD-ROM of the complete Waxweb
 dataset (including a "frozen" html version of the MOO). Owners of the CD
 will be able to register at Waxweb, specifying through an easy to use
 interface where the CDROM is on their local system; thereafter, the MOO
 will point to the CD for all media files. This will allow low-bandwidth
 network users to enjoy Waxweb with quick access to heavy media types such
 as the mpeg video files, while at the same time dynamically interacting
 with the Waxweb server and other users, adding comments, hypertext, and
 pages as they wish.
 
 It is interesting to contrast the Waxweb project with a previous
 incarnation of Wax on the Internet. In May of 1993, Wax was sent across
 the mbone, or multimedia backbone of the Internet, which is a special,
 high-bandwidth testbed for delivery of real-time audio and video across the
 Internet. The New York Times ran a story in the business section ["Cult
 Film is First on the Internet", May 23, 1993], which declared that the
 experiment pointed towards the 500 channels, unfortunately neglecting to
 point out that the net-cast was a multicast, meaning anyone who could
 receive could also send audio or video (or text, of course), so that an
 individual's reception screen could be filled with little boxes of
 reconfigurable intercommunication. I kept this partial misconception in
 mind as I planned the Waxweb project, which in many ways is a re-multicast
 of Wax over the standard, lower bandwidth Internet. As this extremely
 inexpensive project has gone up on the public network, a wide variety of
 multi-million dollar commercial video-server trials have been announced
 around the US, and in some cases constructed. Many of these new networks
 have been conceived on an expanded cable-tv model, offering mainly more
 channels, and user interaction at the level of movies on demand, and simple
 shopping. Many offer high-bandwidth networks 50 to 100 times faster than
 what is available to high-end Internet users. Though Waxweb on the Internet
 is based on file transfer, rather than a continuous stream of digital
 video, I like to point out that if stable bandwidth at least one of order
 of magnitude lower than that being used in the video trials (in their
 "thinner" implementations) was available to Waxweb users, the functional
 difference between the two types of server would blur. With a practical eye
 on the high-end, Waxweb also allows functionality to lower end
 (low-bandwidth) users, including those who have a text-only access to the
 Internet via an ordinary dumb-terminal dialup connection, a type of user
 which at present constitutes the vast majority of internet connectees. This
 project is an example of a narrative "server" scalable from the bottom up,
 from text up to pictures, and in a broader sense demonstrates the strengths
 of an open, reconfigurable system. If the bandwidth were available, the
 ability to send narrative audio/video in a single direction would only be a
 subset of the systems' total functionality. My rhetorical point is that the
 500 channels offered by the videoserver trials are simply a high-bandwidth
 subset of an open, accessible, reconfigurable system, not the other way
 around. In the coming years, as universal digital access becomes viable, as
 bandwidth becomes cheaper and more stable, and the specification and
 standard tools surrounding the World Wide Web increase in capacity, it will
 become possible to imagine a global tv system populated by an indefinite
 number of small, scalable servers, each offering synchronous or
 asynchronous one-way and two-way datastreams, serving simultaneously as
 production environments, content providers and meeting places (or in other
 words, HTML 4.0 will be global television, plus!). This will be one of the
 most important areas of research for the Waxweb project as it moves from
 distribution of a reconfigurable "Waxweb" to the production of "Jews in
 Space". The first stage of the transition will involve a further enablement
 of the workgrouping tools, to allow a richer intercommunicative virtual
 production environment, capable not only of allowing production meeting and
 management, but also access to still and moving image composition tools,
 and large shared databases. These production tools will be developed with
 the idea in mind that they can become distribution tools at the completion
 of the film, to be used by an audience both for heightened on-line browsing
 of the completed multimedia narrative, and as intercommunication tools,
 configurable by users at the narrative server for even their own individual
 production purposes.
 
 The high road to such a server is of course traveled by using
 high-bandwidth internet tools, such as the upcoming Jupiter extensions to
 standard MOO software, which allows text/graphic/audio/video synchronous
 and asynchronous intercommunication by a group of users connected through
 the Internet's multimedia backbone (mbone). The low road is through the
 standard WWW; for instance, a VRML MosaicMOO capable of handling realtime
 data streams could be a very capable visual workgrouping tool. Such a tool,
 with both open and hierarchical functionalities, could be used for
 low-budget, multi-continent electronic cinema production and
 post-production, and then for distribution of a 40 gigabyte multilingual
 hyper/cybermovie that can be verbally, pictorially, and spatially browsed
 and reconfigured across the network, and, recursively, used as a
 text/picture/spatial meeting place and workspace by those browsing and
 writing viewers, all maybe for a dollar an hour, and with portable media
 available in a variety of forms at the same place.
 
 The same dataset created and presented through this server of course would
 also be used to make the linear theatrical feature. The permutatable nature
 of this dataset is at the heart of "multiple media integrated narrative", a
 process by whichhybrid tools are used to affordably create a unified data
 set from which can be created multitude of hybrid media forms which all
 constitute a single narrative. Working to partly produce "Jews in Space"
 through the network, I in no way intend to abandon the idea of the
 large-screen, linear narrative; the theatrical feature will be one
 iteration of the dataset, while an on-line, audience-reconfigurable 40
 gigabyte proto-global tv version will be another, and portable media yet
 another. As best as possible under present conditions, my next feature is
 authored from the start as an integrated database preserving all varieties
 of association, collation, and composition, so that final authoring in a
 variety of related narrative forms can easily be accomplished. A feature
 film in a darkened theater offers one type of narrative, both in meaning
 and presentation; a parallel WorldWideWeb-style version, with as much
 narrative material as 60 CDROM's, plus user interaction, constitutes
 another place, with many related stories; and the variety of
 user-reconfigurable personal, portable media, such as a videotape, floppy
 disc, or CDROM, each offer additional narrative functionalities.
 Rhetorically, it is as if the narrative were some 4th dimensional object
 which cast shadows onto the 2D spaces of composition and audience viewing;
 the shapes of different shadows are captured in separate media by the
 computer-aided artist, whose working power has been amplified by the brain
 machine, which has allowed cheap access to all these different media,
 simultaneous with cheap access to workgrouping and distribution tools,
 whose formal properties additionally effect the final plural results.
 
 It is the hybrid practicality of the open computer network medium, which
 amplifies the individual machine (just as the machine amplifies the
 individual user), that has allowed the new functionalities discovered and
 anticipated in the research described above. Here, we begin to see hints of
 a profound collapse of the previously distinct realms of production and
 distribution into one another. On the production side, Waxweb is an example
 of inexpensive distributed workgrouping tied to the integrated use of
 distributed resources. But this is not separate from distribution; the goal
 was obviously public distribution of a work which, iteratively, was
 designed for audience reconfiguration (production), renewed audience
 viewing (distribution), and so on. Concomitant with perception of this
 blurring, the concepts of integration and hybridity seem to come to the
 foreground. Narratively, integration can often be seen in the collapse of a
 large number of associations into a single coherent narrative; and
 technically, it can be seen in the continuing collapse of narrative tools
 into the individual user's workstation, and the collapse of machines into
 one another across networks. In parallel, narrative hybridity appears as
 the very strange combination of forms caused by the unexpected combination
 of various ways of telling; and technical hybridity as the sudden
 appearance of strange new functionalites caused by the clever recombination
 of tools, a process most easily performed if the tools are themselves open,
 easily available, and reconfigurable.
 
 We have already seen most text tools collapse into the integrated text
 amplifier... or computer, allowing us to do anything we want to do with
 words, in any order we want, on the way to composition. Concomitantly, we
 have gained the ability to project these functionalities across any
 distance, allowing us to not only to write or read, but to do a lot of
 hybrid things which are neither exactly one nor the other. General media
 tools will continue to collapse into the integrated media amplifier (or
 networked media workstation), where hypertext, image processing and
 synthesis, editing, and a variety of in-between functionalities will allow
 anything to happen in any order, on the way to composition, collaboration,
 presentation, and things in between. Inevitably, we are going to end up
 with a very large number of hybrid, multi-bodied media forms. Common to all
 will be that fact that a single, variegated chunk of proto-narrative,
 proto-image, proto-anything data can, and often will, take many different
 forms, which will all have the esthetic tension of being morphologically
 similar, though in different media.
 
 Waxweb has gone from hypertext to hypertext MOO to hypertext Mosaic MOO to
 hypertext VRML Mosaic MOO in about a year. Integration and hybridity are so
 dynamic right now, what with new tools building other new tools all over
 the connected planet, I think it is very difficult to really imagine what
 the possibilities will be in two or three years (WAIS-based scalable
 Video-conference/server with AgentInteractionStoryplace and
 time-based-hypertext interpersonal-VRML MosaicMOO (with whiteboard)
 narrative natively synchronized with various types of cross-platform
 portable media, and able to output new portable media, also available
 text-only, as well as at the local art-cinema, and the video-rental
 store.... and what have I forgotten?) If we can only keep open, accessible
 tools and networks, we will see hybridity become the standard, and maybe
 even live to see the next true step in hybridity, the commonplace use of
 integrated, hybridized network tools for the semi-automatic creation of
 narrative elements, both in production and distribution.Where production
 and distribution begin to resemble one another, and integrated tools create
 hybrid narratives, it is possible to imagine the practical availability and
 narrative application of poetry machines, meaningful autocatalytic images,
 and visual VR techniques in the production (and distribution) of digital
 cinema (though I am prepared to accept this may be an archaic vision).
 
 =============================================================

 Subject: The Avuncular Overnight News  #152  Part 1
 
 >From Perforations
 
 The Technology of Uselessness
 
 Critical Art Ensemble
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
 I am useless, but God loves me.
 
 -Mike Kelly
 
 The expectation that technology will one day exist as pure utility is an
 assumption that frequently surfaces in collective thought on the
 development of society and social relations. This prospect has typically
 suggested two opposite scenarios of the future. On one hand, there is the
 utopian millenium predicted by modern thinkers who were guided by belief in
 progress; this concept slowly began to supplant belief in the concept of
 providence during the 17th and 18th centuries. Both concepts were
 characterized by belief in the unilinear development of the human race, but
 providence was a force that was expected to result in spiritual, rather
 than in economic autonomy. The engine of providence was considered the
 guiding hand of God (which was later amputated and stitched to the cyborg
 of capitalism by Adam Smith). In Early Modernity, when belief in providence
 began giving way to belief in progress, intellectuals and scholars were
 debating whether the social utopia of the future should be based on
 spiritual or on secular principles. Philosophers searched for an
 independent force in the universe that could save the earthly population
 from its economic shortcomings and its spiritual privation. Thomas More
 constructed a rather dubious literary utopia that marked the beginning of
 the shift from God/Christ to science/technology as savior. From More's
 perspective, neither of the two choices seemed particularly satisfying.
 Given the choice between El Dorado and the regime of Mahomet the Prophet,
 Voltaire found the former more tolerable. This type of thought which valued
 secular human advancement and cast doubt on spiritual systems began to tip
 the scales of judgment in favor of science and technology, but certainly no
 celebration accompanied this shift. With the coming of the industrial
 revolution, the scales tipped decisively in favor of science and technology
 once and for all. At last, a foreseeable end was imagined to the problem of
 production - soon there would be enough goods for everyone, and with such
 surplus, competition over scarce goods would cease. The idea of progress
 began to flourish from this point on. Both the left (Condorcet and Saint-
 Simon) and the right (Comte and Spencer) shared an optimism about the
 future in spite of the wildly divergent destinies predicted by each - for
 example, council socialism was anticipated by Saint-Simon, and the
 appearance of the bourgeois Ubermensch was expected by Spencer.
 
 Let us not forget Marx in this thumbnail sketch. Although Marx was not one
 to wax utopian very often, he did have his moments. Marx believed that the
 factory system would solve problems of production (i.e., scarcity);
 however, he foresaw a new problem, that of distribution. The crisis in
 distribution would in turn lead to revolution, by which means the
 victorious workers would restructure the exploitive routes of bourgeois
 distribution. Such speculation has continued to manifest itself even later,
 in utopian visions well exemplified by Rene Clair in the film A Nous la
 Liberte. The film depicts a time after the glorious revolution when the
 workers enjoy the fruits of zero work, and live only to celebrate, to
 drink, and to sing, while the machines work dutifully, producing the goods
 needed to carry this utopia into a shining future. One of the main currents
 in modern art (Futurism, Constructivism, and Bauhaus) illustrated this
 soon-to-come secular utopia. All the same, it would be quite unfair to hang
 the sometimes shameful optimism of the 20th century on Marx. Although he
 demonstrated how rationalized capitalist economy would end the problem of
 production, he also realized that people could not be satisfied by goods
 alone. Marx foresaw that in the epoch of capitalism, although production
 rates would rise, so would the degree of alienation from our own human
 nature, from economic process, from economic products, and from other
 social beings. In terms of individuals' psychic condition, things would not
 get better, but would grow tortuously worse. For Marx, once other variables
 besides production were examined, unilinear social advancement was not to
 be found.
 
 This brings us to the second scenario - the pessimists' dystopia. This
 point of view seems to gain new proponents with each new mechanized and/or
 electronic war. Yet even when the idea of progress was at its apex, before
 the military catastrophes of the 20th century, some critics of the idea
 were already predicting that human `advancement' would end in disaster.
 First and foremost was Ferdinand Toennies, who argued that advanced
 technology would only serve to increase the complexity of the division of
 labor (society), which in turn would strip people of all the institutions
 that are the basis of human community (family, friendship, public space,
 etc). After World War I, Oswald Spengler was among the leaders of this line
 of thought. To his mind, advanced technology and sprawling cities were not
 indications of progress; rather, they were indicators of the final moments
 of civilization - one that has hit critical mass and is about to burn
 itself out. The great sociologist Pitirim Sorokin summed up this
 perspective in ~The Crisis of Our Age~ when he stated:
 
 Neither happiness, nor safety and security, nor even material comfort has
 been realized. In few periods of human history have so many millions of
 persons been so unhappy, so insecure, so hungry and destitute, as at the
 present time, all the way from China to Western Europe.
 
 Here then are the two sides, forever in opposition. Today the two
 antithetical opinions continue to manifest themselves throughout culture.
 Corporate futurologists sing the praises of computerized information
 management, satellite communications, biotechnology, and cybernetics; such
 technological miracles, they assure us, will make life easier as new
 generations of technology are designed and produced to meet social and
 economic needs with ever-greater efficiency. On the other hand, the
 concerns of pessimists, neoluddites, retreatists, and technophobes ring
 out, warning that humanity will not control the machines, but that the
 machines will control humanity. In more fanciful (generally Hollywood)
 moments, the new dystopia is envisioned as a world where people are caught
 in the evil grip of a self- conscious intelligent machine, one that either
 forces them into slavery, or even worse, annihilates the human race.
 
 These are the two most common narratives of social evolution in regard to
 technology. For the utopians, the goal of progress is similar to the vision
 of Rene Clair - technology should become a transparent backdrop that will
 liberate us from the forces of production, so that we might engage in free
 hedonistic pursuits. For the dystopians, technology represents a state
 apparatus that is out of control - the war machine has been turned on, no
 one knows how to turn it off, and it is running blindly toward the
 destruction of humanity.
 
 Evidence can certainly be found to support both of these visions, but a
 third possibility exists, one that is seldom mentioned because it lacks the
 emotional intensity of the other two. To expand on the suggestion of
 Georges Bataille, could the end of technological progress be neither
 apocalypse nor utopia, but simply uselessness? Pure technology in this case
 would not be an active agent that benefits or hurts mankind: it could not
 be, as it has no function. Pure technology, as opposed to pure utility, is
 never turned on; it just sits, existing in and of itself. Unlike the
 machines of the utopians and dystopians, not only is it free of humanity,
 it is free of its own machine function - it serves no practical purpose for
 anyone or anything.
 
 Where are these machines? They are everywhere - in the home, in the
 workplace, and even in places that can only be imagined. So many people
 have become so invested in seeing technology as a manifestation of value or
 anti-value, that they have failed to see that much of technology does
 nothing at all.
 
 Recently, there has been considerable fascination with the perception that
 most people cannot learn to operate their video tape decks. As one comedian
 put it, "I just bought a VCR for $400, and can't figure out how to work it.
 $400 is just too much for a clock that only blinks 12:00." This situation
 is certainly exaggerated, but there is an interesting point of truth in it.
 To program many of the functions on a VCR requires skills beyond those of
 the average consumer. When video first hit the consumer markets, the belief
 was that everyone would soon have a TV studio in h/er house (along with a
 jet pack). The home TV studio would mark the end of progress in video
 production. Instead, VCRs filled with useless computer chips now gather
 cobwebs in home entertainment centers. For example, consider the existence
 of a chip which allows a VCR to be programmed for a month in advance; this
 is actually nothing more than an homage to the useless. It simply exists in
 and of itself, having no real life function. Most programming information
 is not generally available a month in advance, and even if it were, why
 would someone need to tape a month's worth of television programs, and who
 would remember the appropriate times to insert new blank tapes?
 
 Why such a chip was made in the first place falls into a web of possibility
 that is difficult to untangle. First, the perverse desires that consumers
 associate with utility should not be underestimated. Driven by
 spectacularized engines of desire, consumers want more for their money -
 even if what they get is something that will never be used. The corporate
 answer is to meet a cliche with a cliche: Give customers what they want.
 Consequently, the marketing departments of corporations, in their struggle
 for market share in the electronics industry, force their engineers and
 designers to create new products laden with extra features. One main
 selling point: Our machine has the most features for the money. The
 question for the consumer is: "Did I get a good deal [i.e., the most for
 the money]?" The question of "Can I actually use what I buy?" is never
 raised. The corporations know of the desire for the useless (a desire that
 can never be fulfilled), and comply by heaping on their products as much
 useless gadgetry as possible in order to seduce the bargain-hungry
 consumer. And so the cycle starts.
 
 The cycle begins to spiral as new generations of technology are introduced
 - in this case depurified technology. The slogan of one electronics company
 - "so smart, it's simple" - is symbolic of depurification. The corporation
 is, in a sense, announcing that its technology actually has a use.
 Consumers can buy it not just for the sake of having it, but because they
 will be able to make it do something. The slogan also signals that
 consumers are buying the ~privilege~ of being stupid (the ultimate
 commodity in the realm of conspicuous consumption). There will be no
 manuals to read, no assembly, no understanding required. The manual is the
 TV commercial for the product. Having seen it, consumers can make the
 product function.
 
 While the buying patterns of those seduced by pure technology are guided by
 a perverse consumer activism, thoroughly corrupted by the Veblenesque
 nightmare of conspicuous consumption, the patterns of those buying impure
 technology are guided by a need to keep the apparatus of use as invisible
 as possible, so as not to interrupt the trajectory of one's `lifestyle.'
 This attempt to return to impure technology eventually backfires, and the
 spiral becomes a circle again. The consumer zeal for simple technology that
 will not distract from daily tasks is too easily rechanneled into
 specialized products that rarely deliver theconvenience that is so
 desperately sought. Two types of products emerge from this variety of
 artificially generated desire. First there is the product that is a con,
 such as an electric martini shaker. This is one case where the old
 fashioned way works just as well if not better. The second type is
 exemplified by a consumer-grade pasta making machine. One evening at home
 with this gizmo will quickly teach a person the meaning of labor
 intensification. This is not a technology of convenience. Either way, these
 pieces of bourgeois wonder will take their rightful place in upper cabinets
 and in closets as useless pieces of bric-a- brac that did not even serve
 the function of delivering enriched consumer privation. Unlike the VCR
 chip, these pieces of technology require human contact before they achieve
 purity.
 
 In all cases, the desire that consumer economy (the economy of surplus) has
 most successfully tapped is the need for excess, that is, the need to have
 so much that it is beyond human use. Pleasure is derived through negation -
 by not using a product. This form of excess is the privilege of those who
 enjoy the surplus of production. Although the bourgeoisie has never
 achieved the purity of uselessness of previous leisure classes, they still
 aspire with great fear, and with very little success, to total
 counterproduction. This class typically falls short of the upper level of
 the hierarchy of master and slave so aptly articulated by Hegel. The
 products which members of this class consume transform themselves into
 stand-ins for the obscene debauchery of excess, in which, they, as
 chieftains, should personally participate. The cowardice of the bourgeoisie
 can never be underestimated. Confronted with the opportunity to test the
 limits of the possible, they instead let things take their place in the
 realm of the useless. Within this realm, the products of counterproduction
 acquire a being analogous to that of the sacred in `primitive' cultures,
 and become the icons of secular transcendentalism, accumulating mana by
 controlling the lives of those around them.
 
 The uncanny notion that technology which is out of sight and out of mind
 best defines human existence within the economy of desire is one that is
 typically resisted by commonsense thought. As William James and Alfred
 Schutz proposed in their own unique ways, the principle of practicality
 structures everyday life. Objects are perceived first and foremost in terms
 of their instrumental value. In constructing a model of individual
 existence centered around perception, there can be little doubt that the
 visible will be at the center and the invisible at the margins. Within the
 middle ground, utility is the primary governing factor. Hence, within this
 visible realm, the consumption of excess and excess consumption maintains
 an element of practicality. For example, a wealthy person buys a luxury
 car. Although it may have many useless elements, the main reason for its
 purchase is that it is a `nice ride.' The modifying adjective "nice" refers
 to its useless components, while the center component, the noun "ride,"
 refers to the product's function. The potential for the car to make an
 instrumental process pleasurable is what relegates it to the realm of
 desire and excess, and therefore makes it suitable as a product for
 conspicuous consumption.
 
 Another example is the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) device. In many
 cases, the way this diagnostic tool is used in medical institutions may
 actually be abuse. The MRI is a very expensive piece of state of the art
 med-tech, so it is an investment that must be used to recoup the initial
 capital expenditure. The MRI can deliver on its corporate promise, as it is
 the perfect medical sight machine. In a manner far beyond any of its
 predecessors, the MRI can articulate the space of the body with such
 clarity that there can be no place for a biological body invader to hide.
 However, in many cases, the MRI is not needed. An X-ray is often all that
 is required to diagnose an illness. Excess enters this equation when the
 tooI is used abusively on the part of the doctor (simply as means to
 increase profit or to protect capital). Much the same can be said even when
 the machine is used as an extra precaution by the doctor or the patient. In
 any case, the MRI, like the luxury car, can only strive toward purity; it
 will never actually reach it. The MRI will always have the practical
 function of vision associated with it. Unlike these aforementioned
 examples, the useless is rarely noticed, because it is not a part of
 limited bourgeois excess. As consumers, we are not trained to witness
 uselessness or consciously value it - its psychic roots are buried much
 deeper in consciousness and in the economy.
 
 Too often, excessive luxury in the center realm of the visible is mistaken
 for the limits of excess, but the limits of excess go far beyond the
 visible. To comprehend extreme excess, one must go beyond conspicuous
 consumption. Excess will never be seen, only imagined, and within this
 ideal space the margins can at least be understood. Whether it is a useless
 chip in the bowels of a machine, the technology that lives in people's
 closets, or an underground missile system, the purity of uselessness, the
 limits of excess, are not visible. The real deployment of power flows in
 absence, in the uncanny, nonrational margins of existence.
 
 Sacrifices beyond the boundary between the visible and the invisible
 occasionally surface in everyday life. We all know that many people die on
 the roads and highways of the US every year (approximately 50,000 per
 year). These people are willingly and uselessly sacrificed to show the
 sincerity of our desire for transportation technology. No means to end this
 sacrific exists, short of closing the roads, and yet no honor is paid to
 those who give their life for the excess of travel - it remains forever
 hidden. Philosopher and artist Gregory Ulmer proposed that an addendum be
 made to the Viet Nam war memorial in which the names of those killed on the
 highway would be spooled off on a printer beside the monument. Needless to
 say this monument was rejected, since such sacrifice and excess must remain
 hidden in modern societies. To monumentalize death and uselessness is
 simply too frightening.
 
 Monuments to the sacrifices of the state are typical, but are only the
 beginning. Most of these monuments are abstracted bits of concrete, marble,
 bronze, or some other material that will signify the longevity of
 artificially created memory. But there are times when these monuments are
 brutally honest, and useless technology along with its slaves is put on
 public display. The USS Arizona, for example - a half sunken ship with the
 ship's full complement of corpses (officers included) rests silently in
 Pearl Harbor. This national monument, a functional item made useless
 through sacrifice, suggests the metaphysical moment of profound loss
 through its lack of function. (Woe to anyone who does not treat this sacred
 relic with proper respect, for it speaks of the will to excess, which is
 grounded in human uselessness in the face of death). But what is even more
 compelling about this monument is that the ship is carried on the active
 duty roster. This necropolis is more a symbol of the absent core of the war
 machine than a monument to the US soldiers who died in the battle of Pearl
 Harbor; it monumentalizes transcendental uselessness.
 
 Utopian technology is that technology which has fallen from grace. It has
 been stripped of its purity and reendowed with utility. The fall is
 necessitated by a return to contact with humanity. Having once left the
 production table, the technology that lives the godly life of state-of-
 the-art uselessness has no further interaction with humans as users or as
 inventors; rather, humans serve only as a means to maintain its
 uselessness. The location of the most complex pure technology is of no
 mystery. Deep in the core of the war machine is the missile system.
 Ultimately, all research is centered around this invisible monument to
 uselessness. The bigger and more powerful it becomes, the greater its
 value. But should it ever be touched by utility - that is should it ever be
 used - its value becomes naught. To be of value, it must be maintained,
 upgraded, and expanded, but it must never actually do anything. This idol
 of destruction is forever hungry, and is willing to eat all resources. In
 return, however, it excretes objects of utility. Consumer communications
 and transportation systems, for example, have dramatically improved due to
 the continuous research aimed at increasing the grandeur of the apparatus
 of uselessness.
 
 There can be a stopping point to this process - a discovery made by the
 collapsing Soviet Union. For all the `patriots of democracy' who gave a
 collective sigh of relief and boasted that they were at last proven right -
 "communism doesn't work" - there still may be a need to worry. The fall of
 the USSR had little to do with ideology. The US and USSR were competitors
 in producing the best apparatus of uselessness in order to prove its own
 respective Hegelian mastery of the globe. Modern autocrats and oligarchs
 have long known that a standing army puts an undue strain on the economy.
 To be sure, standing armies were early monuments to uselessness, but in
 terms of both size and cost, they are dwarfed by the standing missile
 system of the electronic age. As with all things that are useless, there
 will be no return on the investment in it. The useless represents a 100%
 loss of capital.
 
 Although such investment seems to go against the utilitarian grain of
 visible bourgeois culture, whether in socialist or in constitutional
 republics, the compulsive desire for a useless master is much greater
 (Japan is an interesting exception to this rule). Unfortunately for the
 USSR, they were unable to indulge in pure excess expenditure at the same
 rate as the US. The soviet techno-idol was a little more constipated, and
 could not maintain the needed rate of excretion. Consequently, once the
 limits of uselessness were reached, that system imploded.
 
 The US government, on the other hand, has to this day remained convinced
 that further progress can be made. Reagan and his Star Wars campaign issued
 a policy radically expanding the useless. Reagan, of course, was the
 perfect one to make the policy, since he was an idol to uselessness
 himself. He represents one of the few times that uselessness has taken an
 organic form in this century. (This is part of the reason he was considered
 such a bourgeois hero. He was willing to personally plunge into uselessness
 without apology. He did not let a thing stand in for him). Playing on
 yuppie paranoia (the fascists' friend), Reagan convinced the public loyal
 to him that a defensive monument (Star Wars) to uselessness was needed,
 just in case the offensive monument (the missile system) was not enough. He
 was successful enough in his plea to guarantee that years of useless
 research will ensue that no one will be able to stop, even if his original
 monumental vision (a net of laser armed satellites) should be erased. In
 this manner, Reagan made sure that the apparatus of uselessness would
 expand even if the cold war ended.
 
 Indeed, this situation has come to pass. Currently, the US has no
 competitors in the race to uselessness, but the monument continues to be
 maintained and even to grow, which is particularly odd, since even the
 cynical argument of deterrence is now moot. Even though the offensive
 monument to uselessness seems to be shrinking - missiles are being defused
 and cut apart with the care and order of high ritual, and technology
 costing millions of dollars is being laid to rest, having never done
 anything but exist - thanks to Reagan's farsightedness, the general system
 continues to expand. Although many are still in denial, the desire of the
 bourgeois to subordinate themselves to the useless has become, for the
 moment, glaringly visible. The research is done; the system is upgraded,
 but for what reason? The missiles are now aimed at the ocean, so even if
 they are `used,' they will still be useless. The fragments of Star Wars
 technology have not been released in pure form from the experimental labs,
 and even if they were, no enemy exists against which Star Wars technology
 would protect US citizens. The American system has achieved utter
 transcendental uselessness. This techno- historical moment is the highest
 manifestation of technological purity.
 
 In his rush to save the apparatus of the useless from stalling, Reagan may
 have made one error. When he put the idea of the defensive monument in the
 minds of Americans, he disrupted the primary sign of the war machine -
 mutually assured destruction. He restored hope in American consciousness
 that perhaps utility could save US citizens from the total annihilation
 certain to destroy the rest of the world. The disassociation of death and
 uselessness took previously sacred elements of war-tech out of the
 privileged realm. When these elements became depurified, their value in
 terms of the satisfaction of bourgeois desire plummeted. This is partly why
 Reagan's original Star Wars vision has been dismantled.
 
 Thus far, however, most war-tech has not been depurified due to this
 ideological slippage, and the purity of offensive weapons of mass
 destruction continues to be enforced. Nations that do not understand the
 code of uselessness but that have state of the art military technology are
 a cause for great concern. Iraq, Libya, and North Korea are all good
 examples. The US government is willing to take hostile action based merely
 on the belief that North Korea and Libya might get weapons of mass
 destruction and actually use them. In the case of Iraq, the code was
 actually broken when that government used chemical weapons. Iraq has not
 done well economically or militarily since that time. The lesson to be
 learned is that nations that do not subordinate themselves to the bourgeois
 idols of uselessness will be sacrificed as heretics, and will be denied
 access to the icons of uselessness.

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