Guide to Future-Present Archetypes Read online

Your own design skills, the tech, and the materials only allow you to do certain things. People might be talking about sending 3D printers to the moon. That’s an exciting science-fiction principle, but is that actually possible? I have to assume there’s a frustrating, but very different energy that comes from the material design side of things. Though many times I’ll have a really speculative piece on BLDGBLOG and someone will leave a really perceptive comment about the material limitations of the technology. Some people are very interested in dealing with these limitations. But what I like is talking about the fictional narrative and speculating with the possibilities. How might you usher in a different future? The very act of design is thinking about an alternate future, and whether you do that with narrative or with tinkering with nuts and bolts is more about your background. I come from a humanities background. Maybe if writers grew up in different circumstances, they would be tinkering with drones.

  — Geoff Manaugh

  Just because the way that we interact with systems and cause them to interact with each other is conceptually similar to a cyborg, does not mean that suddenly our understanding is an omniscient killbot, that can hunt its enemies across time and survive the vacuum of space. As much as we let creativity flow, we are constrained by a reality principle. Cyborgs, like the Future-Present, must live on earth, and are not free to roam the speculative realms untethered. There is a grounding in science to both of these that enables their speculation. This is not an arbitrary boundary, but the means by which the functionality is fueled.

  It is a bit startling when the patterns we think might be mere illusions are revealed as the very substance of reality. What was once mere speculative fiction becomes a historical concept for understanding that historical development. Ecstatic visions not only solidify, but turn out to be the entities conducting our job interviews. But we are beginning to develop the toolkit for such uncertain professions, even if we aren’t sure what we are making.

  Guide to Future-Present Archetypes #4: The Commodity Swarm

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  A certain thread of theology holds that angels are not actual entities; they are human characterizations of god’s infinite will, manifested in singular points of time and space that we can only represent as corporeal actions by supernatural beings. Drones are the same. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles themselves are made of very real alloys and composites, flown with very real bands of electromagnetic energy emitted from satellite and ground stations, launching weapons with exothermic warheads resulting in very real deaths. But “Drones”, as we have come to know them, represent an intensely collapsed political, economic, and social cosmology. They are singular points of world-historical militarism, state control, and technological specialty, orbiting high above our heads, the new astrological wanderers of our mortal fates. Dare we ask the rhetorical question: how many drones can surveil the head of a pin? MQ-1 Predator, MQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-170 Sentinel: these names are the basis of a new hierarchical choir of angels, as cataloged by Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.

  Drones function in our current Future-Present, as a category conglomerated from many components. A MQ-4 has very little to do, technologically, with a smartphone-controlled quadrocopter. The relationship between them, which we fetishize into the category of “drone”, is a composite of factors and values so intricate as to border on the cosmological. It is true that they both fly, with different types of remote control. They both contain cameras, so that a person can see a visual field from the vehicle’s perspective. They both contain technological advances that are not entirely new innovations, though their widespread use and public recognition is a relatively recent event. And yet, one is an expensive toy, while the other changes the geopolitical landscape as a weapon of war. It is only when their use, political significance, and market value are networked to their technological construction that they become equivalent in the Future-Present cosmology.

  If angels are too metaphysical a means of getting at the cultural function of such a unifying concept, let us utilize a more atheistic church, another sort of holy ghost. Drones are technology, commodified. Commodities are objects, abstracted from their strict material origins, and invested with a surplus of market-meaning. An automobile, for example, is not so much the frame riding on four wheels; it is not only a pivotal object of the American Dream; it is more than a single class of “Sport Utility” use-case or a particular brand name. It is all of these things. It is a history of technological advancement, a society’s main means of transportation, and a set of cultural value signifiers, condensed into a single object. What does precision milling equipment have to do with “Tell Laura I Love Her?” Everything and nothing. Technological commodities exists in multiple dimensions of technology, culture, economics, and politics simultaneously. What we perceive is the object, but behind it, is its cosmological network. We watch a video of a drone swarm in a college laboratory. We hear a news report about a drone strike on the other side of the world. We dream about the future of airspace regulation over drone-like inventions that don’t exist yet. We interact with all of these threads when we think, talk, or work with drones.

  But what is important to remember about all commodities is that just like this particular archetype of the Future-Present, their existence is not spontaneous. The abstraction of drones’ technological reality into a dreamscape of Future-Present speculation may give us a dozen Minority Report’s worth of murmurrating clouds of flying vehicles. But it does not spring into existence from a vacuum. Drones, as commodities, are “sold” to us, whether by Northrop-Grumman, the State Department, toy companies, Hollywood, Al Qaeda, or Occupy protesters. We adopt this theory-object as a means for thinking about the technological, political, and social issues trailing from the node that is “drones”, and our use of it feeds back into its continued production.

  Don’t let the terminology fool you: this is not simply a criticism of the capitalist systems that work to engender the Future-Present for us, any more than it is a theological criticism. This is part of being a responsible consumer, and even more so, a human being engaged in our history. Even if we are not buying the Future-Present in the form of a smartphone, we are still subscribing to it as part of the constant process of design fiction we engage in, as members of a historical society. We don’t need to invest in drones. In contemporary times, they are buying into us. As we are already ceaselessly engaging with the built-up commodities of the Future-Present, my informants noted, we must understand them better.

  The curve of adoption is an emotional curve. The myth of the rational actor--that people will ultimately make rational decisions--is responsible for much of the damage of the 20th century. People think that they use rationality, and that’s the fundamental lie of western culture. We’re really bad at making reasoned decisions. Look at all the logical fallacies that exist in the world. We have many kinds of intuition, which are often useful, but also sometimes really bad. This isn’t to say we can’t think rationally, but your reaction to a shiny gadget is not necessarily rational. Do you want a smartphone in your life? Do you want to buy into that culture? There are people who ask these rational questions, but they are statistically insignificant. The Amish excise that choice from the individuals and give it to a community that follows a protocol. Most of our interactions with technology are doing what people around us do.

  - Eleanor Saitta

  The curve of adoption--one of the many factors that make up the commodification of the Future-Present--is indeed a form of group-think. There is no rational actor, or invisible hand. There is a cultural unconscious, and its choices are not as simple as a Pepsi Challenge, but more like facial recognition software. What elements of the Future-Present we tend to recognize and select are based on a protocol formed from multiple steps of pattern recognition and summation. The distributed network of decision making is almost an algorithm. But while this cultural “computer vision” might be obscured from our rational minds, we can still hack into that algorith
m and evolve it, if we know what we are doing.

  There are two particular aspects of the cultural weight of technology that are interesting: first, there are technologies that either are or aren’t culturally absorbed. Often a technology will disappear, or isn’t accepted culturally. For instance, game systems that are put out onto the market and fall flat, or Blackberrys that are put out on the market and aren’t used. But then there’s the iPhone, which is changing the way people think and interact with cities. Second, there are things that don’t need to be absorbed--surgical methods, geotextiles, city infrastructure. These things are going to be used because of their function. But the other stuff needs to be coaxed into culture.

  Medical technology moves forward whether or not it is culturally accepted. And yet there are so many new kinds of back surgery that because of their cultural appeal, seem not as invasive. They’re marketed in an effective way. It’s almost an app-ification of surgery. There are things like proactive prosthetics, cosmetic prosthetics, better designed limbs. When it comes to paving freeways, on the other