“Anti-piracy firm DigiProtect, which has teamed up with UK law firm ACS:Law to send thousands of letters to alleged net pirates, has defended its actions.
It follows widespread condemnation of their methods, which involves mass-mailing alleged file-sharers asking them to pay a fine or face court.”
Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8619407.stm
From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8617372.stm
“
The South Korean government is introducing policies aimed at curbing the amount of time children spend playing online games.
The first involves barring online gaming access to young people of school age between 12pm and 8am.
The other policy suggests slowing down people's internet connections after they have been logged on to certain games for a long period of time.
The Culture Ministry is calling on games providers to implement the plans.
It is asking the companies to monitor the national identity numbers of their players, which includes the age of the individual.
Parents can also choose to be notified if their identity number is used online.
"The policy provides a way for parents to supervise their children's game playing," Lee Young-ah from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism told Reuters.
The Korea Herald reports that Barameui Nara, Maple Story and Mabinogi, three popular virtual worlds, will introduce the blackout later this year.
Meanwhile role playing games "Dungeon and Fighter" and "Dragon Nest" will pilot the connection slowing scheme.
A total of 19 role playing games will eventually be included - a huge proportion of the online gaming market in the country.
South Korea has sophisticated high speed broadband connections and online gaming is enormously popular.
But there has been growing concern over the amount of time its citizens spend in virtual worlds and playing online games.
A couple whose baby daughter starved while they spent up to 12 hours a day in internet cafes raising a virtual child online have made headlines around the world.
They were charged with negligent homicide and are due to be sentenced on 16 April.
“
I THINK WE'VE HEARD THE CLICK
posted 8:17 PM
Feels to me like a full cycle of Q&A. Very enjoyable, for me, but I'll take Anabel's thanks as the closer, now. You're all welcome, and thank you for turning up.
QUESTIONS...
posted 8:02 AM
From Cederic:
Q Lets trivialise.
A You go first! Q You obsess in your books about the desired objects of days past, contemporarily still desirable with the added patina of rarity.
- What's your favourite old world treasure?
A I'm more a wunderkammer guy than a big masterpiece guy. I'm with Manny Farber's termites, that way. Sir John Soane's house is probably my favorite London museum. Q - Which watch do you wear?
A Today, an 80s Vostok, a Soviet watch. It has a certain pleasant melancholy about it. Q - Do you seek current objects of desire: iPhone or Android?
A Not so much. I've never been an early adaptor. It's getting to the point, though, where I actually need to get something along iPhone lines. But that would be upgrading from a Nokia flip (chosen because it had very good reception, four years ago). Q - On more philosophical and complicated themes. You are an artist, a creator, but more: you are through your writing an influencer, a shaper of technology, of society itself. Does that scare you?
A I don't actually buy that, the mighty thunderer and shaper of technology thing. I think I'm more of an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist. I'm a sort of Victorian weekend naturalist of technology, who somehow found a way to make a living doing that (and a bunch of other things at the same time).
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:37 AM
Q How much steeping do you do in your locations while writing? Hotels, cities, transportation options?
A Where I happen to have gone tends to produce the locations. For Pattern Recognition. I went back to Tokyo to upgrade my 80s/90s version. Hadn't been to Moscow at all. Filtered that through writer friends who had (Eileen Gunn, Jack Womack). I do virtual steeping, though. Google Earth Street View is a spooky thing, that way. Q Do you visualize some locations from first-hand experience or do you take notes to refresh your memory while re/experiencing them again?
A I have no way of knowing what'll reemerge from the hopper as a novel-unit, so no reason to take notes. Everything goes into the hopper. Relatively few things come out of it. Q Does this research get expensive for you? Is there a way for you to be compensated for this type of research?
A I spend almost nothing on research. A Wired article took me to Tokyo, when I was writing Pattern Recognition. I used to buy lots of magazines. Magazines are novelty-aggregators. But the Web's taken that function over, and is free. Q Do you find that "going there" actually helps you write?
A Having been *somewhere* helps me to write. Having a hopper full of "place" is a good thing, but that's a lifetime accumulation. And there's a certain amount of composting that goes on, in the hopper. It's not journalism, not reportage.
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:25 AM
From Bravus:
Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?)
A I'm not postioned to know. Not sure who would be. Someone who has some overview of what's happening? Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A I read that Stross. The thing to remember is that a look at the actual economics of the thing, that way, would always have been doomy for the unpublished. Most of whom have no idea. Not that I don't think Stross is accurate. I do, but there's a way in which it's not a new scary story. New installment of the old scary story.
QUESTIONS...
posted 10:40 PM
Q What question would Lithos ask you, if he were one of your characters? A "How is this possible?" And I would explain the Internet, etc.
QUESTIONS...
posted 2:27 PM
From Bictaker:
Q I'm picking up on a thread that seems to pervade several of your previous responses, in so much as your writing gift comes at a heavy price. It's almost a suffering ...something you can't and wouldn't want to live without, yet a beast that requires a great deal of time and effort to harness? A living hell for the duration of the work, no? A Yikes! I must've sounded awfully whiny. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. Every job has its costs, some of which aren't so evident to people who haven't done it. But my intention was more to convey, to people who might want to write fiction, that the process they arrive at may not quite line up with our cultural paradigm of what writing fiction is, and that the blisters may form in places other than expected. When I started trying to write fiction, I read writers-on-writing collections, and very little of that, in retrospect, sounded much like what I've wound up having to do to make it happen. When Bruce Sterling and I were writing The Difference Engine, I'd moan sometimes about the labor required (as much fun as that was, and often it was lots of fun, but I'm basically lazy). He always had the same response: "Yeah, but it beats loading concrete blocks." Which is so obviously true, and has since become a mantra of mine. I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.
QUESTIONS...
posted 9:06 AM
From Anabel:
Q There's a highly successful writer who lived in my town, who ran a writers workshop where he said he used real people for some of his characters. Have you used real people to springboard some characters in your work? Was it dicey to do so? A I'd assume we (writers) all must do that some extent, but for me that all goes through some process of unconscious randomization. When my characters arrive, I don't know who they are, let alone who might have contributed DNA. There are exceptions, but usually only with characters who are more broadly parodic of particular attitudes. I had no idea who Cayce was, why she felt that way on waking, whose flat it was, why London. For months. I was inhabiting a very partial construct, waiting to see what attached itself. Waiting to find a center of gravity.
QUESTIONS...
posted 10:49 PM
From Bictaker
| Q How much quicker do you think you would complete Zero History in a world without Twitter? A Not faster, just differently. Twitter, or the Internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write: Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). *Access random novelty.* The writing worth keeping happens within a matrix of mysterious but crucially related activities. I might order myself to write for X number of hours per day (though in fact I never do) but the writing worth keeping can't be ordered to happen at all, let alone for X number of hours per day. It has to be teased out. Fed. Q Do publishers place pressure on authors for X number of hours output per day, or are there just agreed, albeit flexible, deadlines? | ||
|
|
|
QUESTIONS...
posted 10:49 PM
From Sentinel400:
Q Have you ever wanted to wear a uniform? A When was I last out of one? The extent to which we are are all of us usually in uniform brings to mind Eno's definition of culture: everything we do that we don't really need to. Pajama bottoms beneath a raincoat? Out of uniform. Jeans with one leg cut off? Out of uniform. Contracultural apparel disturbs us. Countercultures are intensely cultural. Bohemias have dress codes as rigid as those of merchant banks. We all read uniforms, constantly, whether we're aware of it or not. My favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie's alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character's inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:35 PM
From Martin:
Q Do you think any influence from "The Wire" has leaked into your (this) writing? Would you necessarily aware of it, if it had? A I first watched The Wire when I was writing Spook Country, because my friend Steve Brown told me that one of the seasons had the best stuff about shipping containers he'd seen anywhere, in any medium. But what I really got from that was a sense of the physicality of the containers: that the walls are actually quite thin, things like that. But that's material. "Influence" is something else. Influence is more like weather, when you've been writing for a while. It blows in from somewhere. You can't say exactly where weather *is*, but you can say that it's present.
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:09 PM
From Colin:
Q Seething, termite-like revising seems well suited to word processors, but how did it work out on that famous typewriter? A Really, really *slowly*. Thick scabs of correction fluid. Then I discovered those rolls of self-adhesive white paper tape, that restaurants used to use to correct (this is amazing in itself, to me) the *typewritten* (or maybe mimeographed) parts of their menus. So I'd stick that over a whole sentence or three, a whole para, then type over it. But then the termites would seethe again, and I'd have to paint the white fluid over the *tape*, which didn't really work that well... The pages of the Neuromancer manuscript were *3D*, topographical... Then Bruce Sterling's father gave him an Apple II. I guess he'd moved up to the first Mac. So there's Bruce on the phone from Austin: "This is *serious*, man. This thing *automates* the process." So I went down to Eaton's and bought a IIC and a dot-matrix printer, marked way down because the new Mac was the thing. So I never got the Selectric that had been the pro writer's awesomest tool when I'd started trying to write. I saw one of those for $29.95 in a charity shop, last year.
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:39 PM
From Bravus:
Q In general, do you think the barriers (filters?) to publication for new authors of fiction are working well? (Are they letting the good stuff through, or do you think there are lots of people who have surmounted the barrier of writing and written good stuff but fail to surmount the publishing barriers?) A I have no way of knowing, really. What your question reminds me of, though, is my having asked a couple of my literature profs at UBC, in the 70s, whether they thought there were important works of fiction that we didn't yet know of. This was greeted with a sort of amazed disgust. Of course there weren't. (Neither they nor I had ever heard of Cormac McCarthy, then, and he'd been published for over a decade.) Q And, related, how do you see technology helping and harming with this? Charles Stross has written some interesting blog posts on the economics of a writing career in the days of Amazon, for example, that were quite doomy...
A The economics for the majority of writers, in my lifetime, have never been good at all. I suspect I imagined that the science fiction writers I read in the 60s were all doing rather well. Most of them, actually, were just scraping by, and moonlighting at other things. That was why, I'd guess, many of them seemed to write more often than was good for their writing.
QUESTIONS...
posted 4:38 PM
From Twilite Minotaur:
Q You mentioned spending a year on that one sentence. I notice myself getting tar babied into a sort of perfectionist love-hate with my own sentences (and lyrics), and then find myself paying mental alimony to a work throughout the day, swapping and rearranging bits, more like a jigsaw puzzle engineer than an 'artist' with nouns and verbs fountaining eternal from some Creativity Cortex. Paul Valery's aphorism, that,"an artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it," comes to mind. Was there some point or process for you of learning the art of abandonment, to switch off the inner micromanager, at an appropriate time so as to allow sufficient rumination to be spent on a work, but without becoming lost in it? A If an innumerate like myself can be allowed to say this, there's a feeling of equation, at the end. There's a *click*. When you hear the click, immediately down tools and exit the structure. Don't go back in until your mind's quit overclocking and you can afford some perspective. Chance's are, that *was* the click. Q Also, if you had to live in a city other than Vancouver, what would it be and why?
A Berlin. For all the ways it disproves our ideas of psychogeography and haunting.
QUESTIONS...
posted 1:22 PM
From Dawntreader :
Q Why do you seem obsessed with brand name apparel et al in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country?
A You ain't seen nothing, yet! Actually the new one may explain that, a bit. Or just further convince some people that I'm obsessed. It's one of the ways in which I feel I understand how the world works, and there aren't really that many of those. It's not about clothes, though, or branding; it's about code, subtext. I was really delighted, for instance, to learn who made George Bush's raincoats. A company in Little Rock (now extinct, alas) but they were made of Ventile, a British cotton so tightly woven that you can make fire hoses (and RAF ocean survival suits) out of it. Which exists because Churchill demanded it, because the Germans had all the flax production sewn up. No flax, no fire hoses for the Blitz. The cultural complexities that put that particular material on Bush's back delight me deeply; it's a kind of secret history (and not least because most people would find it fantastically boring, I imagine).
QUESTIONS...
posted 1:09 PM
From: theminx
Q. I am always inordinately pleased when I find out that someone whose work I admire is also a fan of someone else I admire. Some artists I like (such as Douglas Coupland and Kim Gordon) are also William Gibson fans/appreciators. Whose appreciation of your work tickles or humbles you the most?
A. Enthusiastic celebrity readers make me bashful. I actually have a hard time believing them, if that makes any sense. "You *do*? Golly!" Works better for me with random strangers who I'd imagine have any number of better things to do than read me.
posted 10:52 AM
From Bictaker:
Q How long did it take you before you finally gained confidence to put pen to paper [i.e. attempt to write fiction] and what, if any, was your original inspiration to commit yourself? A There was never any pen. It's all been typed. I didn't begin to experiment with writing fiction until 1976 or so (I'm not sure, really) and I was extremely secretive about commitment. Secretive about the whole thing, really. I don't know why I started doing it, or why my commitment to it, when it came, as deeply private as it was, startled me with its depth. The whole thing was deeper than I have access to. And remains so. The first first fiction I ever wrote was this sentence: "Seated in the darkened screening room, Hollingsworth came to understand the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film." Except that it wasn't "Hollingsworth"; something more, er, Ballardian! This is a perfect clinical example of the new writer having failed to even begin to digest an influence, and I could never making it go any further, though I did know that the next image was of a fountain, in the courtyard of an academic research building, into which people had been tossing expensive Swiss watches rather than coins. I think I worked on that sentence for a year or more. Long enough to never have forgotten it. I think I may have eventually decided that I should regard it as complete in itself.
QUESTIONS...
posted 8:12 AM
From Martin:
Q What aspect of ZH are you most eager to talk about (that hasn't been mentioned yet) ?
A Actually I'm not that eager to talk about it. There's a gap, between completion and issuance of ARCs, during which I don't have to, and then I will have to, daily, for months. That's a function of the industry's needs, not mine. It feels slightly unseemly to me, to talk about my own work at any length.
QUESTIONS...
posted 7:27 PM
From Digitalprimate:
Q What would you suggest as listening while reading Zero History?
A Not owls. Not the gentle lowing of cattle at dusk. Not dried corn rattling into a galvanized bucket.
QUESTIONS...
posted 11:39 AM
From Buell:
Q More Bigend; is Hubertus your writer-self's alter ego?
A He seems to me like a sort of clay-footed demigod, the manifestation of something in our species that's unique to us (here, anyway, as far as we know) in ways both very good and very bad. Q I'm under the impression that to take up the excruciating task of writing a novel requires Bigend-like megalomania.
A All sorts of things can warrant the taking up of the task, and do, but relatively few of the novels taken up, species-wide, are completed. A signed contract is a huge help on either end. And I don't mean that it's about money. Rather that there's a structure imposed, a commitment made, a timeline established. There isn't anything that I think I know that would, in itself, warrant the writing of a novel.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 9:53 AM
From Fuldog:
Q Creator's block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?
A "Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art". Q During the journey from the Sprawl to the Bridge to Bigend's, ever thought about changing profession, something radical?
A Never seriously. Probably because doing this, for whatever reason, has to be more an avocation than a career. I like designers, of various things. More than "fine artists", generally.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 6:47 PM
From Bictaker:
Q If you had a chance to meet the author of your favorite book, who would it be and what would you ask them?
A Jorge Luis Borges. "How is this possible?" Though I don't have a favorite book by Borges, or even a favorite book. It's unlikely that meeting a writer of fiction will get me any closer to the writer's work, in my experience. The opposite effect is sometimes noted. Writers of fiction, as I understand them, are writers because they can get closer to you *as marks on paper* than they can any other way. They cannot sit and tell you. If they could tell you, then why would they write? They cannot explain. They do not know, that way. They know transiently, at best, in the act of marking paper.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 7:53 PM
From Mean Old Man:
Q Essays. You're really, really good at those. I read a few of yours a while ago, and was lastingly impressed; Tokyo, watches, one about U2... How do those happen? Does Editor X in Gumbyville slap his forehead and cry, "Navel lint! William Gibson! It's a perfect fit! It'll fill an Entire! Page!! Miss Pertbottom, get New York on the line! What? I don't care if he's in Canada! GET NEW YORK ON THE LINE!", or is it more of an old school sub-rosa web ring kind of thing? A Thank you. It was my first literary form. It was probably your first too. It can happen a number of ways. Ones that involve really expensive free plane tickets (Singapore, Tokyo, say). Ones that involve being asked to consider things I'm peculiarly interested in at the time (the eBay watch one). Ones where I feel honored to have been asked (the centenary of Orwell's birth) though in some cases I've declined out of feeling unworthy. (I declined to write an obituary for Wm. S. Burroughs, but mainly because he was still alive at the time, and believed in magic.) It's not an activity I actively seek out, much, and if asked (and I'm not asked, that often) I more often decline. Q And who do you consider to be superior essayists, living or dead, worth reading?
A Orwell comes to mind, of course, but those are classic formal essays. The various parts of something like Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory *behave* in some ways like essays, and are brilliant, but do various un-essaylike things as well.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 3:52 PM
From Fashionpolioce:
Q Having written three trilogies, and approaching the age where some people choose to retire, do you think you'll keep writing into a ripe old age?
A There's evidence that some people are actually better at writing novels, over fifty. And it doesn't feel like a job, exactly. More like an ongoing experiment of some kind. Q Or have you thought about doing something entirely different - like learning to sew?
A Or knit! Etsy beckons...
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 11:59 PM
From Anabel :
Q How has being a father affected you? In the beginning and over the years?
A In the beginning, it allowed me to write. My wife worked, teaching ESL at UBC, and I was househusband, daytime single parent, and novelist. Not easy, but a surprisingly good fit in many ways. Q Can you speak about the delights of getting to know your kids as they mature, without alienating your kids in public?
A I wouldn't want to. As parent, it would feel insufficiently respectful, and as writer, potentially cheesy. From Colin:
Q So, about that terrifying process again. You have four or five people reading your daily output. Do you plow through the draft from beginning to end, or do these poor (and/or extremely lucky) souls have to read things out of order or the same page six times as you revise it?
A I show them the chapters as I write them, and I write them sequentially. If I don't get it right on the first try, I redo it and send it again. As I go along I revise the whole thing continually, piecemeal, but I don't update them on that. Finally I send them the manuscript. So they read it initially as a serial, every few days. I don't really do drafts, more a constant termite-like seething. I actually enjoy that aspect of the process. I feel like they're badly written but handsomely revised. Revision is largely stress-free. And they are, initially, in my opinion, not that well written. And while I know that they don't have to be, at that point, it still pains me.
Q Do you give them the first first draft of the pages, or the first draft after you've decided you're either not embarrassed or not going to worry about being embarrassed?
A I don't give them anything initially until I have what feels like a beginning. With Zero History, I think that was the first three chapters, which are longish, dense. That way, I feel like they know where we are. There's some kind of benchmark. Then we go on from there. Until recently, I could only have one outside first reader and my wife (and daughter, when she grew into it). Over the past decade or so, I've loosened up, found a greater degree of transparency, and I find that reduces the stress in some ways. For the past few months, writing daily, I found myself wondering what that would look like on a brain scan. I suspect there's some specific neurological activity, one that I can't necessarily produce at will. It's possible to get into a groove, though, and just do it, though at definite cost to everything else in one's life.
SPLITCOIL REMINDS ME...
posted 7:11 PM
Re an earlier question, I have in fact considered writing a Western. Protagonist's job is to see a shipment of high-tone Vancouver-refined opium from here to the finest divans of Manhattan. I don't know whether that ever happened, but it certainly could have. Digging in Strathcona back yards (particularly where outside toilets were located) still turns up the tiny, distinctive, branded, made-in-China bottles the local product was issued in. The last I saw for sale (the bottles) were in a fancy antique shop on South Granville, for about $100 each. Like mold-blown perfume bottles, a thin greenish glass. The late Victorian equivalent of plastic crack vials, I suppose, but prettier.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 6:19 PM
From TwiliteMinotaur :
Q You have spoken previously about the ghostly cloud of hypertext in which your manuscripts are now shrouded, and the way that blogging morsels of your latest writing has helped to alleviate some of the solitude of the writing process.
A I sure have! And I've still got all of that going on, although until recently it's been mainly on Twitter. A platform Margaret Atwood and I find extremely agreeable (make of that what you will).
Q Are there any additional neological emergences to your works and/or writing process that you've noticed during Zero History?
A I am hoping that the phrase "the ugly t-shirt" (or simply "ugly t-shirt") will soon find its place in the jargon of security technology.
...AND QUESTIONS
posted 9:46 AM
from Gromit :
Q Why 'GreatDismal'?
A I had no idea what Twitter was, when a friend joined. GD happened to be in line of sight, so I used it for what I thought would be a ten-minute experience. I did live near the Great Dismal Swamp when I was five or six. From Wanderer :
Q Why did you choose to make Bigend Belgian?
A His full name was a found object. A Belgian one. And Belgians have a certain reputation, deservedly or not, for (1) globalism, (2) startling outbreaks of interesting perversity.
Q And would he be Flemmish, Wallonian or from Brussels?
A No idea.
Q Also, is it intentional that neither his nor his mother's name is typically Belgian, though they sound like they could?
A No, but it seems to fit. Fom LillyLyle :
Q I just read this article about a scientist by the name of Milgrim: http://tinyurl.com/yhpg59u Is this the origin of the character Milgrim's name?
A No. "Milgrim" is an old surname in the part of Virginia I grew up in. (So is "Wintermute", though exponentially less common.) From Trogdor :
A You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
Q I don't regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
A The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
Q But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!
WE GET QUESTIONS
posted 10:40 PM
From Boogerhead :
Q Is there an actual person that inspired the Finn?
A No. From ][mez][ :
Q Why novels?
A Make a living at home, writing fiction! From digitalprimate :
Q What's the process like from a physical standpoint?
A Sedentary.
Q Where do you write? When? For how long?
A Most recently, in the library (which is really the dining room but who needs one?). 10AM til whenever, pretty much daily when it's happening.
Q What do you eat or drink while writing?
A Whatever's available.
Q Do you write in Word? With pen and paper?
A Word.
Q Do you read or avoid reading certain things while you write?
A I avoid reading most new fiction, while writing. From the Hydra :
Q Why Ativan?
A Wanted my addict character to have no trace of literary drug romanticism. Which is difficult, but benzos proved perfect. From Vesper :
Q Which literary world would you like to live in? (Doesn't have to be of your making)
A Not a fantasy I've ever had, actually. Q What would you say if someone picked up some of the characters from Sprawl or Bridge trilogies and wrote a book(s) with them? (Not-for-profit ones, let's say some decent fan-fic e-books)
A Nothing. Mainly because I can't imagine being induced to read it. I don't even reread my own work, ordinarily. Q A book that you wish you had written but someone else did?
A I don't understand the impulse. If someone else writes a book, I can't imagine writing it. My literary admiration never takes that form. From Splitcoil :
Q What project have you considered seriously that your readers would probably find most surprising?
A A space opera, but in the style of Paul Scott's novel The Chinese Love Pa
INTRODUCTION: OUR ALGORITHMIC CULTURE
By John Brockman
Edge was in Munich in January for DLD 2010 and an Edge/DLD event entitled "Informavore" — a discussion featuring Frank Schirrmacher, Editor of the Feuilleton and Co-Publisher of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andrian Kreye, Feuilleton Editor of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich; and Yale computer science visionary David Gelernter, who, in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds presented what's now called "cloud computing."
The intent of the panel was to discuss — for the benefit of a German audience — the import of the recent Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge entitled "The Age of the Informavore." David Gelernter, who predicted the Web, and who first presented the idea of "the cloud", was the scientist on the panel along with Schirrmacher and Kreye, Feuilleton editors of the two leading German national newspapers, both distinguished intellectuals.
As a result of the panel, Schirrmacher has commissioned Gelernter to write a regular column for FAZ, which was inaugurated with this essay, published by FAZ in a German translation on March 1st ("Der Mann, der das 'World Wide Web' erst möglich gemacht hat.")
Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Here at Edge, we are not immune to such considerations. We have to ask if we're kidding ourselves by publishing 10,000+ word pieces to be read by people who are limiting themselves to 3" ideas, i.e. the width of the screen of their iPhones and Blackberries.
Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know. Book publishers, confronted by the innovation of technology companies, are in a state of panic. Instead of embracing the new digital reading devices as an exciting opportunity, the default response is to disadvantage authors. Television and cable networks are dumbfounded by the move of younger people to watch TV on their computers or cell-phones. Newspapers and magazine publishers continue to see their advertising model crumble and have no response other than buyouts.
Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common? All are software engineers or scientists.
So what's the point? It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code. Just look at Europe where the idea of competition in the Internet space appears to focus on litigation, legislation, regulation, and criminalization.
Gelernter writes:
The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don't go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don't go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.
It is just about 10 years since Edge and FAZ co-published Gelernter's June, 2000 manifesto, "A Second Coming", which was widely read and debated. I expect nothing less for this powerful and provocative piece by one of the leading visionaries of the cybersphere. I welcome comments and look forward to a rich Reality Club discussion.
— JB
DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.
TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY
1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.
2. One symptom of current problems is the fundamental puzzle of the Internet. (Algebra and calculus have fundamental theorems; the Internet has a fundamental puzzle.) If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? What do our children know that our parents didn't? (Yes they know how to work their computers, but that's easy compared to — say — driving a car.) I'll return to this puzzle.
3. Here is a simpler puzzle, with an obvious solution. Wherever computers exist, nearly everyone who writes uses a word processor. The word processor is one of history's most successful inventions. Most people call it not just useful but indispensable. Granted that the word processor is indeed indispensable, what good has it done? We say we can't do without it; but if we had to give it up, what difference would it make? Have word processors improved the quality of modern writing? What has the indispensable word processor accomplished?
4. It has increased not the quality but the quantity of our writing — "our" meaning society's as a whole. The Internet for its part has increased not the quality but the quantity of the information we see. Increasing quantity is easier than improving quality. Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.
5. Consider Web search, for example. Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree.
6. We know that the Internet creates "information overload," a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it's more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis.
7. In the last paragraph I wrote "each Internet user"; but users of any computing system ought to have a simple, uniform operating system and interface. Users of the Internet still don't.
8. Practical business: who will win the tug of war between private machines and the Cloud? Will you store your personal information on your own personal machines, or on nameless servers far away in the Cloud, or both? Answer: in the Cloud. The Cloud (or the Internet Operating System, IOS — "Cloud 1.0") will take charge of your personal machines. It will move the information you need at any given moment onto your own cellphone, laptop, pad, pod — but will always keep charge of the master copy. When you make changes to any document, the changes will be reflected immediately in the Cloud. Many parts of this service are available already.
9. Because your information will live in the Cloud and only make quick visits to your personal machines, all your machines will share the same information automatically; a new machine will be useful the instant you switch it on; a lost or stolen machine won't matter — the information it contains will evaporate instantly. The Cloud will take care that your information is safely encrypted, distributed and secure.
10. Practical business: small computers have been the center of attention lately, and this has been the decade of the cellphone. Small devices will continue to thrive, but one of the most important new developments in equipment will be at the other end of the size spectrum. In offices and at home, people will increasingly abandon conventional desktop and laptop machines for large screen computers. You will sit perhaps seven feet away from the screen, in a comfortable chair, with the keyboard and controls in your lap. Work will be easier and eyestrain (which is important) will decrease. Large screen computers will change the shape of office buildings and create their own new architecture. Office workers will spend much of their time in large-screen computer modules that are smaller than most private offices today, but more comfortable. A building designed around large-screen computers might have modules (for example) stacked in many levels around a central court; the column whose walls consist of stacked modules might spiral helically as it rises….
11. The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world. Good news! — the Net will destroy the university as we know it (except for a few unusually prestigious or beautiful campuses). The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.
12. In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The "velocity of information" is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today's typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it's not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, "feeds," "activity streams," "event streams," Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.
16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including "cross network" information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.
17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it's obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it's easy to blend any group of streams, it's easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for "snow" means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn't deal with snow. Subtracting the "not snow" stream from the mainstream yields a "snow" stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.
19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won't distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to "this evening at 10," say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.
20. Sometimes you will want to listen to your stream instead of watching it (perhaps while you're driving, or sitting through a boring meeting or lecture). Software will read text aloud, and eventually will describe pictures too. When you watch your high-definition TV, you might let the stream trickle down one side of the screen, so you can stay in touch with your life.
21. It's simple for the software that runs your Lifestream to learn about your habits; simple to figure out which emails (for example), or social updates, or news stories, you are likely to find important and interesting. It will therefore be easy for software to highlight the stream elements you're apt to find important, and let the others rush by quickly without drawing your attention.
22. Lifestreams will make it even easier than it is today for software to learn the details of your life and predict your future actions. The potential damage to privacy is too large and important a problem to discuss here. Briefly, the question is whether the crushing blows to privacy from many sources over the last few decades will make us crumple and surrender, or fight harder to protect what remains.
23. The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story. (But the world's own story is full of private information — and so, unfortunately, no human being is allowed to hear it.)
24. Ten years ago I wrote about the growing importance of lifestreams. Last year, the technology journalist Erik Schonfeld asked in a news story whether a certain large company "can take the central communication model of social networks — the lifestream — and pour it back into its IM clients." (The story was headlined "Bebo Zeroes In On Lifestreaming For The Masses.") "Lifestreaming" is a word that is now used generically, and streams are all over the net. Ten years ago I described the computer of the future as a "scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater." Today the spread of wireless coverage and the growing power of mobile devices means that information does indeed well up almost anywhere you switch on your laptop or cellphone; and "anywhere" will be true before long.
25. From which we learn that (a) making correct predictions about the technology future is easy, and (b) writers should remember to put their predictions in suitably poetic language, so it's easy to say they were right.
25. If we think of time as orthogonal to space, a stream-based, time-based Cybersphere is the traditional Internet flipped on its side in digital space-time. The traditional web-shaped Internet consists (in effect) of many flat panels chaotically connected. Instead of flat sites, where information is arranged in space, we want deep sites that are slices of time. When we look at such a site onscreen, it's natural to imagine the past extending into (or beyond) the screen, and the future extending forward in front of the screen; the future flows towards the screen, into the screen and then deeper into the space beyond the screen. 26. The Internet is no topic like cellphones or videogame platforms or artificial intelligence; it's a topic like education. It's that big. Therefore beware: to become a teacher, master some topic you can teach; don't go to Education School and master nothing. To work on the Internet, master some part of the Internet: engineering, software, computer science, communication theory; economics or business; literature or design. Don't go to Internet School and master nothing. There are brilliant, admirable people at Internet institutes. But if these institutes have the same effect on the Internet that education schools have had on education, they will be a disaster.27. Returning to our fundamental riddle: if this is the information age, what do our children know that our parents didn't? The answer is "now." They know about now.
28. Internet culture is a culture of nowness. The Internet tells you what your friends are doing and the world news now, the state of the shops and markets and weather now, public opinion, trends and fashions now. The Internet connects each of us to countless sites right now — to many different places at one moment in time. 29. Nowness is one of the most important cultural phenomena of the modern age: the western world's attention shifted gradually from the deep but narrow domain of one family or village and its history to the (broader but shallower) domains of the larger community, the nation, the world. The cult of celebrity, the importance of opinion polls, the decline in the teaching and learning of history, the uniformity of opinions and attitudes in academia and other educated elites — they are all part of one phenomenon. Nowness ignores all other moments but this. In the ultimate Internet culture, flooded in nowness like a piazza flooded in sea water, drenched in a tropical downpour of nowness, everyone talks alike, dresses alike, thinks alike. 30. As I wrote at the start of this piece, no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than "now." As we learn more about now, we know less about then. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all. (Some scientists talk about artificially increasing the power of minds and memories — but then they are no longer talking about human beings. They are discussing some new species we know nothing about. And in this field, we would be fools to doubt our own ignorance.) The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past. 31. But — the Internet could be the most powerful device ever invented for understanding the past, and the texture of time. Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history. They will be bitterly debated and disputed — but it will be easy to compare two different versions (and the evidence that supports them) side-by-side. Images, videos and text will accumulate around such streams. Eventually they will become shared cultural monuments in the Cybersphere. 32. Before long, all personal, familial and institutional histories will take visible form in streams. A lifestream is tangible time: as life flashes past on waterskis across time's ocean, a lifestream is the wake left in its trail. Dew crystallizes out of the air along cool surfaces; streams crystallize out of the Cybersphere along veins of time. As streams begin to trickle and then rush through the spring thaw in the Cybersphere, our obsession with "nowness" will recede, the dykes will be repaired and we will clean up the damaged piazza of modern civilization.34. The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add "drift" to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you're tired) into places you hadn't planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.
35. Pushing the multi-mega-ton jumbo jet of human thought-style backwards a few inches, back in the direction of dream logic, might be the Internet's greatest accomplishment. The best is yet to be.
"
from: http://www.egs.edu/
"Pierre Huyghe, French artist and filmmaker speaking about reality and virtuality, narrative, projection and memory in a free and open video lecture for the students and faculty at European Graduate School Media and Communication studies department program in Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2008. Pierre Huyghe.
...His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), first exhibited in a museum context at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself, now a few dozen years older and out of jail, to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life."
Pierre Huyghe. Narrative, Projection and Memory. 2008. 1/7:
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/us/12tenderloin.html
SAN FRANCISCO — Visitors know all too well this pretty city’s sights, what with the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and the clang-clang-clangy cable cars.
But now San Francisco’s civic boosters have decided they want to add a highly unlikely stop to the tourist itinerary: the Uptown Tenderloin, the ragged, druggy and determinedly dingy domain of the city’s most down and out.
And what is the appeal?
“We offer a kind of grittiness you can’t find much anymore,” said Randy Shaw, a longtime San Francisco housing advocate and a driving force behind the idea of Tenderloin tourism. “And what is grittier than the Tenderloin?”
Indeed, after years of neglect and bitter battles over its gentrification, the Tenderloin remains one of the most stubborn challenges in San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its looks, its way of life and its bold solutions to social ills, whether they involve offering universal health care (the city was the first to do so) or banning plastic bags (ditto).
So it is that armed with a recent listing on the National Register of Historic Places, community and city leaders are readying the Tenderloin for its big moment, complete with plans for a new museum, an arts district and walking tours of “the world’s largest collection of historic single-room occupancy hotels.” And unlike, say, the Tenement Museum in New York, which offers tours of a long-unused Lower East Side apartment building, a trip to the Tenderloin could go a step further.
“We can bring people into an SRO and show them where people are living now,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the single-room occupancy dwellings, or residential hotels, in the area. “And that’s a real plus.”
Mr. Shaw’s plan has the backing of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who announced a city grant last month to help promote “a positive identity for the Tenderloin” and to draw tourism to the area, in part by posting hundreds of plaques on buildings throughout the neighborhood “to create great visual interest for those walking down the community’s streets.”
And oh, what streets those are. Wedged between tourist-friendly Union Square and its liberal-friendly City Hall, the Tenderloin is one of the mostly densely populated areas west of the Mississippi, officials say, with some 30,000 people in 60 square blocks, almost all of which have at least one residential hotel. The district’s drug trade is so widespread, and so wide open, that the police recently asked for special powers to disperse crowds on certain streets. Deranged residents are a constant presence, and after dark the neighborhood can seem downright sinister, with drunken people collapsed on streets and others furtively smoking pipes in doorways.
All of which, Tenderloin fans contend, is as much a part of San Francisco as flashier, decidedly less seedy attractions like Chinatown or Coit Tower.
“I think a lot of San Franciscans appreciate the Tenderloin,” said Don S. Falk, the executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that has renovated and operates 15 residential hotels in the Tenderloin. “It’s part of their identity.”
Encouraging adventure-seeking San Franciscans to visit may be easier than selling the Tenderloin to tourists, city tourism officials say. Laurie Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the recent efforts “a step in the right direction,” but added that it was a “very, very long road” to make the neighborhood appealing.
“At this point in time, there aren’t many reasons for visitors to go there,” Ms. Armstrong said. “We don’t really point people away from there, but our job is to point people to things that they can do. And there’s so many things to do in San Francisco.”
But Mr. Shaw begs to differ, saying the area is chockablock with historical nuggets, like the Hotel Drake, where Frank Capra lived as a starving young director in the early 1920s, or the Cadillac Hotel, built a year after the great 1906 earthquake and fire and where Muhammad Ali later trained. Jerry Garcia also lived at the Cadillac, and he and the Grateful Dead recorded several albums in the area at what is now Hyde Street Studios, as did other Bay Area bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane.
“And when Miles Davis came to town,” Mr. Shaw said, “he played in the Tenderloin.”
Mr. Shaw, who plans to open a $3 million museum in the Cadillac, believes that baby boomer music fans — and particularly baby boomer Deadheads — will be a core demographic for the Tenderloin, as well as those interested in the neighborhood’s “rich vice history,” which includes gambling dens, speakeasies and pornographic-movie houses.
“Most of which are gone,” the museum’s brochure notes, almost sadly.
Experts agree that the neighborhood has historical value, in part because its entrenched poverty and the city’s own prohibitive zoning have prevented development.
“Money sometimes is the enemy of historic preservation,” said Jay Correia, a historian with the California Office of Historic Preservation, which recommended the Tenderloin to the national register. “The irony is because the Tenderloin was economically disadvantaged, there were no funds to modernize.”
And while battles over maintaining low-income housing derailed some past efforts to develop the neighborhood, even Mr. Falk, of the nonprofit housing development corporation, says a little new development would not be a bad thing.
“In 1981, gentrification was the most important issue; in 2010, quality of life is the most important issue,” Mr. Falk said. “People with disposable income help local businesses be successful, and those local businesses help support homeless people.”
In addition to tourism — visitors spent nearly $8 billion in San Francisco in 2009 — city officials are also trying more traditional approaches, including applying for a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for public art on the neighborhood’s western border and backing a proposed 250,000-square-foot retail project on its eastern flank.
Mr. Shaw hopes to break ground on his museum by next year and will start posting promotional placards — inviting visitors to “walk, dine, enjoy” the Uptown Tenderloin — this summer. And more plaques are to be mounted on more buildings soon.
Whether posters and plaques are enough to conquer poverty remains to be seen. Chris Patnode, a ruddy-faced self-described wanderer who is staying in a local SRO, said he liked the idea of Tenderloin tourism and seemed to be willing to welcome outsiders. Just as long, of course, as they know when to come knocking.
“In daylight, it’d be O.K.,” said Mr. Patnode, 48. “But people aren’t going to want to come down here at night. I don’t even want to be here at night. And I’m staying here.”
Boosters of the Uptown Tenderloin plan tours of one of the many residential hotels, like the Alexander Residence, where Anthony Hack recently relaxed in the lobby.
A street in the Uptown Tenderloin district.
The Uptown Tenderloin is not a regular guidebook highlight.
Since its broadcast on German television in October 1973, “World on a Wire” has gone largely unseen. Digitally restored by the Fassbinder Foundation under the supervision of its original cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, a spiffed-up version of the three-and-a-half-hour film had its premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival. Before that — according to Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s longtime editor and the president of the Fassbinder Foundation — it had been shown on the big screen only a handful of times, at retrospectives in the ’90s. The film is set to receive its first ever theatrical run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from April 14 through 19.
Adapted from “Simulacron-3,” a 1964 novel by Daniel F. Galouye, “World on a Wire” revolves around a cybernetics corporation that has created a miniature world populated with “identity units” unaware that they are being controlled from above. Toggling between dimensions, a researcher (Klaus Lowitsch) learns that what he has always known as the real world may itself be a simulation. This is the brand of existential horror that Philip K. Dick perfected (notably in “Time Out of Joint”) but that took off cinematically only in the late ’90s, in a subgenre that the writer Joshua Clover, in his book on “The Matrix,” terms “edge of the construct.” (Among the other movies in this cluster are“The Truman Show” and “The Thirteenth Floor,” another adaptation of “Simulacron-3,” for which Mr. Ballhaus was an executive producer.)
“We knew almost nothing about computers,” said Fritz Muller-Scherz, who wrote “World on a Wire” with Fassbinder. “But Rainer and I were fascinated by the question, If there are other artificial worlds, how can a real world even exist?”
The notion of Fassbinder tackling science fiction might seem strange given the extent to which his films are embedded in social and historical realities. More than any other figure of the New German Cinema, he insisted on showing what his countrymen failed to see or refused to remember, whether in a forbidden-love melodrama like “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (1974) or in his women’s pictures set during Germany’s postwar economic miracle, like “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979). But from the start Fassbinder was also taken with the subversive potential of genre filmmaking. “Love Is Colder Than Death” (1969) and “The American Soldier” (1970) are both gangster-movie riffs. “Whity” (1971), about a black slave in 19th-century America, is a pointedly revisionist western.
Science fiction is a ready-made sandbox for a filmmaker who never stopped wondering what it means to be human. “His main themes were all present: power, dependence, exploitation, manipulation,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said. The difference in “World on a Wire” is that the mind games play out not within an interpersonal context but on a cosmic scale.
Replete with chases and explosions, “World on a Wire” was conceived as cerebral entertainment. “We wanted to make a suspenseful film,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said, “but also one that would convey the seriousness of these scary ideas.” He added that he and Fassbinder had responded strongly to “the idea that we were remote-controlled in many ways.” The back cover copy on the original Bantam paperback hypes “Simulacron-3” as “a shattering picture of our world in the very near future, when Madison Avenue and the public opinion pollsters take over!” While the story predicts the rise of behavioral modeling as a capitalist tool, Fassbinder, born mere weeks after the German surrender in World War II, probably also had in mind the not-so-distant history of fascist social control.
While some interiors were filmed in Germany, Fassbinder found his dystopian urban landscapes in Paris. As Jean-Luc Godard had done with “Alphaville” (1965), Fassbinder used the city’s new architecture — underground shopping malls, hulking concrete high-rises — to suggest an ominous future world.
With a budget of 900,000 Deutschmarks (more than $300,000 at the time) and a 44-day shoot, “World on a Wire” was a large production by Fassbinder’s standards, although it was hardly the only project demanding his attention. He would shoot three more films in 1973 (including “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul”). The script was knocked out over six weekends in Paris, Mr. Muller-Scherz recalled, at a “crummy little bistro” where he and Fassbinder would take breaks from writing with rounds of pinball. During the week, they were in Bochum, Germany, splitting their time between a stage production with the director Peter Zadek and the set of “The Tenderness of Wolves,” a vampire movie directed by Ulli Lommel and written by Kurt Raab, both veterans of the Fassbinder company.
“World on a Wire” marks an evolutionary leap in the partnership between Fassbinder and Mr. Ballhaus, who shot 15 Fassbinder films before going on to a Hollywood career withMartin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. While the Fassbinder films of the early ’70s have an almost theatrical flatness, the layered compositions and sinuous camera moves of “World on a Wire” anticipate hyperstylized later collaborations like “Chinese Roulette”(1976).
Mr. Ballhaus worked with Mr. Raab — who has a small role in “World on a Wire” and (as on most early Fassbinder films) handled the art direction — to outfit the chicly furnished locations with mirrors and glass objects. “They were important for a story where you never know what’s real or what’s a reflection,” Mr. Ballhaus said. Fassbinder’s love of mirrors as décor and alienation devices, inherited from his idol Douglas Sirk, reaches a dizzying peak in “World on a Wire.” Almost every shot features at least one mirror image; faces and bodies are reflected in tabletops, refracted through lamps, caught between infinity mirrors.
The constantly panning and tracking camera, which must often capture an actor’s reflection while avoiding its own, suggests painstaking preparation, but Fassbinder worked as he always did. He stayed away from the locations until the last possible moment, according to Mr. Ballhaus. The most byzantine maneuvers were devised on the spot. “I always had my own ideas,” Mr. Ballhaus said, “but he would usually think about it and come up with a better idea.”
By all accounts it was an untroubled shoot. Productivity was never an issue with Fassbinder, but the confusion between on- and off-camera drama could be. “It was a catastrophe when he let his private life get an upper hand,” said Mr. Lommel, who plays a snooping journalist in “World on a Wire.” “But I never saw him as disciplined as on this movie.”
Which isn’t to say it was all work all the time. The entourage spent most nights at a club called Alcazar, Fassbinder’s favorite Paris haunt, which is featured in a few scenes. Mr. Lowitsch (who died in 2002) pulled off an intense, often physical role despite being, as Mr. Lommel put it, “never not drunk.”
“It was his way of dealing with the pressure,” said Mr. Lommel, who was assigned to be Mr. Lowitsch’s chaperone and drinking buddy. Mr. Lommel said that he soon grew tired of the nightly benders — they often went straight from the bars to the set — but was instructed by Fassbinder to persist for the sake of the film.
Fassbinder did not rank “World on a Wire” among the Top 10 of his own movies (he was a compulsive list maker), but it seemed to be of some significance to him. In his notes for one of his most personal films, “In a Year of 13 Moons” (1978), a response to an ex-lover’s suicide, Fassbinder describes a scene (which never made it into the movie) in which the protagonist is reduced to tears while reading a novel about parallel realities called “Worlds on Wires.” Mr. Lommel said that the last time they spoke, in 1981, Fassbinder mentioned his hope that “World on a Wire” would one day be released as a movie.
The recent Berlin premiere of the restoration, presided over by Ms. Lorenz, was attended by Mr. Ballhaus, Mr. Muller-Scherz and many of the surviving cast members, including Gunter Lamprecht, Ingrid Caven and Mr. Lommel. The evening felt both like a reunion and a truce, with the various factions of Fassbinder associates that have recently feuded over his legacy setting aside their differences to honor a major rediscovery.
If anyone could get the old clan back together it would, of course, be the puppet master himself, still controlling his world on a wire. “You could say the film was a parallel to the Fassbinder universe,” Mr. Muller-Scherz said. “We were all collaborators who were emotionally dependent on each other.”
