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| Adriaan Beukers Ole Bouman Steward Butterfield Ben Cerveny Elisabeth Diller Michael Douglas Maya Draisin Brian Eno Marti Guixe Ivo Janssen Nathalie Jeremijenko Winy Maas Malcolm McCullough Irene McWilliam Sugata Mitra Andre Oorebeek Chris Pacione Garry van Patter Fiona Raby Hani Rashid Kristi van Riet Rick Robinson Alexander Rose Tiffany Shlain Bruce Sterling Lisa Strausfeld Jane Szita John Thackara Tjebbe van Tijen Michael Waisvisz |
It’s been such a great conference up until now, it’s caused me to think about a lot of things that I hadn’t thought of before, and that caused me to create a whole new presentation for this session, which just got finished about five minutes ago. So I haven’t had time to launch the power book yet . . . We talk about the digital age being light, and we imagine that we can copy files easily, it doesn’t have any cost. I guess a phrase we hear most often is ‘lowering the incremental cost’. And imagine that it’s somehow lighter to copy a file than it was to copy a book, to have a scribe sit there and copy things out. But as we say in Canada, I’d like to call ‘Bullshit!’ on that notion. One thing to remember in all this, is that there’s no information that doesn’t have some sort of physical manifestation. Information has to live somewhere in the universe. So it’s never a matter of information being completely abstract, although we like to think of it like that. When information theory was originally developed, it was all about the abstract; and yet the practise was all about the concrete physical manifestation of information, how to transmit a message on a noisy wire. Today, this is where a lot of information lives, in memory chips. You might think again that this is a very light thing; but it’s a very precisely ordered thing, and has to be maintained just so. And there’s a way of restating the second law of thermodynamics, that rather than the universe tending towards entropy, you can say that the preservation of order over time costs energy. Obviously, computers have to have electricity, they have to have some kind of hook-up to run and RAM has to have some kind of constant charge running through it to maintain its state. But there’s a lot more to it than that. We can generalise a little bit further to say there’s no free lunch, and there really isn’t any free lunch. I was quite shocked by John's statement, when he opened this conference, that every PowerBook wastes the equivalent of 4,000 more PowerBooks just in its manufacture. So think about this: we started with Babbage's mechanical Difference Engine, working through information processing machines that filled rooms. While computers have become less massive, they haven’t necessarily become any lighter, because there’s a lot of physical work that goes into producing them. This is a picture of a copper smelter in Montana, 100 years ago, and that still obviously has to go on today – the copper still has to be smelted to produce the wires that we use, and petroleum still has to be mined to produce the plastics that case everything. I don’t want to say that this is bad. I’m only a half-hearted environmentalist. It’s always so hard to say what is really lighter. I went to a West Coast university that was full of environmentalists, and there was a big research project undertaken in my second year about the cups used in the cafeteria. So the geography department did a massive study on how the cups were manufactured, distributed, and used, and what happened to them afterwards, to come up with the optimal environmental choice for people drinking coffee in university. Of course, everyone would think that ceramic mugs are the way to go, the most environmentally friendly. In fact, the results looked like this. Paper cups were the most environmentally, followed by styrafoam, followed by ceramic cups. The reason for this is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to fire the kilns to make the ceramic mugs. They weigh a lot more, so transportation costs are much higher, and because they don’t biodegrade like paper does, they take up more space when they’re finished. Now, they would have been more efficient if they had been used 10,000 times each, but they found that the average lifespan of a cup in the university cafeteria was about 800 to 850 drinks. So all the thinking that goes into creating the computer age counts towards the total energy expended maintaining these precisely ordered structures called the biggest file repositories in the world, called the Internet. And those people waling around eating and driving their cars to work, all that energy is an actual cost towards preserving the order. And obviously things like manufacturing silicon chips, there’s huge amounts of energy that goes into that and you don’t necessarily think about the hundreds of billions of miles of wire that’s required to connect that stuff. So I guess the bottom line is there that we can introduce one more slogan, ‘that there is no information without a physical manifestation somewhere’. And that the preservation of that order has a direct cost. So I get to show this diagram one more time. And I’m showing a trajectory through it. And it’s a great image because it counts for so many different things. On one hand it’s a finite state machine. The trajectory that you follow through a state space describes a computer processing an algorhythm. Or it could be, if you have a numerical model of a weather system, it could be the revolution of a day’s weather. In this example, it’s a possibility space. And the trajectory’s through the themes that we find in the innumerable possibilities that crop up. So I’ll very quickly show a couple of these and illustrate the themes. One is going back to this morning, talking about the amount of knowledge you have to have to get a joke. So obviously people laughed, people know what this is. And there’s some other clever stuff. This actually is not a link. You have to know that blue underlined text means link in order to get it! And this is another example, a good one, of offloading the information that you’re carrying. He doesn’t explicitly have to say ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ you can do that by yourself. Here’s another one, and I didn’t get to find many of these, but a lot of them are either poking fun at the contest, or stepping outside of the rules and making fun. This isn’t obviously what anyone means by not fitting into the 5K. Now, one of the big themes throughout the contest was poetry, specifically haikus, there’s a lot of haiku examples. Here’s one of them. You can always go and look at it on the site. There’s a series of Haiku’s talking about this guy's journey towards creating an entry for the contest. It’s brilliantly well done and obviously it’s a Japanese landscape scroll in the background. And there he is at the end. A whole web page on 5024 bytes? Yes, it’s possible. Click here to view 5K Haiku Another theme that came up all the time was Mondrian. This is one: it’s called Build Your Own Mondrian. I can choose a colour; I can slide it around, if only it was this easy, eh? And there’s a little museum of his works. He came up a lot. Out of 1200 entries, there are maybe 50 Mondrian ones. Click here to view Build Your Own Mondrian (A similar idea is used in Do It Yourself Mondrian) So you can think about these trajectories through the possibility space and one of the neatest points for me was seeing them converge. And here’s one of them, the Mondrian Haiku. It’s maybe not a great aesthetic entry, but it really capped off it nicely for me. What if Mondrian had been a web designer, would he have done this? Click here to view Mondrian Haiku So we never had any time for any questions, but that’s good! Because in the war of speaker versus audience, I win 2-0, you don’t get to ask clever questions and make yourself sound smart and I don’t have to answer difficult questions and make myself sound stupid. But one question that I got asked a lot outside, and that’s where can people find the 5K entries. The answer is simple: at http://www.the5k.org. That’s it. Thank you very much for having me. This is Stewart Butterfield's third presentation at Doors in a series of three. |
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