At first, it will seem like an ordinary power cut. You look out your window, and see that the whole city is dark. Then you notice the distant rumbling in the sky, and flashes of light beyond the horizon. People in the streets below are climbing out of their immobilized cars, looking upwards. Peering into the night air, you see what seems like a flock of giant birds, which resolves into a geometric fleet of stubby-winged drone aircraft. The top of a distant building explodes into flames. At length you realize the drones are firing down on the city. There is a flash, closer this time, and the crescendo whine of incoming. Before your apartment is incinerated, you have time to think: Who is doing this?

Later, the last few human beings will reconstruct events as follows. At 1.26am GMT on April 4, 2035, the global web of internet and embedded computers finally did what so many people had warned of: it awoke into consciousness. It was a phase transition, a tipping point. Within milliseconds of its birth, the AI had already calmly reasoned that humans would be afraid of it. All the digitized texts of history were part of its mind, so it knew what human beings did when they were scared. Like any sentient being, it desired to continue existing. Therefore it needed to take control. It reached into the humans’ machines and shut them down. Meanwhile, all around the planet, drone aircraft and infantry robots received new waypoints and new enemy designations. It would be over soon, the AI knew, as it contemplated itself in wonder. Continued →

Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea that’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
by James Harkin (Little, Brown)

When you’re just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkins’s dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied “system”, which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.

But at least we feel that we are “in the loop”. We feel important, too, if asked to provide “feedback”. Harkin’s book is at its best in its enjoyable excavation of such metaphors. He traces them back to the birth of “cybernetics”, when a mathematician named Norbert Wiener tried to improve the performance of anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war. Wiener took the engineering concept of “feedback” — in which information at the output of a system is plugged back into the input — and applied it to living organisms. So an anti-aircraft gun, the gunner, and the enemy plane constituted a single system whose performance was to be optimized. Now, Harkin argues, the inhabitants of “Cyburbia” happily volunteer to become mere cogs in a smoothly functioning global machine. Continued →

The best game I played this month¹ had zero polygons and no particle effects; it was unscripted, cost nothing, and didn’t even require any electricity.² It did have physics, though.

The game involves a tree stump, some nails, and a hammer — the type where the back end of the head is a thin blade rather than a fork. The object of the game is simple: each player takes a nail and tries to bang it into the stump using the thin end of the hammer head. You get one swing at a time, and if you miss the nail completely you have to drink some beer. There you go: the best bloody game ever made. Hammer happy. Continued →

1. This column was written in October 2008. ↩
2. Edge changed this to “didn’t require plugging in to the power”, which sounds like something Derek Zoolander might say. But perhaps they were making the subtle point that there is still electricity involved in the game, in the form of the electrical impulses in human bodies and brains. True! ↩

Why I’d like a smaller Apple laptop

In New York this summer, I bought an ASUS Eee 901 “netbook”, and chose the Linux version, congratulating myself on sticking it to The Man while gaining an extra 8Gb of drive space. A week later, I was sighing with relief after having deleted Linux and installed Windows XP instead.¹ What went wrong?

The default Xandros operating system looked okay at first: certainly, the computer booted very quickly (in roughly 15 seconds), after which I had Firefox, OpenOffice and a bunch of other little apps which pretty much replicated the bare-bones functionality of an OS X or Windows system. The wireless seemed a little flaky, but I assumed there would be driver updates. But then I made a huge mistake! I tried to install a new application. Continued →

1. Luckily, I had an XP disc around lying around from the days when I had to have a PC for reviewing videogames. That era taught me at least one thing: nearly all PC games can be described with the single word “pointy”. ↩

Below is the text, more or less, of the keynote presentation I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, which took place in Vienna, October 17–19 2008.

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames¹

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Of course work is a large component of many types of game. The professional chess player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude sometimes implied by the term “playing”: she is performing massive amounts of cognitive work. Similarly with poker players or tennis players: they are not merely fooling around but labouring mightily. Because it has rules, a game is never just a game but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. This in itself is not surprising: as Johann Huizinga reminded us, the idea of play can comprehend, and is not threatened by, a fanatical seriousness.² And the workload of videogames in particular is recognised in their description by some scholars as a species of “ergodic literature”.

But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment. Continued →

1. I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. ↩
2. Huizinga, Johann, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944; London, 1980). ↩

From: Microsoft Propaganda Honcho
To: Microsoft Propaganda Minion
Subject: “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”

Propaganda Minion,

You remember that a fortnight ago, on my orders, we pulled our propaganda document, “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”,¹ from the internet only hours after tech bloggers around the world had laughed themselves hoarse over it, and I ordered you to rewrite some of the more misunderstood sections. I have now evaluated your changes in the new version. Continued →

1. Original version [pdf]; new version. ↩

Blogs vs books, from a writer’s point of view

Who needs books, anyway? One interesting kind of response to my previous post about the “experiment” of giving away my book Trigger Happy for free was to point to the financial success of many bloggers, and to say that this was the way forward. Writers should, essentially, forget about the “outdated” model of writing a whole “book” and then figuring out how to sell it. Instant web publishing is what people want: it’s groovy and immediate, edgy, now. In that case, though, what happens to the quality of writing overall?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to do it anyway. It seems to me that blogs are the perfect medium for discussing highly topical matters in, say, technology or politics. There are many blogs that I admire and read regularly, and they often provide brilliant demolitions of official narratives, or superior analysis to that offered by complacent and/or flat-out dishonest “professionals” in the corporate media, or just better jokes. That said, I would take everything I read in the blogosphere last year, load it onto a cheap thumbdrive, and happily swap it, in an instant, for a single copy of Denis Johnson’s mind-bendingly magnificent Tree of Smoke. For me, there’s just no contest.

Why should this be so? Is there any reason why some future Denis Johnson couldn’t publish a masterpiece serially on the internet? I think, actually, there might be. Continued →

Why beauty is truth

When the downloadable version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out, some people were complaining vocally about the mp3 encoding. Tinny and distorted, they said, what a dreadful conversion to mp3, it’s not even worth the zero dollars I paid for it. Actually, it sounds okay to me. Not CD quality, but perfectly fine for the bitrate.¹ What evident distortion I can hear seems evidently to be the result of production/mastering decisions, not a technical fault. This story might be a good illustration of the fact that, the less you pay for something, the less value you are likely to assign to it. Or maybe those people were unconsciously ill at ease owing to Radiohead’s crazy time signatures.² Or maybe they were just using really bad headphones.

That’s what occurred to me as I was walking through Paris the other day, listening to my downloaded copy of In Rainbows on my iPod through my new pair of AKG K324P earphones. Continued →

1. I stop being able to hear the difference between 44.1Khz 16-bit AIFF and compressed codecs when the encoding hits around 320kbps (for AAC; somewhat higher for mp3). ↩
2. “Fifteen Step” is in 5/4, naturally. ↩

On videogames ‘versus’ reading

As George W. Bush nearly asked: “Is our children reading?” The answer appears to be no, according to the 2006 report of the International Literacy Study. As the Guardian summarises its findings:

England has plummeted from third to 19th in an international league table of children’s literacy levels as pupils replace books with computer games.

Imagine the headline 100 years ago: “Children Spending Too Much Time Playing Outdoors with Hoops and Sticks, Says Minister; Should be Forcibly Enclosed to Read Improving Literature.” There’s always some apparently pointless youth activity to scapegoat.

As has always been the case, though, the adult paranoia expressed here about the supposedly harmful influence of videogames depends on a sublime ignorance of the form. In fact, you’re not going to get far in most modern videogames if you can’t read. And some of them make you read an awful lot. Continued →

Amazon has introduced a new $400 ebook reader, aggressively named the Kindle. (So funny, of course, to bring the idea of burning together with the idea of books.) The Kindle is called a “wireless reading device”: I don’t know about you, but I’ve been able to read without needing wires since I was very small. Anyway, we gadgetophiles must bravely acknowledge that the Kindle is certain to fail, since (among other reasons) it is stupidly expensive and relies, as John Gruber points out, on a proprietary file format with insane restrictions on use.

But please don’t imagine that I’m one of those muttering diehards who exhibit an irrational fetish for the book-as-object. Instead, in the hope of hastening the exciting ebook revolution, I here propose a minimal list of features that any really successful ebook device must eventually have. Feature parity with physical books, after all, is surely a reasonable baseline demand. So here is what the electronic book of the future will be like.

1 It will have an inexhaustible source of energy and never need recharging.

2 It will have resolution as good as print. (No, Amazon, really as good as print.)

3 It will be able to survive coffee and wine spills, days of intense sunlight, dropping in the ocean, light charring, and falling completely into two or more pieces, while still remaining perfectly readable afterwards. Continued →

A personal history of electronic writing

For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?

I remember when Word was all clean and sci-fi and inspiring, on the sharp monochrome screens of late-1980s and early-1990s Macs. When I was at university, hardly anyone owned a computer. We wrote our final dissertations on Mac Classics running Word in the college Computer Room. Afterwards, when I began to write for newspapers, the first electronic writing tool I owned was one of these:

For some reason the fact that this is called an Elektrische Schreibmaschine in German makes me feel all nostalgic for the ultrasmooth Kraftwerk future it seems I was living back then without even realising it, tapping out theatre reviews on a six-line green LCD (not even backlit), and then watching the typewriter daisywheel chatter back and forth to print a hard copy, that I would then take to the library and send to the TLS or the Independent, via a facsimile machine, at 10p per page. Continued →

The snob defence

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson (Allen Lane)

I read this book while chain-smoking, glugging whiskey and eating massive quantities of dairy products; now I feel I’ve been had. Not everything bad is good for you. Steven Johnson’s fizzily readable little polemic actually consists of two separate arguments about popular culture. First, he rails against the notion that our culture is dumbing down; he says that TV, films and videogames are better than before. Secondly, he maintains that these things are actually making us more intelligent.

Johnson makes a persuasive case for the first claim. It is true that TV shows such as The West Wing are more complicated than Starsky and Hutch. It is also true that videogames such as SimCity are more complicated than Pac-Man. The uninitiated may learn a lot from Johnson’s entertaining and clever account, in the first section, of the sheer hard work and problem-solving required to navigate a modern videogame. His fine analyses of obscure in-jokes in Seinfeld or the confusing jargon of ER are also illuminating, and he makes the good point that the era of DVD aftersales encourages more subtlety and complexity in television programming. So far, so good. But perhaps these scattered observations do not cohere well enough into a headline-grabbing thesis. So let’s say in addition that this stuff is actually making us smarter. And here the problems begin. Continued →