Berkman Summer Interns 2008

I’m sure many of you, as kindred spirits, have read this already, but I happened across it again during an extended fugue-state webcrawl, and it just seemed so eerily apt to what many of us do that I had to post it.

In fact, I’ve never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don’t watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That’s becoming more difficult to do because everything is “around them”.^[58]

–William Gibson, 2007

Can we foresee an end-state, if only a temporary / indefinite one, where computers and people are a single homogenous “whole”?  If so, what will that mean?  Are we there already?  Will it be Kurzweil’s IA?  The Singularity?

For even more of an interesting thought-spark, compare this, from Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties (2004)

 ”How come this old shit [computer equipment] is always that same color?”

“There are two theories.  One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace.  Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms.”

“Yeah?  What’s two?”

“That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible.  Literally ‘plain vanilla’, you follow me?”

I suspect it’s both, and that we are only now / recently  coming to an awareness and acceptance of computer equipment that we might actually design them for aesthetic use, as well as for use as tools.

–Adam