Applied Semiotics

or how everything (and I do mean everything) is falling further and further

behind the accelerating hyperreality of video games.

I went to E3 last week and felt old. E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the biggest video game trade show in the industry. For the last several years its been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm going to get back to E3 in the specific and video games in general, but before we move on, I want to unpack "feeling old" a little, because it's important to the larger point I'd like this essay to make.

I've felt uncool before. Old is a similar feeling to uncool, because both involve feeling out-of-the-loop. There is a party going on that you weren't invited to, because.... why? Because you don't get it, your clothes are no longer of the mode, you don't understand what people mean when they say "I totally crushed it." You're just a little too slow.

This is ultimately an essay about speed - movement over time. Speed is always a function of time, and speed is of massive importance in a capitalist economy, especially a post-industrial information economy. We talk about computers in terms of processor speed. We talk about the collapsing speed of the news cycle. Much of the information we deal in our day-to-day lives is with is issued with an expiration date, its ability to confer value or competitive advantage is a function of its time criticality - its relationship to time is a goad to speed.

This was the first year at E3 where the product I saw exhibited was a radical departure from my mental model for "video game." What I saw was so cinematic, so photorealistic, so massively multiplayer that it bore as much relation to my old Atari 2600 as a cheetah bears to a trilobite. Sure, there's a line of relatedness, but the distance is so great that comparison is largely an academic exercise.

This has been a long time coming. Anyone that understands Moore's law could have guessed that these consumer-grade consoles were eventually going to get to this level of capability. But we need to put this capability into context. This was the year that I felt like we arrived at the watershed. Sure, video games are in the ascendant. That's not news. What is news is that video games still looked like video games last year. This year they looked like... nothing I'd ever seen before. If the past is another country, the future is a land filled with objects, means, systems and ways that nobody has ever seen before. It is the landscape of the unprecidented. Yes, video games are in the ascendent, but it is a question of scale. It is a question of speed. This is a media on an ascending trendline like an F-18 going into a balls-to-the-wall climb - two pounds of thrust for every pound of airplane, the sky turning outer-space black outside the canopy.

Context. It is not just that video games are amazing. It is that this was the first time that I saw them replacing... everything. Television is still our dominant media form, but in the developed world we already exist in a hybridized space where television is the one-way mass-market high-def delivery pipe that plugs people into the conversation-driven high-findability medium of the Internet. We are a post-literate society, that's not news. But I could feel the money at E3 this year. Bigger than publishing. Bigger than film. The thin edge of the wedge, to be sure, but it was there. The gap is getting bigger. And the rate of growth is accellerating at computer speeds. Think about that, cultural change at computer growth speeds. When Toffler spoke of "Future Shock", he predicted that our post-industrial society would eventually hit a change curve where we would inadvertently alter our own culture so quickly that we would wind up giving ourselves collective culture shock - just by walking out the door for a quart of milk. What he didn't guess was the mechanism, or that the biggest change would be at home, on our living room screens. What he didn't guess was the rate of change, the speed.

Context - video games are the new context of comparison. In my day job we build websites for the automotive industry. The experience gap that we have had to deal with to date is the space between television and a networked personal computer. That gap is effectively gone - we are pumping video to people, creating product-focused reality tv shows, offering things that could never be possible on conventional tv. Our star was on the rise.

But our best offering looks like shit compared to the games I saw. Yes, the game industry has billions of dollars more than we do. But guess what? Nobody cares. The consumers we are targeting will increasingly hold these massively immersive and interactive game environments as their gold standard, their default frame-of-reference. So what that our website has a $300k budget and your game has a $100m budget? Do you think that Joe and Judy America at home give a shit what my budget is? I still have to compete with your game if I want to sell a car. How am I going to do that? I'm not sure, but the result sure isn't going to look like the way we do it now, I can tell you that much. The answer may be not competing at all. Or that the game producers are the new television networks. Or that advertising and the whole of the culture industry as we know it is over.

In his book "The Curve of Binding Energy" John McPhee describes how the calculation of the CBE made nuclear weapons a theoretical possibility. By plotting the curve, physicists could know how much energy would be liberated in the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Once the trend of that curve was known, the arrival of a weapon orders-of-magnitude more powerful than anything in human history was only a matter of time.

The new curve is there for everyone to see. And as the aperture of the gap between video games and everything else widens, the light it will liberate will be blinding. Everything else will seem shabby and dull by comparison. The culture industry is in for a turbulent ride.

This isn't the end of the world. As Bruce Sterling likes to point out, the past is always with us, and the present is composted to make the future. When the bomb was born in July 1945, we had to learn to live with it.

Adjustments will need to be made. Fast, as in "with speed."

A tag search for "Precision Guided Munitions" on Flickr goes horribly wrong

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Things find us. Mosquitoes, gossip, bombs. There is the information and the vessel that moves the information.

My buddy Wade sent me this email:

subj: Benjamin Rush, "Plans for a Peace-Office"

SF author Will Shetterly linked to this on his blog, saying, "The plan itself is a charming mix of the practical and 17th century enlightened Christian gonzo."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance76.html

Gonzo, indeed! For example, his plans for redecorating the War Office - what would now of course be the DoD - are striking:

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, – let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,

"NATIONAL GLORY."

Folks, this is strange stuff. The kind of semantic air pocket that knocks the coffee out of your styrofoam cup and burns your leg. I mean, one moment you are thinking about your morning team meeting, then next... this.

Let's retrace our steps through this garden of forking paths: Crazy Age of Enlightenment Framer, the suspended animation of print, then blogged by Messrs Rockwell and Shetterly, the link cut-and-pasted into a email to me from Wade.

Awoken from the death-sleep of a forgotten book, the molecule-slowing cold of deep space, roused by the heat and warmth of the Internets into some kind of hyperactive quickening of forwards, the strangeness of this Peace Office idea is like The Blob crawling out of a freshly crashed meteor in a cornfield. One brain out of six billion pulls a gene of information loose from the big goopy genome of a book, enzyme splices it into a rhinovirus, and then wipes it on the handrail to the subway. And the next thing you know you are imagining Donald Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Peace, blissed out from the electrode implanted in his substantia nigra, transformed into the lever-whacking lab monkey of American foreign policy.

Shocked awake by our collective You Tubed Flickrated Dr. Frankenstein consciousness, these informational chimeras shamble to their feet and hammer at the glass double doors of our mental shopping centers. They find us. And after that finding, the world is different.

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This isn't Aeon Flux. It's just tagged that way. The meaning isn't destroyed, just stranged.

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I typed Aeon Flux into flickr’s tag field – and somehow wound up with what seems to be a Nike ad.

Nike has its headquarters in Portland, which is a very strange town. So what exactly is going on here? The quantum noise of people thinking and sticking words on things. Nothing new there - poets call it "motion of mind." They call it that in MFA programs, in any case.

What is new is that when I stick a word on something, and I make a misstep, or a misstick, the missticking still stays stuck. And that slippage, that seismo-semiotic skip remains visable from the air. It is findable. And that mashup of findability and strangeness is new.

Neomorphisms get neologisms. I would like to propose a new word. Proposals are usually the start of something strange anyway, somebody asking you to do something you didn’t think of on your own. The word is RESE, which is a strange kind of word, an acronym:

Reverse Entropic Strangeness Effect

Strangeness is created, but it is never destroyed. And once it is created, it gets found. Once it's found, it grows ever more findable, as the neural network of our brains is wired (and continually rewiring itself) for strangeness.

Chris Anderson has written extensively about The Long Tail, the way the Internet has changed the traditional behavior of markets. To quote him directly:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In other words, niche markets thrive because demand can ALWAYS find supply. This is how the Long Tail disintermediates, disambiguates and other discombobulates traditional markets through the subversive power of findability. But I want to push that concept one step further. The Long Tail not only allows people to find strangeness, but in the finding it creates more strangeness.

Dadaism works by through combinatorial effect - by combining disparate elements in an unexpected way it subverts the significance of both. It is the power of Eisensteinian montage to create meaning turned on its ear. Or as Johnson characterized the metaphysical poets, "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

The proliferation of life forms that evolutionary paleontologists call "The Cambrian Explosion" likely occurred because of the development of sexual reproduction - the deliberate combination of previously uncombined genes into totally new genomes. Information could suddenly shuffle its own deck, over and over again.

That's what we are in the middle of, right now, a long orgy of recombination, our information reproducing itself not in monastic cells of orthodox transcription, but in a writhing mess of brains, trained and untrained. A mess of information in transit and transition, with the only constants being change and strange.

The Long Tail isn't quite enough of a label for this phenomenon. Maybe we could call it the Long Flail, or the Strange Grail, which isn’t even an anagram, but does rhyme, and sounds very Golden Bough.

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This is Aeon Flux. And a physical tag of Aeon. And the tag has been tagged ...

"That which does not kill us makes us… stranger."

As much as I love that line, I didn’t write it. Trevor Goodchild says it in the animated series Aeon Flux.

Have the Internets ushered in a brave new tomorrow of transparency, a real-world correlate to what economists and game theorists have called perfect information, the informational equivalent to the frictionless void of high school physics homework? I don't know. It's probably something like that.

Have the Internets unleashed a horrific avalanche of human depravity and avarice upon a previously insulated world? I know that I managed to make to thirty years of age before I knew what a furry was - and then the internet brought not only the idea into my head, but an actual furry into my living room. Guess what? I never wanted to know about the furry lifestyle ("lifestyle" - a favorite strangeness mixer), but once that box is opened and the cat is out of the bag and the metaphor is mixed, there not a damn thing you can do about it. It's a kind of entropy, an arrow for time based on the inalienable ratchet that while strangeness is created, it is never destroyed. Because strangeness is bulletproof. And look, I don't have a problem with furries. Ok, actually I do. I don't think I would have so much trouble with the concept if these people were better looking. Maybe if I looked like that, I would want to pretend I was a priapic dolphin covered with synthetic fur. It may be one of the last acceptable prejudices in the developed world. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't know if the Internet, if this ever-improving exchange of information has made the world a better place. I don't know if it has made it a worse place, or only helped us be awful faster and harder than we ever have before. But there is one thing I know for certain...

The Internet has made the world stranger.

Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars. And the Internet is only perimeter. Everything is an edge. The long edge.

The edge is where things get strange.

Stranger.