We see through the interface of the surface. What happens in the interstitial space is us and the object. The interface is a Skeuomorphic, but that is gradually falling away with every iteration, were there are fewer layers (or more metaphors) between us and the task. The task is the core – the action that we perceive. The distance and time between action/reaction has collapsed, where we act on things, and the things act on us. The neural net is a loop.
There is an intentional blur between the hardware and the software. While computers can be reduced to the hardware that constitutes them (and perhaps indeed there is no software), and we as humans can be reduced to the minerals that make up us, the devil is in the details. There is a complexity that is at times breathtaking. The complexity is masked by a layer of the familiar.
it is easy to acknowledge that humans
are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or
the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more
challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing.
rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of
something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind. (Latour)
It is not my intent to argue for the existence of a soul, but something is there. There is a system. There is a relationship.
We build technology to be familiar because familiarity breeds adoption. We suspect that which is alien, but alienist is often the presage of the future. The context is additive, like pages in a book, building towards something, but in our case the last chapter has not been written. It unfolds.
Folders, sheets of paper, a cluttered desk, this what grounds us, the signpost that points us. The first generation Macintosh shipped with Audio cassettes and a truly excellent manual to guide users through a way of working with this device that was familiar, but new. The typography and layout was generous, the drawn images ample in size. It was consciously not like a computer manual. It was a humanistic book informed by good design. The book and cassette was a linchpin between the familiar and the new. The design was to be the interstitial to the interstitial. We leaped across media like a fish leaping out of a pond.
We are so much past that now, but perhaps we are not. The things we use will increasingly have the appearance of a life of their own, but like the windup cymbal playing monkey, the actions are elemental, the linkage is still there, the cymbals crash. They are agents. There is the effect, the action, and it impacts us. The loop is still there, but it is transparent at times; now these loops intersect in ways that are beginning to slip from our cognition. At times these loops between us are synchronous, and at times asynchronous. As Bill Joy once said, “The Future Doesn’t Need Us”, and perhaps that may be true. As long as the Nest thermostat has power, it will continue to adjust temperature. The whir of a robotic vacuum will keep the house clean, silent of the echoes of footsteps.
This is not my attempt to paint a bleak picture of the future of man-made things, but to recognize that we give ourselves over to these layers of action, where the action/reaction loop exists, but at times it appears that the relationship is changing. We live in a world of agency. Siri, Google and Cortana will offer us helpful advice through the sound of a quasi-human voice. Google will index all of our photographs for us. We can adjust the settings on the thermostat, we can decide where the robotic vacuum cleans the house. We still control the power that keeps these things running. Our relationship between us and these things has begun to shift, and with it we shift – to where i do not know.
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The Fifty-third Calypso
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen–
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice–
So many different people
In the same device.
Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle “The Book of Bokonon”
History and Theory of Communication Technology 