• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


Earlier tonight, my metamour @cathoderaydude wrote an excellent piece about a subject we've chatted about a couple times at home: Gravis's thesis that human technology has already developed all the consumer electronic devices as human beings are ever likely to need. There's pocket devices, tablet devices, laptop devices, desktop devices. The last really important new sort of device, the smart phone, is now over twenty years old, and even that was more like an elaboration on the older notion of a "personal digital assistant". What has there been since then that's really new—a brand new consumer device that offers some completely novel way for a human being to interact with a personal computer, however small? Watching the technology industry flail around with things like AR eyeglasses and "smart rings" and other gimmicky wearables, none of which seem to have much audience beyond the usual gang of elite professionals who jump on every technological bandwagon no matter how inane, I'm tempted to agree with Gravis: maybe we really have exhausted the space of useful consumer electronic devices.

I don't want to agree, I admit. I want to cling to a vague faith in unknown possibilities. I tell myself: if a truly new device comes along, won't it be something that nobody guessed ahead of time? And while some of the canonical consumer devices that we've got feel like they've arrived at their final overall forms—it's difficult to imagine a tablet computer, for example, being much different from existing ones apart from details and refinements—other devices feel weirdly unfinished to me. Are we really stuck with featureless rectangles for phones now? The personal computer most especially feels like it's stuck halfway between a hobby kit and a finished consumer device, and I'm not convinced that Apple's approach is the only approach to making a desktop computer that's more like a polished, professional bit of instrumentation.

But I suspect that Gravis is mostly correct, which means that the real challenge now when it comes to consumer technology is improving accessibility. If we basically have all the devices we're likely to need, then the new mission ought to be making them maximally easy to use, and ensuring that as many human beings as possible have a fair opportunity to benefit from the technology. We have the computers and the smart phones and so forth, veritable miracles of technology, and yet they're deeply unpleasant to use and too expensive for a great many people to own and operate—despite the infuriating social assumption, prevalent in techbro circles, that the landscape of high technology is somehow democratic and "everyone" has modern devices and high-speed Internet now.

Really the situation isn't much different when it comes to older-fashioned technology, like trains or better kitchen appliances: we have the technology already, but not enough people get to use it. Needless to say, though, the current landscape of corporate technology is hostile to prioritizing accessibility. It's more profitable to focus product development on an privileged upper crust of the human population, the folks with all the money to spend on new toys, and who have been conditioned into accepting increasingly gimmicky technology that's badly designed and unreliable as the price of innovation. Meanwhile, the reactionary political beliefs of the technocrats supply them with handy excuses for keeping technology expensive and inaccessible.

I can think of one other curious possibility, when it comes to this question of where innovation ought to be happening, and that's the possibility of abandoning the notion of discrete consumer devices in favor of direct symbiosis between humanity and high technology—i.e. modification of the body with devices designed to work seamlessly with organic life. Cyborg tech, in other words. The contemporary techbro culture, from what I've glimpsed, seems to have some painfully ambivalent feelings about such notions; there's a lot of "my body is a temple" sentiment thinly disguised as rational concern for losing one's humanity by technological modification. And yet there's a lot of excitement for Neuralink and presumably for other implantable devices...maybe someone could explain to me exactly what sort of cyborg stuff the techbros want, vs. what they fear.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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in reply to @pnictogen-wing's post:

He's not wrong.

We think the next threshold will be virtualization. Full sensorium, BCIs IF THEY WORK (I doubt it especially with Musk at the help), travelling without travelling, worlds within a matrix.

But making that work WELL is still a ways off. The best we can do is random vibrators and shock-suits and dual monitors worn on your face. I mean for fucks sake we can't even get video calls right with all the processing power we have.

Don't get me wrong, I think we'll see advances elsewhere, but like I'm typing this on a 10 year old PC. I MODEL AND RENDER HI-POLY 3D PRINTS on a 10 year old PC. I can even do some VR on it, if I don't mind the accompanying text-blindness. The tech race has slowed to a meditative stroll. For the time being, I think personal and household devices are about as "smart" as they're gonna get.

There are still many areas for invention and innovation that are not lil consumer media doodads. Robotics, biotechnology, material science... there's a lot of stuff we're not "at the end of the tech tree" in

oh I agree, and it's gotten me to thinking about how the really vital and world-changing inventions are likely to be things you'll never see, because they lead to invisible improvements—but all the attention and hype is drawn to making the sort of gadgets that a wealthy professional might think of as the pinnacle of technology. I'm reminded of how cars have acquired this false air of being the apex of engineering

i mean we could speculate on the contents of the minds of techbros; maybe time is better spent on what sort of cyborg technology might be worth pursuing, whose lives might be improved by it, what could be plausibly mass-manufactured, what regulatory frameworks would be necessary to get in front of data vacuums, etc.

EULAs and closed-source software take on completely different dimensions when they have direct access to one's body... there's a lot of abandonware prosthetics/medical devices. What if neuralink paralyzes me and... I have to go through forced arbitration instead of the legal system? Since tech companies are only interested in serving businesses and narrower and narrower sections of consumers, any cyborg tech might not end up coming from the usual suspects at all. You want internal and prosthetic tech to be long-lasting and robust, as well, which means that any offerings worth buying won't be recurring money streams or good targets for perennial hardware updates...

"i mean we could speculate on the contents of the minds of techbros; maybe time is better spent on what sort of cyborg technology might be worth pursuing—"

Oh, I suppose you're right, but that's not really my field—the technical side of things, that is. (Maybe others in the plurality, but not me.) I'm like the Shadow; I want to know what evils lurk in the hearts of men, so I'll never stop wondering just what's going on in these people's brains.

I definitely agree that the current climate of corporate technology (and corporate medicine), in which the end user has virtually no power or recourse, is extremely hostile to the notion of developing safe cyborg tech. It's difficult to see any reliable and trustworthy progress being made in this field without a drastic revamping of how society practices medicine and how it regards procedures that, right now, would be sneered at as purely frivolous luxuries. ~Chara