Extinction
Wired has a grim though not terribly serious article up today entitled “Facebook: Too Creepy, Childish for the Workplace.” It’s worth reading if only for the giggle you’ll get out of hearing about Bill Gates quitting the network in part because of a bumper crop of “weird fan sites about him.” Gorgeous.
And just a few days ago I was saying the same thing. Sort of. I feel like I’m ahead of the curve.
It does raise the question, in a roundabout sort of way, that I like to apply to pretty well all things, eventually: how long will this thing last? Facebook won’t be around forever, neither will Yahoo, Google, the Internet, the Earth, and the Sun. Likely for unrelated reasons, or at least I’d like to hope so. More interesting is the thought of when and why these phenomena will expire, explode, extinguish, or otherwise make their exit.
In the case of web platforms like Facebook, the most likely end-game scenario, to my mind, involves mass user exodus, for any number of reasons. It becomes uncool, alienating its primarily youthful demographic. Its youthful demographic grows up, and the upcoming generation chooses newer and hipper platforms over its outdated service. It is the subject of a deal-breaking scandal. It’s hacked, driving users out because of security fears. We’ve already seen negative media coverage roughly to the effect of each of these things, but Facebook is still on the way up.
Of course this involves Facebook being replaced rather than simply annihilated; the technology will remain relevant at least as the progenitor of bigger and brighter things so long as people are networking. There’s also a distinctive split in terms of its exit being a slow dissolve or a sudden death, but you get the idea.
I’ve seen smart people making predictions like this fairly often, but I’m more interested in speculating about potential causes and scenarios. I like futurology. So does Adrien Veidt.
So what do you think? What’s on the way out in the foreseeable future? What’s going to happen to make it so?
I fear the day that Google dies.
Them’s fightin’ words
I’ve been reading Wired magazine’s Top Stories feed for about six months now, and while it’s always been concerned with the intersection of technology, politics and culture, I’ve never actually sat down with a proper article before. I’m using my powers of intuition to their absolute limits here, but I’m sensing that the editors have a penchant for shit-disturbing. I admire that, I’ve always been attracted to the radical periphery of discussions, particularly as they pertain to such geeky topics as technoutopianism and futurology.
While I’d like to say, in philosophical terms I appreciate the role which radicalism takes in balancing out the Luddite/conservative element I perceive as commonplace and oppressive in my day to day life, and I do, the mundane truth of it is I find the dreamers to be awesome.
Wired published most of their newest issue on the web yesterday. While I’m comfortable with the lads at the mag gleefully flogging the Environmentalist status quo, among other suitably anti-PC stances, something is rotten about their angle on the “Petabyte age”, or at least Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory and its notion of the end of scientific theory.
I get that journalists are in the business of attempting to be the first one to say “I fucking called it”, a practice, I’m sure, involving scores of cloaked and hooded men whispering over the light of guttering candles, the act of naming the stuff of distant threads of time ushering dark powers to whichever thrall is blessed by being the first. But this is taking things a bit far, somewhere between the reasonable “we are headed toward a paperless society” and the “humans will marry robots by the year 2050”. The article itself is a great read, extremely well written while raising compelling points, but there’s a limit to how well one can stomach an article subtitled “…Scientific Method Obsolete”.
The article itself is a great read, but the thrust of it is this: the ever advancing computational strength available in the modern age has begun to redefine not simply how we collect data – about everything and anything – but also how and what we learn. Scientific models in all fields are always wrong, hence why they’re constantly modified and updated, and thus the why of understanding phenomenon can be discarded in favour of increasingly rich volumes of what is.
The colossal elephant in the room, however, is the idea that we can excise meaning from information and still learn from it. While the author is careful to focus his parlance on the extinction of models from scientific theory, I find it difficult to separate this from the fact of meaning. How do we understand the Theory of Evolution without any underlying model? We may collect volumes of data to perceive that species change over sequential generations, but what do we understand if our inquiry exists wholly within this step?
This amounts to an assertion that interpretation can be replaced by pure mathematics.
The author points to a biologist, one J. Craig Venter, as the “best practical example” of what he’s describing as the future of science. It’s not my place to criticize Venter or his work, but I take issue with dubbing his method the future of scientific inquiry. The article openly admits that where Venter has used cutting edge Petabyte style technology to discover scores of unique and previously unknown microorganisms, he knows precious little about them beyond the statistical fact of their existence. Consequently, that is all his method, in and of itself, has contributed to the body of science. This is a complex matter, but I beg the question: what have we learned from this?
I find that there is palpable and uncomfortable void in answer to that question. In the author’s own words “It’s just data.” Necessary, but not sufficient.
BIT PART 
