Technosexual is real? Fcuk Android Today!!

A designer I’ve never heard of, but am probably meant to know, called Manish Arora (flash site, beware!) has been putting on shows at London Fashion Week (extreme narcissism, beware!). As an Indian, he has, of course, been patronised by the press.

This fashion nonsense isn’t the kind of thing that would normally raise the slightest interest from me. The only thing that keeps me from calling most fashion (and related parasitic pursuits) “utter wank” is the fact that I get up every day and pull a pair of jeans on. Ergo I’m clothed, and somehow be-fashioned. But then this image came via Boing Boing, of one of Arora’s models, backstage at, er, LFW:

It’s a beautiful shot of a beautiful woman, even if she’s done up like an extra from Farscape. It was only in the morning I’d learnt there was a term “technosexual“. So I found this great site, which features Hajime Sorayama’s Gynoids, of which this is the least masturbatory:

Read this early tale of implied robot-sex, if you can find it: Helen O’Loy by Lester del Rey (1934) – my copy is in the US version of this 1974 anthology. It’s edited, with visionary commentary, by Norman Spinrad. Plot: Home-spun domestic service unit discovers love, drives away creator. Creator discovers sex with domestic service unit, lives happily ever after. (Some fan-fiction here, but saying I’ll read it is commonly known as a lie.)

If you think I’m being selective, then be alert for any possible connections: it’s the 1982 Pris pleasure-model vs the 2007 Re_Vamp model (snapped at LFW yesterday). “Celebrity Fembot Match” is on later, after Horrific Tele-Surveillance Accidents: the Ant & Dec Years.

It’s the Silver Jubilee, the 25 years between Blade Runner and today. I wonder if the future is closer, or whether our perception of the future has become mired in stereotypes. Surely not.

Some say: fucking machines. I say: machines fucking.

[Anies, dude, happy birthday - hope the missus doesn't mind you surfing robot-porn]

Update: the day after … today’s Urban Dictionary Word of the Day is technosexual. How’s that for coincidence?

Syllogomania – Infohoarding

Wired has an article called “Downloading Is a Packrat’s Dream“, which tells us about those people who seemingly can’t bear to leave anything un-downloaded. Call it syllogomania, compulsive hoarding or, in this time of the web, infohoarding, but this “may be the first psychiatric dysfunction born of the digital age.”

Quite often, this compulsion is borne of not having enough information to make effective decisions about collection or disposal. Sometimes this manifests itself as disposophobia, the fear of throwing anything away.

Is this going to cause a problem, as data production exceeds storage capacity? No, of course not – at least, not on the individual level. If a few thousand people end up at SA (Syllogomaniacs Anonymous) then our world can cope. But is there a broader, sociological manifestation of this in our collective inability to dispose of data? Are corporations and governments displaying a ‘rainy day’ aversion to ditching reams of data, just in case they need to use it in the future? Is this pathological? Is there a solution? Well, according to the Wired article, one woman was ‘cured’ of her download addiction when she realised that if she wanted information, all she had to do was ask Google…

What’s New Media? have started a wiki for syllogomania.

Global data production to outstrip storage

Rod at Perfectly Reasonable Deviations posted this story from Business Week magazine about how global data production will outstrip available data storage capacity at an unspecified point in the near future. Global data generated rose to 161bn gigabytes last year (161 exabytes), up from an estimated 5 exabytes in 2003. The current study (by IDC) estimates available global storage in 2006 at 185 exabytes, rising to 601 exabytes in 2010. Unfortunately, data production will have risen to 988 exabytes in the same period.

Rod suggests that free data storage, as per gmail or wordpress.com, for example, is therefore not sustainable, and providers will inevitably have to start charging consumers for storage privileges. That’s entirely plausible, and some people (i.e. me) regard the plethora of free web services as nothing more than a massive loss-leader anyway.

Is that a solution? Do we need all this data? Technology is fuelling a compulsion to remember and record everything, and we do not yet understand the full psychological consequences of this. People losing their jobs as a result of perceived indiscretions recorded on Facebook, Flickr, blogs, etc, are just the beginning of this. I have written before about universal computational limits and an ethics of forgetting: a consideration of the latter might help mitigate for the limitations of the former.

I’d be interested to see a breakdown of the origins of global data: personal, business, government, etc. This would certainly help inform discussions of appropriate data retention, etc.

Everyland, Everyman

Strange Maps came up trumps again recently with a map of ‘The Most Generic Country Ever‘. There is little that is human on this map except city, canal, road, crossroad and village and, of course, ‘Country or Kingdom’. ‘Boundary of Country’ looks more like a footpath. There is a real sense of exploration and colonisation, which reflects the imperial outlook of Britain in 1897.

But what would have been added to a map like this since 1897, were we to redraft such a map for the early 21st century? There are several candidates: nuclear reactor, oil rig, motorway. You could add digital telephone exchange, dormitory town, out-of-town shopping mall, light industrial estate, central business district, enterprise zone.I would add a submarine cable, even though they have been in place since the 1850s, and a military base, for controlling the natives (us). In that vein, we should have television and radio transmitters, and a propagandist centrale (you takes your pick). Perhaps we could put a data haven just offshore in international waters, and a line of trajectory for a token orbiting telecoms satellite, with a crosshair for a geostationary one.

Most importantly, we should have an airport. I did a quick straw poll amongst friends, and this was by far the most common response. As an icon of modernity, the airport rules. Other modern must-haves include a demilitarised zone and a disputed territory. We should also build a wall, turning that flimsy international border into something more concrete and butch. It’s all the rage this year.

CTheory mourns Baudrillard

CTheory’s Arthur Kroker can barely have had time to wipe the tears from his copy of ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ before writing a short piece memorialising ‘The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard‘. I like Kroker, but occasionally his po-mo waffle makes me gag a bit. Luckily, he seems to have come up with the most memorable passage I have yet seen regarding Baudrillard’s legacy:

If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned – a political conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating, reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard’s thought had about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, “falling upwards” into the desert of the real.

Update: Bruce Sterling, one of the editors of CTheory, posts the full text of this piece at Beyond the Beyond.