Remembrance of SETI’s Past

(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan.  The topic called for us to think broadly about the future in relation to SETI.  My own contribution revolves around the SETI/METI divide and the question of time.)

As Pioneer crafts hurtle off into interstellar space with their plaques celebrating Eurocentric, heteronormative humanity atop a school-child’s depiction of the solar system, people have inevitably thought of better things they could have sent to the stars.  These have been the subject of numerous discussions and Kickstarter campaigns.  But all of these concerns and alternative plans reflect on one of the chief obstacles to communication with ETI—coevalness.  SETI doesn’t take place in coeval timespace; even signals to (or from) nearby systems (e.g., Proxima Centauri) take a few light years to reach there.  Their past is our present; our past is their present.  Whether we are listening for “their” signal, communicating “ours” or some combination, we do so through a time machine that denies the coevalness of the encounter.  SF writers have utilized a variety of devices to surmount these temporal obstacles, e.g., Le Guin’s ansible (first appearing in her 1966 Rocannon’s World), but the problem of communication (rather than just signal detection) remains.  More recently, SF fiction and film have gravitated back to the question of coevalness, notably in the 2016 film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 “Story of Your Life”) and the 2014 film Interstellar.  And even though these mark a departure from the ansible-like plot devices, they ultimately revolve around questions of coevalness. In Arrival, Louise Banks learns an alien language that is premised on strikingly different temporalities—past, present and future circle back on one another in a non-linear way.  And with her language acquisition, Banks becomes aware of the future (remembered as her past), in such a way that allows her to intervene in the present.  With Interstellar, it’s the protagonist, Cooper, who falls into a tesseract which allows him to manipulate the past in order to allow his daughter to develop the technologies that will liberate humanity from a dying Earth.  Strictly speaking, the alien is ancillary to both of these films.  In Arrival, we see aliens through a translucent screen and, in Interstellar, Cooper’s daughter misrecognizes the dust patterns as a ghostly, alien-like communication.  Really, it’s the humans that matter.  In Arrival, the plot hinges on very human problems of war, aggression and cooperation—with the aliens remaining enigmatic and part of the film’s mise en scène rather than active agents.  In Interstellar, of course, the dust patterns and the watch-face manipulations come from Cooper himself.  However: the importance of these films is not their novel approach to communication with ETI; it is, simply, the importance of communicating with ourselves across temporalities.  In other words, finding a coeval timespace to communicate with the alien is a symptom of our own problems communicating between human futures and human pasts and, in the process, coming to terms with a present in which both the past is interpolated into the future, and the future in the past. 

With Pioneer and Voyager, our future contact is premised on our past assumptions about science, philosophy, aesthetics and political economy.  They are—strictly speaking—communications with our past that lie in our future, with an “us” that is already alien(ated) to us.  Is this inevitable?  Or is it (pace Arrival) an artifact of Western temporalities that position past, present and future along a line like the solar system in the Pioneer plaques?  How can we think about that in a way that doesn’t reproduce “the future” as superannuated past?

Why would this matter?  Here, the Other we encounter is our past--the assumptions we make about ourselves and the assumptions we make about extraterrestrial intelligence.  Even if we concede that others whose signals we might detect labor under the same time machine conditions that we do, there is no certainty that the face the same problem of coevalness.  Ours is a product of Western ethnocentrism, modernity and, perhaps, the duration of the human.  But even Earthly species experience markedly different temporalities than the scientists who search signals from other places and other times.  It seems likely that the problem of coeval timescapes doesn’t look the same elsewhere.  

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Twitter's Time Effects: Why Twitter Needs to Become a Time Lord Social Media

As Twitter continues to flounder as a business, many have tendered their advice for the struggling company.  On the other hand, people at Twitter have responded by introducing what appear (to some) to be "innovations" that are already shared by multiple, social media.  All this has prompted me to think about my own fascination with the platform.  Even though I've blogged here many times about Twitter's relationship to physical and social space, I find myself most often thinking about Twitter's time effects. 

Like other social media, part of the allure of Twitter is the way it allows users to manipulate space--i.e., using social media to "be there" even when you're very far away.  But time is also a resource that people manipulate through their social media.  While some social media emphasize the present (or the "expanded present"),  other platforms allow for other, sometimes subtle, temporalities.  This powerful combination of space and time effects is nowhere more evident than the current popularity of dating apps for the 18-34 set.  As a recent Pew study suggests, by allowing people to connect to each other through non-contiguous space across asynchronous time, online dating apps utilize space and time effects to maximize opportunities for meetings.  In other words, the attraction of social media is more than just a condition of "speed"; it's the combination of sychrony and asynchrony that makes social media so compelling. 

Ostensibly, Twitter (like other social media) displays content along a linear timeline, with the most recent tweets at the top of your reader.  You can think of this (as, perhaps, people less familiar with social media might) as similar to print-based content like newspapers and magazine articles.  But this isn't quite right.  On my desk, for example, is the excellent 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary, a "curated" collection of tweets from young people during the 2015 Baltimore Uprising.  As a book, it's taken all of the linear, temporal tweets and bound them up into a single, syntagmatic diorama.  As a temporal event, the book of the tweets collapses the Uprising into a single plane of discourse, and reading the book is a very different experience than live-tweeting the event.

However, this obvious difference discounts the structure of the social media platform as, ultimately, a heterogeneous chronotype.  Twitter looks like our experience of Newtonian time; to the casual observer, our experiential "now" is the "now" of Twitter.  Scrolling down the timeline takes us into a past that looks like our past.  But Twitter time operates according to very different rules than our ordinary, everyday understanding of temporality.

For one thing, there are many practices that can disrupt Twitter's apparent linearity.  First, you can re-tweet, summoning up content from earlier in the Twitter timeline and magically depositing it in the present.  Events that transpired in the past suddenly become the "now"--not as memory or echo, but as coeval with unfolding Twitter time.  The only indication of the asynchrony is the time-stamp.

Threading your tweets is another common form of time manipulation.  While most users seem to use this "self-reply" function to articulate longer, more complex thoughts, there are also numerous time effects.  For example:

The differences between 4 and 37 minutes are collapsed through the 3 tweet thread.  Moreover, the linear flow of Twitter is reversed, since the oldest tweet appears first.  The above example is certainly less dramatic than a days or weeks-long gap between tweets in a single thread, but the power of this function (or what Fast Company calls a "hack") is to collapse temporally discontinuous discourse into a coeval frame.

You can also manipulate time-lines with hashtags.  By utilizing a hashtag, a user affiliates their content with other tweets that use the same, even if those tweets are temporally distance.  The effect of a search query, then, folds time into tweet content.

Or, rather, hashtagging sets up another timelines--this one relativistically yanking events out of their original timespace and setting up a chronological alternative.

In addition, Twitter (and third-party sites) offer a variety of tools to help users manipulate time. 
There's "TweetDeck," which allows a combination of specialized timelines and scheduled tweets across multiple accounts--a kind of time dashboard where users can work within multiple threads across time zones.  And there are others as well--"tweet4.me"--that are more user-friendly apps that allow users to do the same.  While the intent of these tools is to enable users to always be "on," they really constitute a form of time travel, with the content I post now existing only in a shadowy future.  Discursively, the Twitter user can follow the same path as Robert Heinlein's protagonist in "All You Zombies" and go back in time to give birth to himself.  

Finally, there are a variety of tools to freeze time altogether.  Your own archive of tweets is one example of this effect, as are third party apps like Storify, that let users create social media narratives with custom (and fungible) timelines that additionally allow you to mix multiple social media platforms, and then arrest the linearity of social media through "publishing" your story.  Here's part of one I did a few months ago on a small neighborhood in Seoul:

 With all of this time traveling, and the all of the chronological disjunctures this implies, it's not surprising that recent features ("Moments" and "Home Timelines") are also temporal features, but I can't help but think that Twitter could do much, much more.  For example, time zones can be manipulated by a user through scheduled tweets, but not by your timeline--a difficulty not only for those of us interested in Twitter traffic in, say, Korea, but also for the general health of public discourse.  Another possibility would be to develop a more Bergsonian app for Twitter.  When you read someone's tweet, re-tweet or reply, you're reading it out of their, individual Twitter-time.  What were they writing or commenting upon before and after this tweet?  Yes--you could find out (just as you could simply run searches to read tweets from other time zones), but why couldn't Twitter make these into new features?  

Twitter needs to consider it's relationship to time--to become a Time Lord, and to share their power with users taking control over their own temporalities. 
 

Mind the Gap—Technology and the Multiplication of Space/Time

Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment:Quantum City.  It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum  looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning.  But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life.

Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons

If we think of 19th century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a linear equation.  These are not new insights for ethnographers who are steeped in what Bergson called “duration.”  On the other hand, as Fabian pointed out long ago in his Time and the Other (1982), these insights into temporal relativism often came at a cost, imprisoning “the Other” in bubbles of time/space that made anthropology’s interlocutors even more vulnerable to power and manipulation.

But when applied to the city’s spaces, anthropology anticipates many of the insights and critiques of Henri Lefebvre and others, namely that capitalism seeks to impose ideologies of homogeneity on the city’s diverse rhythms, practices of space and time which, paradoxically, capitalism generates through highly differentiated productions of commodified spaces, work schedules and mobilities.  For Lefebvre, recovering the “rhythms” of our actual lives is antidote to this ideological reduction.

Within these interstices of space/time lie new possibilities for challenging hegemony.  On the other hand, each juncture suggests new possibilities for commodification and profit, with differences in the production of time and space exploited through arbitrage strategies that commodity them.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the development of mobile computing and social media.  On the one hand, our mobile handsets promise homogenous instantaneity, where physical presence is just a phase embedded in a spectrum of virtual presences, and every corner and relationship is reduced to a node in a web of commodified information.   On the other, these ubiquitous technologies generate countless fractures and interstices in space/time, with each technology generating absences and lacunae right alongside transparency and surveillance.  Far from complete homogeneity, social media makes our urban perambulations more like a lattice of Wi-Fi coverage—with people moving in, out and between charged fields in ways that multiply connection, continuity and ubiquity, but that simultaneously construct their opposite: disconnection, discontinuity and schism.

There are numerous, well-known examples.  In 2012, Facebook forced all of its accounts into its “timeline”—a chronology of your posts that scrolls down your screen.  At the same time, it introduced gaps in that chronology: the time before your Facebook account, or the times when you’ve been less active on the social network.  Foursquare users “check in” at different intervals with their status and location, but the social media simultaneously introduces gaps and inconsistencies before or after “check-ins”.

Some of these discontinuities may tease out the ghosts of alternative possibilities.  After having been accused and harassed for months by the FBI, the artist and University of Maryland professor Hasan Elahi began his own “sousveillance,” calling the FBI before his trips abroad and updating his whereabouts constantly on his website/art installation, “Tracking Transience.”   There are (reportedly) more than 20,000 photos on his site—an eloquent protest against a government obsessed with the surveillance of ordinary people.  But there is also an element of “intransigence” here as well, for each photograph is simultaneously the creation of an infinite number of movements and practices that are off-frame—the spaces and times between the photographs that proliferate despite the Orwellian state.

Of course, these rifts in time/space are more often ambiguous in their ultimate significance.  I think of driving around last week in Baltimore in a friend’s car with GPS.  We follow its deadpan directions through West Baltimore and then suddenly balk when it prompts us to drive through the parking lot of a strip-mall.  Did this lead me to critique of the commercialization of public space?  Does the GPS help me to question the legitimacy of the strip mall to interrupt the maximum efficiency of our route?  I remember feeling annoyed, but also wondering if I shouldn’t stop and buy something.

But that isn’t atypical.  Space/time discontinuities are routinely exploited by an advanced capitalism forever expanding into new frontiers of accumulation.  A few months ago, a big box store in Seoul (HomePlus), installed  virtual shopping along the walls of the subway station at Seonreung Station, allowing commuters to use their smartphone to click onto pictures of groceries that get delivered to their homes that evening.  The success of the virtual store depends not on the homogenization of different temporalities, but on their exploitation.  By moving into the space of competing urban rhythms: work, commuting, shopping, delivery, HomePlus seeks to colonize the temporal fragments that mark the borders of one type of mobility and another.

Undoubtedly, we will see more of this.  While the promise of ubiquitous, mobile computing is the perfect synchronization of our digital and material lives, the exact opposite is also true, with each mobile technology delivering disconnection and rupture right alongside promises of transparency and connection.  There are also reasons to hope that an anthropology sensitive to time and space practices as generative of difference and heterogeneity will continue to use these gaps in order to evoke critical topologies, but it must do so nimbly.  By the time we step in, disruptive time/space may have been already (re)colonized as productive time/space.

[published previously in Anthropology News]

Urban Durations, U-cities, HomePlus

Tesco's HomePlus virtual shopping in Seoul

Along the walls of Seonreung Subway Station (선릉역) in Seoul, Tesco HomePlus (a popular shopping chain with corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom) has put up photographs of 500 commonly ordered products in a style similar to their display on the shelves of a physical HomePlus.  Subway passengers can scan accompanying QR codes with their smart phones; the products will be delivered to their homes that evening.

Yes, yes--this is certainly convenient and suggests the degree to which Seoul is well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous computing city (or u-city)--and well ahead of cities in the United States.  But this also offers a more complex view of the occasionally simplistic logic behind the u-city. 

When we look at cities and their built environments, we can identify what John Urry calls different "mobilities" that bring together people and objects in different spatio-temporal configurations: riding the subway versus driving an automobile versus walking down a wide boulevard versus sitting at a cafe (Urry 2007).  Each divulges a different temporal rhythm.  This is partly because of the temporal regimes that have been built into these systems--subway schedules, speed limits, the timing of traffic lights, etc,  And this is also partly due to the ways people have engaged these spaces through their own temporal practices (Lefebvre 2004).  Through these manifold technologies, we share temporalities with others--waking in the morning, the daily commute, breaking for lunch.  Commuting into Seoul from Ansan in Gyeonggi-do, you really get the sense of people marching lock-step in both time and space.  But the variations in those temporalities are the most noticeable. 

In fact, it is at those precise places where different temporalities collide that have been the most interesting for urban dwellers: the entrance to a Seoul subway station where people wait for each other or sell gimbap.  A pojangmach'a (포장마차) (harder to find these days!) set up in alleys where people move by according to different temporal practices--walking from work, socializing, touring, going to class at a nearby language institute.  Vast urban markets like Namdaemun (남대문시장) where people alternately sit, scurry, stroll.  Isn't at least part of the charm of these urban oases the confluence of difference?  And not only difference in the way that we usually think of it in anthropology, as differences in identity or social class, but differences in temporality--the difference between people caught in the rhythm of work versus those pursuing a variety of modern pleasures.

Of course, these same temporal differences can lead to all sorts of frustrations--when you climb into a car or taxi and find yourself jammed in on Jamsil Bridge (잠실대교), too annoyed to take in the view of Seoul's skyline.  Or when waiting exceeds the 30-minute mark and turns to frustration.  

Image from the Urban and Regional Innovation Group (http://www.urenio.org/2010/09/26/u-city-new-trends-of-urban-planning-in-korea/)

But what happens when we are in constant, real-time syncopation with the built environment around us?  As Seoul moves to ubiquitous computing, the frisson that comes from the confluence of different temporalities would seem to be threatened.  After all, the whole point of ubiquitous computing is the adoption of integrative, networked technologies that span these spatial and temporal differences, creating a vast syntagmatic exchange of information.  The dream, then, would be seamless networks that stitch together city services, transit, consumption, together with our home- and work-lives.  

And yet, that may not be how ubiquitous computing develops into urban contexts at all.  When we look at the HomePlus installation at Seonreung Station, its success depends not on the homogenization of different temporalities, but on their exploitation.  It's precisely because there are different mobilities in subway transit--descending into the tube, walking to the platform, waiting for the train, standing in the subway car--that there's a temporal residue for HomePlus to exploit.  In other words, it's the between-ness of the subway station that makes QR-code shopping at HomePlus an attractive option.

In the future, I would expect these temporal disjunctures to be fertile grounds for ubiquitous computing; and, perhaps, these may result in the concomitant multiplication of these temporal differences rather than their transcendence.  That is, the temporal dissonance between different formations suggests durational spaces for networked action.  With them, perhaps, an awareness of heterogeneous temporalities that may lead to new possibilities for human interaction in the interstices of the temporal formations we inhabit.

References

Lefebvre, Henri (2004).  Rhythmanalysis.  NY: Continuum.

Urry, John (2007).  Mobilities.  Malden, MA: Polity.