The Implausi.blog – Page 2 – The online home of Dr Implausible

Ancillary Tech

While science fiction often showcases technology, often very front and center, there’s often a lot of additional tech in the world that goes barely remarked. We can call this ancillary technology, in a way that offhand mentions of tech in a sci-fi book often include – one-liners that function as set dressing that end up becoming prescient for future real-world innovations.

We see examples of this throughout science fiction, from the simple screens, tricorders, and automatic doors of Star Trek, to the various uni-functional droids in the Star Wars universe, to the aforementioned one-liners in cyberpunk novels that end up becoming part of our daily lives: think smartphones and credit cards and dashboard cameras. There’s some amazing stuff there hidden between the margins.

Ancillary tech is a corollary to the idea of the technological sublime. In his work on the electrification of America, David E. Nye noted how the technology really gained traction when it disappeared behind the walls, when it became infrastructure that would just reliably work with the flick of a switch. This sublimation of the tech into the built environment evokes the dual meaning of the root word: it becomes awesome (or awful, I guess. Either way there’s lots of awe involved in the sublime). This is similar to the Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, where our relations to our tools and tech changes when it goes from being a thing we do to a device where we push a button (frex).

This idea of Ancillary Tech popped up again for my during a recent re-read of Virtual Light (Gibson, 1993), as we noted in a recent issue of the Newsletter. I noticed the text had several examples of tech in the marginalia, things like one-time credit cards, rear view cameras in vehicles, led displays on vehicles and all kinds of surfaces, and several other besides. Many of these are things where we can see a version of it in our daily lives.

Ancillary Tech is all around us in the media. If you see some examples of Ancillary Tech, let me know your fave. 🙂

Takes on a Train 16 – Conference Prep

Would I take the train again? I’m thinking yes, and possibly even in reverse. (West to East).

Or I’m thinking of a time when I might’ve liked to have taken it, earlier in my life.

Like Congress, the big annual SSHRC hullabaloo, especially on the occasions when it was down East: Toronto or Montreal.

Pack everything up, including the laptop and a couple books, board the train in Edmonton, and then sit tight for 3 days and just prep for the conference. Nothing else to do. Focus on the presentations, finish them as papers.

Walk into the conference ready. Prepped. Good to go.

Take the time, to dive into the conference and be present with the sessions. Make it a two-week thing.

And then fly back or whatever, or return via train and use the time to reflect on what you learned.

Sounds awesome. Bookmarked for the future.

Takes on a Train 15 – The Shift

Riding the train has explained a lot, in terms of Canadian Communications Theory. Thinking specifically of both Innis and McLuhan, and the Bias of Communication specifically.

Rail and Road and Telecom: Parallel lines

Innis would have been speaking of the age of rail, but also the era of the fur trade, that ran in conjunction with that, though rarely overlapping. Rail during that era would have been the symbol of big industry, as was shipping obviously, though the Age of Sail was in the rear-view at that point, with the Age of Steam coming into its own.

Then the Shift happens, a shift without direction, though one is often implied as the charts of history put time on the Y axis. Rarely we may get something of a vertical orientation, either up or down, and almost never moving right to left.

(Might have to try that one sometime.)

Anyhoo, the Shift, as McLuhan is talking about, takes place in an era of air travel and electrical communications. (Innis too, but bear with me for a moment). The primary mode (of both transpo and comms) has changed, and while the old one still exists, and maybe even in a greater volume, the way we think about the world has changed as well.

The new and old continue exist in parallel lines, mirroring each other down vast stretches of the countryside. Part of this is simply due to convenience: once one route is carved, it’s easier to lay down the another next to it. Path Dependency. And the ground shapes it (well, maybe not in Saskatchewan) too; the land speaks through the topography. The paths may be laid down following valleys and gulleys and “paths of least resistance”, or “desire paths” as they are coming to be known.

This is described by Tung-Hui Hu in their book “A Prehistory of the Cloud“, how the paths of the telegraph wires from East to West followed the lines of the railroad, obviously, and how those followed the paths of the Pony Express. So the donkeys noses led the way, and we’re still using those paths all these years later.

Even in Saskatchewan.

Takes on a Train 14 – The Honkening

Did I mention that the horn never let’s up?

Ringing out at every controlled and uncontrolled crossing, the honkening is incessant.

I guess it’s a good sign that there are roads out there, in the big empty blackness.

Sitting in the dome car at 5 am with the big empty of the Canadian Prairies, somewhere in Manitoba, west of Winnipeg (or maybe we crossed into Saskatchewan without noticing, it’s hard to say) one feels adrift in space, like an astronaut looking out the cupola into the void, with only occasional lights in the distance.

Probably felt by nighttime pilots, especially in WWII. Probably why we had those navy men turn to writing sci-fi in the 50s and 60s. Hmmm.

Also:
Ear buds, tomorrow. Definitely.

Takes on a Train 13 – Two-Point-Nine

Apparently 2.9% of the worlds surface area is inhabited by humans. (Thanks, internet!)

And after 2 days of the Canadian Shield and the Prairies, by rail, one asks “Really, that much?”

No where else can really make you feel that small than the big empty of this chunk of our country.

Other places can make you feel small, of course, we’re small and tiny creatures clinging to the surface of a rock hurtling through the cosmos. But this particular kind of small, of the relentless miles, of the distance between everything, in ways that a car trip obscures (with the towns and gas stations and frequent stops, the points of interest), and air travel annihilates by dint of being above the clouds (and by finishing a four-day trip in four-hours).

It’s instructive, it’s educational. Edifying even.

I feel that everyone should do it at least once, in the same way that you see proposals that “everyone should have to work for a month (or year!) in x”, where x stands for the job that’s the author’s bugaboo, be it retail or waiting tables or delivery or whatever.

(FWIW, that proposal usually won’t work as intended, because one of the takeaways for the proposal is that it is tied to “living off the wage of the job in question”, and those that might learn something from it can just skate by insulating themselves from it with money.)

“But it might work for us”