Spimes
Bruce Sterling's BoingBoing: Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech got me thinking about the use of objects in a near future, when their value gets to be defined by their social and environmental cost.
Bruce said
And that is part of the prevalence and ubiquitous presence of information, from the places that sell you stuff for living, called supermarkets, to those that sell you the stuff for enjoying, called boutiques.
You are going to pay for your luxuries. Might as well get to wrangle these, get to trade them and their effects.
Remember Gresham Law, that people tend to keep to themselves the best money, and pass to others the lowest quality one? The same thing happens with information, and by extension, with the kind of information the Bruce Sterling is proposing: When objects become repositories of information, from their origin, their embedded energy, their environmental costs and their projected life, you can easily see this enormous gap between the informationally wealthy and the ones that lack that resource. Objects, right now, carry the hidden information within them - it is up to you to google those, to search for a possible meaning, to get guilty and try to forget that your NYT means acres of trees, and that your daily soy milk macchiato carries with it the deforestation of the Pantanal.
Objects with all that information are not going to be welcome, and of course, peace of mind will be expensive - a front company that takes all that info and sells you blank, silent spimes, whereas all middle-class workers get to carry their own artificial consciences, and the illegal, disenfranchised people find solace in objects disconnected from the grid, or too expensive, clunky, less functional versions of previous spimes. Discarded objects with a lot of information and associated guilt.
Imagine a world with two kinds of people, the affluent ones with the latest, most sophisticated spimes, and the poor people with the old, polluting spimes, receiving hand-me-downs, spimes that do not compete anymore, where the benefit is in receiving something that in any other way will be out of the possible purchasing power.
If we ever include all that information inside our daily objects, if we get to perceive the actual environmental and social cost of our luxuries and daily ration of meat, who is going to be able to afford them? The average American consumes 800 kilos a year of grain, mostly as beef feed. Who gets to see the cost of these meat processing plants, of the immigrant without either insurance or rights, of the community poisoned with endocrine disruptors and unbearable stenches?
Expensive products only serve to widen the gap between different social groups: think Middle Ages, and project that into a world with limited resources and strict constraints on production and consumption, perceived as costs and, ultimately, price. The simple inclusion of these costs in products and services is not enough to direct the market toward a better stewardship of resources.
However, as Bruce Sterling said, there is the potential for enhancing our environment, not just making it sustainable.
It would require a profound shift in our economic perceptions and the functions that our institutions serve. It would mean that those with a passion for Open knowledge would acquire an advantage over more secretive operations. It would probably for corporations to evaluate their business model.
There is so much more.