Keller Easterling

Decades ago, Douglas Adams proposed that if you simply pivoted and turned slightly, you could see and be in a whole new universe. In Medium Design, Keller Easterling proposes that you can look at everything differently, without leaving this universe or entering another. It can be a revelation in any number of circumstances.

The basic principle is that it doesn’t really matter what things are. What matters is the interplay they have. He gives the example of a real estate development or just a section of town. If asked what you make of it, the correct answer would be to wait to see how things play out there. How the light affects it at different times of day, how traffic flows, how dense pedestrian activity is, how the sun changes its atmosphere, how weather changes its performance, how it conserves or wastes energy, and so on.

Easterling explains these as protocols of interplay. An interplay is a form that keeps working even when things go wrong. And everything goes wrong. It is expected to, it should go wrong, and really, it must go wrong. There are too many variables to avoid nothing going wrong. And how it changes when something goes wrong is a protocol of interplay. He says there is no sense of victory or loss; there is only interplay among innumerable factors.

Easterling looks at several scenarios in his chapters. The internet of things, for example. He says it is a throwback, not a step into the future. It is reductionist, attempting to limit the number of variables and having decisions made on them alone. “Rather than declaring the digital to be a dominant technology of innovation, it is the space where technologies interact that may be the real medium of innovation. It is the interplay between technologies that generates information and it is the quality of their entanglements that signals more or less sophistication.”

Therefore, to be practical, medium design is Indeterminate.

Easterling has found examples from many sources, experts in all kinds of disciplines, from the famous to the totally unknown. It is a refreshing approach to life, the universe, and everything.

David Wineberg… (altro)

Extrastatecraft turns out to be a survey of the state of supranational infrastructures. Things like free trade zones, international broadband, and telecommunications in general have been harmonized, homogenized and replicated all over the world, beyond the reach of governing power structures to modify them. Your bank or credit card fits any ATM or card reader anywhere. Suburban communities in Tibet look just like the ones in Alabama. Your computer connection is the same worldwide. Add to that, worldwide standards for quality, production and management from supranational agencies like the ISO.

There are huge implications for individuality and culture, but Easterling doesn’t examine them. It’s far more about the history of laying cables to and in Kenya than the disappearance of idiosyncrasies and anomalies. The stated objective is the relation of these infrastructures to spatial considerations: the instant city of the free trade zone, for example. But there is no deep examination. It’s almost all superficial description.

There are the predictable and tiresome quotes of Foucault that no academic work can avoid, it seems. There are footnotes galore. But apart from the initial concept (which is fascinating), there is very little new.

Instead, Easterling concludes with how to attack the structures. The answer is – never head on. Find what Easterling calls dispositions, that the rest of us would call vulnerabilities. These are points of entry that appear to be malleable. There are numerous tactics to morph them, from rumor to sarcasm and out and out lies.

The chapters all stand alone, and indeed, most of them were previously published separately. The overall effect is less than the sum of the parts.

David Wineberg… (altro)