Ziggy Stardust and Hypernormalization in the AI Era
A few posts back, I referenced Bowie’s opening track, “Five Years,” from “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972).”
In this song, humanity has been told Earth has 5 years left. This catastrophic message and the song’s minor-key, elegiac quality lay a foundation upon which the narrator describes ice cream parlors (hedonic commitment after the weighty news) and public weeping. Against the looming Big End, people keep doing what they do in the most bourgeois and pedestrian way because, well, in the words of Bowie’s fellow Englishmen Pulp: “there’s nothing else to do.”
I really feel like that sentiment connects to the current AI moment. Sometimes I’m elated and sometimes I’m horrified. After whipsawing back and forth I too want a milkshake like Bowie described.
This idea has been called “hypernormalization:” the way we all keep going through the motions we’ve always gone through, because this is the only way we’ve ever known how to conceptualize life, even though the ground is actually falling out from under our feet.
If AI pessimists are correct, we have fewer than “Five Years” before superintelligence remakes the world in a way we will either not be a part of, or not recognize.
I Miss the Post-Hippie Techno Utopianism of 90s Silicon Valley
When I got my first dial-up internet account, dialing a modem into an SCO Unix system (System V, based off of Unix 3.2), I started researching the tools and technology of the era.
It looked something like this after the modems finished singing.
There were also magazines hyping up the nascent internet culture like Mondo 2000 and Wired.
Mondo 2000
But both Mondo and Ed Krol’s Internet book cited the WELL, the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” as being an important something. It as something more than a BBS (bulletin board system) by terms of its cultural impact, and it was also an accelerant to (what we now think of) as the guardrail-free internet. Eventually I realized that “Whole Earth” was a thing, an ethos, an idea. And that idea manifested in a literal catalog as well as digital community.
Thus I came to understand the “Whole Earth” thing’s progenitor, Stewart Brand, as being somehow a guy into tents and a guy into computers at the same time.1 “Whole Earth” was where a love of survival gear, camping equipment, and (not-too-subtle) hydroponics hardware intersected post-Sixties Californian identity.
The WELL, then, was a Kryptonian ark carrying a certain vintage San Francisco/Marin County culture out to the wider universe. It met me in proto-internet culture in 1992 and it had been baked into the tech landscape that emerged from the Berkeley-Stanford-San Francisco triangle in the 1980s-1990s.
But it was also baked into some of the people who grew up under or were pulled to the sway of those ideals, not least of whom Steven P. Jobs and Bill Atkinson. Emissaries of the “Whole Earth” ideal were still afoot (while their age of Aquarius was fading) when I reached the Bay in 2000.
I see none of their ilk left there today. I miss them. We are worse off for their absence.
Here’s Atkinson:
Learning From the Failure of X.400
X.400, the UN-backed email standard from 1984, was the more feature-rich system by a wide margin — recallable messages, self-destructing mail, built-in encryption, read receipts, delivery guarantees, decades before SMTP got around to bolting most of it on. It lost anyway. The best explanation I’ve read for why:
X.400 was conceived as a tool, rather than a product.
X.400’s spec prescribed outcomes: software shall do this, and this shall happen as a result. SMTP described exactly how things should work. It’s like the cognitively difficult bit had already happened.
It’s very much another victory for the guiding dictum to building anything digital: worse is better.
Get to market and build solutions that iterate quickly. Over-specification — the UN or EU committee style, or MIT-style development, as against Berkeley-style — means you’ll be shipping paper while your competitors will have shipped features that, imperfectly, are becoming loved.
A comic is worth a million words. From Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie:
From Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie
Source: X.400 vs. Email: the future we could have had
Hat tip to Pablo Amoroso for the pointer.