barcodes on everything

There is the known, the unknown known, and the unknown unknown. When the unknown unknown comes lurching to town, you have to learn about that comprehensively and at great speed. Generating new knowledge is very good, but in a world with superb archives, accessing knowledge that you didn’t know you possessed is both faster and more reliable than discovering it.

Donald Rumsfeld? No, that is Bruce Sterling in his new book Shaping Things. I’m a huge fan of Sterling’s science fiction. His Schismatrix is one of my top three or four books in the field, along with Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and – with some reservations – David Maruszek's Counting Heads.

Shaping Things isn’t cyberpunk, it is a slim book about the future of technology and design. It comes in somewhere between Bruce Mao’s Massive Change and Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, but is less fruity-utopian and techno-gaga than either of those. Sterling is exploring the possibilities for the operating system of the future. That is, how we will interact with objects in the world once they become spimes.

"Spime" is his neologism for objects that are historical entities that have a precise, documentable, and machine-readable trajectory through space-time. The entire history of every object will be embedded in transparent networks of information management. The members of this technosociety will have an unprecedented advantage over other cultures. Faced with any problem, they will be able to perform a rapid search of the solution-space, generating and testing billions of possibilities in a very short period of time. A spime-laden technosociety will be like a hyper-version of Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer. Other societies will have their Kasparaovs, but will be at a permanent and deepening disadvantage. Their options will be to join or submit. A spime technosociety is a natural empire.