The View from Underneath

Posted on 18 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Halwaz is in a makeshift bar in Caracas, Venezuela. The beer kegs, the bar itself, the glasses and the seats are made of Gu which is showing signs of having morphed too many times; it is dull and a little spongy. She is talking to several men of a mixture of races. They have no greyware (they all carry cheap portable netphones), and the entire scene is from her perspective. She is present in person.

“So you all make your living hiring out Gu?” you ask.

The men speak Spanish, but there is simultaneous translation.

“Yes, we hire to the guristas,” says Ramón. “That is what we call them.” He spits expressively onto the floor. “Caracas food is famous in all the world, but they do not eat here. They give no restaurant jobs, no hotel jobs – you cannot even rob them or sell them drugs.”

The other men laugh. “Don’t listen to him,” says Julio. “He’s just in a bad mood because his wife is sick and needs the bed, so there is less Gu for him to hire.”

“You hire out the Gu you use in your homes?” you ask.

“What other Gu would we hire out? We are poor men. My wife, she works across the city, so she gets up early and rides the Gu to the centre, then when New York wakes up – it is almost the same time there as here – there it is for some gurista to hire.”

“Do you think life was better before Gu, or after?”

The men look at each other. Léon answers, “Let me tell you. When I was a little boy, my father had no work, but also we had no Gu. We had very little in our homes, no way to travel around except by walking. Then came the factory jobs and my father had work for a while. We ate better and I went to school. Then the factories closed. They said it was because of Gu. People in North America were not buying what the factories made, because they had this magic thing Gu that could be anything they wanted. I hated Gu for a while. When it first came here I wanted nothing to do with it. But it is only a thing, after all, and now it is my living. You know what I’m trying to say?”

“Would you rather have a factory job like your father?”

They laugh. “Lady, what would you rather do: work hard in a factory all day, or hire out to the guristas and drink here in the bar?”

Cut to the interior of a slum dwelling. It is largely a bare room. Maria, Léon’s wife, is sitting on the floor on a cushion of worn-out Gu, talking to Halwaz.

“Of course I would rather he had work. It is no good for a man, to sit and drink with his worthless friends all day. But what can I say? There is no work that he could do. At least he runs the business himself, not like that Luis, he makes his wife do that too. Me, I work in a restaurant kitchen. Not everyone who comes to Caracas comes as a gurista.” She smiles, and you feel a sense of relief – presumably that Halwaz had made the right decision by being present in person.

“And has Gu improved your lives? Or made them worse?”

“Well, who can say just one or the other? Gu provides money for us, but they say it made the factories close. I remember my father, just sitting and drinking – not like Léon, he is cheerful, he is with his friends, but my father, he was alone, and sad, and then he would grow angry and sometimes he would beat us. I went with Léon when he asked me because I could not stand to be in that house, so hopeless.”

“Do you have hope for the future?”

“Of course I have hope for the future, I am a mother. My little girl, she is so smart, she is in the netschool and she is learning to design. Making things, there is no money in that, but designing them, for that you can still get money. My boy, he worries me, he is like his father, he says to his sister, ‘Why do you work hard? We can live easy, look at Papa.’ I tell him to have ambition and he asks if I do not respect his father. What can I say?”

Posted in guristas, manufacturing, poverty, unemployment | 1 Comment

The Last Manufactured Thing?

Posted on 17 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

The memory ends, and you are back in the tropical heat, breeze on your skin, scent of frangipani, but this time still in Arnold’s body, looking at Halwaz. Surprisingly, fifteen years have made a positive difference. Arnold is fitter and healthier now than she was then, and also more relaxed. Halwaz is looking relaxed as well, in her trademark grey, but appropriately dressed for the warmth, her long chestnut hair caught back in a pony tail and her intense dark eyes serious.

“So,” she says, “tell me about your backers.”

You smile. “Don’t you read the papers? It was the Jewish-Muslim-Catholic-Pagan Illuminati lizard aliens from the House of Windsor Rand Corporation.”

Halwaz laughs.

“No, seriously, someone must have staked you, but as far as I can tell you’ve never said who.”

“And I won’t be changing that today,” you say. “You wouldn’t recognize the names in any case, but I have a contractual agreement not to name them. You’d be surprised, though, how little investment there was in the research stage.”

“Really? This doesn’t strike me as the kind of science you can do on a shoestring.”

“Well, shoestring is a relative term, but we all lived and worked in the same old building with a basement full of several hundred cheap servers, a genius programmer – that would be Ted – and state-of-the-art greyware that we’d put on our student loans, so that we could have a completely virtual development environment, walk around inside the molecules and feel how they moved. We lived on ramen noodles and worked mostly for equity. When we were absolutely convinced that we had the design right – absolutely convinced, no shadow of a doubt – we rented time on an orbital lab and made about 150kg of the stuff for final testing, and for the demo.”

“Ah, yes, the famous demo.”

This time a lap-dissolve into the memory, around the same period as the last. The setting is a large meeting room in which a number of men and women in business garb are seated, not in theatre-style seats but in individual chair-desk combinations like an old-fashioned classroom (which is probably where they have come from). There is enough distance between the seats for someone to walk freely around the whole room, except where people have moved them together to talk, which a number of groups are doing. The overall tone of the conversations includes complaint, mystification and impatience; overheard words indicate that the attendees are not impressed at the invitation’s insistence that they must be here in person.

You are at the podium, scanning the crowd, reading their broadcast metadata. You feel pleasantly surprised that so many of the attendees are relatively senior – not just regional managers, as you expected, but a few vice-presidents of technology and the equivalent. You have chosen to launch in Los Angeles, at some trouble and expense. You hold in your mind the knowledge that your whole team has been busy for months, pushing buzz out on every channel they possessed to say “Gu is amazing”, without ever quite saying what Gu is.

You broadcast an attention-request to the room and it slowly quiets. The audience regards you somewhat skeptically.

You smile mischievously.

“Welcome,” you say. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here today.”

Mutters on the general theme of “Damn straight.”

“You’ve heard the rumors of something radically new in materials science,” you say. “You’ve heard that it’s called ‘Gu’ – that’s our brand name, the name we’ve been using in the literature is ‘morphmass’.” You pause while they associate, and as the journal abstracts highload through their hippocampi and they “remember” them, you see a few early eyebrows go up. Mostly people with first degrees in engineering, from their metadata. Most of the other eyebrows draw together, though, in puzzlement. You press on.

“The technical details aren’t why I called you here, into this room, though. You’re here to experience Gu. And so, without further delay, here it is.”

You flip a mental switch.

Out of the tank of Gu in front of the stage, immediately below the lectern, morphs, then steps, a smooth, slightly shimmering dancer, silvery-pale all over and looking and moving a little like a claymation figure. You know that it is being controlled by Serena’s niece, a dance student, from backstage. She’s using an interface bodystocking from a Nintendo LiveConsole.

Most of the audience are unimpressed, but a few – mostly the engineers who have already gained some idea what Gu is – sit forward a little. You put the a virtual targeting spot on the forehead of the one sitting nearest the front, and the slim figure pulls the transparent cloth off the two large trays of snacks on the table to her left, picks up one tray, moves gracefully between the desks-and-tables, and offers it to him.

A quick cut here. Halwaz has evidently tracked the man – a Du Pont executive called José Thomas – down and obtained his memory.

You reach out slowly, not completely believing, not wanting to be made a fool of by some new hologram technology – and pick up a canapé. One eye on Callie Arnold, one on the salmon roll, you lift it, convey it to your mouth, bite it. You feel a visceral shock as you understand. The canapé is real. The tray is real. The girl is real – for a very specialized meaning of real. She’s solid, she can pick things up, but you just saw her morph out of a tank of Gu.

Cut to Halwaz’s view of José Thomas, present day. He is greying slightly now, heavier.

“Mr Thomas,” you as Halwaz say, “you were perhaps the first person outside the project itself to realize the implications of Gu. Can you remember what you thought in those first few seconds?”

“Susan, it took us all a good deal longer than a few seconds to realize the implications of Gu. I don’t think we’ve realized them all yet, for that matter. Every year, someone comes up with a major new use for Gu technology. But what I do remember thinking after I bit into that canapé was, we have to make this – because if we’re not making this, pretty soon we won’t be making anything.”

“You foresaw the end of manufacturing?”

“Uh – no, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. There’s still plenty of manufacturing going on, even now. There are things Gu can’t do, or can’t do as well. There are plenty of applications where you need a frame made out of something more robust, or a special-purpose brick that sits inside a Gu construct and does processing or control. Our slogan “Gu, the last manufactured thing” was – well, it was a marketing slogan. We’ll see manufacturing for a good long time to come. But there are also many, many, many products that we will not see mass-produced again. I was in the fortunate position of seeing that in advance and being able to plan for it.”

“How do you plan for a thing like that?”

A shadow crosses Thomas’s face.

“You have to make some tough decisions. For some of our people to keep their jobs, a lot of others had to lose theirs. It wasn’t easy. None of it was easy.”

Back to Callie Arnold, Halwaz’s viewpoint, present day.

“You had to know the implications of this technology for old-style manufacturing.”

A cut to Arnold’s viewpoint. You’re a little tense.

“Yes, we did. You have to remember, though, Susan, that 18th-to-early-21st-century manufacturing was itself a disruptive technology – highly disruptive. It moved people who made things from working in family groups in their own homes, often in rural or semi-rural environments, to working in factories in an urban environment, with all the alienation and poverty and ill-health that came along with that. In a sense, Gu helped restore something of the previous situation, without wiping out the gains that had been made in the meantime in communications and medicine and human rights. Manufacturing, old-style manufacturing, isn’t exactly a romantic technology. I don’t mourn for it.”

“But what about the human cost? All the people out of work?”

“I…” you’re quite unhappy now. “Yes, I know. I could say the pat thing, that the days of conventional manufacturing jobs were numbered anyway, that automation would have replaced them in a few years, but I know I helped accelerate that process, and I know that for the people affected it was a terrible shock. I’ve had trouble sleeping sometimes, believe me. I’ve tried to do what I could, through my foundation and by lobbying governments, particularly the Latin American governments whose people were most affected. I tried to get such planet-based support industries as there were located in the regions where most manufacturing jobs had been lost. I tried to arrange for education, retraining, so that people who had lost those jobs had the option of moving to better jobs, more interesting jobs. But a lot of people just suffered, and I’m sorry for it. I mean, my own grandparents were uneducated people in manufacturing jobs. I remember my grandmother’s stories of how hard it was when they were laid off.”

“So,” Halwaz says, “was it worth it? Was it worth the pain?”

You look her directly in the eyes. “I’m not the person who can answer that,” you say. “You need to talk to the people who felt the pain.”

Posted in Callie Arnold, demo, José Thomas, manufacturing, poverty, Serena Koslowski, Ted Anderson, unemployment | 1 Comment

The Gu of Names

Posted on 17 June 2008 by Mike Reeves-McMillan

When Susan Halwaz’s latest documentary dex Gu begins, you are in her body. Facing you – you are in comfortable chairs, under a shade-sail in a tropical setting – is a middle-aged woman, dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, quietly attractive, dressed well but casually and for the climate. You immediately know (even if you didn’t already) that this is Callie Arnold, the inventor of Gu, and that you are in her Caribbean home.

You hear and feel yourself ask in Halwaz’s rich contralto: “So, who came up with the name ‘Gu’?”.

Arnold laughs.

“That was a team effort. In which my role was only to approve the choice. Would you like the memory?”

A memory bead emerges from her forehead in your shared virtuality, and you reach for it and run it.

You are Callie Arnold, introspection tells you, fifteen years previously. This setting is indoors, a meeting space with – unusually even then – all five attendees present in person. As you look at each person, the knowledge of their identity comes to you effortlessly, even though this memory was recorded so long ago (technologically speaking), and is notably thinner than the present-day recording. (It is this kind of editing – brilliance applied to the point of invisibility – that characterizes Halwaz and has justly earned her three Williams for Best Documentary.)

“We can’t keep calling it ‘morphmass’,” you say. “We need a marketing name for it, a brand. Morphmass is like vacuum cleaner. What’s the ‘Hoover’ equivalent?”

Everyone stares for some seconds at a bucket in the middle of the table which holds a silvery substance.

Ted Anderson, a jowly thirtyish man with keen, intelligent eyes, narrows them and suggests, “Stuff. Silverstuff. Morphsilver, uh…”

Jill Kwan, compact, fit, impeccably dressed, says, “Protean, ummm, substance, I mean…”

“Protean Silver?” says Ted.

The memory is edited here, presumably removing more brainstorming. You as Callie Arnold say: “Serena, you’ve got more of a distance from it than we materials people. What’s the first thing you think of when you look at it?”

Serena Koslowski, the pale, slightly rumpled control-systems expert, says, “Well, it looks a bit like… goo.”

There is a pause.

Ted Anderson says, “Don’t you have to misspell it if it’s marketing?”

“Gu? With a ‘u’?” says Jill.

Tavita Sharma, short and plump but graceful, asks, “Does that mean anything in Japanese?”

You can actually feel the search lag and – even if you already know the answer – you get the excitement, the feeling of new knowledge, as the result is returned: Gu in Japanese means tool, means, or ingredients. Everyone grins.

“Perfect,” you say. “Gu it is.”

Cut back to Halwaz, who’s now with Emeritus Professor Allan Scott, pop linguist, host of The Talk Show and author of the bestseller Verbing Weirds Language. As usual, he has accessorized his white hair and beard and sparkling eyes with the costume of a wizard from popular culture, in this case Albus Dumbledore. His educated Highland Scots accent almost lilts as he says, “I have a few words for you today, and here they are: Gu. Gupe. Cos. Stiff. And what’s interesting about those words is that anyone on the street could give you a definition of them that would be different from the definition they would have given just fifteen years ago.”

He gets up from behind his desk and writes in front of himself on an airboard in vivid green with his finger, the finger which bears a green ring with a stylized lantern on it. The letters hanging in the air spell: Gu, Gu-Duplicate, Gu-Costume, Stiffstuff. He’s a practiced airboarder, and they’re perfectly legible even though from his viewpoint they’re back to front.

“One measure of how important a word is, how frequently it gets used in a culture, is how it gets shortened. It’s like stones being worn down in a stream. Another, of course, is how it forms compounds with other words, but a very important measure of the importance of a word – ” he pauses, and points with his finger at Halwaz’s viewpoint – “is how it can be dropped out of a compound because everyone knows it’s there. And in only fifteen years, Gu has become such a word. Look at this. Gu-Duplicate. That word only appeared about ten years ago, when Gu became affordable enough that people could rent a human-sized amount and use it as a remote avatar to move around on the other side of the world. You probably remember the ads: ‘Shake the hand, sign the contract…’ Pretty quickly, it got shortened – why have two letter “U”s when one will do? Guplicate. And then you hear the kids…” He affects a teenage drawl. “‘Like, y’know, I’ve gotta gupe over and see the wrinklies, you da?’ All of a sudden it’s been verbed.” He erases most of the letters of “Gu-duplicate” and pulls the remainder together to spell “Gupe”.

“And Gu-costume, well, that didn’t last long, Gu-cos was good enough, especially since the Japanese had already shortened it and ‘cosplay’ was an English word already. But hardly anyone puts the ‘Gu’ on the front of it now. Of course your cos is made of Gu. You wouldn’t make it out of, like, fabric, y’know?” He rolls his eyes in a convincing parody of teenage scorn, grins his famous grin, and knocks “Gu-costume” down to “cos” on the airboard.

“And do you know what a ‘stiff’ is these days? It’s someone who’s wealthy enough that they own things that stay the same shape all the time. Stiffstuff. Un-Gu. I collect pieces of natural language in the wild, as you know – press them like lizards for my album – and I found a great sentence the other day. Young teen ranting off on her feed. ‘So I’m guping New York, and some stiff takes exception to my cos, and I’m all, “Eat turtles, Grandpa,” and he gets all excessive, you da?’

“Beautiful. Just beautiful.” He smiles, twinkles, and erases the “stuff” from “stiffstuff”.

“Gu,” he says, “weirds language.”

Posted in Allan Scott, Callie Arnold, Jill Kwan, Serena Koslowski, Tavita Sharma, Ted Anderson | 9 Comments