Ich weiss, Robert Harris verkauft (zu recht) auch so genug Bücher. Aber ich muß schon sagen, Imperium war hinreichend lehrreich und unterhaltsam um eine lobende Erwähnung zu rechtfertigen. Harris erzählt die Geschichte von Marcus Cicero aus der Perspektive seines Sekretärs und Stenographen, des Sklaven Tiro. Es geht um Politik im antiken Rom, jedoch sind die Parallelen zur Jetztzeit unübersehbar. Und die Lehren über Politik und Politiker sind zeitlos. Wenn es um Machterhalt oder -gewinn geht, kennen sie nur taktische Loyalitäten und gehen im Zweifel einen faulen Kompromiß ein, auch wenn das in der Realität die verheerendsten Auswirkungen hat. Das Buch ist jedenfalls spannend, unterhaltsam und liest sich gut weg, insofern als Lektüre durchaus zu empfehlen.

“Fiction can often tell the truth better than nonfiction. And there is a lot of truth that needs to be told.” said the author, and given the positions he held in the US security apparatus, before retiring to the usual consultant-afterlife of politicians, he is certainly right. On the outside, the book is a well-written politico-military thriller. But the meat is in the details. Clarke tells a lot about one half of the massive foreign influence on US strategy – the saudi oil money interests. A lot of information is given on how the Pentagon leadership does what they are paid for by oil money interests, regardless of how many soldiers die. Thinly veiled hints point to real world events of the last months, and the overall scenario seems not too unrealistic (the house of Saud toppled by an internal revolution, US thrown out of Iraq, China trying to assert its access to the Saudi oil…).

In short: worth reading. Lots of information packaged in a fast-to-consume thriller set in a convincingly realistic scenario.

Longtime readers of this blog and good friends know that I consider Bruce Sterling to be one of the more interesting and important writers of our time. So no big wonder, I immediately ordered his current book Shaping Things as soon as it became available. It took me a surprisingly long time to actually finish it, but that is not because it is boring or unimportant or badly written.

To the contrary. It is one of these books where you read a couple of pages in the tram and spend all day and most likely the next couple of days to think through what you have read. I simply could only manage to ponder one or two aspects of Sterlings ideas at a time (partly also because I had so many other things to do and think about ).

Sterling manages to bring thoughts to a crisp and clear point that have moved me for a long time now. Essentially it is this:
To make the world a better place you can work by two methods
* prevent bad things from happening
* make good things happen

As a technosocial group we (people that I consider my peers and friends) have a very serious capability to build, to make good stuff happen by designing our positive and progressive ideas into systems and things and projects. We have partly neglected that for some time now, because we were so busy preventing bad things from happening. That needs to change.

Sterling in his book promotes precisely this idea. He goes on to try to grasp the coming wave of technology in some manageable terms and metrics, so it becomes possible to think about it in a concrete way. He introduces the Spime for objects that are identifiable and trackable and linkable with a virtual data shadow of all kinds. Imagine to have a total and precise inventory of all the things you own or have around.

He makes the very important point that RFID must be used to solve the recycling problem. If any device you own contains a memory of itself, of its material contents, production processes, specific properties, manual and so on, it becomes much easier to re-use it and in the end recycle it properly and at much reduced cost.

If the 3D blueprint of objects is embedded into them, it becomes very easy to built it again by means of fabbing , which is the term for all kinds of direct production of material objects from computer data. You can also easily manufacture spare parts for things that no longer are serviced by the manufacturer, you can build electronics upgrades for physical devices that are still good but just computationally outdated etc. pp. And you can go on and modify and adapt existing designs. I can see that there will be a open design movement that works like GNU for CAD files, as soon as access to fabbing devices becomes affordable. The groundwork is already being laid by the OpenDesign people who work on vendor-independent 3D CAD file format, which is essential for this vision.

Sterling is remarkably poor in suggesting ways to cope with the unavoidable privacy implications. The topic apparently does not really interest him, or he simply had no good ideas. This is where I think a lot of work is needed. As soon as the physical world becomes fully accountable, measurable in large areas and referenced in historical databases, a lot of things become possible. Maintaining control over your things becomes much more complex and demanding, as each item carries a full load of data. partly spread over various databases not under your control, with it. Sterling has the nice term “cognitive load”, the brain bandwith occupied by each object that you own, but somehow fails to elaborate on one of the more important load factors a fully networked Spime-object creates: to keep track of all the privacy implication it has. I can clearly see that completely new methods to profit in ethically questionable way from people who do not understand the new world will arise.

The best way to work with the upcoming technology wave is to embrace it and design better things with it, to built our ideals into systems. Here I can agree with Sterling wholeheartedly again. Learning to really use 3D CAD and fabbing is high on my agenda this year.