Nova Express Laptop
There was a story last week from the BBC: BBC NEWS | Technology | Digital guru floats sub-$100 PC.
Nicholas Negroponte has an idea to take a basic laptop, skinny it down,
and have it run Linux. Used educationally it would be the New Model
Horn book, an updatable multi-subject textbook and inexhaustible
notepad.
Whenever I think of Nicholas Negroponte I always think back to
when I first heard of him (I may have run over this before, but even
if). A number of years ago I bought an old book called the Soft Architecture Machine.
It was written back in the 70's by a grad student at MIT and proceeded
on the topic of the possible ability of computers to aid in design and
graphics. It did this in breathless style and prose that seemed
to owe debts to McLuhan and William Burroughs. The title even seems to
refer to a Burroughs' novel the Soft Machine,
written using what Burroughs called the cut-up technique and from
the same stack of notes done during his Tangier days that he used to
write Naked Lunch. It's a tetralogy: Naked Lunch, the Soft Machine, the
Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. The cut-up technique is just
like it sounds: write it, cut it up, tape it back together,
shuffle, mail to publisher. The Soft Machine is the human mind or
rather the human brain. Linearity and the dead weight of temporality
are just control systems that keep us down. One chapter in Negroponte's
book describes guinea pigs pushing servo-motor assisted blocks around
to make their nest home in a big cage. An ideal for living.
This is always linked in my mind with an article by Dora Merris:
"Product Engineering in Technological Forecasting : Half Science Half
Magic."(Product Engineering p.80 16Jan1967 ) Which I came across
about the same time. I have a two line note in a notebook from 10 years
ago that tells me this. The article dealt with Kaiser Aluminum and a
board game (Cordon/Helmer, creators) they had made from something
called project delphi. It all seemed very fashion forward and futuristic. I
allowed this to symbolize for me a lost technological optimism of the
60's. Asking then - this just before the dot com boom: Where did that
go?
Like a carefully banked ember tucked away in a corner of the
fire place, it didn't go anywhere. As I discovered a few months latter.
As head of MIT's media lab, cofounder of Wired magazine,
and author of Being Digital, Mr. Negroponte continues to exemplify
technological optimism even as he did at that time with his soft
machines. I don't know how that whole board game thing for Kaiser
turned out, but I'm guessing that the Helmer of my note is Olaf Helmer
who developed the Delphi Method system of trend forecasting for Rand Corporation. The relative
fortunes of Dephi method (=LCSH) over the years show how the future continues
to be be elusive, both in what the future will give us and what it
needs from us; as though it were just out of reach.
11:31:51 PM  ;;
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