*It's an interview.
http://www.vice.com/read/talking-to-the-future-humans-julian-bleecker#quotefmReady
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You’ve written/ talked about how fiction can be the momentum behind what eventually becomes reality. Between fiction and fact, who wins at reality?
Really, what’s the difference between fact and fiction? If an engineer or programmer writes a specification for something yet to be constructed or coded – is that fact or fiction? If a science writer for The Guardian tells a story about something that some guy is hoping to achieve in a well-funded corporate lab – is that science fiction or science fact?
Erm.
I don’t want to be pedantic about it, but the influence is arbitrarily predetermined by saying there is some clear distinction between fact and fiction. It’s like apologising for a great sci-fi film because it’s not real. You just don’t do that. You accept things as they are and you let them shape and influence and inform how and what you think about. That’s it. It’s that simple. We shouldn’t pretend to know fact from fiction – embrace them both as ways of trying to explain the world we are in and the world we want in the future.
Here’s a simple one: How are digital technologies affecting our constructs of reality?
Technology is a reification of culture—it’s a materialization of our rituals, practices and aspirations. It’s not so much a tool or something purely instrumental as it is itself culture. We make it not to do things but as an expression of culture—it just happens to be expressed in things that take batteries or have a screen or require technical specifications, industry standards, FCC approvals and tooling to manufacture.
I see.
All those things I mention, by the way, are ways of obscuring the ways in which those “things” are really forms of culture. In fact, an industry standard is arbitration amongst a bunch of human engineers who agree by consensus and probably something close to parliamentary rules on how something should work. That’s culture. Technologies in this way construct reality just like any culture constructs reality. It’s the same thing to ask how an Irish Jig or breakfast cereal or any country’s Senate constructs reality....
