Designing a Half Post-Capitalist and
Half Post-Socialist Home of the Future
Alan N. Shapiro
I was thinking recently about how high my income taxes are in Germany and that I like that. Many Americans seem to want to pay as little taxes as possible, perhaps even preferring that to contributing to and receiving government-subsidized health care. In Germany, it seems, the more money that I earn, the higher – and significantly so – is the percentage of that money that I pay in income taxes. I had a full-time teaching job recently which paid about 4 thousand Euros a month. My after-income-tax net pay was about 3 thousand Euros. Then I had a second full-time teaching job which paid about 6 thousand Euros a month. The after-income-tax net pay was about 3500 Euros. So with a salary two thousand Euros higher, I had 500 Euros more in my pocket at the end of the month. But I have come to understand that paying these higher taxes affords me access to an important and interesting form of human enjoyment: the joy of giving to the “social state”; the joy of helping other people, the joy of participating in a better-functioning society; the joy of feeling empathy and solidarity towards others. Yes, I like to pay these higher taxes. I feel a sense of belonging to a good society. Along with the “capitalist” values of self-interest, consumerism, profit maximization, and productive-organizational efficiency, the “socialist” values (and what exactly are they? altruism, recognition of “otherness,” ecological awareness, creativity beyond work?) should be half of our lives!
The half-and-half mixture that I am looking for is not, in any case, strictly about the economic-ideological systems of capitalism and socialism as they have been in the past. We want to take a methodological approach of ambivalence towards historical capitalism and historical socialism (both of which can be interpreted as being part of “modernism”). Our goal is to simultaneously comprehend how both capitalism and socialism can be “reformed” (or improved in pragmatic-utopian directions) and to move towards a synthesis of the two. But our first task is to grasp that, in many areas of Future Design, we need to find a new counter-balancing force or emphasis with respect to existing views which are too one-sidedly capitalist.
In the age that we are living in of new media, new technologies, and the information society, we find ourselves to be in a very new – paradoxical and ironical – situation in our social and individual existence. We must paradoxically proceed beyond modernism while, contemporaneously, recovering the “socialist” side of modernism which has been thrown away. We abandoned socialism ironically because we believed that capitalism – thanks to its cyber-consumerist, data-flowing, and “curating of the personalized self” social performance features and innovations – had eclipsed modernism. Socialism, which was a grand narrative about advancing towards a good society, ended up classically being associated with modernism. The hyper-modernism of techno-capitalism is about doing business at the speed of light; instituting cybernetic behavioral control models; setting up platforms of digitally connected sociability; and programming the post-consumerist information-ization, data-fication, and media-tization of avatar-enabled attention-seeking “simulated” interactions.
Our ideas, mental pictures, and proposed prototype realizations of what the future is going to look like in many areas of the design of high-tech experiences – Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, non-linear storytelling, physical-virtual architectures, and autonomous self-driving mobility, for example – derive from too one-sidedly capitalist assumptions and values. The same observation can be made regarding our longstanding ideas about “the home of the future.” The predominant notions that we have about the “home of the future” – going back to the archetypal representations of the “home of the future” offered by some large American corporations in the 1950s and 1960s – for example, in the 1956 General Motors-sponsored film Design for Dreaming, or in the 1967 film called 1999 A.D. released by the Philco-Ford corporation, or in the General Electric “Progressland” exhibition or the General Motors “Futurama 2” ride and pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair – derive from a certain identifiable key set of ideas leading to suggested design projects.
Five Design Ideas for the “Home of the Future”
I will consider five of these core design intentions associated with our paradigmatic view of the “home of the future,” and then explicate, in each of the five cases, how the given idea arises from fundamental capitalist values and commitments. Then I will contemplate how each idea would be transmuted if a counteracting socialist perspective were introduced, first as a separate pattern or Gestalt, and then in a synthesis of these two design dimensions. At the same time, I will explore the outcomes of steering the design viewpoint and implementations from modernism to postmodernism to the beyond that we call hyper-modernism.
The five principal concepts underlying much of the Future Design of the “private” human living space which I will examine are:
(1) The world as picture (a term of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger), as brought to me from “there” to “here,” from “absence” to “presence,” the world becoming available to me via visual perception, through telecommunications, and displayed on a screen, thanks to the aesthetics of representation, and tending towards hyper-reality (a term of philosopher Jean Baudrillard).
(2) What I apprehend comes to me through the communicational mode of information (Mark Poster), rather than via “knowledge,” and through the cognitive learning style of hyper attention (N. Katherine Hayles), as opposed to “deep attention.”
(3) Inheriting from the Western-liberal-modernist political, economic, and legal theory binary opposition between “private” and “public” spheres of individual/social life (going back to Aristotle’s Politics), yet having been diverted in practice (although not yet in principle) away from this strict private/public dualism, my abode – in the home of the present and the future – is physically separated from the external society surrounding it, yet is connected to that outside environment through electronic and media channels.
(4) Through robotics (descended from the term “robot,” which was coined by the Czech science fiction writer Karel Capek), I delegate work to intelligent artificial beings or devices that was previously done by myself or by other humans, or I invent new kinds of work and offload them to the AI entities, to enable new daily life conveniences for myself, and to organize my routine activities and my use of time and space more efficiently.
(5) In the design paradigm and “futurist imagination” of the 1950s and 1960s classical capitalist-consumerist culture, my home is an extension of my rational-organizational consciousness or awareness. The “functionalist sociology” of Talcott Parsons is seemingly no longer especially relevant, but it still corresponds to many aspects of the design of the “smart home” domicile. According to widespread social expectations, I am a functioning human in a functioning world. In the structuralist-functionalist sociological model, human actors fulfilling their institutional roles or functions of executing tasks and responsibilities serve to maintain the smooth operationality of social, economic and legal structures. The individual has a structural-functional consciousness that supports his or her ability to perform as a purposive agent within this machine-like system. When the Parsonian model is applied to the home, activities are conceived as being within the framework of the programmed coded administration that ensures survival, the satisfaction of needs, and the continued reproduction of everyday existence. It will be important to investigate which alternative psychology of consciousness is possible.
From the World as Picture to the Appearance-and-Concealment of the World
If we wish to move beyond the design concept of the world as picture, and to integrate into a new comprehensive view a concept that derives from “socialist” history, then what would this concept look like? What “socialist values” are we talking about, and how will they be applied to the “home of the future,” in which applications?
The world is a mystery, an unresolvable enigma to be respected. We should not regard this basic situation as being a problem. Unknowability is what the world is, what defines it intrinsically. We heed the world’s right to exist on its own terms and its not-so-silent plea to us to recognize its epistemological undecidability, as it asks for dialogue with us and consciousness from us, communing reciprocally in the expanse and exchange of a second, advanced ecological dimension. We will need to change our design-image of what media and software are, change our presuppositions of what media and software systems could or should do – away from the paradigm of information (the world is ready and eager to disclose “pictures” of and “data” about itself to us) and towards an appreciation of the continuous back-and-forth or play between concealing and revealing, in the direction of a steady give-and-take between us and the world, towards a new alliance between humans and the world.
This new physical-virtual media technology project will be designed, and it will respect the world. Screens, physical objects, biological living creatures, plants and flowers, artificial life, artificially intelligent devices, hybrid molecule-byte physical-digital entities built from the new building blocks or smallest units of the new neither-atom-nor-bit-yet-both-atom-and-bit mathematical physics of real and computable numbers, Virtual Realities, Augmented Realities, holographics, fractal image patterns, and digital landscapes all orchestrated in design. We have the technologies to do this. We would simply need the moral will to creatively bring all the technologies together and push through a paradigm shift. Characters and objects pop into and out of existence. Flying-vector wallpaper-like views shoot off visual displays, leaving the TV or computer screen and moving flexibly around the physical environment. Each capitalist-cultural-citizen may buy one of these physical-virtual media-software systems for the surround-home with her hard-earned virtual-currency cash. Each socialist-cultural-citizen, as part of the guaranteed income scheme, will receive one of these physical-virtual media-software systems. I will be immersed in this Virtual Reality, in this partnership with the world. Within this ambiance, I will dance and feel movement, I will experience theatre and music and soundscape and performance. This ecosystem is not like a program which can be stopped and restarted. It is always running.
The technological innovations to make everything in the home environment more flexible and more flowing already exist, or are rapidly coming into existence. What we need is a design vision of creativity transforming informatics, rather than allowing informatics to transform creativity. Given the existence of the kind of processed society that we have built on the foundation of the established informatics, and the hope of the kind of more liberated society which we would alternatively like to build, transforming informatics seems like a rather important project. Instead of the world as picture delivered to me through telepresence, I would interact with the world in an unending alternating dialectic of appearance and concealment.
From Hyper-Attention to Deep Attention
In the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), produced by Steven Spielberg, based on a short story by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, and originally developed by Stanley Kubrick, a more advanced knowledge-learning-library interface, as an imagined wish-media of the future, is depicted in the virtual-avatar character of Dr. Know, an intelligent software agent with the voice of Robin Williams. The film’s protagonist David is a humanoid robot-boy engaged in a quest to become human. During his spiritual journey, David encounters the new kind of search engine named Dr. Know in a decadent red-light district of a Las Vegas-style future Metropolis called Rouge City. Dr. Know is a cross between Albert Einstein and Steven Spielberg. He is a holographic volumetric answer engine – a display device forming a three-dimensional visual image and deploying a natural-language conversational interface. He is the image of a wish-media of the future that is a vastly improved software interface to repositories of knowledge (compared to what we have today), an intuitive software agent who guides the user towards developing new curiosity and finding interesting resources. You ask the library interface any question, and the wizard helps you and stimulates your thirst for knowledge.
Knowledge must become alive. The user must actually experience knowledge, in the sense of Virtual Reality, and in the sense of the Star Trek Holodeck technology. The Holodeck, with its “ideal human-computer interface” of voice-activated commands and ultra-lifelike landscapes, objects, scenes, and walking-talking avatar story characters, is the Holy Grail that drives Virtual Reality research. We need to make a synthesis of the strengths of book culture and the great strength of multimedia, which is essentially experience. Learning should combine the depth of knowledge – the engagement with a written text like a book – that promotes critical and imaginative thinking with the amazing promise of multimedia and new technologies, which is to experience that knowledge. We are deeply respectful of books, yet at the same time we want to enliven them, to increase the vitality of the knowledge they contain.
In the online information society, our habitual mode of cognition has shifted from knowledge to information. All the information that we need is now at our fingertips or just a few mouse clicks away. There is an instant answer available for every question, instant data to satisfy all of our informational needs. In her 2007 essay “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” N. Katherine Hayles discusses the contemporary neurological reconfiguration of the mind as a controllable and processing brain whose physical structure indeed gets modified by frequently partaking in new media experiences such as web surfing. The practitioner of hyper-attention zaps many channels and becomes very skilled at acquiring, both on-screen and in neural-cerebral architectural arrangement, a thin horizontal layer of vast informational connections. The ability to have experiences of deep attention – such as reading a novel in paper medium, watching a film in a “dark theater,” or taking a long walk in nature – is more and more getting lost. In deep attention, one needs to concentrate on a single attention-object for a sustained period of time. In hyper-attention, one performs a fast alteration or sequence of micro-instances of alertness. Yet being in a state of constant alertness can be beneficial. In a rapidly-changing environment, a person with advanced hyper-attention skills will be able to more quickly adapt to the new circumstances. The challenge for design is to imagine and implement new forms of engagement with knowledge, information, and experience that combine the strengths of both hyper-attention and deep attention, achieving a constructive synthesis. Bringing together storytelling and Virtual Reality in creative ways is one promising transdisciplinary area for this kind of design effort.
Do “Private” and “Public” Still Have Meaning?
Physical spaces that we inhabit in the offline zones of the cyber-capitalist society are supposedly demarcated by “ownership”: we traditionally understand these spaces via the modernist political-economic theory-system known as “private and public.” In the postmodernist and then hyper-modernist cultural paradigms (all three paradigms exist simultaneously today) of digital codes and ubiquitous informational flows, circulations and networks, the structural arrangement of clear physical demarcation between “private” and “public” recedes quickly and decisively into the past.
What is “private” space? It is usually understood, in one register, as being the physical space that belongs to the private person (the individual human being or family), living in a space where they are safe and protected from the “outside”; not to be touched or disturbed by strangers – or, perhaps, by large capitalist corporations, or by the government. It is his or her or their own domain. Yet nowadays this “private space” is clearly “connected” with the rest of the world through telecommunications and the electronic media. A second meaning of “private” space is an economic or legal sense of the dominion of “private” large capitalist corporations, known as the “private sector,” conceptualized in binary opposition to the “public” jurisdiction or territory of the institution of the state, or the open or shared resources which are said to be in the realm of “the commons.” Private space, in this usage, is not in the sphere of legal, economic and institutional activity that belongs to everyone in the society. Practices like leftist activism, street art (“public art”), and the critical theory of society all rely consistently on a notion of public space, of the commons, to situate their system of beliefs in opposition to the “corporate private.” The left-liberal idea is that there is and should be a “public sphere” or “public domain” or “shared cultural space” within modern society which is outside of and exempt from the economic nexus of cash values. But in the era of online existence which we have entered, the entire concept of “private and public” has become obsolete. I sit at my “personal computer,” but others are with me in my living room. I see on skype and facebook and other networking applications every little movement of theirs, when they come online and go offline, or you can fake your “last seen” status in WhatsApp.
The money sphere and the public sphere (or “new meaningful public space”) can no longer be understood as being separated from each other, but are rather intertwined. The notion of their separation inherits from the historical background of a relatively simplistic (“modernist”) socialist model of the “mixed economy.” According to this old-fashioned idea, commerce and monetization are some kind of “necessary evil” for society as a whole, an involvement which should be avoided when high up in the rarefied air of “public goods” like culture, art, education, creativity, etc. But in reality – in the new real of hyper-modernism –the two spheres are already intertwined on the intimate detailed level. They intermix in a complex intricate flowing topology. It is the “non-Euclidean” spacetime of multiple refracting waves in an enigmatic hyper-space beyond any classical geometry. An inside/outside Möbius strip, a paradoxical architecture, as in the dreamscape walk-in audiovisual architectonic mind-designs portrayed in the 2010 Christopher Nolan science fiction film Inception.
My Home and My Creative Consciousness
In addition to my home being an extension of my rational-organizational and structural-functional consciousnesses, my home can also be an active partner in the growth and development of my creative and “spiritual” consciousnesses. The dreaming-mind and the creative-mind, appearances and displays of the mind presenting themselves in archetypal and visual formats. Insights, inspirations and realizations of “truths” that come upon me suddenly; messages surging up from my deepest inner life; my subconscious and my conscious mind arriving at a more lucid mutual understanding; my body speaking to me in its own language which I begin slowly to decipher. Images, sounds, thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, vibrations, intuitions, scents, tastes, and tactile contacts. Phantasms, imagination, and expressiveness. It is about my relationship to my home as a whole: a living relationship, a living partnership, a relationship of the breath as embodied symbol of our symbiosis. Breathing. Breathing in and breathing out. My home is something alive, like Alexa, the intelligent personal assistant from Amazon. Alexa the smart home controller provides real-time information, manages self-updating calculation-rich spreadsheets and to-do lists, monitors the contents of refrigerators and mailboxes, observes visitors at the front gate, sets off or responds to alarms, schedules music playback, reminds me of appointments, and exchanges intimacies with me through speech interaction.
In addition to the structural consciousness of the smart home, activated by my functional consciousness, there can and will be the creative, phantasmal consciousness, given free play by my sensory imagination, expressed and merged with flexible phantasmal media applications. Poetry, poetic code, and metaphors all steering my smart home from a deeper embodied level, in the spirit of earlier transdisciplinary “cybernetic” thinkers like Maturana and Varela. Certainly we already have the knowledge and the technology to do this: to program or to write the software to activate the phantasmal consciousness, an alternative computational consciousness. This holistic awareness is brought to life, symbolically and literally, by the respiring breath, the moment-to-moment primary renewal of life, the borderline or interface between body and world. This is interactivity through the breath, a relationship with experience.
From the Robotic Home to the Android Home
Here I will write the final section on robotics and the “android alternative.” What are the “socialist values” in this area and how will they be applied, in what applications? In addition to robotic devices, the “android home” will have living interactive ecosystems ambiences.