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Interview: futurist Mark Pesce
Monday, 22 February 2010
mac-nz: You used to live in California, now you live in Australia – what led you to move?
— Mark Pesce: I was offered an opportunity to work with the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, guiding them into digital media and digital distribution. That, in turn, led me to my research into social networks, which turned out to be very fruitful.
I did fall in love with Sydney pretty quickly, and with Australia in general. It’s a size that makes it knowable. The US is far too large to be knowable.
mac-nz: Have you noticed any obvious difference between the NZ coding and development industry and the Australian?
— Mark Pesce: Not noticeably. I don’t spend a lot of time inside coding and development firms these days – certainly not like I used to. Silverstripe seems to be very much like any of a dozen other web startups I’ve seen over the years, in the US and Australia.
One thing I will say – Kiwis do seem to feel that they have ‘something to prove’. That shows in the quality of their work.
mac-nz: Decades ago you were involved with Apple coding; in particular, for networking. Wikipedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pesce) your first patent was for a ‘Sourceless Orientation Sensor,’ which is used to track the motion of persons in virtual environments. (This was not for Apple, but for the Ono-Sendai Corporation Pesce founded in 1991.)
Was this SOS used in gaming environments?
— Mark Pesce: The Sourceless Orientation Sensor was invented to be used for a VR gaming system of our own design, but was licensed to SEGA for use with the Sega Virtua VR headset, which was designed to be a peripheral for the Sega Genesis/Sega Mega Drive system.
So yes, you could say it was designed to be used in gaming environments. But we quickly realised it had a lot of other potential. We designed a remote control that could understand body gestures – something you wouldn’t see again until the Nintendo Wiimote.
mac-nz: Apple Macs seem natural platforms for great games, with excellent and robust graphics routines, audio capabilities and more – yet with letting Windows run on Macs, Apple pretty much conceded the turf to Microsoft.
Then Apple came back with the iPhone and now we’re expecting the iPad, both of which introduce and enable a whole new games milieu. Do you think Apple will ever make Macs themselves viable gaming platforms again? Or is that pointless?
— Mark Pesce: I am so not the right person to ask this question to. I’ve cared very little about games – on any platform – over the years. I’m not a gamer, per se. Never really have been. I’ve always regarded the device qua device as the ultimate toy. When I want to have fun I go write some code. (This is something I rarely have the opportunity to do these days, so it is a great deal of fun & play.)
It’s true. The only game I ever really enjoyed was Tempest, which was an early 3D arcade game. That should tell you something. ;-)
mac-nz: Have you had anything to do with video as part of HTML5?
— Mark Pesce: Nothing at all.
mac-nz: What concerns me about the iPad is the difficulty inputting data (a virtual, or plug-in, keyboard). But Brian Fling divides people into two different types of mobile users: those very particular about their mode of input, and those who think in services. “Destinations like sites or apps, or their social connections, are the tools to perform tasks, the method of access is completely replaceable. “Twitter is a perfect example of a non-3A service: I can interact with it in a number of contexts, devices and inputs to the extent that is makes the mode of access irrelevant.”
Fling also thinks that for 80% of the people he knows, the iPad is the only device they’ll need.
(The short version of the Brian Fling interview is on the Herald. The full version is here on mac-nz.com)
What’s your take on this shift in computing models?
— Mark Pesce: We’re seeing the birth of web-as-appliance, and that’s all to the good. For a long time we’ve been promised that computers will vanish into things – the same way electric motors did a hundred years ago – and we’re finally seeing this happen. The number of highly intelligent devices surrounding us – GPS wayfinders, mobiles, toys, cameras, etc – has increased exponentially over the last decade. This is happening again. At this point, the interface is (one hopes) driven by the task at hand. That becomes more problematic when the device (like iPad) has multiple functions. One of the consistent critiques of iPad is that it is excellent for consuming media and not really very good at creating it. This design methodology affects the users’ expectations when they approach the device – but, that said, industrious individuals will always find their way around it.
I’d ask Brian Fling if he’d tried typing on an iPhone. It stinks. And that’s by design. You lose some specific capability for an exponential broadening in overall capability. It’s a trade-off. All designs have tradeoffs.
mac-nz: You said at Webstock that books (ie tangible, with covers and pages) are at the point of being on the way out, since they’re increasingly being digitised.
(For me, this sounds like a good thing, as for a couple of decades already I have been annoyed that books don’t have a clock in the corner and I still find myself groping for a keypad to type in a search.)
But there are many purists who will regret and resent the downturn of traditional book publishing.
Will history just consign these book fans to the ranks of collectors?
— Mark Pesce: Traditional book publishing is already dead. Mainstream book publishers are only interested in ‘celebrity diet books’ which can sell in the hundreds of thousands. Mid-list authors (who sell in the thousands) are simply not being offered publishing contracts any more. Those authors will need to develop their own systems of distribution, which will not look like the traditional models.
As for the collectors, there will always be a market for printed books, just as there is a market for vinyl.
mac-nz: A concern with books becoming digitised is ownership of the information they contained. I can imagine a future where ownership of huge tracts of human information could be fought over. Should governments be examining their copyright laws, attitudes and standards? Or should we concede this turf to Google, the current publishers savvy enough to get with the program, and the media giants? (The heart trembles at, for example, the idea of Fox controlling such legacy information.)
— Mark Pesce: Copyright law is fundamentally inconsistent with the nature of networks, which seek to replicate any information presented to them. Google, the law courts and even NEWS Corporation can do nothing about this.
I’m hardly the first person to notice this.
The future does not lie with those who would use copyright as an economic cudgel, but rather, with those who use copyright as a lever to work out some other form of advantage.
mac-nz: You also said at Webstock that the iPad is the first device that truly turns the web into an appliance and it’s a sign of what the web will become – ‘the complete translation of the human universe into a ubiquitous and translatable form.’
I was intrigued by this as we tend to think of ‘human’ concerns as those of flesh, bone, thought and nature, and technology as something ‘other’. But you’re right, of course – we created technology, so it’s also essentially ‘human’.
It seems we are, as never before, at a point at which we need to embrace technology as a part of the human paradigm and move on.
Should we be scared? Or should we rejoice?
— Mark Pesce: Being scared is pointless. It is what it is. Besides, we did this. This isn’t a monster hiding in the closet. This is us looking in the mirror. Technology is always a mirror, a conversation between the mind and the hand.
Should we rejoice? Only insofar as what we do relieves suffering, or creates opportunity.
I grow increasingly concerned that we have become quite literally attached to our devices, that they’ve become so fundamentally incorporated into our ontology that we’re really not the same Homo Sapiens Sapiens that walked out of Africa 60,000 years ago. This is maybe as important (or perhaps more important) than the birth of language many tens of thousands of years ago. That is changing everything. And as for that, we should be scared. And rejoice.
mac-nz: One thing the iPhone did was make tech even friendlier. People who find computers intimidating seem to have no problem with the iPhone, and even toddlers take to it immediately. With the iPad as an ‘internet appliance’ (a long-cherished dream of Steve Jobs), barriers to entering the world of tech come down to price and bandwidth.
This further disenfranchises many technocrats who seem to bitterly resent the ease with which people can achieve computing tasks – they dislike Macs for this reason, and the iPhone and iPad must be perceived as even greater threats. Do you have any advice (or sympathy!) for them?
— Mark Pesce: None whatsoever. That said, I do like to have the option; I use Terminal all the time on my MacBookPro, and I do like the fact that Jailbroken iPhones offer me the same capability. I don’t trust a computer I can’t get a shell into.
mac-nz: Meanwhile, Adam Greenfield (who spoke earlier on the same day you did at Webstock) noted that by 2008, over half the human population lived in cities for the first time. With the explosion of GPS and surveillance, Greenfield said we could/should forget any ideas of anonymity. He showed CCTV footage coupled to automatic face recognition as an example.
Perhaps this will just become an impetus to further craft our ‘digital personalities’? I am interested in any thoughts you would have on this kind of world, in which not only our digital, but also our analogue footprints become part of a huge data stream:
— Mark Pesce: I did tweet something during Adam’s talk: “anonymity is an ephemera of modernity. get over it.” But that was a bit too strong. Really, this is all about evolution. As the gaps in the smooth functioning of power are closed (Foucault, who Adam has clearly read) in the public spaces, the public will react by producing ever-more-untraceable versions of themselves. This is evolution in action, a cat-and-mouse game. I don’t think this is over. That said, there is enormous value to be realised in being an identifiable entity in a particular place – value to one’s self, not to Starbucks so they can send you a fifty-cents-off coupon. So there will be interesting pressure coming from both directions simultaneously: the pressure to remain anonymous against the pressure (and pleasure) of being discretely identified.
mac-nz: Your idea (as stated at Webstock) about devices like the iPhone interpreting data (for example, food package barcodes) to tell you what you can and can’t (or should and shouldn’t) eat, and to help track medical conditions, was brilliant. Are you aware of any moves in these directions?
— Mark Pesce: There has been – for some time – an iPhone app that can scan a UPC on a product, and give you ecological information about it. (The name of it escapes me at the moment, but should be Googleable.) That’s only the tip of what’s possible. So yes, there are definitely moves in this direction. I expect that medical devices similar to the one I talked about – for patients, not for doctors – will become a very prominent thing this decade, as it’s shown that they lead to better patient outcomes, and at much lower costs for care. That, to me, is the low-hanging fruit. But as I said it my talk, it will probably come to us from a direction that no one yet expects.
mac-nz: Finally, do you think Apple wants to rule the world, or just push it along?
— Mark Pesce: I think Apple is as much the accidental ‘victim’ of the era of computers-as-cool as the instigator of this era. They’re simply in the right place at the right time. That said, they have a very good sense of what makes the device cool. Why Nokia or Microsoft haven’t been able to ‘get this’ themselves is one of the biggest open questions in technology. This is emphatically not about Steve Jobs. This is about doing your UI/UX homework.
Now, that said, I don’t think Apple really wants to rule the world. They had DRM on iTunes for precisely as long as it took until the labels realised that DRM-free tracks make the public happier. Then they dropped them and moved along. Apple does not need DRM to survive and thrive. Not on music, not on movies, not on books.
Against that, there’s the strictly locked down nature of iPhone OS. Where did Apple learn this from? NINTENDO. Nintendo was the first company to strictly test and quality-control all the titles released for their platform – standard procedure among the gaming console vendors today. Apple is simply replicating this extremely successful strategy. (The game console is not thought of as a computer, is it? Neither is iPad.)
To the degree that Apple makes stupid decisions about what can and can not run on that platform, they make Android and Windows Mobile 7 more alluring. Apple understands this. So there’s a balance. That balance will become more nuanced this year, as the two other competitive platforms mature into serious gravitational forces in the app phone space.
[Pic from http://markpesce.com/]
