Sci-fi of the hyperbolic present: Technicolor Ultra Mall, by Ryan Oakley

Technicolor Ultra Mall, by Ryan Oakley (EDGE Books, 2011), looks into the future and finds humanity conducting its daily affairs within the walls of city malls, the outdoors reserved for toxic air and garbage. Populations under a roof. For the lowest on the ladder, a dim and desperate basement. For the middle classes, shopping and distractions on their own bright, green level, and sometimes just distractions on the lower red level. For the highest, an unknown blue tier. Maybe they can see the sky there.

Technicolor is more William Gibson and Philip K. Dick than Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson, but it's not quite cyber-fiction, despite the highly connected setting, cy-fi vernacular, and video-game features. It's grim, dystopic, and all too close to reality. It doesn't romanticize a grand narrative. It is disjointed, frequently interrupted by fake advertisements and television and radio segments. It has subplots that collide in unexpected ways. It speculates on what happens when a society considers new ways to distract, amuse, pamper, and embellish oneself to be progress: better shopping, drugs, sex, television, and violence.

More than anything else, Technicolor is about violence—brutal violence—which is something I haven't come across much in my reading. I'm probably reading the wrong books. It shows its bloodied, scarred, disfigured, and senseless face right away. The characters, including the protagonists, are mainly members of a criminal gang. They're grotesque, self-serving, and proud brawlers and killers. They can also be obsequious, loyal, and wary of greed. These inner conflicts result in near constant taunts, threats, grandstanding, and frequent outbursts of intense and bloody brutality, usually by knife. It seems gratuitous, but that's the point. A central event finds a gang member volunteering to die under a guillotine, in the middle of a wake that is also a rave. The gang celebrates violence. It is creative performance; for some the only creative outlet they have.

Budgie is an adolescent gang member born and raised on the red levels of the mall. The reds are where the authorities send the undesirables in order to maintain peace on the upper levels. They are poorly policed ghettoes populated mainly by criminals, drug dealers, prostitutes, gamblers, and cheats. But the gangs profit from upper-level folk slumming it at red-level clubs on weekends, so despite frequent violence and general lawlessness, there is order.

Budgie's gang, the Vidicons, is ruthlessly expanding its territory, and Budgie has a change of heart after losing the closest thing he's ever had to a friend. Despite rising in the ranks, in the reds he sees only more dumb violence and a quick death. He devises a plan to decamp to the greens and start a new life. But he can't afford it right away. He's got to get a legitimate job, work his way up, before he can make the move permanent. In the meantime, he's got to face his comrades, who have no love for defectors.

Enter TeeVee, an alpha Vidicon hacker who scans the Info Dump, analyzing information to run criminal schemes and make dance music. (I should mention that Oakley displays a dry humour that corresponds to the setting, dark and raunchy.) TeeVee has caught wind of Budgie's plans. He wants a pair of eyes on the green levels to improve his data flow in preparation for a really big scheme. TeeVee doesn't want Budgie to spy; he wants to program Budgie so his eyes effectively become surveillance cameras, feeding information to TeeVee. Budgie accepts, without any real idea of what he's getting himself into, or any real choice in the matter. If he wants to avoid trouble with his peers, he's got to get out of the reds fast. He needs the money. Budgie also manages to woo Harmony, an independent-minded and equally disillusioned Vidicon who gives him hope for a normal life like he's only seen in old mashed-up movies.

A crooked jobs agent finds Budgie work outside the walls of the mall, maintaining the garbage sorting machines in the vast landfill surrounding. He allows his hope to grow, to reach for the horizon. Despite the drudgery of the work, the desolation of the outdoors, and the protective suit he wears against the deadly atmosphere, Budgie feels free like never before. He stares at the sky, awed and afraid. His supervisor warns him not to look at the sun.

It's fun, and it ends in disaster, but I don't want to give anything away.

I hardly need to point out the symbolism of the title, Technicolor Ultra Mall. The literal levels of the city-mall correspond to the figurative positions of their denizens. The poor and criminals live in the dim red basement levels, at the bottom of the social pyramid, where it is perpetually 2:00 a.m; where once overhead projections of stars shone, now interactive ads flickered, barely lurid enough to distract. It is out of sight, but just below the level of sanctioned activity. If they are chipped, red-dwellers are effectively prisoners in a jail city. Those without chips are just in hell, freedom within sight, but made near-impossible by social conditions. Above the reds, presumably at ground level, is "the lawn", the middle class green levels, bright and wide and tall, perfect for shopping and working, passable for entertainment. Every legal thing you want is available, but most things happen via television. Best not to think too much of the activities happening underfoot. Don't cause trouble, and you won't end up there.

Technicolor Ultra Mall is science fiction as the hyperbolic present. Its world is the delusion of a conspiracy theorist or an apocalyptician or the most extreme political commentator, a projection of the paranoid mind. Pollution may have made the outdoors unlivable, but finally, people are free from the stifling regulations of government (except harsh criminal law); commerce flows freely to its natural conclusion: the city as shopping centre. But despite the authorities' best attempts to eliminate the criminal element from polite society, racial and sectarian violence is out of control in expanding ghettoes that threaten the middle and upper classes! Look at how the de facto legalization of drugs and prostitution in the ghettoes has corrupted good citizens! Listen to the angry man on the radio! He argues like a champ and makes his guests sound crazy.

This is life inside a pulpy video game: competing gangs fight over territory, characters wear personal energy displays and carry strange weapons, they collect bonuses for tasks and reach distinct levels of achievement, and there is abundant graphic and cartoon violence.

The violence below the main floors exaggerates the violence that exists below the surface of our daily lives, directly or not—threats, pushes and shoves, looks, arguments, fights, assaults, gang violence, police violence, harassment and abuse, weapons, war, revolution—in person, on television, in the news, in sports and video games. Violence is everywhere, and we hardly notice it, we pretend not to, we acquiesce, or we participate, often without realizing it. There are people who can't ignore it, because it is integral to their life or livelihood. There are people who think some violence is acceptable, even necessary. They justify it. The rest of us pretend the world is safe: TV and video-game violence isn't real, only criminals are violent, war isn't violence, revolutions are for the unemployed, life doesn't end in violence. But it does, in fact, and Technicolor gives it to the reader in gory glory.

Beneath the violence of Technicolor are interesting, realistic, and sometimes exaggerated characters facing extreme conditions, on both the red and green levels. Communication is mediated by antisocial codes and television, but the characters manage to relate when they want to and when they try. They are still human, by turns repulsive and sympathetic, obnoxious and innocent. Without these conflicted characters, the violence they commit might be too much—too hard to take, too pointless, too blunt. Oakley makes it work and, as a result, the book is a strong first effort.

The central idea of Technicolor Ultra Mall is violence: how we can live with it, how some violence is better than other violence, how violence negates heroism. But it is full of sci-fi ideas, original and imminent. In the mall/world, shopping is the central act of citizenship; citizens, including red-levellers, undergo genetic/biological modifications (fur, wings, animal ears, etc.) as we might get tattoos; what is now on the fringe of science and society—pseudo-biological data storage, interactive TV upgraded with surveillance, transfer of mind between bodies, bio-digital computer programs, artificial intelligence, meme viruses and sicknesses, movie remixes/mash-ups, identification chips for criminals, animatronic fish, bio-digital pets, and on and on—is routine. Any one of these ideas could support a plot. Oakley presents all of them in a familiar but confusing world. Together with the well drawn characters, these ideas make the mall less blood red and more Technicolor.

My only complaint with Technicolor is the editing, which probably only bothers me as an editor. There are typos and double words that are evidently out of place, and I believe I noticed a couple of minor inconsistencies that gave me pause. Initially, I tried to rationalize the errors as a stylistic, as though the book was published in the time it takes place and language is looser. But it's clear that the book really just needs a good edit. In any case, this is the publisher's fault, not the author's, and it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

In Toronto, you can buy Technicolor Ultra Mall at Bakka Phoenix Books on Harbord, near Spadina, and no doubt other fine literary establishments.

Online, you can find it at Amazon, of course, in both print and Kindle versions. Read on..!

The internet always remembers?

Does the internet really remember everything? Do we need to teach computers how to forget?

I wonder if it won't just happen "naturally", like by attrition.

I imagine that sooner or later, irrelevant information will be pushed to the bottom of the pile (or search list) and then eventually be "forgotten", if not completely erased. Google already does this to a certain extent, arranging search results by relevance, estimated by factors like how many other sites link to the information and so on.

If a piece of information exists on a computer connected to the internet, but no website links to it, will anyone ever recover that obscure information? And what about when computers disconnect from the internet? Unless their data are cached somewhere (which, admittedly, Google and others do on a large scale), that information is no longer accessible. Also, over time, as formats and computer languages change, much more information will become inaccessible without translation.

Maybe it's just the same as with current information in "legacy" formats: there's a lot of it that exists, but which we are completely unaware of—like in dusty old tomes in libraries that we would have to spend hours or years searching for because it's not indexed. Still it's there.

I understand the ideal of going "off the grid", and avoiding trails of data that can tell others about one's daily habits or personal life. At its simplest, it means I can just go somewhere and no one will know where I am, or I can do something, and no one will know what I'm doing. Without such protection, we end up in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, never sure if someone is watching, always afraid to act.

It's not about living by the law or not. I'm sure that for many law-abiding citizens, once they believe that someone is watching their every move, they will reconsider some or many of their actions; they will become unnatural, separate from their desires, alienated from their selves.

Of course, time won't help if someone wants to remove some damning information from the internet right away. Facial recognition certainly won't make it any easier. It's almost enough to make me want to give up on Facebook. Sometimes I don't want to worry about someone seeing my photos or personal information (despite security measures).

I do believe that, in time, much digital information will be lost, in the ways I've mentioned and others. As disasters and time have destroyed copious past knowledge, so they will do to current and future knowledge. Most people probably have little to worry about when it comes to their personal information. That is, besides marketers, identity thieves, and future historians and archeologists, few people care about the average person's information. And for the time being, going off the grid can be as simple as leaving the house without your phone and wallet, and paying for things with cash.

We make much of our dependence on technology, and surely much of the talk is true. Perhaps fewer people each year could survive "in the wild"; and the idea doesn't interest them. Can we say that these people are worse off than others? Is it as dangerous as some say to trade our privacy for convenience? Is it harmful to trust technology with our secrets, some of which we would never even tell other people? Read on..!

The Interior Design Show and Come Up To My Room

I visited the Interior Design show a couple of years back when my friends at Furni Creations were exhibiting this bad boy, among other things. Danijela and I had just bought our house (we hadn't moved in yet), and we toured the exhibition with some interest. I remember enjoying the special installations and the showcase of fancy new stuff, but high-end bathrooms, kitchens, fireplaces, and all the rest were not really in our future then. That remains true today, and at this year's IDS, again the most interesting stuff was Studio North (the new design showcase), the prototypes, the student design showcase, and the installation Five Small Rooms.

It's not all great, but a lot of it is very interesting. Nothing was as thought-provoking as Radiant Dark, but IDS isn't an art or high-concept show; it's for consumers. Usually, the things I like most demonstrate attention to materials and processes that minimize the end product's environmental impact, but not always. In this case, few designers exhibited such focus. You can read about the things I found most interesting at Toronto Craft Alert.

Come Up To MY Room is the most conceptual of the TIDF events that I attended this year, and also the most remarkable. If you don't know what CUTMR is, the organizers invite artists to create installations in the second floor rooms and hallways at the Gladstone Hotel. The results are always intriguing and there are always a couple of installations that look and feel really great—in which the artists create great experiences. The artists have to work within a couple of significant limitations; for example, the rooms are small and oddly shaped, and the walls must remain white. I think the best pieces take full advantage of the room's conditions, including its shape and its lighting.

Maybe because the installations are enclosed—separate from reality—they often have the feeling of fantasy. I guess in a sense that's always the artist's intention: to create the feeling of something that's not real or hyper-real. It helps, too, that at CUTMR the viewers get to move from room to room and fantasy to fantasy, becoming more and more disoriented as the place gets busier and busier. You just need a fussy rabbit to lead you around and you'd feel perfectly lost in Wonderland. You can read my thoughts on some of the rooms on Toronto Craft Alert. Read on..!

iTunes should not exist

I had a nerdy inspiration one night last week as I was falling asleep. I can't explain why at all, except maybe that I am perpetually looking for a music organizer with certain specifications that I can't find in any existing application. (More on that after.)

The inspiration was this: iTunes, and most other music player/organizers (e.g., WinAmp, doubleTwist, Windows Media Player) add an unnecessary layer to users' daily computing activities. Everything that they do can (or could with little programming or scripting) be done via folder actions in a file manager (i.e., OSX's "Finder" and Windows' "Windows Explorer"). The only difference is that dedicated music players make it all look so pretty. (That's mild sarcasm, by the way.)

Okay, so I'm probably getting ahead of myself. File managers could easily perform all of the basic and most (if not all) of the advanced functions of any given music player. It's just that the developers of these programs would have to integrate some of these advanced functions into the file manager rather than separating them as they are now. One might argue that including these advanced functions is unnecessary since not all people will use them, but this is completely a non-issue. OSX and Windows both come with music players pre-installed, and few people will ever remove them.

Let me clarify. The basic functions of the average music player include:

• Playing music
  
• Organizing music
  

These actions are of course more diverse than I want to make them appear. The first might mean playing audio from a CD, MP3s or other audio files, podcasts, streaming radio, shuffling, crossfading (or other effects), and so on; and organizing music includes sorting in various ways, searching your collection quickly, creating playlists, updating song information, &c. Also, people use iTunes and the like to fill their portable music players, to buy music, to rip and burn audio discs, to convert audio files to different formats, to look at visual accompaniments (visualizations), and even to share musical recommendations and files.

If you know a moderate amount about today's operating systems, you recognize that the file manager can already do pretty much all of these things without any added software. In fact, you might even have done some of these things yourself via your file manager: if you navigate to a folder containing music in OSX, and select a file, a "preview" window appears in which you can listen to the song and view some file-related information, along with the song's cover art, if available. It's much quicker than opening iTunes, but inefficient for listening to many songs. Still, the functionality is right there in Finder. Searching, too, is built into file managers: switch to your file manager, press Cmd/Ctrl-F, start typing the name of the song, artist, or album you want, and presto, all the songs with your criteria are on display, hopefully including the object of your search.

What else? Ripping and burning functions have been part of file managers for years; and only iPod users are forced to use iTunes to load music to their players (although with exceptions)—as far as I know, other music players allow users to drag and drop files from their file manager.

In fact, in some ways, file managers are more versatile than iTunes and the like. For example (and this is my desired specification I alluded to above), file managers commonly allow users to arrange their windows in much more diverse ways. I want to be able to look at my music in two side-by-side windows. Is that too much to ask! (As far as I can tell from this miniscule screenshot, WinAmp includes this feature; but the program isn's available for OSX. If anyone wants to offer step-by-step instructions on installing it with Wine, please let me know!)

Anyway, here's my vision for this infinitesimal fraction of the future:

A file manager "Music" window setting (like the "Filmstrip" folder option in Windows XP) that, when selected, would display the contents of a folder like a music management application. This new setting would be accompanied by a "Music" (or "Media") menu incorporating the features listed above. In other words, I don't want to click and open iTunes to get at my music (time-consuming, inefficient). I just want to open a folder that looks basically like iTunes and that will do all of the same things (quick, efficient).

I suppose there are reasons why this hasn't taken place yet; but I suspect that it's just status quo and marketing thinking. It's far easier to market a distinct application with a name than one that's simply there, doing its thing mostly invisible to the user—even if that program is free, which most music applications are. Also, if Microsoft and Apple maintain separate programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player, they can say they are adding clear value to their operating systems with these programs. Not so easy to say when there's no program to talk about.

Somebody tell me I'm wrong. Read on..!

The new music industry model

If you haven't heard of "Guitar Heroes", you're probably Amish—which is fine. But if you haven't heard of the open-source Guitar Heroes-style game "Frets on Fire", then you are missing out on the beginnings of what will be a huge story in the coming years.

That story is "interactive music", and I'm pretty sure that it will evolve into an alternative music industry, eventually to mate with and eat the current one, producing a freaky and amazing bastard offspring.

The point is, in Frets on Fire, you can make your own songs, add your own songs, play your own songs. You can give them to other people and they can play them. Other people could "cover" your songs, sample them, remix them, and give them back to you, just like with "real" music, but in video-game format, which makes everything better and more real.

And now (actually for a while now), you can actually create music with the guitar controller that comes with Guitar Hero. There's a band called the Guitar Zeros who have been playing live shows using two guitar controllers and a drum kit (and various computer equipment).

It's only a short step to a version of one of these (types of) games that allows players to improvise (solos!) and be judged on the quality of their improvisations, or to write songs on the fly and be judged on those also. And much more, of course

But the real advantage and interest here is that if musicians can write and create songs and immediately release them to a willing market of gamers, well, I think they'd give major traditional label artists a run for their money. Of course, any indie artist can release stuff about as easy as 1-2-3 as it is, but the market is limited. People are listening to music less and playing video games more. If the two are combined—voila!—a massive new market, and a product really worth paying 99 cents for.

The Guitar Zeros

An interview with the Guitar Zeros Read on..!