where does chumlig come from?

Persisting to page 130 paid off; the last 200 pages of _Rainbows End_ went quickly. It helped, also, to have a large chunk of unexpected and unclaimed time today so that the difficulty of holding on to who is who in the book wasn't intensified by the gaps between my previous reads.

Arrogant judgment: If Vinge had written characters that were more than sketches with one or two traits -- sometimes visual, sometimes personality (Miri is heavy, Alice is withdrawn, Carlos flutters periodically into Mandarin and wears Bermuda shorts and T-shirts, Robert is an arrogant asshole) -- the book would compel as well as give fun. I might have also gotten engaged in the plot, which although was supposed to be tied to the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it had neither suspense nor weight. The pleasure for me was in his imaginings of technological implications, which are suggestive -- but schematic.

The descriptions of the protest at the library that weaves through most of those last pages -- pitting the belief circle of the Scoochis against that of the Hacekeans -- did bubble for me because it's Seuss meets Society for Creative Anachronism. Both come with already-established visualization and high silliness, and Vinge plays it out at night, under the eucalyptus. Vinge asks us to imagine this event drawing the attentions of hundreds of thousands of people, many participating in its distributed sustenance and movement. Within the book the event is supposed to be a big deal because it's the first time that belief circles have clashed with each other, rather than internally. They clash because the SCA contingent wants the library's books to be digitized, no matter if the books are destroyed; the Scoochis want to hold on somehow to the 'real' books while the digitization happens.

In spite of that, there's no real defense put up for books as unique objects. In the last pages, following the prevention of the dangerous mice being shipped out, the library is rebuilt as a place of haptics: feel the book, turn the pages: it's all digitized and being spread everywhere. Where the ‘real' books are stored or who has access isn't discussed. I must have missed something about the Scoochi position and how it differed from the Hacekean because it doesn't seem that there are two widely separate positions there: one is tied to a dream of chain mail fantasy and the other to plush furries, and it's okay that the British Museum can be made to fit on a sort-of floppy because there's haptics, and at the end Vinge tells us that this is the result of the two positions working in parallel.

At best, then, there is an argument for belief circles not being exclusive, without reasons being given and with an unspoken ambivalence about the materiality of words and books circulating throughout. But I want to stop complaining.

I do enjoy the descriptions of the wearables that allow the wear-ees different kinds of primarily visual overlays: a cop car on the freeway becomes a woman on a pterodactyl, the scrub of San Diego County reveals its water system or allows mutual game playing in the hills (where we lived when I was very little, before those hills were suburban). Vinge does allow me to imagine the results of thousands of people playing together as individuals, without planning or hierarchical oversight, to result in complex entertainments -- and he plays that off interspersed descriptions of hundreds of people in various security organizations looking, individually, within the playing for patterns that denote imposed plans and plots. It is distributed computing carried out through certain logics of social organization, where most people, it seems, are meant to be distracted and the rest are meant to keep them safely distracted by keeping anyone else from giving the distribution enough shape to bend it in any particular direction.

But what's of focused interest to me in all this, given what I do, are the occasional descriptions of the Composition class in which several of the principles take part. By having old people need to be educated into wearable and other technologies just as the young people do, Vinge sets up being able to explain stuff without having to have pages of overt let-me-explain-how-this-all-works exposition. And so the poet who has come back from Alzheimer's has to take a sort-of remedial Composition class at the local high school along with the kids who aren't the stars; the same teacher also teaches a "Search and Analysis" class. The Composition class consists of people making things, and being graded -- it sounds like -- on both process and product. The process, in part, is learning how to partake in distributed systems, in learning how to hook up with others and collaborate and consider how one contributes (the poet collaborates with a boy, teaching him to be comfortable with words in exchange for technical lessons); the products include water purifiers, musical compositions played by school orchestras thousands of miles apart, and a virtual bridge that circle the Earth.

I circle back then to the book's ambivalence towards words: these compositions are fully multimodal and collaborative, requiring lots of discussion -- which we never see -- and apparently no writing. Vinge is certainly doing things with words as a writer, and he must know his limitations because he doesn't give us any of the great poet's poetry -- which the great poet can no longer create, anyway, as a result of the medical procedures that have brought him back from Alzheimer's. The boy with whom the poet collaborates is drawn to the poet after after being transfixed by the poet's performance of a poem, and at the end the boy creates the words that accompany the musical composition I mentioned above. One of the minor -- and made-to-be mediocre -- characters comments that those words are beautiful, and the poet agrees, while thinking that in his past life, as the poet, he would have found them second-rate. Words are here, then, but uncomfortable, necessary but causing considerable tension in their print manifestations, allowed to be the past beautiful results of a single great (but asshole) man's efforts but fading now as biological patterning and collaborative creations become the dangerous or engaging ways of being with others.

Is distributed aesthetics about the fading of singular creative types and the glistening of those who know how to collaborate and spread and insert delight in many different and often small places?

It's time to sleep, and I have devoted more time to this than I should, but now I know even more the directions some of my reading has to take: sensation, aesthetics, distributed cognition, ethics, yee-hah. What would a distributed ethics be -- if it's different from how we already live? (What is morality in distributed cognition?)