The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  The stele, in short, was no big deal. It was simply what the government used for publishing, at least when it wanted its publication to last more than a couple weeks.

  For more ephemeral communications it had other means, a centrally located bulletin board being the most important of them.

  There, along the base of a set of statues honoring the 10 mythical founders of the Athenian tribes (called the Monument of the Eponymous Heroes), the government affixed wooden whiteboards displaying mobilization orders, drafts of new laws, and notices of lawsuits.

  A more intriguing medium of proclamation, the axones, is mentioned in passing by the Agora Museum’s literature, but its details are left maddeningly unexplained.

  On page 2 of the pamphlet “Life, Death, and Litigation in the Athenian Agora,” a sketchy drawing is presented: A wooden frame stands upright, three square- sectioned dowels or beams installed within it, horizontally, with Greek script running along the four faces of each. The inscribed cross-beams appear to be attached to the frame by free-turning spindles, with the apparent implication that users could rotate the beams to access a desired section of text.

  The caption: “Reconstruction of wooden axones on which the laws of Solon were recorded in the Stoa Basileios.” That’s it.

  Why the Solonic laws were displayed in this form is not discussed. Nor does the text even tell us how big the axones frame was. Taller than a person? Desktop size? If anybody out there knows more, please enlighten us.

  Finally, let’s consider the medium that suffuses all of the aforementioned: writing, which though hardly extinct these days, is not exactly the spring chicken it was in ancient Athens.

  The Greeks had after all been writing for only about 250 years by the time Athenian democracy was fully implemented, near the end of the 6th century B.C. And we who spend our leisure hours sorting live media from dead would do well to keep in mind that the distinction between young media and old can be just as interesting.

  As for how writing among the Greeks may have differed from what it has become today, I won’t go into such formal aspects as the absence of spaces between words, the general paucity of punctuation, and the snaking left-to- right-to-left direction of many ancient Greek inscriptions.

  Much has been written elsewhere on these topics. But there is a subtler, more subjective type of difference to be discerned in the inscribed artifacts collected at the Agora, I think. I base my sense of it, somewhat tenuously, on a single recurring theme in the earliest of those inscriptions: the use of the first person to identify inanimate objects, as in, for example, “Of Tharrios I am the cup,” written on the side of a cup. Or on the handle of a pitcher: “I am rightfully (the possession) of Andriskos.” (“Graffiti in the Athenian Agora,” figures 5 and 52)

  That this was not just a jocular convention is indicated by the fact that it can also be found in an official decree of a sort, a stele placed at the Agora’s political boundary that bears the inscription “I am a boundary marker of the Agora.” What then to make of this curious practice?

  Though I’m aware it may in fact mean very little, I suspect it actually implies a semiconscious notion among the Greeks that writing bore the voice not just of the writer but of the object written on.

  I suspect, further, that this notion was as much a belief as a conceit, as much magical as metaphorical. And yet I don’t mean to imply that the Greeks were therefore more primitive thinkers than we are.

  On the contrary, the nearest parallel to this phenomenon that I can think of is our own semiconscious, semimagical belief that computers speak in a voice of their own. Computers, too, are merely a kind of inscribed object, after all.

  Yet look at all the computer programs that have been written as if it were they, and not their programmers, who were speaking to us through the interface. Look at all the automatic teller machines that refer to themselves in the first person, look at all the anthropo- and zoomorphized software agents coming out of comp sci labs, look at our insistent attribution of personae to “artificially intelligent” programs (Deep Blue, Eliza) that are in fact a very far cry short of HAL. I’m not saying any of this is silly.

  I have in fact long sympathized with the view that thinking of computers as thinking beings (a habit the philosopher Daniel Dennett refers to approvingly as the intentional stance) is a sensible cultural response to the technology’s complexity, and that it will only grow more sensible as the complexity increases.

  But suddenly I find myself wondering. Are we, instead, simply in an early, passing stage of enchantment with our powerful new information technology, as the Greeks perhaps were with theirs? And will we look back someday on the symptoms of this enchantment and find them just as odd, and charming, as the talking cups and pitchers of the Athenians?

  THE OBJECT AS DECREE; TILE STANDARD

  Not all decrees can be made entirely through language. In the case of officially decreed weights and measures, for instance, some specific object must sometimes be constructed and pointed to as defining the metrological unit in question.

  The Athenians, for example, evidently kept complete official sets of weights, made of bronze, in the government buildings of the Agora. They were made and overseen by the Controllers of Measures (or Metronomoi), who also kept on hand ceramic and bronze vessels that defined the official dry and liquid measures.

  In this the Metronomoi were not that different from, say, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Office of Weights and Measures, which, if I read their Web page right, keeps precision-shaped standard-setting objects on hand to calibrate measuring tools that go out for use in science and industry. But when it comes to government requirements for specific products like wine bottles, say, or bedding, modern methods of standard-setting are much more abstract, usually involving precise, technically involved textual descriptions. NIST and other standards bodies do not, as far as I know, guard in their vaults an Official Wine Bottle or an Official Fire-Retardant Mattress, suitable for comparison with their commercial epigones.

  In the case of at least one product, however, the Athenians appear to have done approximately that. Outside a civic building in the Agora, carved into the stone of a wall, were two official tiles, each defining the standard dimensions of a different type of roofing tile.

  This site, the museum literature observes, “must often have been the meeting place of irate buyers and makers of roof tiles so that an offending product could be compared with the standard.”

  Now, this is clearly as mundane a phenomenon as any I have discussed in these Notes. But let me point out nonetheless that when a tile ceases to be a tile, and becomes instead the definition of a tile, something strange and deeply human has happened.

  It is a moment not unlike that in which some culturally valued object, a head of cattle, or a pretty shell, or a lump of metal, ceases to be itself and becomes instead the definition of all things valued: becomes money. Indeed, this weird alchemy, this transmutation of the specific object into the abstract notion, seems to be the defining feature of information technologies in general.

  Of media, if you will. For what, in the long run, has been the work of the Dead Media Project if not to catalog the endless variety of tangible physical phenomena, bones, knots, sound waves, fire, air, electricity, flowers, that humans have transformed into the abstract stuff of symbol and image?

  And if the birth of Athenian democracy can also be thought of as a movement from the specific to the abstract, from the rule of a particular person or persons to the rule, in principle, of any and all citizens, then doesn’t that imply a peculiarly resonant relationship between democracy and media? I think it does. Abstractions, after all, are hard to believe in if you don’t have some way of physically embodying them.

  Mathematics didn’t really take off, for instance, until the Mesopotamians figured out how to squish numbers into the surfaces of clay tablets. And while it may be stretching things to say that democracy would never have taken
off if the Athenians hadn’t figured out a way to build its logic into the kleroterion, the allotment token, the juror ballot, the axones, and all the other physical mechanisms of its political culture, surely these tools were indispensable to democracy’s robust development in the long run.

  They didn’t do it alone, of course. But along with the traditions, the conventions, and the citizens of Athens, they gave democracy its shape.

  They made it real.

  Source: Exhibits and literature of the Agora Museum in Athens, Greece, including the pamphlets The Athenian Citizen (revised 1987); Life, Death and Litigation in the Athenian Agora (1994); Graffiti in the Athenian Agora (revised 1988); and Socrates in the Agora (1978), published and sold as Picture Books No. 4, 23, 14, and 17 by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, c/o Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.

  The Stereoscope; IMAX

  From Stefan Jones

  A Dead Medium Revived: The Stereoscope in Across the Sea of Time

  I’ve been a low-key aficionado of 3D media for some years. I go out of my way to take in presentations in stereo, and snap up magazines and comics that feature the technique. (I also have the odd habit of crossing my eyes whenever I see identical pictures, images, or patterns displayed side by side, in hopes of fusing the pairs to produce a 3D effect. I was reassured no end when a character in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon indulged in this trick.)

  I recently had the good fortune to take in the latest in popularly available 3D entertainment, at the Sony IMAX theatre in Manhattan. The theatre presents several 3D movies, each a bit under an hour long, several times each day. My cousin, playing local guide, selected a production titled Across the Sea of Time, and it turned out not only to be a great demonstration of modern 3D effects, but a wonderful tribute to a dead medium.

  IMAX theatres feature a screen several stories tall and immensely wide; the film itself is projected at high speeds and has fantastically high resolution. The 3D effect is provided by a high-tech “shutter” system. The projector alternately displays frames from a “right eye” and “left eye” perspective. Each eye is presented with only the appropriate view via bulky (but fairly comfortable) headsets with electrically “opaqueable” lenses.

  Infrared sensors on the goggles keep the shutter effect in synch with the projector. The film follows the adventures of “Tomas Minton,” a young Russian boy who stows away aboard a merchant ship to track down a branch of his family that emigrated to New York at the turn of the century.

  The only clue to the whereabouts of his relatives: some ancient letters and a bundle of stereoscope slides, taken by the fictional stereoscopist “Leopold Minton.” Tomas, barely fluent in English, tromps through 1990s Manhattan, taking in skyscrapers, Central Park, ethnic neighborhoods and a Broadway play.

  The quality of these “modern day” images was stunning; I found myself repeatedly reaching out to grab at fish, balustrades and other objects. I was more impressed by close-up images and street scenes than “show off” aerial shots of bridges and such; the former showed off IMAX’s wonderful ability to capture fine details, such as scuff marks on a stage and the faintly grimy fingerprints Tomas leaves on a granite block after washing his face in a fountain.

  The dead media angle: Tomas’ adventure is narrated by his distant relative Leopold, via readings from his letters home; and interspersed with the moving, color images of modern day Gotham are hundreds of stereoscope images of old New York, blown up to full IMAX size and expertly adapted to the shutter 3D process.

  As Leopold describes his arrival in America, the street life of turn- of-the-century Manhattan and Brooklyn, the construction of subways and skyscrapers, the delights of Coney Island and his growing family, we see all of these things, in wonderfully clear and detailed black and white still images. The stereoscope slides I’d seen previously tended to depict natural wonders and monuments.

  “Minton’s” slides show ordinary people and places: immigrants at Ellis Island, kids playing in the street, young women in full- length bathing suits at Coney Island, workers lighting fuses in the tunnels of the nascent subway system, and more. Thanks to the depth, great clarity and immense size of the images, we see the subjects as people, not blurred and anonymous phantoms.

  I highly recommend this film to anyone visiting New York City; besides reviving some wonderful images from the past, it makes for a great ersatz tour of Manhattan.

  Source: personal experience

  Mutant Mosquitoes in Subway Tunnels

  From Bruce Sterling

  “A variation on the old urban legend about albino alligators dwelling in the New York sewer system comes to us from London: Biologists say a new species of mosquito is evolving in the tunnels of the London Underground. Researchers at the University of London believe the insects are descendants of mosquitoes that colonized the tunnels a century ago when the railways were being built. Originally bird-biters, they apparently evolved new feeding behavior, dining on rats, mice, and maintenance workers. ‘It looks as if there has been a unique colonization event,’ says biologist Richard Nichols.

  “Nichols and colleague Kate Byrne have shown that the Underground mosquitoes, dubbed molestus, are now different from Culex pipiens, the bird feeders. Genetic studies revealed significant differences in the frequency of alleles at 20 different loci, suggesting that the subterranean pests are well on their way to becoming a separate species, and it is almost impossible to mate the two varieties. The team, which has a paper in press at the journal Heredity, also found some genetic differences between mosquitoes on different Underground lines, suggesting that drafts disperse the insects more readily along rather than between lines.

  “The Underground provides an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes with its moderate temperatures and pools created by water leaks, says Nichols. ‘Human skin and other debris from passengers likely provide food in the pools for larvae.’”

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: The London Underground is very far from a dead medium, but this eldritch report makes one wonder about other possible speciation events. Chicago’s abandoned tunnel system would seem ideal for this. So would the dead Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahachie, Texas. What unique little creatures may end up leaping and crawling in the vacancies of mankind’s dead technology? Have they gone all blind and pale yet?]

  Source: Science magazine 4 September 1998, Volume 281, page 1443 Random Samples page, edited by Constance Holden

  Telegraphic Paper Tape; Digital Paper Tape; Baudot Code; Dead Encoding Formats; ILLIAC; TTY

  From Martin Minow

  [Bruce Sterling remarks: Martin Minow is a senior software engineer at Apple Computer He is a 35 year programming veteran who worked on the original Illiac computer, as well as TRASK, the PDP-11, the DECtalk speech synthesizer, and many other projects.]

  PAPER TAPE ODDITIES

  This note describes a variety of encoding formats used for computer processing and typesetting from, roughly, 1950 through the early 1970’s. Paper tape formats, especially the five-channel format generally called Baudot, were used for telegraphy since 1874. See the article on Telegraphs in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11th Edition for more details on early telegraphy. Baudot is a 5-unit start-stop code. (It is described in International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2, and defined in International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) Recommendation F.1, Division C.) In addition to Baudot, I will describe an incompatible variant used by Illiac, a first-generation computer designed in the late 1940’s and in production from 1952 through 1962 at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.

  OPERATION

  The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11th Edition, vol 26, p. 521 describes the Baudot code in its Telegraph article, here somewhat paraphrased.

  The system brought out in 1874 by Emile Baudot and since considerably developed is a multiplex system giving from two to six channels on one wire, each channel giving a working speed of thirty words per minute.


  Each channel consists of a keyboard and receiver, both electrically connected to certain parts of the distributor (which multiplexes channels). The keyboard has five keys similar to those of a piano.

  The letters and figures are obtained by the different combinations, which can be forced by the raised and depressed keys. In the unforced position, a negative battery is connected to the distributor, and in the depressed position, a positive battery.

  At regular intervals a rotating arm on the distributor connects the five keys of each keyboard to the line, thus passing the signals to the distant station.

  There the signals pass through the distributor and certain relays, which repeat the currents corresponding to the depressed keys, and actuate electromagnets in the receivers. Each receiver is provided with five electromagnets, corresponding to the five keys of the keyboard. The armatures of the electromagnets can thus repeat the various combinations for all the signals. When a combination of signals has been received, and the armatures have taken up their respective positions, a certain mechanism in the receiver translates the position of the five armatures into a mechanical movement. This movement lifts a paper tape against a type-wheel. The type-wheel prints the corresponding letter on the paper tape. The movement for any particular combination of armatures can only take place once per revolution of the type-wheel, and at one particular place. The signals must therefore be sent at regular intervals. To ensure this being done correctly, a telephone or time-tapper is provided at each keyboard. It warns the operator of the correct moment to depress his keys.

  The Murray system extended Baudot’s design, to use mechanical typewriter-like keyboards, and tape perforators that could control a printer. This printer is purely mechanical, and its speed is very high. An experimental printer constructed about the middle of 1908 by the British Post Office, operated successfully at the rate of 210 words (1260 letters) per minute. (This corresponds to about 21 characters per second.)