The thing of it is, it is true! Whenever I'm shopping, I imagine better environments for ourselves, in terms of the material resilience and convivial relationships we could experience, versus the throw-away and the anonymous.

One core of this problem is an information asymmetry: while the supply cycle was optimized through information technology, everything within the sphere of the shopper is quite opaque by comparison. Due to the lack of information within the shopper's sphere, there's little value coming from the shopper's end of the supply cycle, and therefore it is often truncated into a supply chain, leading to very expensive recovery conditions for shorter term gains. Similarly, due to a lack of information about the specific product and the conditions of the people that produced it, the consumer is often forced to rely upon brand, possibly supporting economic and environmental changes elsewhere that may also be hard to recover from. As we don't know the people we're interacting with in commercial relationship, we can't draw from social ties to make our interactions mutually rewarding. And as bad as the shopping experience can be, the post-consumer experience is trash!



This information asymmetry is not a necessity. The design futurist Bruce Sterling has put forward a compelling alternative in his design manifesto Shaping Things: by completely tracking of the product's lifetime and allowing for public displays of identity, the role of the shopper changes form being a consumer (or, if they are particularly active, an end-user) into a wrangler: someone who finds their interactions fully legible and easy to affect. We now interpret commercial objects as spimes: the sequential history of each individual object, and its assessment, is fully included, ready to continue in the supply cycle after use.



I find this very compelling, because it corresponds to every best intuition of my education and experience. My background is in studying sets of sequential histories in the context of manufacturing, transportation, information processing systems, customer relationship management, and computer architecture, and then implementing systems for describing, learning, visualizing, simulating, and assessing these processes, as well as instruments for planning, inferfacing, and influencing how they unfold.

This is not merely a technical study: I've been paying close attention to other field that watches sequences carefully. Futures studies looks at processes and trends over a longer timescale across many disciplines to offer advice to more focused experts. Network-oriented architects simulate people's activities in order to configure structures to personal and public needs. Critical design posits new object relationships that reflect changes in interaction. Technological artifacts are not interesting, but techno-social assemblages are: ultimately, cycles of technical activity must include assessment.

Given these studies, I'm here to say that there aren't any foundational technical obstacles when it comes to the information technology of spimes. Using today's social informatics, we could tag, search, sort, score, discuss, revise, deliberate, and assess with the very best of them. Therefore, I don't work on fundamental science, but instead I work on the social, cultural, and technical implementation of the social informatics that we need to evaluate our social infrastructure.