 That's kind of fascinating to me about the technological moment we've been in for the last half century or so is it emerged out of a culture of relationship with the planet that sort of expected nature to always be there. And we've given ourselves this kind of space to create without reckoning the full cost. And now, belatedly, we're realizing that there is a cost that needs to be accounted for and addressed. And so a lot of the thinking that I'm doing now is actually how to bring these seemingly very disparate worlds of attention to the natural world and attention to media and technology more closely together and not just to tell the stories of plants and other organisms because media is very good at doing that, but what does it mean that these things inhabit the same world? How do we create a technosphere, an information society, a world of media that takes the planet into account? That's kind of the question that's foremost in my mind these days. Boom! What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are at Harvard Kennedy School in the beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about time and memory in the digital humanities and beyond. We have Matthew Battles joining us on the show. Hello. Hey, Alan. Thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. I look forward to the conversation. Likewise, Matthew's background is so awesome. He's Associate Director of MetaLab at Harvard, where he studies the impact of digital technology on the humanities. Over a 23-year writing career, he has authored four books on the subjects of the survival and destruction of knowledge, the tale of students, scholars, and staff who give a great library its life, the history of writing from Mesopotamia to multimedia, and most recently on trees, alliance, and entanglement with humanity from antiquity to present. You can find Matthew's links below, his MetaLab Harvard link below, as well as his Twitter link as well. Let's jump into things from our perspective of we are find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of our world? Wow, that's a big question to open with, and it's definitely a question that I've been thinking about a lot, and particularly our relationship as a species with the planet, which is a fraught topic. It's a fraught question because there are a lot of different ways of being human, and I think when we think about the impact we're having on the planet, we're thinking about kind of one sector of humanity at one time, preeminently, right, the West and modernity, the technological moment, the great acceleration of the last, you know, less than a century, a very narrow slice of human life that has had this decisive impact on the planet, on ourselves as a species, certainly, but also on the rest of the life we share this planet with. So a lot of my work currently is thinking about that from a humanity's perspective, hardly the only one who's doing this, the humanity's discovered, you know, in the last quarter century that, oh, there's a planet that the humanities happens on and the species lives on, right? And so, you know, a lot of folks who spend a lot of time in libraries and archives are now waking up to a different sense of responsibility, also, I think, a different sense of possibility to bring those tools of memory and reflection of argumentation and critique to bear in impactful ways on the ways in which we think about our relationship with the planet. Almost as though the awareness has come back to the humanities after the Industrial Revolution and exponential technology age that we've come, that we've built and come through. Yeah, you know, I think that in the modern era, we sort of, humanity ceded that ground to science and there was this classic sort of split, you know, that was after C.P. Snow, a scientist in the mid-20th century, a British scientist, wrote this essay called The Two Cultures where he identified this split between the humanities and the physical sciences, a split that had emerged, you know, in history long before that, but which really came to a head in the 20th century. A lot of humanities folks said we should leave all that stuff to the folks in the sciences to worry about, you know, that the cosmos, life and the planet and the material things of the world and focus on the imagination, focus on, you know, symbol and idea and archetype and memory and we stopped thinking about those things as really knit together and the way they have been for members of our species for a much longer period of time than this narrow sort of Two Cultures split might indicate. At times it definitely feels like there is a segregation into engineers and scientists and then artists and they work so closely together. There's so much overlap that has happened with the industrial revolution up until exponential technology age that's happened, but why only now with the proliferation of AI and static biology and all these other issues that we're having, are we finally going like, hmm, what is that? Humanities, how does that have to do with what's happening right now? Yeah, yeah, it's a funny question, an interesting question. And I think it might have to do with the way in which the technology seems to be escaping our control in certain kinds of ways. I mean, at a certain level that's a kind of marketing ploy. It's a way to describe technology that gives technology a lot of power, but there's something substantial behind it as well, particularly in the context of machine learning and these other kind of algorithmically powered means of statistical prediction and inference. We think of them increasingly as kind of natural phenomena. They've been talked about as techniques that get us beyond needing to actually come up with ideas and theorize. You have enough data, you have the right tools, you set the tools loose on the data and they will tell the stories and make the arguments. And maybe that begins to feel a little out of control for everybody in a way that makes the humanities useful, refreshing, and perhaps a source of insight to what the effective, by which I mean sort of the emotional, as well as the ethical dimensions of those technologies might be. It's just so interesting talking to you about this. It just feels as though we've been making the technology flower and then we finally realize, holy cow, human is not even really in control of technology. And then we look at maybe religion or some sort of humanities or some sort of transcendent thing that gives us potentially a deeper sense of why we built that technology, why we're not in control of it, where we're actually going from here. Yeah. OK, let's get into the journey, Matthew. So how did you get even hooked into writing for 23 years and being associate director here at Harvard's Meta Lab? So yeah, how did this process happen from your young years? Oh, sure, sure. Well, I mean, for me, the sort of fusion of the humanities and the sciences comes pretty naturally because these things have always sort of been engaged in a struggle for control over my imagination. I mean, from a very early age, I wanted to be a writer. I was drawn to writing and the arts. At the same time, the wonders of the natural world were of kind of constant importance to me. My favorite trip as a child was to go to Chicago. I grew up just outside of Chicago. We'd go in and go to the museums and the combination of the museums, which are all within a nice walk from each other in Chicago, the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Natural History, the Shed Aquarium, to go from sort of the wonders of visual culture and the ways in which humans have expressed themselves through art to giant skeletons of dinosaurs and also collections of human cultures through time at the Natural History Museum, to the Shed Aquarium with this kind of jewel box of fish shimmering in the dark. That was very evocative for me, that cluster. So it wasn't only the sciences and the humanities, but also the context of the museum that exerted a big fascination on me. At the same time, if you know that kind of museum scape in Chicago, it's right along the lakefront and this big cold, forbidding abyss of water also beckoned. And so the natural world itself and its kind of uncanny otherness from us and yet its intimacy, its swirling around us all the time, that was all part of the mix as well. So with that background, I ended up in college starting out thinking that I would study evolutionary biology, which took me to the anthropology department, but it was the social anthropology that began to appeal to me more and in particular questions about how we imagine and what kinds of meanings we ascribe to those phenomena that I was just talking about. Why do we put those things in museums and not other things? Do other people in the world put the same things in museums that we do? These were the sorts of questions that began to appeal to me. Through all of that was the sense that the best way I had for getting control over all of that was by writing about it. And so finishing up on a graduate degree in anthropology, particularly at the time I was doing that in the early 90s was a time when a lot of anthropologists thought of themselves as mostly writers. They called themselves anthropologists to gain some kind of authority or expertise in the world, but really what they were just doing was writing about their experience. I thought, okay, well maybe I can just be a writer then and dispense with the whole expertise and authority side of things. So I did a graduate degree in creative writing, focusing on fiction, but also had wonderful exposure to poetry and playwriting in the graduate program in creative writing at Boston University. Finishing that up, I sort of felt like I needed a good place to be while trying to start writing about things in the world. The library seemed like a good place to be for a writer. And so I got a job at Widener Library at Harvard, which as well as being a kind of preeminent, a very powerful institution of higher learning, it's also just like when you live in the Boston area, it's like another big employer. So they had jobs in the library. I thought what could be better than to be in the midst of the library, I thought I'd just be shelving books and thinking about the things that I wanted to be thinking about. But the library very quickly became a kind of focus fascination for me. In a way I started to think of myself as an anthropologist in the tribe that I was studying was the librarians, but also the technologists, the students, the scholars who used the library. So the library quickly switched from being an accommodating milieu for being a creative person to being the topic of my creativity. So that's how that transition was made. It happened for me at the very same time that some will remember, Nicholson Baker, author and novelist, was writing in The New Yorker about the demise of the card catalog in libraries. So this was like 1997, 98, that the World Wide Web was just emerging, we were just seeing Mosaic turn into Netscape, just beginning as a culture to kind of accommodate ourselves to the thought of being networked with each other digitally. And that was having a big impact on the library. And Nicholson Baker was one author who was writing critically about what are we losing when the card catalog is taken away and all we have left are computers. And being in the library at the time, I thought, you know, I realize because you see the whole archeology of how libraries have organized themselves over time, particularly in an older and big research library like Widener, I thought, this has happened again and again and again. This is not the first time that libraries have gone through a technological revolution. And so I became fascinated in that kind of archeology of the structures of knowledge, organization and dissemination in the library as well. So that's how I got from, you know, wandering along the lakefront in Chicago to wondering about how libraries are put together, what they've meant to us in different times and places and what the future might hold for them as well. I love when you're describing being a kid and going between the museums. I think that that's something that we hopefully can get more parents and children to do together because it gives a very multidisciplinary upgrade to the worldview when you can pop between the different museums as well. See the big Lake Michigan as well. And yeah, it's so different than the skyscrapers right next to it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I keep looking for that museum that has all of that stuff together. Yes, yes. But it's nice to have to walk from one to the other too. Yes, yes. Yeah, they're specialized in a sense. They're still multidisciplinary, but specialized. Yeah, yeah. And then also in the story, it's great that you found yourself being, you know, in the employment with Harvard because then, especially in the library, because then you end up realizing the, like you said, this technological transition, how it affects a library. And then also you're interested in, you know, well, one human takes months or years of their life to synthesize their worldview into an eight-hour read. And then there's like millions of those eight-hour reads available for people. And so then it becomes a very interesting compression algorithm for knowledge. And so yeah, so then this is... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point. And it's a compression algorithm also for all of those readings as well. I mean, I like that image of a book as a kind of concentration of intellectual, imaginary, creative labor. And there are a lot of other people involved with that too. And I mean, that changes over time. You know, there are times when a book is really a product of one person, but there are many kinds of books that are the product of many, many people. And also the way those books end up on the shelves and organized on the shelves. And there are ways to find them, to discover them, to relate them to each other. All of those are like technologies as well that lots of people are involved with, right? And the relationship of those books on the shelf, that's a story that's an argument as well. And so thinking of the library as, you know, almost a fractal kind of compaction or expression of many different kinds of intellectual labor, as well as physical labor, as well as the, you know, distribution of materials. I mean, the mind really boggles when you think about, you know, how many different kinds of activity are organized in the thing we call a book. Yeah, yeah, and it's also nuts thinking about how we can, we could go and partake in the millions of books within the library. And now we, and that used to be kind of like a little community, and now we're with our news feed, and our social network news feed, that these things can just be browsed from the chair in the home, and what is the signal-to-noise ratio, and these are huge effects on humanity. Right, right, and we're really trying, and we've been trying to sort that out now for a while. I mean, and depending on how you define the terms, we've been trying to sort that out since the 2016 election or since the advent of social media or since the advent of the World Wide Web, or maybe since the rise of a professional class of news reporters and commentators on the world, which gets us back a couple of hundred years, or maybe the invention of the printing press, or maybe it's the invention of writing, which takes us back 5,000 years. But at each of those stages, people had to contend with questions about their relationship with the mass of stuff called knowledge, who has control over it, who has access to it, who gets to participate in its creation, and its management, its administration. We've had so many different ways to configure that. And I think it's been commented on many times in the history of the West, in the 18th century, people thought, oh, all of these new books that are getting printed, printing press makes it so easy. The bar to authorship and authority and expertise is now so much lower. People saw that as problematic then in a way that I think is very recognizable to us today in terms of asking questions about who has authority to tell stories about public experience. And then the democratization actually in many ways became really important and great. And so, yeah, this is, I also really like how you take us back 5,000 years to writing, and then you take us to the digital technology, it's just kind of the span of what you've been also writing and interested in. Let's go ahead and do exactly that. Cool. Let's do library. So one of the first books, and this is really cool, from Alexandria, the library of Alexandria to the internet, and the preservation, the inspiration, the obliteration of knowledge. Yeah, it's a big story, and it was kind of overwhelming to start taking that on, the story of the library, because the library's not only like a place you go to get books, but it's like an institution. So it's got a power, it's got a politics to it. There are people in charge, there are people who are in or out, and that changes over time. It's also an archetype, right? I mean, we think about the library as a kind of symbol for memory, for expertise, that person, she's like a library, right? And so, it's got kind of a mythic weight to it. It's got a lot of cultural baggage attached to it. It's got a power dynamic and a politics associated with it, and it's changed a great deal over that sweep of time. Libraries have really existed, in a way, since writing came into being, but I've got a friend, Jessamyn West, is her name. She's a technologist and librarian in Vermont, and she speaks very intelligently about the roles technology plays in libraries today. And she likes to look at those little free libraries that you see on like bird houses in neighborhoods. Wonderful things. But she says, that's not really a little free library, that's a little free book box, because a library has librarians in it. A library has people who know where the books are and where they came from, and they can help you find them. And that's a very, I think, powerful and expansive definition of what a library is. Not just a set of books, but also, you know, a community of readers and a community of people who know how to help put those readers in touch with the books. But that's also an image of the library that has a history. I mean, you know, the public library that we sort of take for granted as a civic institution in the US in particular, hasn't been around all that long, you know? And even today, in a lot of places that feel fully participating in the modern world in other kinds of ways, in many other societies, the idea of, you know, a town or a neighborhood or a city having a public library where anybody can go and take books and take them home with them and bring them back whenever they feel like it. It's not universally available. And so, you know, that also implies that there may be a time when that doesn't exist anymore. And that's where, you know, a certain amount of the kind of political, cultural anxiety we have about the library comes from as well. They're very, you know, robust institutions, but also ephemeral. I feel so much anxiety about losing libraries. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I wanna know, what is your take on the power dynamics that have occurred from the burning of Alexandria? Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. I mean, you know, libraries, because they're repositories of knowledge, they become, you know, tokens in games of power. And I mean, in the ancient world, in particular when, you know, the forms of expertise and authority were difficult to develop, but also where the material that writing went onto was expensive, it was a matter of craft, it took a long time to make books, and you could only make a few of them at a time. So, you know, they were very much part of the administration of power in the ancient world. And, you know, so they become tokens in kind of games of power. And, you know, the story of the Library of Alexandria, which is a story that I explore in Library on Quite History, is really an interesting one because it has both the dimensions of the library as a symbol, as a kind of mythic entity, and as an actual institution in the world, part of empires that change hands or change their shape over time. We think of the library as something that got burned. And, of course, there were some burnings involved, but the Library of Alexandria, as an institution, it had a life that spanned millennia. I mean, it was hundreds and hundreds of years, and that library waxed and waned over time. It grew and it receded. Its role in society changed very early on. It was primarily a repository for scholarship about Homer's stories, The Elite of Neodicy. It became a repository for poetry than scientific knowledge in the ancient world. And was also attached to an academy and institution of learning. So it changed hands. It changed rules. And its fortunes went up and down many times throughout its history. And that's true of many of these institutions, libraries we think of as places where we put the books in order to preserve them. One of the ironies of that is it makes them very easy to destroy. It's easy to destroy a whole bunch of books. A whole lot of the acquired knowledge of a culture. Not only knowledge of the sciences, of poetry, of divinity, but also memory, the ways people attach themselves to these books and the institutions that hold them. As we've seen even recently in wars in North Africa or in the Balkans in the 90s, enemies target the libraries of one another, the archives, as well as the neighborhoods, as well as the institutions, as well as the military infrastructure. And that's been, libraries have been victims of that dynamic all along. A library being able to last multiple generations is very interesting that you're pointing out even hundreds of years also that what makes it a target is that it is such a capture of the brain and heart and soul as sense of periods of time, of the edge of knowledge of what was in parts of culture. So this is a very important way to view what libraries are and to not necessarily just brush things off because we now are giving children smartphones their whole lives. So to take a child into the library and to really put this knowledge that you're teaching right now and equip them with it, I think is critical. You know, I'm thinking about how a few years ago, I remember a point Steven Johnson made about games that I think might be pertinent here. A few years ago in a book, I can't remember which one, Steven Johnson wrote that, you know, digital games are much more exciting to him than a lot of board games are because they introduce young children in particular to, you know, digital ways of knowing and digital media to manipulate. And he in particular pointed out shoots, shoots at no candy land. Candy land was the one he pointed to. And he said, you know, I would rather have my like pre-literate child playing on an iPad than playing candy land, which is just this game that, you know, that it doesn't really, there's no decision making involved, you just pick up a card and you go where it tells you to go. And I thought, you know, I understand that. I mean, it's interesting candy land, which if you're not familiar with it, it's just, you know, it's a kind of track game and you have players, you have tokens and you pick up a card and you go to the next color of that card, right? So in a way, you shuffle the deck and the game's kind of already done. You're just finding out how it plays. But if you think about playing that game, the three-year-old, the five-year-old, what else are they getting from that encounter? They're getting a sense of taking turns, of playing fair, you know, of all of the kind of social demands that come with sitting around a board game with other people and agreeing to get along for that space of play. You can get that in digital contexts, but the face-to-face encounter remains important for human beings to be able to master. And in a way, a library can be a place where that same kind of encounter can take place. Yes, we have digital tools that are very powerful. And there's something about a place where we come together and share access to knowledge and resources, where we learn to take turns, where we learn to borrow and put things back. I mean, these are very simple ethics. But having the kind of rich, complicated, messy encounter with them in shared space remains vital, I think, and libraries can provide that. Now, it's important to remember at the same time that we're talking about a particular kind of ideal for the library, which I think most of us would share, but it hasn't always existed. It hasn't always existed for everybody. You know, we've struggled to make libraries accessible to everybody in society who gets counted as part of society, who gets a library card. That changes over time. Libraries in the Jim Crow South excluded people of African descent from full participation in their community's store of knowledge. And so a library can be used as a kind of disciplinary means of control or means of oppression. We do well to ask ourselves who's left out of these systems, even as we celebrate the potential and the power of these institutions to provide a space. Who gets access to it remains an important question, I think. Yes, taking this brain, heart, soul, essence of cultural knowledge at the edge and being able to distribute widely and fairly and kindly to people in a democratized way is so important. And I love how you talk about social-emotional intelligence and that. And it's such a crucial thing for the humanities to be able to teach passed on to kids, especially in the exponential technology age. Okay, and then this leads us also, you're speaking about widener a lot as you're talking because this is the complexity of actually what happens within the library. There are students that come in and learn from these compressed algorithms. There are scholars that write and compress those and teach them. There's staff, like you said, librarians that know where things are at, how it's organized. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, indeed, indeed. And for me, widener was, I mean, it's, you know, it was a marvelous place to end up in because these complexities were evident, they were apparent, they were layered, they were messy, they were rich. It's not the only place where that sort of thing happens. You know, it's one of the larger academic libraries for sure and part of a system, a very large system of academic libraries. But it's something you can find in, you know, in your local college or university library, your local public library system as well. You know, these things have different kinds of shapes and patterns in different institutions, but they're widely distributed in the library world. And they all kind of have a history that they participate in together. And then this one was crazy, okay, so palimpsest. If the history of writing from Mesopotamia to multimedia, and then you were actually teaching me about this, you actually were teaching us about this a little bit ago too, how you just didn't have as much ubiquity in the resources available to actually be able to write. And now, especially in the digital age, it's just everywhere all the time, but you actually had to work really, really hard with the limited amount of space that you had to write all the way from the days and had cave wall writing and painting all the way up until pre-printing press. Just so much, what was it, Papyrus was one of the major? Yeah, Papyrus was an early writing medium that was made from reeds that grow principally along the Nile River and a few other places in the Levant and North Africa. A reed that when you sort of pound it out gets kind of sticky and lets you kind of roll these fibers into sheets. And so that became an early kind of paper-like medium. In East Asia, people used, they used split bamboo, they used leaves of different kinds. In the West, people used the bark of trees, they used wood itself. And of course, stone has been an important medium. In ancient Mesopotamia, they used clay. Most ancient Greeks of the early era of Greek alphabetical literacy probably would have come into contact with writing most often on faces, on ceramics, where early ceramicists were using writing to tell stories, to indicate ownership and these sorts of things. So yeah, writing has existed in many different kinds of media. And the book, as we think of it now, the kind of thing you go to a bookstore or go into Amazon to purchase, it has like a barcode on the back and it has an ISBN number, it has a copyright, it has a table of contents and an index. That thing is just one way that writing has existed in the world. And it's important in particular, remember, that it's like, you know, a book is like, you know, we all venerate books, we all try to take care of them, we treat them well. There are also commodities, right? They exist in a market system. And that gives a certain kind of fluidity or portability to the book. It also imposes certain kinds of constraints on what that form is. Books have taken a lot of different kinds of forms through time and what we think of as a book today is just one of those forms. As you were saying stone and etching, writing into stone, it reminded me that we, when we bury people in the ground after they die, we etch into stone. So it remains there for really long periods of time. And also, I want you to explain to, you start explaining to me before we went on that, that when you have such a limited amount of pay for your ability to take what's here and be able to put it into something that can be passed down, that sometimes you would recycle or reuse and then you can only see it with like a UV light down the line. Yeah, so that's the origin of the title Palimpsest, my book about the history of writing and writing systems from clay through to the digital age. And yeah, the Palimpsest is a term for a piece of writing that's been written over subsequently. And it's a practice that emerges from this context of rarity in written materials. Before paper was a mass produced commodity, you could buy it by the ream or the reel or the roll. It was difficult to get stuff to write on, particularly papyrus, which we already talked about, but also parchment or vellum. These are made from animal skins and there's a whole craft in practice. So you wouldn't just have that stuff lying around, typically. A book produced in the Middle Ages, like say a thousand years ago or 750, 800 years ago, was like a major cultural production. Thinking about creating a book was kind of like thinking about creating a movie today. Take a lot of people with a lot of different skills and bring them together and make it happen. And so if you had something to write and didn't have time for that to unfold, that process of craft to unfold, you might say, well, this old piece of writing that's some religious tract that is heretical now or it's an idea that's been superseded. So I'm gonna take this book, this vellum, and I'm just gonna repurpose it. Take a knife and scratch the writing off of it. So it's kind of like a messy surface, but it's good enough. And then I write out what I have to share with the world on top of the old writing. Of course, then a thousand years passed and somebody comes along, a librarian or an archivist or a scholar, and says, you know, I wonder what that previous writing said because there's very little often left from those earlier ages, right? And so by using UV light or infrared light or using raking light, just looking at it in the light the right way, holding it up to the light, you can discover what was on that, what the previous writing said. And some very rare pieces of textual scholarship have been gleaned in this way. So the palimpsest is an artifact of prior knowledge. It's also, again, a kind of metaphor for the way in which we layer our meanings, our stories, our arguments, our hopes, one on top of the other in the long sweep of time, and in a sense, it's a sort of trope for even the digital moment. It's hard to have a digital palimpsest, but code often contains little bits of code from other places. These things are cobbled together and pastiche. Iterations. Yeah, right, the versioning, in a way, you can read, in a GitHub repo, you can read a whole archeology of how a project came into being. And so it's a concept that still has some salience today. And to be able to get behind the eyes of humans that 100 billion humans built civilization before us, and to be able to get behind the eyes of ones from 5,000, 1,500 years ago, and realize what access they had to knowledge and what access we have to knowledge now, and what access we now have to ubiquity in food, water, or shelter, or electricity, and all these types of things. So to have immense gratitude for that, but also to be able to look back and say that, hey, maybe they were doing some of the things right that we're now not doing right. Because, yeah, I think that's a really important reflection to be able to do. Humanities is one of those ones that gets you to really consider, is everything that's exponential technology right now actually completely positive and good? Yeah, it's one of the debate topics that I hope gets brought into the high school and collegiate system soon is resolved. The cost of social media always the benefits. And I just hope to really have a long period of nuance debate on that subject because there is so much good that comes from some of it, like long form conversations with edge thinkers and leaders, but at the same time, it can take people away from creative endeavoring. And the attention of Congress is a tricky thing. All the way up to trees. So now, trees alliance and entanglement with humanity from antiquity to present. We love thinking about the interconnectedness of everything from the roots to the atmosphere to all the animals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, my most recent book, Tree, is in, at least superficially, in some ways a departure from that focus on the history of the written word. Of course, there's this superficial connection that's fun to play with that we make paper from trees, and that's one way we make paper. And the tree and writing have long been associated with each other, sort of metaphorically, symbolically. But for me, this book came out of engagement with, in a way, another collection, another museum, specifically a place called the Arnold Arboretum here in Boston. It's a botanical garden. It's on the other side of the river in Boston. Although Harvard operates it as a kind of research facility, Harvard actually has it from the city of Boston on a lease for 1,000 years, which is long-term thinking, right? But we, at MetaLab, my research group here, did a number of projects in the context of the Arboretum looking at ways to let visitors to the Arboretum experience some of the data behind the research work that's done at the museum. I mean, at the Arboretum. It's, in a way, a museum with a living collection, literally. The objects, I mean, I like to say that any museum's objects are living, in a way, because they do change over time. But trees really are living. They grow. They die. And looking at that relationship of an institution that has a collection, there are thousands of trees in the Arboretum at any time, but that collection also has a life of its own. It's responding to the seasons and changes in the environment. And each of those trees, each of those organisms is doing that independently. It was kind of inspiring and fascinating to think about. So in the course of those projects, I really began to think about what it means for us to have a relationship with these organisms that have lifespans far longer than a human lifespan, that interact with the world in much different ways from us, that have a kind of responsibility or a role to play in the maintenance of a healthy planet, a planet that's survivable, that really cause us to pause and think about our relationships with them. At the same time that we were doing that kind of work, there have been a number of really stimulating books and scholarship produced in the last few years about the kinds of agency that plants might have in the world that we've realized, again, as comes and goes, but we've realized, again, that these things, they live in the world, and they kind of have a life, they change, they grow, they adapt to their circumstances, they actually send chemical signals to each other. There is a layer of communication and action and agency that's often invisible to us that plants are participating in, just on different time scales with much different kinds of apparatus involved, right? The thing that kind of concerns me about that is that we too readily then begin to think of them in anthropomorphic ways. They're right here, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a funny thing, it's great though. Yes, yes. And they are not an audience for us, these plants. As much as they're here and they feel like an audience, they're dealing with what's happening in this space in a much different way from us. And so I was interested in that. They're apparatus, they're a way of taking in the stimuli of their environment and processing it and then making the next. Right, yeah, yeah, how they respond to that is much different, right? I mean, it's interesting to think about those trees and these plants as maybe a season for them is like a day for us. The light is much more important to them and also they have this bifurcated world of roots and air that are like two different realms they live in at the same time. There's a lot this fascinating kind of like, just cogitate on, just kind of daydream about. I love that bifurcated realm of roots and roots. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the root system becomes a really important and useful metaphor for us to think about networks and the rhizome, like the ways in which things are connected to each other that may be below the surface. So they have a lot to teach us these trees and these plants. And you begin to think about some of the institutions, the Arboretum is one of those with its 1,000 year lease, but any national park or national forest in our society today, it's populated by organisms that might live 1,000 years and to think that we presume to exercise control over them institutionally, politically, maybe we could learn to be a little more humble from those lifespans of organisms that far outstrip our own. It's a crazy thing to think about a tree in a national forest in the Cascades that has been growing since before the Constitution, before our Congress enacted an act that made a law that protected it. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, there's something to contend with there in terms of our own impact on the planet. That's very humbling to take us to the multi-hundred year timescale of some of the most beautiful, large, just majestic. There's so incredible. One person on the show said that the most beautiful thing in the world was massive national parks filled with the trees and the diversity there and how they're just like living, breathing organisms of Mother Earth. And I thought that was really well said. And there's just so much that's been entangled. It's so funny that, like you said, even at the beginning, it relates to libraries and the paper. Yeah, it relates to our ability to have communicated knowledge, disseminated knowledge and then continue to build on it. Trees were one of the main ways that we did that. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, those relationships are, they're inspiring, they're fascinating. It's so important to recognize they have a history that we've come in and out of perception of those relations over time. We've given them different kinds of weight and importance over time. And as we continue to build our human world on the sort of substrate of the planet, this human world that is made in this palimpsestic way of memory and writing and information and knowledge sort of layered and interwoven, that it all also depends on the substrate of a healthy planet. And you think about a technology like blockchain technology, which is intriguing for its social and political implications, as well as for its kind of intrinsic technological fascination. It has a certain kind of instrumental kind of capacity, efficacy to liberate us from certain forms of institutional embeddedness, politically and economically. And yet, and yet, it's also a very impactful technology in terms of its carbon footprint, right? And one of the things that's kind of fascinating to me about the technological moment we've been in for the last half century or so, is it emerged out of a culture of relationship with the planet that sort of expected nature to always be there. And we've given ourselves this kind of space to create without reckoning the full cost. And now, belatedly, we're realizing that there is a cost that needs to be accounted for and addressed. And so, a lot of the thinking that I'm doing now is actually how to bring these seemingly very disparate worlds of attention to the natural world and attention to media and technology more closely together, and not just to tell the stories of plants and other organisms, because media is very good at doing that. But what does it mean that these things inhabit the same world? How do we create a technosphere, an information society, a world of media that takes the planet into account? That's kind of the question that's foremost in my mind these days. Even all the way to the nature therapy that we can walk through a forest or beaches and just get our cortisol levels dropped, connect deeper to Mother Earth and the oneness, these are very critical things that we need, we've kind of lost in some cases with over 50% of people living in metropolises. So this is, yeah, and I like how you looped us all the way back to the effect that in many ways that some of the industrial revolution and up until exponential technology has had on the way that we just take the garbage and just dump it right into Mother Earth, no problem, just like short-term thinking is, that's not okay and we're awakening to changing that. And yeah, let's jump into the meta-lab deeper on that. So the impact of digital technology and humanities and you were teaching me and you actually, we're slowly starting to get into this, but just the perception systems of plants and animals and machines now as well, like the way that a autonomous car just sponges in information from all of its cameras compared to our cameras just looking in one direction, focusing on one thing at a time, these are all interestingly different things that we can discuss, figure out what is good code from these different things, how do we merge codes, make new codes that make potentially an objective function of maximizing flourishing of society better. So meta-lab is, it seems like a very multidisciplinary place, a place that's trying to like kind of probe reality with humanity's lens and while understanding digital technology, give us the scoop here. Yeah, so meta-lab is a group that started in 2011, 2012. It was founded by my colleague, Jeffery Schnapp, who's a professor here at Harvard, trained as a medievalist, but has had a long kind of entanglement with the use of digital technologies and with design in particular, as ways to bring different kinds of knowledge together, usefully, enlighteningly. He began that work at Stanford with a group called the Stanford Humanities Lab and then kind of brought that spirit here to Harvard and meta-lab is, as you say, a really recklessly multidisciplinary group of people, including artists, technologists, designers and scholars fundamentally and we're looking for ways to bring those different toolkits together, to tell stories, to make arguments, to extend scholarship to new audiences, as well as develop new forms of telling stories and making arguments in the first place. So, and that work, I mean, it's a team of people with students, it's a community that fluctuates from maybe five or six to 12 or so people at any one time, working often together but often independently as well on a variety of projects that include gallery installations, documentary films, data visualizations that live on the web, the use of mobile technology and it's a pretty varied set of outputs these days. And then these projects come up once every month or two months or six months? They're on different time frames, depending on the sort of the amount of funding we have and the particular encounter. There are projects that we've been working on for two or three years and some that are really much more on a two to three month or a semester kind of time frame. And give us an example of some of the cool projects. Well, one project that we've been working on for a couple of years now is a project called Curricle, which kind of brings data visualization to bear on the experience of selecting courses for students. So, it's an attempt to, it kind of expand the scope of possibility for what you can discover in the curriculum. By giving students tools for seeing connections among classes that might not be apparent from just a kind of keyword search. Typically, as a student registering for courses, you go onto the university's course registration website, you put search terms into an interface, a very standard interface, you get a list of courses and you kind of like, you know, grope your way along that way. What we're interested in doing is using data visualization, maybe a little bit of an algorithmic capacity as well to identify connections among courses that might pique students' curiosity and interests, that might in particular help students to remember that there are many different ways of finding a way to not only, you know, an impactful and rewarding career, but knowledge, discovery, insight. That you may find your way, you want to be a physician, you can find your way through the humanities or through the arts or through the social sciences as well as the physical sciences. You want to be a physical scientist. There might be perspectives from the arts or poetry that are germane to your interests and your research questions. Helping to surface those in the context of finding courses is something we're trying to do with Curricle. There are also projects though, you know, much more kind of artistic or creative vein that involve kind of playful multimedia or participatory installations in galleries. My colleague Sarah Newman is an artist who has had a project for several years called The Future of Secrets, which is in a sense a way of thinking about what it feels like to be a digitally mediated human being today and have kind of record of all of your written relationships with people in the form of email or text or other social media. The installation in a gallery is a computer terminal. You go up to it, it asks you for a secret, you write out a secret, and it prints out for you somebody else's secret and creates this kind of economy of like, what do I divulge? Do I tell the truth? Do I lie? What do I get back in return for that? Yeah. And it's a very provocative way of, with and safe, I would say as well, a way of kind of mobilizing some of those emotional responses we have to being digitally mediated selves that gives us a chance to reflect on what it means without necessarily putting our own actual email into the equation. Yes. Yes, I love immersive experiences like that that challenge the way that we see the world. Like you said, there's so much that goes into that. Do I tell the truth? Do I not tell the truth? What secret do I get back? How much should I reveal? Yeah, can I believe the statistic was something like over 70% of people don't trust the home devices that they have, that they think that they constantly listen to them. Yeah. So yeah. We have human relationships with these non-human things, and they continue to kind of body forth into our relationships, and yet they're actually made out of much different things from us. To think about Siri as an entity with a body in the world, that is a much different body from any human that we encounter, and yet we have exchanges with these agents throughout our days with varying degrees of kind of emotional, effective impact, right? So almost as though once we get to the point where there is a passing of Turing tests, that if it is anthropomorphized, that would their kid be a greater degree of empathy rather than if it was completely different looking than humans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All different types of stuff, at least now. And one more thought with the artificial intelligence that you guys are studying, AI, machine learning, how is that going at MetaLab? Where are you looking at that with the digital humanities? Yeah, well, I'll say that a lot of that practice is being advanced by my colleague Sarah Newman, who I mentioned previously. Newman is doing this through the Agency of Art, asking people to reflect on their emotional and effective experience of machine learning technologies and other forms of technology that we associate with artificial intelligence. Some of my own practice also involves using machine learning to reflect on biodiversity. And I'm like training recurrent neural network algorithms to give me names for species of organisms that don't exist. As a way of thinking about the difference between digital abundance and biodiversity or natural abundance, we used to think that nature was inexhaustible. Now, technology seems inexhaustible. They're in the balance in an interesting and curious way. One of the things about these encounters with these uncanny technologies that seem to think or to have capacities that outstrip our own cognitive capacities is also the experience of these technologies prompts us to think about what our definition of intelligence is, what our definition of cognition is, what we value, what we ignore in those terms in the experience of being sentient, in the experience of being conscious. The Turing test as a paradigm implies, and for many of us it implies in a kind of normative way, that at some point machines will become intelligent as we are. But what that means, that shifts over time, just as the kind of meaning of writing systems or story and argument of the library has shifted over time as well. And one thing that strikes me about that is that we often ascribe intelligence to things that pose some kind of risk to us, that we have some kind of charge, meaningful encounter with, an encounter in which there's a politics, some things at stake. We have to agree to get along, or we have to struggle for predominance. Technology, for the most part, we don't have that relationship with, but maybe we're beginning to. And it's interesting to think about the ethics of that when it's not only the sort of cognitive complexity of a technology, but what does it have at stake? That increasingly becomes an important part of our relationship with these man-made, human-made entities. Yes, all of this and a lot more into the application of the humanities over the last thousands of years through what we're facing in the exponential technology era, I look forward to unpacking that with you more on the next time that we're able to sit down together. Because that specific subject to how the humanities impacts what we do in the next hundred years is extremely important, how we can best embed ethics and morals and love and compassion into super intelligences, all that type of stuff. All right, and on the way out, let's do two quick questions that we like asking on the show. First question is, are we in a simulation? I think, boy, I want a witty answer to that. I don't think that I have one, except that if I did, that might seem more like a simulation. So maybe my own inability to come up with an answer is an index of the reality versus a simulation that we're in, a simulation that simulates uncertainty is a pretty powerful simulation. Yeah, correct, and this non-binary answer. And then how about what is the most beautiful thing in the world? I think we used to, when I was born, I was born in the midst of the Apollo 8 orbit of the moon when the Earthrise photo was taken. And for many people, that image became an image of the beauty of the world itself. I think increasingly we're realizing that beyond that beautiful abstraction, there's just the costumer-thin ephemeral unity of the whole, that reality, which so coordinates and conditions who we are and what we can be, even to the point of creating the possibility for entities that can transcend it. The world is the most beautiful thing in the world. Yes, yes, that's right, that's right. I love it, I love it. Matthew, thank you so much for coming on to the show and talking to us. This has been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure for me too. Really appreciate you had a good time. Yeah, you bet, Alan. There's still so much to unpack and understand, especially time, memory, digital humanities, everything from libraries and knowledge all the way up to the interconnectedness of everything that exists around us. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Let us know what you're thinking. Go and check out Matthew's links in the bio below. Go and share more content like this with your families, your friends, your coworkers online. Get talking more and more about it, especially as you get into the exponential technology age on the digital humanities side of things. Also, support the organizations around the world that you believe in, the entrepreneurs, the artists, the organizations. Support them simulations. Links are below. Support us as well. And go and build the future, everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you soon. Peace.