 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Violent Cybernetics Charles Wright |
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In order to overcome ennui, and survive the banal and bland routine of everyday life, one needs a regular injection of horror.
Some people get their rush by debugging original files, or never taking backups. Some read Stephen King. My personal taste is to commandeer a couch, pour myself a cup of Queen Mary tea and read articles about progress.
Quite recently I read an interview with Alan Kay, user-interface pioneer and Apple Fellow, in which he outlined his views on what computer technology has in store for us. Like all truly awful things, Kay's vision of the future comes packaged in anodyne phraseology. In this case, it's something called "pervasive networking," and - shudder - it's only a few years away.
What abomination does the expression "pervasive networking" obscure? Think of it this way folks: unless we've all been zapped in the interim by some other technological marvel - cold fusion melt-down, perhaps - it won't be too long before we're all bobbing in a sea of electronic information - hooked up, through our computers, to something that Kay describes as "an information utility that is pervasive as our power and lighting utilities."
"The idea is that even when you're in a car or out in the park or something," Alan opined, "you are continuously connected to packet switching." In other words, wherever you go in the world, some satellite is going to be downloading information at you. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard.
Have you ever gone to the movies and had someone in the next seat haul out his mobile telephone to take a call? Did it bother you? Think what it will be like when he's downloading the closing quotes on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
You're empathising madly with the images, lost in your celluloid dream of love with Jessica Lange or Tom Cruise, when suddenly, out of the corner of your eye you see this Philistine pull out his computer. He'll just casually flip up his active-matrix screen - by then, no doubt, it will be a hyperactive matrix screen, colour of course - consult his spreadsheet forecasting model, do a few what if routines, and place his buy/sell orders via the packet-switching network. You probably won't hear the dial tone or the beeps, but given the volatility of the share market (it will probably be about time for the next cyclical crash by then), the rasp of his heavy breathing may well drown out your own, not to mention the movie sound track. And this will not be an isolated incident, dear reader. By that time practically everybody will be able to afford a cute little packet-switched portable. The glow of hyperactive matrixes in a theatre near you will be blinding, particularly if they're all running Pyro!
Of course, it won' t just be investment junkies who'll be tapping this never-ending stream of information in our cars, or parks or something. Nobody is going to be able to let all that information go to waste. Somebody else might get it first. So don't kid yourself, you re going to have to plug in, like everybody else. Can you imagine how painful its going to be to have to go jogging with a portable computer? Can you believe the traffic jams when people start checking their Email at the traffic lights?
If you happen to be in a restaurant, you wont want to eat anything without fixing up the Toshibette or the PowerBooklet, and consulting the pervasive nutrition database or the food additive register. If you frequent the places I tend to eat at, you'll want to check out the poisons register too.
There's virtually no area of human activity, and for that matter inhuman activity, that will not be affected by the constant availability of real-time information.
It's important to distinguish here, between the terms "information" and "facts." A great deal of what you're going to be receiving in your car, park, cinema, restaurant, etc, is the sort of thing that is currently being stuffed in your mail box or your fax machine: junk E-mail. There are millions of E-mail-order entrepreneurs out there, with an inexhaustible supply of merchandise, and pretty soon, they are going to be telephoning your computer. Opportunity is no longer going to be content with knocking on your door, its going to track you down in the streets.
Even that scarcely rates on the horror scale. According to Kay, - "The retrieval systems of the future are not going to retrieve facts, but points of view. The weakness of databases is that they let you retrieve facts, while the strength of our culture over the past several hundred years has been our ability to take on multiple points of view."
I have bad news, Alan. When our computers start widely disseminating multiple points of view, all hell is going to break loose. Anyone who hasn't been living in a cave - or in Kay's case, a computer lab-during any portion of the past several hundred years, would be acutely aware that the thing our culture has been least successful at doing is taking on multiple points of view. Personalities as diverse as Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Josef Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Colonel Gaddafi, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein and your unfriendly neighbourhood serial killer, have eloquently demonstrated that holding more than one point of view in our culture is a distinct health hazard. Some people are even bigoted about their computers. I have had MS-DOS computer evangelists ring me up and abuse me for daring to write about Macs. Shopping malls are already dangerous places. What will it be like when one of our fellow citizens (who's just had a mail order Armalite or Uzi, with spare magazines, shipped in from Adnan Khashoggi's online home munitions supermarket) goes online in the cafeteria and reads some of the flame mail that he's bound to attract from any one of those millions of folk who don't happen to share his particular point of view?
One of the most chilling stories I've ever read came from Marshall McLuhan's book, Understanding Media, which first promoted the concept of pervasive networking. McLuhan called it the global village.
On September 6, 1949, a psychotic veteran, Howard B. Unruh, in a mad rampage on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, killed 13 people, and then returned home. Emergency crews, bringing up machine guns, shotguns and tear gas bombs, opened fire. At this point an editor on the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's name in the telephone directory and called him. Unruh stopped firing and answered, "Hello. This is Howard?"
"Yes..."
"Why are you killing people?"
"I don t know. I can't answer that yet I'll have to talk to you later. I'm too busy now."
Alan Kay doesn't have quite this scenario in mind. He believes that what we're all going to be doing on our computers is simulations. We're going to take all this pervasive information and play what-if? games with it.
"Our basic drives are very similar to those of other animals," he explains, "but we have this much stronger superstructure that, especially if used well, is able to channel all this energy into symbolic pursuits that are pleasurable. To me that's what civilisation is all about It's not repression, as Freud suggested. What you want in a civilisation is a way for people to empress their deep drives that is not destructive. Intelligence gives us another world that we can live in besides the physical world... I think when you start laying over these larger symbol systems, you start channelling the fairly direct impulses people have into art, invention, theatre, sports and all those kinds of things that are a good way of having cathartic experiences without going out and bashing people. It is very difficult to predict the kind of world the computer is going to bring, but certainly, for me, it's the next big thing since Gutenberg."
Well Alan, what I've noticed about simulations is that pretty soon, someone naturally begins to get dissatisfied with make-believe, and starts to wonder what it would be like in real life. Forget Gutenberg, this is going to be the next big thing since Rambo. Just when you thought it was safe to open your E-mail!
Reprinted from the May 1992 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
