You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (22 page)

Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. Freeman suggests that the coming era of synthetic biology will be a return to Eden.

I suppose amateurs, robots, and an aggregation of amateurs and robots might someday hack genes in the global garage and tweet DNA sequences around the globe at light speed. Or there might be a slightly more sober process that takes place between institutions like high schools and start-up companies.

However it happens, species boundaries will become defunct, and genes will fly about, resulting in an orgy of creativity. Untraceable multitudes of new biological organisms will appear as frequently as new videos do on YouTube today.

One common response to suggestions that this might happen is fear. After all, it might take only one doomsday virus produced in one garage to bring the entire human story to a close. I will not focus directly on that concern, but, instead, on whether the proposed style of openness would even bring about the creation of innovative creatures.

Let’s say you have something complicated, like a biological cell, or even something much less complicated, like a computer design or a scientific model. You put it through tests, and the results of the tests influence how the design should be changed. That can happen either in natural evolution or in a lab.

The universe won’t last long enough for every possible combination of elements in a complicated construction like a cell to be tested. Therefore,
the only option is to establish as much as possible from the results of each test and proceed incrementally. After a series of encapsulated tests, it might seem as though an improved result appears magically, as if it couldn’t have been approached incrementally.

Fortunately, encapsulation in human affairs doesn’t require lawyers or a tyrant; it can be achieved within a wide variety of political structures. Academic efforts are usually well encapsulated, for instance. Scientists don’t publish until they are ready, but publish they must. So science as it is already practiced is open, but in a punctuated, not continuous, way. The interval of nonopenness—the time before publication—functions like the walls of a cell. It allows a complicated stream of elements to be defined well enough to be explored, tested, and then improved.

The politically incorrect critique of Freeman’s point of view is that the restrictions created by species boundaries have similarly made billions of years of natural biology more like hardware than like software. Hardware is the stuff that improves according to that exponential demon, Moore’s law, because there’s a box around it and you can tell what it’s doing. Software is the stuff that rarely, if ever, improves. There is no box around it, no way to predict all the interactions it might have to endure.

To put it another way: there won’t be an orgy of creativity in an overly open version of synthetic biology, because there have to be species for sex to make sense.

If Linux provides one model for the future of open culture and science, Wikipedia provides another.

Many scientists, especially younger ones, hold Wikipedia in high regard. I don’t dispute many of the achievements claimed by proponents of Wikipedia. The problems I worry about are perhaps subtle, but I think they are important nonetheless.

Wikipedia is a great example of the dilemma I face when I argue,
“You don’t know what you’re missing.” The collective encyclopedia is used by almost everyone at this point, so what’s the problem?

There seems to be no limit to Wikipedia adoration. For example, a ghastly news story—such as one covering a terrorist event—might focus on how magically the corresponding Wikipedia entry came together, as if that were the situation’s silver lining.
^*

I am not strictly against any particular digital technology. There is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia—in moderation. I do myself. But I’d like to engage the reader in challenging the elevated position Wikipedia has been granted in the online environment.

As a source of useful information, Wikipedia excels in two areas: pop culture and hard science. In the first category, truth is fiction anyway, so what the wiki says is by definition true; in the second, there actually is a preferred truth, so it is more plausible to speak with a shared voice.

Wikipedia was predicted by Douglas Adams’s science fiction comedy
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
. His fictional
Guide
functioned in a similar way, with one of its contributors able to instantaneously update the entire entry for Planet Earth (from “Harmless” to “Mostly harmless”) with a few taps on a keyboard. Though Earth merited a two-word entry, there were substantial articles about other topics, such as which alien poetry was the worst and how to make strange cocktails. The first thought is often the best thought, and Adams perfectly captured the spirit of much of Wikipedia before it was born.

It has been pointed out that Wikipedia entries about geeky pop culture are longer and more lovingly crafted than those regarding reality. A science fiction army from a movie or novel will typically be better described than an army from reality; a porn star will get a more detailed biography than a Nobel Prize winner.
^†

This is not the aspect of Wikipedia that I dislike. It’s great that we now enjoy a cooperative pop culture concordance. This is where the Wikipedians take on true voices: they become human when they reveal
themselves. However, one is constantly bombarded with declarations about how amazingly useful and powerful Wikipedia is with regard to nonfiction topics. These are not untrue statements, but they can be misleading.

If you want to see how valuable something is, try living without it for a while. Spend some time ignoring Wikipedia. When you look something up in a search engine, just keep flipping through results until you find the first one written by a particular person with a connection to the topic. If you do this, you’ll generally find that for most topics, the Wikipedia entry is the first URL returned by search engines but not necessarily the best URL available.

It seems to me that if Wikipedia suddenly disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors and with a greater sense of style and presence—though some might counter that the non-Wikipedia information is not organized in as consistent and convenient a way.

The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy. There really is no longer any technology behind the choice of the first result for a great many searches. Especially on mobile devices, text-entry boxes and software widgets that are devoted purely to Wikipedia are starting to appear, not even bothering to include the web at large. If Wikipedia is treated as the overarching, primary text of the human experience, then of course it will, as if by decree, become “more convenient” than other texts.

Another part of the convenience factor is the standardization of presentation. While I’ve run across quite a few incomprehensible, terribly written passages in Wikipedia articles, on the whole there’s a consistency of style. This can be either a benefit or a loss, depending on the topic and what you are after. Some topics need the human touch and a sense of context and personal voice more than others.

One of the negative aspects of Wikipedia is this: because of how its entries are created, the process can result in a softening of ambition or, more specifically, a substitution of ideology for achievement.

Discussions of Wikipedia usually center on the experience of people who use it as a resource. That’s important, but I would like to also focus on the experience of the people who create it. They aren’t a random assortment of people, even if they sometimes pretend to be. They are often, so far as I can tell, people who are committed to whatever area they are writing about.

Science-related Wikipedia entries often come together in a cordial manner because the scientific community is practiced at being cordial. So the experience of scientists writing in Wikipedia is probably better on average than it is for other contributors.

Typical authors of Wikipedia, however, implicitly celebrate the ideal of intellectual mob rule. “Edit wars” on Wikipedia are called that for a reason. Whether they are cordial or not, Wikipedians always act out the idea that the collective is closer to the truth and the individual voice is dispensable.

To understand the problem, let’s focus on hard science, the area aside from pop culture where Wikipedia seems to be the most reliable. In fact, let’s consider the hardest of the hard: math.

For many people math is hard to learn, and yet to those who love it, doing math is a great joy that goes beyond its obvious utility and puts it in an aesthetic realm. Albert Einstein called it “the poetry of logical ideas.”

Math is an arena in which it’s appropriate to have high hopes for the future of digital media. A superb development—which might take place in decades or centuries to come—would be for some new channel of communication to come along that makes a deep appreciation of math more widely available. Then the fundamental patterning of reality, which only math can describe, would become part of a wider human conversation.

This kind of development might follow the course of what has happened to moviemaking. It used to be that movies came only from a few elite studios that had access to the expensive and cumbersome equipment then necessary to make films. Now anyone can make a movie; moviemaking has become a part of general experience.

The reason moviemaking has become as much a part of pop culture as movie viewing is that new gadgets appeared. Cheap, easy-to-use video cameras, editing software, and distribution methods—such as YouTube—are what made the difference. Before them, it might have seemed as though moviemaking was such an esoteric practice that even if widely accessible tools arrived, the experience would still only be available to a few special geniuses.

And while it’s true that there are still only a few special geniuses of cinema, the basic competence turns out to be as easily acquired as learning to talk or drive a car. The same thing ought to happen to math someday. The right tools could help math become another way large numbers of people can connect creatively in our culture.

In the late 1990s I was excited because it looked as if it was starting to happen. All over the world, mathematicians of all stripes were beginning to create websites that explored the potential for explaining what they do for civilians. There were online introductions to wonderful geometric shapes, strange knots of logic, and magical series of numbers. None of the material was perfect; in fact, most of it was strange and awkward. But this kind of mass development was something that had never happened before on such a scale and with such a variety of participants, so every little detail was an experiment. It was slow going, but there was a trend that might have led somewhere.

One institution from this nearly forgotten chapter of the early web was ThinkQuest. This was a contest run by internet pioneers, especially Al Weis, in which teams of high school students competed for scholarships by designing websites that explained ideas from a wide variety of academic disciplines, including math.

Early on, ThinkQuest enjoyed a successful niche similar to the one Wikipedia occupies today. A nonprofit site, it was drawing the same huge numbers of visitors as the big commercial sites of the era, which included some outfits with names like AOL. A ThinkQuest entry was often the first result of a web search.

But the contributions of ThinkQuest were far more original and valuable
than those of Wikipedia. The contestants had to learn how to present ideas as wholes, as well as figure out how to use the new online medium to do that. Their work included simulations, interactive games, and other elements that were pretty new to the world. They weren’t just transferring material that already existed into a more regularized, anonymous form.

ThinkQuest probably cost a little more than Wikipedia to operate because the machinery of judging used experts—it wasn’t supposed to be a war or a popularity contest—but it was still cheap.

The search for new ways to share math on the web was and is incredibly hard work.
^*
Most ThinkQuest entries were poor, and the ones that were good required extraordinary effort.

The web should have developed along the ThinkQuest model instead of the wiki model—and would have, were it not for hive ideology.

For a few years, there were often multiple pages of top results to a great many queries in search engines like Google that were really just echoes of a Wikipedia entry. It was as if Wikipedia were the only searchable web page for a big slice of human thought and experience. The situation seems to have become better recently—I assume because search engines have responded to complaints.

People who contribute to Wikipedia naturally become emotionally committed to what they have done. Their vain links probably helped drive the search engines to the one book of the hive. But the era when
search was hogged made the genuinely creative, struggling, experimental web designs become less visible and less appreciated, often leading to a death spiral.