You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (27 page)

If some infantile trauma or anxiety can be made obsolete by technology, then that will happen as soon as possible (perhaps even sooner!).

Children want attention. Therefore, young adults, in their newly extended childhood, can now perceive themselves to be finally getting enough attention, through social networks and blogs. Lately, the design of online technology has moved from answering this desire for attention to addressing an even earlier developmental stage.

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

Accelerating change has practically become a religious belief in Silicon Valley. It often begins to seem to us as though everything is speeding up along with the chips. This can lead many of us to be optimistic about many things that terrify almost everyone else. Technologists such as Ray Kurzweil will argue that accelerating improvement in technological prowess will inevitably outrun problems like global warming and the end of oil. But not every technology-related process speeds up according to Moore’s law.

For instance, as I’ve mentioned earlier, software development doesn’t necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware. It often instead slows down as computers get bigger because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake, and that’s what is happening.

For instance, the user interface to search engines is still based on the command line interface, with which the user must construct logical phrases using symbols such as dashes and quotes. That’s how personal computers used to be, but it took less than a decade to get from the Apple II to the Macintosh. By contrast, it’s been well over a decade since network-based search services appeared, and they are still trapped in the command line era. At this rate, by 2020, we can expect software development to have slowed to a near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole.

There is another form of slowness related to Moore’s law, and it interacts with the process of neoteny. Broadly speaking, Moore’s law can be expected to accelerate progress in medicine because computers will accelerate the speeds of processes like genomics and drug discovery. That means healthy old age will continue to get healthier and last longer and that the “youthful” phase of life will also be extended. The two go together.

And that means generational shifts in culture and thought will happen less frequently. The baby boom isn’t over yet, and the 1960s still provide the dominant reference points in pop culture. This is in part, I believe, because of the phenomena of Retropolis and youthiness, but it is also because the boomers are not merely plentiful and alive but still
vigorous and contributing to society. And that is because constantly improving medicine, public health, agriculture, and other fruits of technology have extended the average life span. People live longer as technology improves, so cultural change actually
slows
, because it is tied more to the outgoing generational clock than the incoming one.

So Moore’s law makes “generational” cultural change slow down. But that is just the flip side of neoteny. While it is easy to think of neoteny as an emphasis on youthful qualities, which are in essence radical and experimental, when cultural neoteny is pushed to an extreme it implies conservatism, since each generation’s perspectives are preserved longer and made more influential as neoteny is extended. Thus, neoteny brings out contradictory qualities in culture.

It’s worth repeating obvious truths when huge swarms of people are somehow able to remain oblivious. That is why I feel the need to point out the most obvious overall aspect of digital culture: it is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia.

Some the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.

It might seem that I am skewering the infantile nature of internet culture, but ridicule is the least of my concerns. True, there’s some fun to be had here, but the more important business is relating technological infantilism neoteny to a grand and adventurous trend that characterizes the human species.

And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The internet is turning us all into children, isn’t that awful;” quite the contrary. Cultural neoteny can be wonderful. But it’s important to understand the dark side.

Everything going on in digital culture, from the ideals of open software to the emergent styles of Wikipedia, can be understood in terms of cultural neoteny. There will usually be both a lovely side and a nasty side to neoteny, and they will correspond to the good and the bad sides of what goes on in any playground.

The division of childhood into good and bad is an admittedly subjective project. One approach to the good side of childhood is celebrated in philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s
Poetics of Reverie
, while an aspect of the bad side is described in William Golding’s novel
Lord of the Flies
.

The good includes a numinous imagination, unbounded hope, innocence, and sweetness. Childhood is the very essence of magic, optimism, creativity, and open invention of self and the world. It is the heart of tenderness and connection between people, of continuity between generations, of trust, play, and mutuality. It is the time in life when we learn to use our imaginations without the constraints of life lessons.

The bad is more obvious, and includes bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness.

The net provides copious examples of both aspects of neoteny.

Bachelardian neoteny is found, unannounced, in the occasional MySpace page that communicates the sense of wonder and weirdness that a teen can find in the unfolding world. It also appears in Second Life and gaming environments in which kids discover their expressive capabilities. Honestly, the proportion of banal nonsense to genuine tenderness and wonder is worse online than in the physical world at this time, but the good stuff does exist.

The ugly Goldingesque side of neoteny is as easy to find online as getting wet in the rain—and is described in the sections of this book devoted to trolls and online mob behavior.

There’s almost nothing duller than listening to people talk about indescribable, deeply personal, revelatory experiences: the LSD trip, the vision on the mountaintop. When you live in the Bay Area, you learn to carefully avoid those little triggers in a conversation that can bring on the deluge.

So it is with trepidation that I offer my own version. I am telling my story because it might help get across a point that is so basic, so ambient, that it would be otherwise almost impossible to isolate and describe.

Palo Alto in the 1980s was already the capital of Silicon Valley, but you could still find traces of its former existence as the bucolic borderlands between the Stanford campus and a vast paradise of sunny orchards to the south. Just down the main road from Stanford you could turn onto a dirt path along a creek and find an obscure huddle of stucco cottages.

Some friends and I had colonized this little enclave, and the atmosphere was “late hippie.” I had made some money from video games, and we were using the proceeds to build VR machines. I remember one day, amid the colorful mess, one of my colleagues—perhaps Chuck Blanchard or Tom Zimmerman—said to me, with a sudden shock, “Do you realize we’re sitting in the most interesting room in the world right now?”

I’m sure we weren’t the only young men at that moment to believe that what we were doing was the most fascinating thing in the world, but it still seems to me, all these years later, that the claim was reasonable. What we were doing was connecting people together in virtual reality for the first time.

If you had happened upon us, here is what you would have seen. A number of us would be nursing mad scientist racks filled with computers and an impenetrable mess of cables through whatever crisis of glitches had most recently threatened to bring the system down. One or two lucky subjects would be inside virtual reality. From the outside, you’d have seen these people wearing huge black goggles and gloves encrusted in patterns of weird small electronic components. Some other
people would be hovering around making sure they didn’t walk into walls or trip over cables. But what was most interesting was what the subjects saw from the inside.

On one level, what they saw was absurdly crude images jerking awkwardly around, barely able to regain equilibrium after a quick turn of the head. This was virtual reality’s natal condition. But there was a crucial difference, which is that even in the earliest phases of abject crudeness, VR conveyed an amazing new kind of experience in a way that no other media ever had.

It’s a disappointment to me that I still have to describe this experience to you in words more than a quarter of a century later. Some derivatives of virtual reality have become commonplace: you can play with avatars and virtual worlds in Second Life and other online services. But it’s still very rare to be able to experience what I am about to describe.

So you’re in virtual reality. Your brain starts to believe in the virtual world instead of the physical one. There’s an uncanny moment when the transition occurs.

Early VR in 1980s had a charm to it that is almost lost today. (I believe it will reappear in the future, though.) The imagery was minimalist, because the computer power necessary to portray a visually rich world did not exist. But our optical design tended to create a saturated and soft effect, instead of the blocky one usually associated with early computer graphics. And we were forced to use our minimal graphic powers very carefully, so there was an enforced elegance to the multihued geometric designs that filled our earliest virtual worlds.

I remember looking at the deeply blue virtual sky and at the first immersive, live virtual hand, a brass-colored cubist sculpture of cylinders and cones, which moved with my thoughts and was me.

We were able to play around with VR as the most basic of basic research, with creativity and openness. These days, it is still, unfortunately, prohibitively expensive to work with full-on VR, so it doesn’t happen very much absent a specific application. For instance, before even acquiring equipment, you need special rooms for people to wander around in when they think they’re in another world, and the real estate to make those rooms available in a university is not easy to come by.

Full-blown immersive VR is all too often done with a purpose these
days. If you are using VR to practice a surgical procedure, you don’t have psychedelic clouds in the sky. You might not even have audio, because it is not essential to the task. Ironically, it is getting harder and harder to find examples of the exotic, complete VR experience even as the underlying technology gets cheaper.

It was a self-evident and inviting challenge to attempt to create the most accurate possible virtual bodies, given the crude state of the technology at the time. To do this, we developed full-body suits covered in sensors. A measurement made on the body of someone wearing one of these suits, such as an aspect of the flex of a wrist, would be applied to control a corresponding change in a virtual body. Before long, people were dancing and otherwise goofing around in virtual reality.

Of course, there were bugs. I distinctly remember a wonderful bug that caused my hand to become enormous, like a web of flying skyscrapers. As is often the case, this accident led to an interesting discovery.

It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. I became curious about how weird the body could get before the mind would become disoriented. I played around with elongated limb segments and strange limb placements. The most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster. A lobster has a trio of little midriff arms on each side of its body. If physical human bodies sprouted corresponding limbs, we would have measured them with an appropriate bodysuit and that would have been that.

I assume it will not come as a surprise to the reader that the human body does not include these little arms, so the question arose of how to control them. The answer was to extract a little influence from each of many parts of the physical body and merge these data streams into a single control signal for a given joint in the extra lobster limbs. A touch of human elbow twist, a dash of human knee flex; a dozen such movements might be mixed to control the middle joint of little left limb #3. The result was that the principal human elbows and knees could still control their virtual counterparts roughly as before, while also contributing to the control of additional limbs.

Yes, it turns out people can learn to control bodies with extra limbs!

In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles
in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling. I fully expect morphing to become as important a dating skill as kissing.

There is something extraordinary that you might care to notice when you are in VR, though nothing compels you to: you are no longer aware of your physical body. Your brain has accepted the avatar as your body. The only difference between your body and the rest of the reality you are experiencing is that you already know how to control your body, so it happens automatically and subconsciously.