And seldom was that mandate so timely as at the turn of the millennium. Normally science fiction writers are almost the only citizens who pay any attention at all to the future—beyond the next fiscal quarter—and we customarily spend our professional hours trying to con and cajole readers into joining us. (We perceive an urgent need for smarter voters.) But in December of 1999, thanks to the imminent approach of an utterly meaningless non-event—some fuss about the date; perhaps you’ve heard of it—suddenly everybody and his chatgroup were talking obsessively about the future, for a change. Big surprise: most of us are paranoid. We can’t help it; it’s hardwired into us.
So suddenly I was unusually popular. Commissions and assignments abounded, invitations to appear on panels, participate in colloquia, write essays, play talking head. “What will things be like in the next twenty/fifty/hundred/thousand years?” asked the editors, producers and webmasters. They all had the same deadline, and I got the sense most of them hoped I would hint darkly of dread disasters on the horizon, futuristic fiascoes we’d be lucky to survive.
Unfortunately, they all wrote valid cheques, so I did my best to accommodate as many of them as I could. Which meant that for a while there I was heartily sick of scrying and decrying—if I’m lying, I’m dying. I propose a conceptual one-eighty. I’d like to glance backward, at the twentieth century’s latter half and some of the unexpectedly wonderful technology it has been my fortune and privilege to come to take for granted in that time.
I was born in 1948, so let’s say I’d basically finished booting up by about 1955. By then I’d already been inoculated against ghastly things called smallpox and polio. Music came on big fragile vinyl plates and you paid extra for “high fidelity” (mono), which today would be considered unacceptably poor for a taxicab radio. And they only sounded that good the very first time you played them, no matter how careful you were. Even at seven I sensed how fiercely proud my father was that we could afford a color television. Its screen was smaller and had much poorer resolution than the monitor I’m typing this on, and its audio made low-fi records sound good. It had rabbit-ears on top, which you configured by hand for each channel—all six of them. Nobody had FM, or a portable AM. If you got a phone call from more than fifty miles away you knew someone had died. Dad’s company gave him a new car every year—and on winter mornings he routinely budgeted half an hour to get it started. The furnace in the basement wasn’t much more reliable. We knew people who’d flown on airplanes, but didn’t expect to ever get that rich ourselves. Computers existed—men raced around inside them, replacing blown vacuum tubes. They could perform thousands of operations in a single second! If you spoke Computer. I expected nuclear war in my lifetime. Everyone did.
You’ve read all this before, seen a documentary on A&E or the History Channel. But I don’t know if they’ve conveyed just how unexpected and astonishing every one of the technological wonders of my time were when they came. I read my first sf novel when I was six, and it described a landing on the moon, and I must ask you to believe me when I tell you that an attempt to discuss the subject seriously with my teacher got me sent to the school shrink. I’ve seen correspondence in which he warned my parents that continued exposure to such fanciful nonsense could “damage the boy’s psyche by over-stimulating his imagination.” (Thank God my mother knew mahooha when she heard it!) A mere fifteen years later, Armstrong told that teacher and shrink to take a flying leap for all mankind. And even I, a lifelong space-travel buff, was stunned that we’d really pulled it off.
Positive change always takes us by surprise. Sf writers often look for hopeful futures, but not one of us predicted that the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, apartheid, the Cold War or Nuclear Winter could not only go away, but do so without bloodshed. Yet every one of those godsent miracles was a direct and (in retrospect) inevitable result of technological change. Lasting peace in the Middle East or Ireland or Serbo-Croatia will probably seem impossible right up until a week after they’ve come. Then—at last, thank God!—they’ll be old news, as boring as space travel.
I can hang from my belt a recording of Louis Armstrong playing “Old Man Mose” thirteen years before I was born, with better sound quality than Pops heard when they played back the master that day. My Honda always starts on the coldest morning, is much less likely to kill me than a ’55 Ford and the dashboard clock keeps time. After thirty years’ fruitless search for a copy of William Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, I can now click a mouse, locate a dozen copies, order one with another click and be reading it tomorrow. I’ve watched a Space Shuttle take off from two miles away. Nobody ever has to get lost again, unless they choose to switch off their GPS and cellphone. It’s been a great century, and I belong to the luckiest generation of monkeys that ever griped.
And I’m sorry to disappoint the paranoid, but the next generation might actually abolish hunger, poverty, racism, death, taxes and even loneliness. No foolin’. Half the geniuses who ever lived are alive and working now. Who says living in interesting times is a curse?
The New Idiot Box
Be Less Than You Can Be, or
The most important component is the off switch
FIRST PRINTED APRIL 2000
WHY, THE OLD JOKE ASKS, does a dog lick his testicles? Answer: because he can. Perhaps it’s time to ask whether that’s a good enough reason.
Classic military doctrine says you must plan not for what you think the enemy will do, but for the worst he can do. If he can, he probably will. Humans like to push the envelope, to operate near the redline: we tend to do about as much as we possibly can (get away with) in any given area. Given half a chance we’ll eat ourselves into obesity. Given very mild stimulus to a certain spot in the medial forebrain bundle, and the means to keep the current flowing, we’ll sit and starve to death with big grins. As I drive along cursing the slow traffic, I’m traveling twice as fast as the fastest horse my grandfather could have ridden…and once traffic opens up, I’ll reach speeds twice again as fast, speeds he could only have achieved by falling off a very tall cliff or being shot out of a cannon.
But why I’m in four times as much of a hurry as Grandfather was, I don’t know. Maybe just because I can be?
E-mail is a wonderful thing. Yes sir, wonderful. A powerful tool, they keep saying. An enormously powerful tool. At sixteen, I was hired as a nightshift janitor at a hospital, my first legal job. The first night, my boss, Reverend Willie Brown (who was moonlighting on his day-gig as pastor of, I swear I’m not making this up, the First Church of the Ugly Death) introduced me to a machine called a buffer. Before letting me touch it, Reverend Willie gave me a lecture/demo on the philosophy and parameters of its user interface—though I’m not sure he used those precise terms—and tried to impress on me that it was an enormously powerful tool. He did in fact use those exact words, which is why I’m remembering this now. I assured him I understood.
Then he stood aside, and I put that sucker right through a wall. Only by a miracle were there not sleeping patients on the other side of it, in whom I could have induced cardiac arrest.
For the rest of that summer, Reverend Willie ran the buffer, and I pushed an idiot stick. That buffer didn’t look all that powerful—but it was. And it gave you positive feedback, which makes a system tend to oscillate wildly out of control, fast—as when a microphone is placed too close to its speaker, for instance.
So it is with e-mail. What seemed to me at first a miracle of convenience has come to feel like a cybernetic Sorcerer’s Apprentice, mindlessly flinging bucket after bucket of information at me, heedless that I’m drowning.
It’s wonderful that I can send a letter to someone on the other side of the globe within ten minutes. The problem arises when some fool on the other side of the globe sends me his manuscript, knowing I’ll have it in ten minutes…and therefore expects response within fifteen minutes and becomes shirty if it’s late. Simply because I now can spend every waking hour harking attentively to the peremptory summonses of strangers an
d friends alike, it’s assumed, for some reason, that I will.
I’ve searched my hard drive carefully, and can’t find any contract in which I agreed to answer e-mail at all, much less promptly. I never even promised to read any.
I concentrate for a living…so I take great care to keep a low profile in cyberspace. I don’t join forums, visit chat rooms or give out my e-address indiscriminately. I try not to even think about alt.callahans, the metauniverse created over a decade ago by some folks inspired by my Callahan’s Place books—said to be the largest non-pornographic newsgroup on USENET. (Its core membership far exceeds the population of the town I live in, and each month they upload more words than I’ve written about Callahan’s Place in a quarter-century of doing so for my living.) My browser is configured to reject all cookies. I don’t buy anything online unless I’m sure the vendor safeguards its mailing list.
And yet every day, at least the first two hours at my desk are spent dealing with e-mail.
In the Olden Days, I’d get a handful of letters a day, five days a week. Maybe two would require an answer; at the end of the week I’d write a dozen replies or so and mail them next time I passed a postbox. Now, I get at least fifteen letters a day—and that’s seven days a week. A hundred tugs at my lapel, however brief, every week. Each knows I felt the tug nearly instantaneously, and is liable to yank again, harder, if I don’t respond promptly enough to suit their sense of their own importance.
Two hours a day for seven days is 35 percent of a forty-hour week. Answering mail, which once took an hour or two a week, now eats up a third of my time. A powerful tool indeed. As Pyrrhus said, one more victory like this and I am screwed.
Naturally there are even more stupendous victories looming ominously on the horizon…
I’ll hold out as long as I can…but sooner or later the bastards will find some way to force me to accept one of those damned palmtops, you watch. Then it’s game over: I’ll never be free again, not in a rowboat, a hang-glider or halfway up a cliff. My attention will be perpetual hostage to any idiot who wants it; no matter how far back up into the forest primeval I trek, the dread words “You’ve got mail” will e’er haunt me.
Quoth the PalmPilot, “Evermore…”
Thanks to digital technology, our bosses can follow us anywhere, summon us from bed or bath. Our jobs can take over our waking lives. Much as science has given our government the theoretical power to destroy human life on earth, it’s given each of us the power to pester everybody else until then, 24-7. We can become the generation that went from the forty-hour week to the 112-hour week—excuse me: from one spouse working a forty-hour week to two spouses working 224 hours total—without any significant increase in real income. We have that power now…if we are boneheaded enough to use it.
To paraphrase Cool Hand Luke, what we could use around here lately is a failure to communicate.
Give It Another Kick, David—
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2000
WHEN GALAXY ONLINE decided to remake their site in June of 2000, the result was a completely redesigned, impressively beautiful, and far more powerful and flexible than ever home page…on which almost nothing worked. I tried using the recommended browser-iteration and plug-in, on an accelerated PowerPC with oodles of RAM, over the fastest connection Compuserve Canada will sell me, and it took me nearly half an hour to load and inspect the new home page. From there it took me another half hour of desperate thrashing about to find a functioning path that led to any of the splendid nonfiction, fiction or streaming video content that had been available on this site as recently as two days earlier.
When a regular website doesn’t work, that’s business as usual. No big deal. But when the Galaxy Online website doesn’t work, it’s a sign of the times, isn’t it?
Galaxy Online is highly interested in cybertechnology, their technical staff is among the best and most creative in the world, they have visionary leadership, access to the very best state of the art tools and lore, some serious funding and the finest minds in the field available for consultation…and even they are lucky when the damn thing works at all.
We science fiction authors believe in the future. We are inclined by nature, training and mandate to be optimistic about tomorrow.
But with each passing year my computer gets just a little slower and less reliable. And that, I fear, is the good news from cyberspace. The rest of the house, all the stuff that used to be as reliably dumb as a bag of hammers, seems to be getting entirely too smart to suit me.
After that abortive attempt to log in to the Galaxy Online site, I mentioned it in correspondence with interface expert Jef Raskin. He replied in part:
“Sadly, even the best-intentioned web designer, without understanding even the little that is known about cognition, is in over his or her head today. And when you do understand, then it is clear that you can’t do a good job given the existing browsers and computer environment. There’s just no way to build a really good web interface on present day software systems.”
It is to this intrinsically unstable platform that our culture proposes to entrust nearly everything of any value to us. It will probably be just after the very last actual physical retail sales outlet (“store,” they used to call them) has gone out of business that we will all suddenly realize the system we scrapped them for simply doesn’t work reliably.
And bookmark my words: in a few years it will be almost impossible to buy any household appliance or device that is not “Internet-ready,” “wirelessly online” and empowered to take autonomous action in your name. And forgive a crusty old cynic (I used to cut off the crusts, but it’s hard to dunk without them) for suspecting that their default setting will most often be: “spend the customer’s money as lavishly as can be justified, and tell us all her most intimate secrets.” That’s when they’re working right, I mean…
Hang on to all your present appliances. Cherish them. Nurse them along just as long as you can, replace only what you absolutely must. Every smallest aspect of your life, from your toaster to your toothbrush, is being relentlessly “wired” as we speak, by clueless greed-dazzled cybercarpetbaggers who don’t seem to understand the fabled information superhighway is just barely an improvement over two empty Campbell’s tomato soup cans connected by a taut string.
Cyberspace Cadets
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 1998
YOU SAY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD of Tulip Mania, your library doesn’t stock Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and you want to know just how bad could this Internet Goldrush business really be? You think it’s merely another fad, like the hula hoop or the Spice Girls?
I wave my magic wand. Zap! You are now Bikenibeu Paeinu. But don’t worry: spelling it is everyone else’s problem, for you are the Prime Minister. Of Tuvalu—a collection of nine small atolls (small even as atolls go, I mean) hard by the International Dateline, so remote that the nearest land-mass of consequence, Australia, lies 2,600 kilometers distant. You govern some 9,200 souls whose principle export is copra and average income is under $500 (Canadian!). In a good year they might get to milk as many as 1,000 tourists, making Tuvalu a destination roughly as popular as Passaic, New Jersey. There may not be fifty computers in your whole nation. How could Internet Fever possibly affect you or yours?
Surprise, Prime Minister! About five years ago, some geeks in suits on the other side of the planet devised the “domain-name” system for Internet addresses. Assignment of the most popular domain names—.com, .edu, .org, and .net—is, by fiat of the US government, a monopoly of the Virginia firm Network Solutions, Inc., which has registered over 2 million .com addresses alone since 1993. But as an afterthought, possibly born of the subconscious awareness that the US government has little claim to any authority in this matter, it was also decided to assign a domain name to each of the 159 nations on earth, to do with as they pleased. The planners went so far as to pick the names for them—to save them the bother, you see—and when they got down as far as Tuvalu, it tu
rned out .tu was already taken (I presume by Tunis or Turkey), so without another thought they awarded Tuvalu the domain name…
You’ve already spotted the significance, haven’t you? (So why didn’t they?) Tiny Tuvalu has the exclusive worldwide right to assign Internet addresses ending in .tv.
How many networks or cable stations would like to have such an address? All of them. How much is it worth to them? Well, what it’s actually worth is the square root of minus one—I confidently predict not one station will ever induce one viewer to watch one additional minute because its Website address is cute—but the important question is, what are broadcasters (not to mention the vast transvestite market) willing to pay for the worthless privilege in the present hysterical climate?
Plenty, says Toronto-based Information.ca Infotouch Corp., and it’s ready to put its money where its mouth is. It is now offering to give you (you’re Prime Minister Paeinu, remember?) somewhere between sixty and one hundred megabucks—per year, forever—for the right to sell your domain name abroad. If you divide it among your constituents, each will make twenty-two times his usual income this year, and every year hereafter. And even if you steal the whole score, most of it has to trickle down, eventually, if only because there is nowhere else on Tuvalu for it to go. This could be a bigger cash cow than Liberian ship registry. And what are you trading for all this manna?
Absolutely nothing. Hot air.
Even in Tuvalu, they can sense that the Crazy Years have come.
About as Reliable as a Computer…
The Crazy Years Page 20