by Joel Garreau
IN THE NORTH AMERICAN Great Plains in 1928, the greatest thing since radio was hybrid corn. It caused farmers’ yield per acre to soar. It was one of the most astonishing new agricultural technologies since the plow. But it was costly, which meant that to pay for it, you needed more land per farmer, more tractors per farm and more bank loans per tractor. It pushed so many small-scale, change-averse farmers off the land that some states’ populations actually shrank. It reshaped the heartland for generations.
In 1941, two sociologists at Iowa State University, Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross, began to wonder how this chain of events had occurred. So they sought to find out how Iowa farmers had made the decision to try this newfangled innovation.
Ryan and Gross were not the most obvious academics for the job, notes Everett M. Rogers in his classic work, Diffusion of Innovations. One farmer asked Gross for advice about horse nettles. Gross, a city slicker who would end up at Harvard, had no idea the farmer was talking about noxious weeds. My God, man, said Gross to the farmer. Call a veterinarian to look at the poor sick horse.
Nonetheless, Ryan and Gross’ 1943 report is to this day the most influential study of the ways humans adapt to innovations. Turns out the diffusion of any new technology—air-conditioning, cable TV, laser eye surgery—follows the same pattern.
First there are the Innovators. These are the geeks for whom venturesomeness is an obsession. Are you old enough to remember the first Apple Newtons? These were the first palm computers that were supposed to recognize your handwriting, back in 1993. Remember the people who rushed to buy them? Gary Trudeau in his comic strip Doonesbury lampooned them. These are the Innovators, the kind of people who always want to be first with anything. They love to be rash, daring and risky. They usually exist on the fringe of any social group. Their opinions are not necessarily respected. They add up to 2.5 percent of the population, according to the model.
Then come the Early Adopters. They are just slightly ahead of the crowd. But they are much more connected to the social fabric. They are hip. They frequently populate newspaper trend stories. Think of the first crowd of singles to bring their palm computers to nightclubs to beam their phone numbers rather than shout over the din. Because they value their reputations as trendsetters, these people are judicious about which innovations they adopt. (Remember former presidential candidate Bob Dole shilling for Viagra?) Early Adopters constitute a seventh of the population.
The Early Majority follows. They are numerous—a third of the population. They never lead, but they don’t want to be stick-in-the-muds. Fitting into this group are the CEOs who, in the nineties, may not have known how to type, but nonetheless insisted that their company have a Web site of some sort. This group moves deliberately but does try to maximize return.
The Late Majority then kicks in. For them, change has become inevitable, usually because clinging to their old ways is killing them economically. Recall the businesses that finally realized e-mail was not a fad. This Late Majority is another third of the population. By the time a technology reaches them, it can be irritating to deal with those who are not with the program: “You have to find a pay phone because you don’t have a cell phone? Are you serious?”
Finally come The Laggards. They tend to be suspicious of any change and stick to other people like themselves. They frequently don’t have a lot of money, and they hate risk. There are as many of them as there are Innovators and Early Adopters combined. Laggards sometimes get treated like the Amish in sentimental newspaper accounts. Think of the heart-tugging tale of the last person in Mississippi to plow with mules, or the last dairy farmer to hand-milk cows in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
This is the human dynamic that feeds the radical evolution of The Curve. “What people mean by the word technology,” says Alan Kay, who first conceived the laptop computer, “is anything invented since they were born.”
But now we’ve crossed a line. Patrick J. Fee of Germantown, Maryland, a consultant, once told me about the reptilian rocket moment of shock when he realized it. He found himself staring at the blue screen of death on his laptop. Gone. Vanished. Everything. He pounded on the computer, hitting the same key again and again. He cursed so dramatically that his small dog fled. It was no use. The hard drive was fried, and with it years of work, addresses, phone numbers, overdue projects—“my life,” as he put it. With it, too, went the press on Fee’s dress shirt, which became sweat-soaked while his heart pounded.
Fee suffered the classic anxiety attack of our new century—a fight-or-flight reaction when you lose control of the machines that have become part of you. Such a reaction is involuntary. It’s not rational. It’s the same alarm that goes off when you look over a cliff or somebody drops a snake in your lap. You pant and feel nausea, dizziness and a sense of impending doom.
It starts in a tiny part of your brain called the locus ceruleus, way down in that very dim bulb at the tip of your spinal cord, the reptilian brain, which is at least 300 million years old.
But something new is going on here. Let’s see—when our computers die, we react as if attacked by a velociraptor? Our reptilian brain is recognizing something: We have bonded with these new machines. They have become part of us and we part of them. We are Borg, as they say on Star Trek—cyborgs, enhanced creatures. We have crossed the line.
Take Soo-Yin Jue. As she wobbled into an office north of California’s Silicon Valley, she trembled, her knees buckled and she grabbed the table to keep from falling. She held her hands up in front of her face, went pale and then lost all expression. She was, quite literally, in shock. Nine years of her life she had poured into a book about China, crossing the Pacific a dozen times. All of that was embedded on her Mac. She thought she had backed it up. Only when she heard the horrible grinding sound did she discover how wrong she’d been. She felt as if she had “lost her soul.”
The woman who talked Jue down from flash-frozen terror was Nikki Stange, who has a degree in psychology and knows exactly how, psychically and emotionally, we view our new machines as extensions of ourselves. A former suicide prevention counselor, she now has the title “data crisis counselor.” She works for DriveSavers, a large data recovery company.
“You can hear the white knuckles,” Stange says. “They are in total despair, and you have to let them know there is hope; there is a reason to live. Personally and professionally, it’s like working in the emergency room of a hospital. You know how you hear that when someone is near death, your life flashes before your eyes? I can’t tell you how many people tell me about having that sensation when their hard drive crashes. The intensity of emotions is certainly similar.”
You could see it with Jue. In front of a reporter and a photographer from the San Jose Mercury News, she embraced everyone at DriveSavers after they recovered her book, as if they had saved her life.
Thomas Lewis, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how mind and brain link to other beings, agrees. He is the co-author of A General Theory of Love, a groundbreaking book that looks at the most intimate emotional workings of the human brain. Lewis says that dealing with machines that are more and more a part of us is comparable to dealing with a parallel personality.
“When you look at another person, you are reacting to them and they to you. You are engaged in that kind of synchronous duet or ballet,” he says. “It’s a novel development to expect that from a machine. With your hand on the mouse, you do something and you expect the machine to do something back. It really bugs people if you interrupt that loop. People are only designed to make that loop with other people. In our mad frenzy to make computers more and more responsive—to our voices, to our facial expressions—we’re attempting to duplicate in silicon that kind of reaction duet.
“There’s two ways to think about it,” says Lewis. “Emotionally, people have a general disposition to a bond of affection with their regular companions that help them out. Nowadays, they are distraught if they’re separated from their compute
r, their helpful mechanical friend. They turn to the computer for emotional support, to be entertained by it, to encounter a social presence in the form of online communities and chat groups. Out here in Silicon Valley, I have spoken to people who say they consider regular human relationships superfluous and outdated, that they get everything they need from the computer. They say that and mean it; they’re not kidding around.
“And then cognitively, it’s become an auxiliary part of your mind. If you lose it, you lose part of your mind.”
In 1960 two NASA scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, coined the term cyborg—cybernetic organism—to describe human bodies that had been altered and augmented with machines. Trust the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to figure that there’s nothing better for those long-haul space trips than a niftier class of human.
Since then, there has been no end to the titanium and plastic stuck into our bodies—pacemakers, hips, knees, heart valves, eye lenses. But these are mechanical and primitive. They don’t wire to human consciousness or brainpower, much less to emotions. Until now.
It quickly came to the point that Deanna Kosma banned her husband’s new machine from the bedroom. When it vibrated in the middle of the night, skittering across the nightstand, beckoning him—and especially when he responded to it—it was too much. The apparatus in question is called a BlackBerry. At one level, it is only a primitive handheld wireless device that allows you to send and receive e-mail anytime, anywhere. But it has widely and quickly become notorious as the “CrackBerry.” Everyone from colleagues to lovers use words like “junkies” to describe its users. “It can compete with the children for his attention,” Deanna Kosma says.
I call Montgomery Kosma, a Washington attorney, and demand he defend himself. He talks about the two weeks he took off when his son was born. His BlackBerry was in for repairs. He felt as if a part of him had been removed. “I was at home, with no access, forced to rely on ancient technology—voice mail. It was an incredible burden to me. I felt withdrawal.”
Kosma is cheerfully defensive about the time he devotes to the machine even when he could be examining the miracle of tiny baby hands. “There are times when the baby’s asleep. I’m not interrupting the baby. I deal with it when it’s convenient. There’s often five minutes of downtime. I take it into the bathroom when the kids are washing their hands,” he says.
Deanna half jokes about Montgomery’s “addiction behavior.” She stresses that she is “married to a very good man. My husband’s still pretty human. He doesn’t allow it to do his thinking for him. Or his living.” Then she pauses.
“Now, you want to talk about an addict? My son will have withdrawal symptoms with his GameBoy. He will get irritable if you take it away. It’s hard enough for him to be away from the Internet or cable TV. But he will get snappy if you take the Game Boy away. Almost like an addict. You can see it in his eyes.”
That’s why the next time you jack an MP3 player into your skull to shut out the world, or the next time you can’t put down that solitaire game, or the next time you talk in the food court to noncorporeal companions rather than the person who is serving you lunch. . .
The next time you pay more attention to your e-mail than to your children, the next time you feel like throwing up when your connection to the cosmos is ruptured, the next time the innermost recesses of your brain recognize a machine as part of you when it dies, remember this:
You have crossed the line. For you, the revolution has occurred. The machines have not only changed you, they have become you. You have become Borg. Not metaphorically, but in a way as real and tangible as that keyboard you clutch.
Resistance, apparently, is futile.
THE CURVE WARPS our sense of past and future. It is at the center of our feeling that we are at a hinge in history, at a time when the earth is beginning to move beneath our feet.
Human memory is a wonderfully elastic thing. Its greatest trick is to see any point on a curve as part of a straight line stretching directly and infinitely back into the past and forward endlessly into the future. Things have always been this way. Haven’t they? They will always be this way. Won’t they? This is normal, no big deal. Right?
By the arithmetic of The Curve, however, the last 20 years is not so much a guide to the next 20 years. It is a guide to the next eight. Similarly, the last 50 years is not a guide to the next 50 years; it is rather a guide to the next decade and a half.
Test your perceptions. Take a not terribly distant year, such as 1990. Below is a list of 15 events. Which of these would you say occurred in that year? Which would you say occurred much earlier or later?
The environment:
• Africanized “killer” bees first entered the United States.
• The Clean Air Act passed.
• The spotted owl was added to the threatened species list.
Statecraft:
• Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Republic in that new nation’s first free elections.
• Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
• Nelson Mandela was freed.
Cultural news:
• Dr. Jack Kervorkian assisted his first suicide patient.
• Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show.
• Smoking on U.S. domestic airplane flights was banned.
Technology:
• The Hubble space telescope was launched into orbit.
• Microsoft replaced DOS, in which users made computers do things by typing in commands, with Windows 3.0, which matched Apple’s mouse-driven point-and-click system.
• In one entire year, The New York Times mentioned the Internet in only 27 articles, and then often thought it necessary to explain to its readers that this was “a network of business, government and military computers.”
The economy:
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 2,629.21.
• The federal government’s estimate of the cost to bail out the savings and loan industry was doubled to $130 billion.
• The corporation with the largest market capitalization in America was International Business Machines.
Doesn’t some of this recitation seem like ancient history? The answer is they all occurred in 1990. If you guessed that any of these events had occurred much longer ago, that may say something about the way you are responding to The Curve.
Confronted with such reminders, the tendency is then to say, Okay, well that era was weird. But things are leveling out now.
Our mental maps have changed, however. It used to be that societies preserved their traditions and transmitted their values by telling stories about their past. Americans were no different. Once, the Western was our most popular genre. The great cowboy movies—High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—told us how to live, how to act, how to be human.
At some point, however, we turned our gaze. We started exploring and explaining ourselves by telling stories of our future. Now the great blockbusters are Star Wars, The Matrix, Men in Black. We are awed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner. Our emotions are tugged by the little darlings of E.T., A.I., and Lilo and Stitch. We cheer Independence Day, Contact, Minority Report, X-Men. The star of The Terminator runs for governor of California, promising vaguely superhuman power to balance the state budget, and wins! Even our romantic myths are wrapped in characters with astonishing abilities. Never before have three series of films—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter—proved so fabulously profitable and internationally popular.
In these films, check out how often we seem interested in anticipating everyday affairs suddenly interrupted by vast changes in the rules about how the world works, from the Harry Potter series to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The Curve implies one of the all-time changes in the rules. Those who study it call it “The Singularity.”
AT DUSK, through brightly lit dust, the stadium in which the Super Bowl is to be played the next day looks like the most impressive craft extraterrestrials ever imagined landing. Strobes flash from its sides, smoke from test fireworks wafts from its interior, unexpected pulses of illumination shear through banners, blades of focused light shoot out for miles. To embrace all of San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium you have to sweep your eyes from left to right. The city’s red trolley cars pull up like toys. Even the blimps overhead—flying in formation as if they were alien escort craft, radiating orange and yellow light from within—seem puny.
The figure striding across the top of the stadium is barely discernible. He’s walking on the light ring. That’s the thin concrete halo below which dangle the flood lamps, well above the highest seats. The light ring is no wider than the hood of an SUV. It has no handrails. It’s an 80-foot drop off one side and a 300-foot drop off the other. Every 10 paces, the figure moving on it has to dance over yet another crate of high explosives that will be part of tomorrow’s fireworks display. Dressed in black, with his baseball cap reversed, he prances out to the very end of the strip with the sort of abandon that curdles your innards even if you are sitting firmly on the ground watching it through binoculars.
He’s out there to aim the laser cannon at his friends. Again.
His friends are just 400 yards from the stadium in an unadorned industrial garage. It is just across that deep ditch of a ravine grandly named the San Diego River. Beyond that, the I-8 roars. The garage has roll-up doors at either end and is big enough to handle a couple of tractor-trailers. But that’s not what’s in it. The garage is a fluorescent-lit void being filled with possibilities. A crowd of young men have pushed tables and desks to the center and covered them with screwdrivers, cables flowing down from the ceiling, monitors, keyboards, headsets, surge suppressors, garage door openers, FedEx boxes, Pizza Hut boxes, Bud Light boxes, Snapple Pink Lemonade boxes, satellite dishes, joysticks and robots made out of Legos. In the corner is a Honda 600R competition motorcycle. A movie-quality blonde occasionally swings by in a wine-colored Jaguar, bringing in more food, like Wendy tending the Lost Boys. A pink inflated bubble suit wanders through. Turns out there is a man inside. He is equipped to investigate unhappy nuclear reactors.