by Joel Garreau
This is how Lanier gets to his ultimate measure of the success of The Prevail Scenario. It is the third ramp of progress—the ramp of increased interpersonal connections. That ramp, historically, starts with the invention of language and then moves to writing, drama, literature, printing, film, the telephone, radio, television, the Internet and so forth. What you are measuring is an increase in the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of ways in which humans can connect to each other. Not ways in which they become identical, but ways that they become closer. It’s the increased solution to the problem the Martians felt sad about when they encountered those sacks of skin surrounded by air.
The connectedness ramp is not measured by inventions. The test is interesting group behavior. Lanier doesn’t care, for example, that millions of people are now participating together in online games. These he mostly finds tedious. Progress is in the emergence of interesting human societies. “This is where I see the action right now,” he says.
For example, at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where a certain royal hottie studied art history in the early 21st century, Prince William couldn’t even go out for drinks with friends without being tracked electronically by a pack of wired women. “A quite sophisticated text messaging network has sprung up,” an “insider” told the Scottish Daily Record. “If William is spotted anywhere in the town then messages are sent out” on his admirers’ cell phones. “It starts off quite small. The first messages are then forwarded to more girls and so on. It just has a snowball effect. Informing 100 girls of his movements takes just seconds.” At one bar, the prince had to be moved to a safe location when more than a hundred “lusty ladies,” so alerted, suddenly mobbed the place like cats responding to the sound of a can opener.
This is the sort of interesting growth in human social connection Lanier has in mind. It’s called “swarming,” a behavior that is transforming social, work, military and even political lives worldwide, especially among the young. It is the unintended consequence of people, cell phones in hand, learning that they can coordinate instantly and leaderlessly.
“It’s the search for peak experience, something that’s really going to be special,” says Adam Eidinger, a Washington political organizer. “It happened to me just last week. There was a concert.” His cell rang, and the call was from Bernardo, “one of the biggest swarmer cell-phone people I know. ‘Where are you? There are all these people here!’ And he wasn’t just calling us. He called 25 people. Pretty soon everybody he knew was sitting on the grass, and none of them knew they were going to be there that morning.”
This is the precise opposite of a 1962-style American Graffiti world. Then you had to go to a place—the strip, the malt shop—to find out what was going on. In the early 21st century, you found out by cell phone what was going on, and then you went to the place where it was happening.
Swarming is a classic example of how once-isolated individuals discover a new way to organize order out of chaos. It is a tick on The Curve of the connectivity ramp. The whole point is to bring people together for face-to-face contact. Swarming is also leading to such wondrous social developments as “time-softening,” “cell dancing,” “life skittering,” “posse pinging,” “drunk dialing” and “smart mobs.”
Howard Rheingold is an apostle of swarming. A colorful character who tastefully paints his black dress shoes with moons, stars, planets and flames, Rheingold has for a generation examined society’s unintended and imaginative uses of new technology.
He helped pioneer virtual communities (a phrase he invented and wrote a book about) before most people had even heard of e-mail or seen a cell phone. He began this work so far in the dim and murky past—1988—that pundits then saw as preposterous the idea of human relationships being created simply by typing into the ether. This was before flesh-met entered the lexicon of the early adopters, as in: “Oh yeah, we know each other real well—although I don’t think we’ve ever flesh-met.”
As a cell phone increasingly becomes something that a teenager gets with her driver’s license and it shrinks from a tool you carried to a fashion item you wear, Rheingold sees a profound shift in society. “They amplify human talents for cooperation,” he says.
This is by no means all fun and games. The gear is used by “some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks,” says Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Smart mobs are a serious realignment of human affairs, in which leaders may determine an overall goal, but participants at the lowest possible level—who are constantly innovating—create the actual execution on the fly. They respond to changing situations without requesting or requiring permission. In some cases, even the goal is determined collaboratively and nonhierarchically. It is the warp-speed embodiment of the French revolutionary’s maxim “There go the people; I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
The key to why mobiles are an uptick in the ramp of human connectivity is that they move communications out to wherever and whenever humans roam. Especially as e-mail is piped to your mobile, one sees behavior like that in the Philippines in 2000 and 2001. There, former president Joseph Estrada, accused of massive corruption, was driven out of power by smart mobs who—alerted by their cell phones—swarmed to demonstrations, gathering in no time. “It’s like pizza delivery,” said Alex Magno, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines. “You can get a rally in 30 minutes—delivered to you.”
Cell phones driving political change is part of a ramp of political connectivity with mythically Prevail overtones. These include fax machines enabling Tiananmen Square, photocopiers fueling the Polish Solidarity uprising, cassette recordings firing the Iranian revolution and shortwave radios aiding the French Resistance. The difference with cell phones was the amazing speed with which people could swarm. It created not only a new kind of protest but also a new kind of protester. “It’s a great way to get people who are in offices involved,” Christina Bautisto, who works in Manila’s financial district, said of her fellow professionals. “They don’t have to spend all day protesting. They just get a message telling them when it’s starting, and then they take the elevator down to the street. They can be seen, scream a little and then go back to work.” In Washington, mobile-mediated swarms are regular highlights of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund protests. “I don’t want to give away all our tricks,” says Eidinger, the political activist. “But wireless plays a huge role.” That includes everything from little “Family Pack” communicators from Radio Shack on up to sophisticated channel-skipping radios that are not easily monitored, all of which are used by “flying squads” to respond quickly to unanticipated opportunities. Cell phones are in constant use by lawyers seeking court orders designed to complicate the lives of the authorities as the protest is still evolving.
The U.S. military has been one of the earliest institutions to both fear and see the possibilities in swarming. John Arquilla co-authored Swarming and the Future of Conflict for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He sees swarming—“a deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions”—as spearheading a revolution in military affairs. “In future campaigns,” Arquilla says, leaders might benefit by simply “drawing up a list of targets, fixed and mobile, and attaching point values to them. Then units in the field, in the air and at sea could simply pick whatever hadn’t yet been taken. The commander would review periodic progress, adjust point values if needed from time to time, and basically stay the hell out of the way of the swarm.”
Despite these sober implications, in the early 21st century social swarms were easily the most interesting examples of the ramp of connection. Social swarming involves sharing your breath with others in real time. It means pulsing to the rhythm of life with your posse. It means a nonstop emotional connection to your clan.
It’s Saturday night in Washington, and between the art-show openings of twilight and the after-hours club
s near dawn, the tribe that swarms touches down at Gazuza. Single, in their twenties and thirties, and wired, the members of the hive flit into the stylish Dupont Circle club as they hear that at this instant, the action is here. Bill Luza, 35, an architectural designer dressed all in white, is old enough to regale the crowd with tales of days so ancient that his first cell phone was the size of a loaf of bread. It came with its own shoulder bag. Today, of course, to be young is to be cognitively welded to a mobile. “You always want it near you,” somebody says. “You take the phone out of your purse and leave your purse behind. You take your phone even when you don’t take your purse or your keys. It’s like a little person.” Luza raises his head from a call. “That one was from Argentina,” he remarks casually.
All right, Mr. Lanier, you say your measure is interesting group behavior? The swarmers laugh when “cell dancing” comes up. This is the choreography of two people who are vaguely in the same area but can’t find each other. “It’s a locator service,” says Anna Boyarsky, 21, an intern at National Geographic. “My younger brother was in town. We were going to meet up for lunch. ‘I’m at M and something,’ he said.” She had him start walking down the street, calling out landmarks. Suddenly, she crowed, “I see you, I’m at the other corner.”
“Drunk dialing” brings blushes of recognition. “Saying things that you shouldn’t be saying because the cell phone’s in your pocket and you’re drunk,” someone acknowledges knowingly. “Stupid things,” says Angie Hacker, an intern with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “My best friend at home, she broke up with this guy she went out with for two years. She calls him and like, ‘I know you’re not over me. I know you feel that way. You’re just going out with that other girl because she’s around.’ And then she hung up.”
“Ohhhhhh. I have a friend,” says Corinne Fralick, 21, an intern at the Center for Policy Research on Women. “Every weekend, one o’clock in the morning, she calls me. She’s totally trashed, and in California—three-hour time difference—to tell me how much she loves me, how much fun she’s having, how much fun I’m having. Talking about everything. ‘The boy I kissed earlier.’ No point to the conversation. The cell phone companies must love it.”
More seriously, everyone acknowledges that being constantly in touch with the rest of the swarm is changing their sense of time, place, obligations and presence—indeed, the texture of their lives. Which would be Lanier’s point.
The very fabric of their time has softened. Remember arranging to meet at a specific time, like 8, at a specific location? Forget it. The new hallmark of squishy lives involves vaguely agreeing to meet after work and then hashing out the details on the fly. A time-softened meeting starts with a call that says, “I’m 15 minutes away.” It’s no longer unforgivable to be late, as long as you’re in contact. “If you didn’t have the cell phone, you’d make more of an effort to be on time,” says Kaine Kornegay, 21, an intern in the Senate. “It’s more socially acceptable to be late, because you’ve given notice that you would be.”
“With that, the problem is resolved because the information was transmitted, although not his physical body,” chimes in Ky Nguyen, 30, a freelance writer. “There’s a level-of-service agreement. You expect people with cell phones to be available all the time. If they don’t call back quickly, that’s interpreted as a snub, and it causes anger. It would not be the same calling a land line because you might be out, so taking a day to get back could seem perfectly reasonable. You get mad at each other when those expectations vary from actuality. Sometimes it’s because of a failure to perform on the part of a person. But at others, it’s just a failure to communicate the level of expectation—what one person is expected to provide versus what another person expects to receive.”
The expectations for connectedness can be astonishingly high. In an earlier conversation, Shirleece Roberts, 21, a senior at Rutgers who likes to use text messaging, had said of her swarm, “Everything is based around the cell phone. Where we’re going to meet. Where we’re going. Whether we’re lost. Where we’re at. How to get there. Everything.” Roberts is constantly pinging her posse. “When I get off work, going to the gym, I tell them, ‘Meet me there.’ If I’m going to the store or to the movies or out to eat, I’ll tell them. If we’re at parties or clubs and get split up, we’ll send a message that says ‘Meet me outside.’ You talk to all your friends, all day, every day. Before you come to work, when you get off work, during work, before going to bed. See what we’re doing. Going to sleep or going out.” The last thing Roberts does at the end of the day is send a text message that says, “Good night.”
There can be a dark side to all this. Swarmers run the risk of skittering like water bugs on the surface of life. By being quickly and constantly connected, they can avoid deep contact in time-consuming and meaningful ways. “If I’ve shown up and not found the love of my life, not had a love-at-first-sight experience,” at one location, says Bernardo Issel, a writer, “then I have the opportunity to find out if there are other events going on where that might happen. You’re flitting from one place to another. You’re more likely to pursue superficial engagements rather than deep pursuits. It contributes to this certain MTV approach to life where you engage in something for a few minutes and then there’s a commercial.” Boyarsky agrees, though she adds, “You have to have a grip on reality. Unless you know what is real—what is a real friendship and relationship—neither can have an effect on you. If you know what is real, then you know that the cell phone is not a real relationship. It’s a connection, but not a person. It allows you to connect to other people, but it’s not them, and not you.
“It’s a sign of commitment when you turn off the phone,” Boyarsky says. “When somebody turns off their cell phone for you, it’s true love.”
Lanier has a word he uses to describe this kind of intensity: flavor. “To my mind flavor is simply the word for whatever it is that defines the circle of empathy that I don’t know how to describe scientifically or technologically but that I think I can see. It’s some kind of meaning beyond the thing itself.” To him flavor captures whatever it is about the human enterprise that is ineffable and marvelous.
This is why Lanier is not at all panicked by the prospect of an increasingly enhanced humanity. As long as it narrows the gaps between people and has flavor, he is content. In fact, he can’t wait for the ramp of connectivity to give him the communication powers of his beloved cuttlefish. Sure, he says, some people will use their enhancements to advance their flavorless conformist careers, with everybody looking the same because they’ve all got the same tall, blond ideals. But that’s going to get real boring, not to mention that genetically engineered lawyers are going to be a variation on The Hell Scenario.
At some point, a device will appear that will be to biological enhancement what the Kurzweil 250 synthesizer was to music. It will finally put the powers of creation in the hands of people with some real imagination. When that day occurs, Lanier would like wings, please. Wings that have the presentation capabilities of the skin of his beloved cuttlefish, to be precise. He would like wings he could unfurl on which he might display whatever he imagined. He would have not just words for things as he tried to connect to others, but pictures—moving pictures, from his artistically original mind. He thinks it would be pretty hot on a date.
If I were a Natural, I ask, and I came across an Enhanced with cuttlefish display wings, would I be able to connect with such a creature?
“I actually think this is a yes,” he says. He admits that there may be a little initial recoiling in horror, but by that decade, he figures, there will be enough Enhanced with unusual attributes that good old-fashioned human curiosity will take over. “Whether you can connect to this person is the responsibility of both parties. I’d want to be somewhat surprised by somebody who went to that much trouble, to have wings.”
For The Prevail Scenario to work, he believes, you will have to have a world in which you have both differences between peopl
e and opportunities for intense connectedness. The measure of success would be the extent to which you could communicate more deeply and completely with others in a flavorful way.
So Lanier thinks the answer to whether the Natural could have an intense connection with such an Enhanced would be based entirely on the content of her spirit and on what that person revealed of herself on her wings.
“If somebody has display wings integrated into their body,” Lanier says, “and all she can do is show Gilligan’s Island reruns, I mean, I don’t want to know that person,” he says.
“That wouldn’t even be funny once.”
TRYING TO ARRANGE a journey to wherever Kurzweil, Joy and Lanier might happen to be tomorrow is like playing pool on a table where the balls jump like bullfrogs. Of them all, Jaron Lanier is the hardest to nail down. So when he abruptly announces that if I can get myself to the Denver airport, he’ll pick me up for a road trip down the Front Range on his way to visit his ailing dad in New Mexico, I hop to it.
Wrestling his way out of the snowy elevations, Lanier shows up at the airport in a Ford Windstar, a minivan at the unfashionable end of the mommy-mobile spectrum. It was the only vehicle he could find in Colorado, he explains, for which the rental company wouldn’t charge extra for him dumping it far, far away—doubtless because they were relieved to see it depart. So there we soon are, tooling through the mountains and deserts west of the 100th meridian with tape recorders, batteries, legal pads, pens, laptops, shoulder packs and a backseat rapidly filling with snack food wrappers. Two desperadoes headed for the border, looking like we’ve just ditched the middle-school soccer team. Oh yeah. Out of our way. We bad.