Wonkr (and Believr and Hungr et al.) are just imagined examples of how artificial intuition can be enhanced and accelerated to a degree that’s scientifically and medically shocking. Yet this machine intelligence is already morphing, and the results are not just something simple like Amazon suggesting books you’d probably like based on the one you just bought (suggestions that are often far better than the book you just bought). Artificial intuition systems already gently sway us in whatever way they are programmed to do so. Flying in coach, not business? You’re tall. Why not spend twenty-nine dollars on extra legroom? Guess what? Jimmy Buffett has a cool new single out, and you should see the Tommy Bahama shirt he wears on his avatar photo. I’m sorry, but that’s the third time you’ve entered an incorrect password; I’m going to have to block your ISP from now on, but to upgrade to a Dell-friendly security system, just click on the smiley face to the right…
None of what you just read comes as any sort of surprise. But twenty years ago it would have seemed futuristic, implausible and in some way surmountable, because you, having character, would see these nudges as the expressions of trivial commerce that they are, and would be able to disregard them accordingly. What they never could have told you twenty years ago, though, is how boring and intense and unrelenting this sort of capitalist micro-assault is, from all directions at all waking moments, and how, twenty years later, it only shows signs of getting much more intense, focused, targeted and unyielding, and galactically more boring. That’s the future and pausing to think about it makes us curl our toes into fists within our shoes. It is going to happen. We are about to enter the Golden Age of Intuition and it is dreadful.
I sometimes wonder, How much data am I generating? Meaning: How much data do I generate just sitting there in a chair, doing nothing except existing as a cell within any number of global spreadsheets and also as a mineable nugget lodged within global memory storage systems—inside the cloud, I suppose? (Yay cloud!)
Did I buy a plane ticket online today? Did I get a speeding ticket? Did my passport quietly expire? Am I unwittingly reading a statistically disproportionate number of articles on cancer? Is my favourite shirt getting frayed and in possible need of replacement? Do I have a thing for short blondes? Is my grammar deteriorating in a way that suggests certain subcategories of dementia? In 1998 I wrote a book in which a character working for the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant in Oregon is located using a “mis-spellcheck” program that learned how users misspell words. It could tell my character if she needed to trim her fingernails or when she was having her period, but it was also used, down the road, to track her down when she was typing online at a café. I had an argument with an editor over that one: “This kind of program is simply not possible. You can’t use it. You’ll just look stupid!” In 2015 you can probably buy a mis-spellcheck as a forty-nine-cent app from the iTunes store…or upgrade to Mis-spellcheck Pro for another ninety-nine cents.
What a strange world. It makes one long for the world before DNA and the Internet, a world in which people could genuinely vanish. The Unabomber—Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski—seems like a poster boy for this strain of yearning. He had literally no data stream, save for his bombs and his manifesto, which ended up being his undoing. How? He promised The New York Times that he’d stop sending bombs if they would print his manifesto, which they did. And then his brother recognized his writing style and turned him in to the FBI. Machine intelligence—artificial intuition—steeped in deeply rooted language structures, would have identified Kaczynski’s writing style in under one-tenth of a second.
Kaczynski really worked hard at vanishing, but he got nabbed in the 1990s before data exploded. If he existed today, could he still vanish? Could he unexist himself in 2015? You can still live in a windowless cabin these days, but you can’t do it anonymously anymore. Even the path to your shack would be on Google Maps. (“Look, you can see a stack of red plastic kerosene cans from satellite view.”) Your metadata stream might be tiny but it would still exist in a way it never did in the past. Don’t we all know vanished family members or former friends who work hard so as to have no online presence? That mode of self-concealment will be doomed soon enough. Thank you, machine intelligence.
But wait. Why are we approaching data and metadata as negative forces? Maybe metadata is good, and maybe it somehow leads to, I don’t know, a more focused existence. Maybe in the future mega-metadata is going to become our new frequent-flyer points system. Endless linking and embedding can be disguised as fun or as practicality. Or loyalty. Or servitude. Last winter at a dinner, I sat across the table from the VP of North America’s second-largest loyalty management firm (explain that term to Karl Marx), who was the head of their airline loyalty division. I asked him what the best way to use points is. He said, “The one thing you never ever use points for is flying. Only a loser uses their miles on trips. It costs the company essentially nothing while it burns off vast swaths of points. Use your points to buy stuff, and if there isn’t any stuff to buy” (and there often isn’t other than barbecues, leather bags and crap jewellery), “then redeem miles for gift cards at stores where they might sell stuff you want. But for God’s sake, don’t use them to fly. You might as well flush those points down the toilet.”
Glad I asked.
So what will future loyalty data deliver to its donors, if not barbecues and Maui holidays? Access to the business-class Internet? Prescription medicines made in Europe, not in China? Maybe points could count toward community service duty?
Who would these new near-future entities be that want all of your metadata anyway? You could say corporations. We’ve now all learned to reflexively think of corporations when picturing anything sinister, but the term corporation now feels slightly Adbusters-y and unequipped to handle our new twenty-first-century corporate weirdness. Instead let’s use the term Cheney instead of corporation. I say Cheney because Dick Cheney remains the one figure in popular lore of the past two decades whom, even if you like him, it’s impossible to cast as anything but most likely evil, either in a Mr. Burns way or a monstrous way. There are lots of Cheneys out there and they are all going to want your data, whatever their use for it. Assuming these Cheneys don’t have the heart to actually kill or incarcerate you in order to garner your data, how will they collect it? How might a Cheney make people jump onto your loyalty program (data aggregation in disguise) instead of viewing it with suspicion?
Here’s an idea: What if metadata collection was changed from something spooky into something actually desirable and voluntary? How could you do that and what would it be? So right here I’m inventing the metadata version of Wonkr, and I’m going to give it an idiotic name: Freedom Points. What are Freedom Points? Every time you generate data, in whatever form, you accrue more Freedom Points. Some data is more valuable than other data, so points would be ranked accordingly: a trip to Moscow, say, would be worth a million times more points than your trip to the 7-Eleven.
What would Freedom Points allow you to do? Freedom Points would allow you to exercise your freedom, your rights and your citizenship in fresh, modern ways: points could allow you to bring extra assault rifles to dinner at your local Olive Garden restaurant. A certain number of Freedom Points would allow you to erase portions of your criminal record—or you could use Freedom Points to remove hours from your community service. And Freedom Points are about mega-capitalism. Everyone is involved, even the corn industry—especially the corn industry. Big Corn. Big Genetically Modified Corn. Use your Freedom Points to earn discount visits to Type 2 diabetes management retreats.
The thing about Freedom Points is that if you think about them for more than twelve seconds, you realize they have the magic ring of inevitability. The idea is basically too dumb to fail. The larger picture is that you have to keep generating more and more and more data in order to embed yourself ever more deeply into the global community. In a bold new equation, more data would convert into more personal freedom.
At the moment, artificial intuitio
n is just you and the cloud doing a little dance with a few simple algorithms. But shortly everyone’s dance with the cloud will be happening together in a cosmic cyber ballroom, and everyone’s data stream will be communicating with everyone else’s, and they’ll be talking about you: What did you buy today? What did you drink, ingest, excrete, inhale, view, unfriend, read, lean toward, reject, talk to, smile at, get nostalgic about, get angry about, link to, like or get off on? Tie these quotidian data hits within the longer time framework matrices of Wonkr, Believr, Grindr, Tinder et al., and suddenly you as a person becomes something that’s humblingly easy to predict, please, anticipate, model, forecast and replicate. Tie this new machine intelligence realm in with some smart 3D graphics that have captured your body metrics and likeness, and a few years down the road, you become sort of beside the point. There will eventually be a dematerialized duplicate you. While this seems sort of horrifying in a Stepford Wifey kind of way, the difference is that instead of killing you, your replicant meta-entity will merely try to convince you to buy a piqué-knit polo shirt in tones flattering to your skin at Abercrombie & Fitch.
This all presupposes the rise of machine intelligence wholly under the aegis of capitalism. But what if the rise of artificial intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? We can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing, yet instead they stick with Google and then get worried about Google having too much power—which is a relationship dynamic like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982, but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.
The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was twenty years ago. The only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments—or any other government—to say, “Okay, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine,” that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access—which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)
The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetize information in the same way they’ve monetized medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans, who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured and thus turned into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an Internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.
To summarize: Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)
The darkest thought of all may be this: No matter how much politics is applied to the Internet and its attendant technologies, it may simply be far too late in the game to change the future. The Internet is going to do to us whatever it is going to do, and the same end state will be achieved regardless of human will. Gulp.
Do we at least want to have free access to anything on the Internet? Well yes, of course. But it’s important to remember that once a freedom is removed from your Internet menu, it will never come back. The political system only deletes online options—it does not add them. The amount of Internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get. If our lives are a movie, this is the point where the future audience is shouting at the screen, “For God’s sake, load up on as much porn and gore and medical advice and blogs and film and TV and everything as you possibly can! It’s not going to last much longer!”
And it isn’t.
Yield: A Story about Cornfields
One day, people everywhere started looking around at all the other people and realized that everybody was looking younger. Well, not so much younger as…smoother. Wrinkles were vanishing not only on human faces but on their clothing too—and for at least the first sixty seconds after people realized this, they ran to their mirrors, saw their reflections and said to themselves, Dang! I am looking hot today!
But then that first minute ended and people began noticing other things. For example, stains were vanishing from clothing and furniture, and surfaces everywhere began looking Photo-shopped and sterile. Hairdos were looking cleaner and more geometrical—no more flyaway strands. Plants and animals began looking cuter and more rounded, and it dawned on everyone at the same moment: Holy shit! We’re all turning into cartoons!
Being aware of what was happening didn’t slow down the pace of cartoonification. With precision and speed the world was being reduced and crispened and stylized. Some people turned into manga characters. Others turned into high-res video game characters and avatars. Still others turned into classic cartoons, with faces where only the mouth moved when they spoke, with eyes that blinked once every seven seconds.
The world’s cartoonification was emotionally troubling, and it was bad for the economy too, as people stopped eating and taking shits and doing anything else that was unclean or unable to be reduced to colourful dots, lines, polygons or digital mesh.
A world of financially insolvent cartoons? Noooooooooo!
And then from Iowa came both hope and fear: a cornfield in that state had yet to convert into a cartoon cornfield. It had remained as real as ever, and cartoon people drove from everywhere in cartoon cars just to see something that hadn’t turned into squiggles and lines and polygons.
The only problem with the cornfield was that the cartoon people couldn’t get into it.
When they tried to enter, they hit an invisible wall. Cartoon planes flying toward the cornfield crashed into that same invisible wall; they fell to the earth in flames, with huge ink letters above them that said “WHAAM!!” and “k-k-k-keeeRACK!!”
From within the cornfield came a loud, bellowing voice, like that of actor James Earl Jones, claiming that it was responsible for turning the world into a cartoon and that it was enjoying every second of it.
The situation was dire and the world needed a hero, and it found one. He went by the name of Coffinshark the Unpleasant, and cartoonification had barely touched him—at most he looked like he’d had a lot of good cosmetic work done. He had a slickness that made people think that if he tried, he could easily pass as a member of the local Channel Three News Team.
People gasped in disbelief as Coffinshark smashed a hole in the invisible wall and entered the cornfield, vanishing quickly into its thousands of rows.
Near the middle of the field, he heard James Earl Jones shouting, “Coffinshark the Unpleasant, you are a loser and will never catch me!”
“But what if I do?”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
The voice was indignant. “You don’t even know who I am!”
“When I catch you I will.”
“Just you try!”
And so Coffinshark raced through the cornfield, trying to find the source of the voice. Sometimes he felt as if the voice was just a few stalks away; at other times it seemed distant. As Coffinshark chased the voice, he began making random turns within the corn, and soon the voice became confused.
�
�Coffinshark! What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to be chasing me!”
“But I am chasing you.”
“You do not have a clue what you are doing!”
“You’re right,” said Coffinshark. “I don’t.” He stopped and looked up at the sky and said, “Okay, big boy—you got me. Why don’t you come and hammer me into the ground right now.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I’m serious.”
“You people are idiots. I’m glad I turned you all into cartoons. It’s all you deserve.”
“Well, come on, squash me like a bug.”
The voice sighed and said, “Very well. As you wish.” From the sky a huge finger came down, and just before it squished Coffinshark, the voice cried out, “Oh shit!”
With all of his running, Coffinshark had drawn a huge button in the cornfield, and he had trampled down more cornstalks to spell out the words SATELLITE VIEW. As the finger squished Coffinshark, it pushed the button, and the world immediately resolved itself back into the real, photographic, life-as-normal deal.
Coffinshark picked himself up off the flattened corn, looked down at his torso, at his arms and legs, and saw that what little cartoonification had occurred to him had vanished—and he missed it already. “Screw this,” he said to himself.
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