The Inevitable

by Kevin Kelly

  In addition to findability, another ongoing revolution within media can be considered “rewindability.” In the oral age, when someone spoke, you needed to listen carefully, because once the words were uttered, they were gone. Before the advent of recording technology, there was no backing up, no scrolling back to hear what was missed.

  The great historical shift from oral to written communications that occurred thousands of years ago gave the audience (readers) the possibility to scroll back to the beginning of a “speech,” by rereading it.

  One of the revolutionary qualities of books is their ability to repeat themselves for the reader, at the reader’s request, as many times as wanted. In fact, to write a book that is reread is the highest praise for an author. And in many ways authors have exploited this characteristic of books by writing them to be reread. They may add plot points that gain meaning on second reading, hide irony that is only revealed on rereading, or pack it full of details that require close study and rereading to decipher. Vladimir Nabokov once claimed, “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Nabokov’s novels often featured an unreliable narrator (for instance, Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor), which strongly encouraged readers to review the tale from a later, more enlightened perspective. The best mysteries and thrillers tend to end with stealthy last-minute reversals that are brilliantly foreshadowed on second reading. The seven volumes of Harry Potter are packed with so many hidden clues that the stories need to be reread for maximum enjoyment.

  Our screen-based media in the last century had much in common with books. Movies, like books, are narrative driven and linear. But unlike books, movies were rarely rewatched. Even the most popular blockbusters were released to theaters on a certain day, played in a local theater for a month, and then were rarely seen again, except on late-night television decades later. In the century before videotape, there was no replaying. Television was much the same. A show broadcasted on a schedule. You either watched it at the time or you never saw it. It was uncommon to watch a just released movie more than once, and only a few television episodes would reappear again as summer reruns. And even then, to watch it you needed to schedule your attention to be present on the day and time when that show was due to run.

  Because of this “oral” characteristic of movies and television, shows were engineered with the assumption they would be seen only once. That reasonable assumption was made into a feature because it forced the movie’s narrative to convey as much as possible in the first impression. But it also diminished it because so much more could be crafted to deliver on second and third encounters.

  First the VHS, then DVDs, later TiVos, and now streaming video make it trivially easy to scroll back screenworks. If you want to see something again, you do. Often. If you want to see only a snippet of a movie or television program, you do, at any time. This ability to rewind also applies to commercials, news, documentaries, clips—anything online, in fact. More than anything else, rewindability is what has turned commercials into a new art form. The ability to rewatch them has moved them out of the prison of ephemeral glimpses in the middle of ephemeral shows, to a library of shows that can be read and reread like books. And then shared with others, discussed, analyzed, and studied.

  We are now witnessing the same inevitable rewindability of screen-based news. TV news was once an ephemeral stream of stuff that was never meant to be recorded or analyzed—merely inhaled. Now it is rewindable. When we scroll back news, we can compare its veracity, its motives, its assumptions. We can share it, fact-check it, and mix it. Because the crowd can rewind what was said earlier, this changes the posture of politicians, of pundits, of anyone making a claim.

  The rewindability of film is what makes 120-hour movies such as Lost, or The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica possible, and enjoyable. They brim with too many details ingeniously molded into them to be apparent on initial viewing; scrolling back at any point is essential.

  Music was transformed when it became recorded, rewindable. Live music was meant to be of the moment, and to vary from performance to performance. The ability to scroll back to the beginning and hear music again—that exact performance—changed music forever. Songs became shorter on average, and more melodic and repeatable.

  Games now have scroll-back functions that allow replays, redos, or extra lives, a related concept. One can rewind the experience and try again, with slightly different variations, again and again, until one masters that level. On the newest racing games, one can rewind to any previous point by literally running the action backward. All major software packages have an undo button that lets you rewind. The best apps enable unlimited undos, so you can scroll back as far as you want. The most complex pieces of consumer software in existence, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, employ what is called nondestructive editing, which means you can rewind to any particular previous point you want at any time and restart from there, no matter how many changes you’ve made. The genius of Wikipedia is that it also employs nondestructive editing—all previous versions of an article are kept forever, so any reader can in fact rewind the changes back in time. This “redo” function encourages creativity.

  Immersive environments and virtual realities in the future will inevitably be able to scroll back to earlier states. In fact, anything digital will have undo and rewindability as well as remixing.

  Going forward, we are likely to get impatient with experiences that don’t have undo buttons, such as eating a meal. We can’t really replay the taste and smells of a meal. But if we could, that would certainly alter cuisine.

  The perfect replication of media in terms of copies is well explored. But the perfect replication of media in terms of rewinding is less explored. As we begin to lifelog our daily activities, to capture our live streams, more of our lives will be scrollable. Typically I dip into my inbox or outbox several times a day to scroll back to some previous episode of my life. If we expect to scroll back, this will shift what we do the first time. The ability to scroll back easily, precisely, and deeply might change how we live in the future.

  In our near future we’ll have the option to record as much of our conversations as we care to. It will cost nothing as long as we carry (or wear) a device, and it will be fairly easy to rewind. Some people will record everything as an aid to their memory. The social etiquette around recall will be in flux; private conservations are likely to be off-limits. But more and more of what happens in public will be recorded—and re-viewable—via phone cams, dashboard-mounted webcams on every car, and streetlight-mounted surveillance cams. Police will be required by law to record all activity from their wearables while they are on duty. Rewinding police logs will shift public opinion, just as often vindicating police as not. The everyday routines of politicians and celebrities will be subject to scrolling back from multiple viewpoints, creating a new culture where everyone’s past is recallable.

  Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations that moving images are undergoing. These two and many other factors of remixing apply to all newly digitized media, such as virtual reality, music, radio, presentations, and so on.

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  • • •

  Remixing—the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces—plays havoc with traditional notions of property and ownership. If a melody is a piece of property you own, like your house, then my right to use it without permission or compensation is very limited. But digital bits are notoriously nontangible and nonrival, as explained earlier. Bits are closer to ideas than to real estate. As far back as 1813, Thomas Jefferson understood that ideas were not really property, or if they were property they differed from real estate. He wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the
idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today.

  For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important.

  How does one “own” a melody? When you give me a melody, you still have it. Yet in what way is it even yours to begin with if it is one note different from a similar melody a thousand years old? Can one own a note? If you sell me a copy of it, what counts as a copy? What about a backup, or one that streams by? These are not esoteric theoretical questions. Music is one of the major exports of the U.S., a multibillion-dollar industry, and the dilemma of what aspect of intangible music can be owned and how it can be remixed is at the front and center of culture today.

  Legal tussles over the right to sample—to remix—snippets of music, particularly when either the sampled song or the borrowing song make a lot of money, are ongoing. The appropriateness of remixing, reusing material from one news source for another is a major restraint for new journalistic media. Legal uncertainty about Google’s reuse of snippets from the books it scanned was a major reason it closed down its ambitious book scanning program (although the court belatedly ruled in Google’s favor in late 2015). Intellectual property is a slippery realm.

  There are many aspects of contemporary intellectual property laws that are out of whack with the reality of how the underlying technology works. For instance, U.S. copyright law gives a temporary monopoly to a creator for his or her creation in order to encourage further creation, but the monopoly has been extended for at least 70 years after the death of the creator, long after a creator’s dead body can be motivated by anything. In many cases this unproductive “temporary” monopoly is 100 years long and still being extended longer, and is thus not temporary at all. In a world running at internet speed, a century-long legal lockup is a serious detriment to innovation and creativity. It’s a vestigial burden from a former era based on atoms.

  The entire global economy is tipping away from the material and toward intangible bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.

  So what should the new laws favor in a world of remixing?

  Appropriation of existing material is a venerable and necessary practice. As the economists Romer and Arthur remind us, recombination is really the only source of innovation—and wealth. I suggest we follow the question, “Has it been transformed by the borrower?” Did the remixing, the mashup, the sampling, the appropriation, the borrowing—did it transform the original rather than just copy it? Did Andy Warhol transform the Campbell’s soup can? If yes, then the derivative is not really a “copy”; it’s been transformed, mutated, improved, evolved. The answer each time is still a judgment call, but the question of whether it has been transformed is the right question.

  Transformation is a powerful test because “transformation” is another term for becoming. “Transformation” acknowledges that the creations we make today will become, and should become, something else tomorrow. Nothing can remain untouched, unaltered. By that I mean, every creation that has any value will eventually and inevitably be transformed—in some version—into something different. Sure, the version of Harry Potter that J. K. Rowling published in 1997 will always be available, but it is inevitable that another thousand fan fiction versions of her book will be penned by avid amateurs in the coming decades. The more powerful the invention or creation, the more likely and more important it is that it will be transformed by others.

  In 30 years the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed the most.

  9

  INTERACTING

  Virtual reality (VR) is a fake world that feels absolutely authentic. You can experience a hint of VR when you watch a movie in 3-D on a jumbo IMAX screen in surround sound. At moments you’ll be fully immersed in a different world, which is what virtual reality aims for. But this movie experience is not full VR, because while your imagination travels to another place in a theater, your body doesn’t. It feels like you are in a chair. Indeed, in a theater you must remain sitting in the same spot looking straight ahead passively in order for the immersive magic to work.

  A much more advanced VR experience might be like the world Neo confronts in the movie The Matrix. Even as Neo runs, leaps, and battles a hundred clones in a computerized world, it feels totally real to him. Maybe even hyperreal—realer than real. His vision, hearing, and touch are hijacked by the synthetic world so completely that he cannot detect its artificiality. A yet even more advanced mode of VR is the holodeck on Star Trek. There, holographic projections of objects and people are so real in fiction they are solid to the touch. A simulated environment that you can enter at will is a recurring science fiction dream that is long overdue.

  Today’s virtual reality is in between the elemental feeling of a 3-D IMAX movie and the ultimate holodeck simulation. A VR experience in 2016 can involve a billionaire’s mansion in Malibu that you walk through, room by overstuffed room, feeling as if you are really there when you are actually standing a thousand miles away wearing a helmet in a real estate agent’s office. That is something I experienced recently. Or it might be a fantasy world full of prancing unicorns where you authentically feel you are flying, once you put on special glasses. Or it may be an alternate version of the office cubicle you are sitting in that includes floating touch screens and an avatar of a distant coworker speaking next to you. In each case, you have a very strong sense that you are physically present in this virtual world, in large part because you can do things—look around, freely move in any direction, move objects—that persuade you that you are “really there.”

  Recently I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in many prototype VR worlds. The best of these achieve an unshakeable sense of presence. The usual goal for increasing the degree of realism while you tell a story is to suspend disbelief. The goal for VR is not to suspend belief but to ratchet up belief—that you are somewhere else, and maybe even somebody else. Even if your intellectual mind can figure out you are really in a swivel chair, your embodied “I” will be convinced you are trudging through a swamp.

  For the past decade, researchers inventing VR have settled on a standard demonstration of this overpowering presence. The visitor waiting for the demo stands in the center of an actual real nondescript waiting room. A pair of large dark goggles rest on a stool. The visitor dons the goggles and is immediately immersed into a virtual version of the same room she was standing in, with the same nondescript paneling and chairs. Not much is changed from her point of view. She can look around. The scene looks a little coarser through the goggles. But slowly the floor of the room begins to drop away, leaving the visitor standing on a plank that now floats over the receding floor 30 meters below. She is asked to walk out farther on the plank suspended high over a most realistic pit. The realism of the scene has been improved over the years so that by now the response of the visitor is very predictable. Either she cannot move her feet or she trembles as she inches forward, palms sweating.

  When I was plunged into this scene myself, I reacted the same way. My mind reeled. My conscious mind kept whispering to me that I was in a dim room in the research labs of Stanford, but my primitive mind had hijacked my body. It was insisting that I was perched on a too narrow plank too high in the sky and that I must back off this plank immediately. Right now! My fear of heights kicked in. My knees began to shake. I was almost nauseous. Then I did something stupid. I decided to jump off the plank a little ways down onto a nearby ledge in the virtual world. But of course there was no “down,” so my real body dove onto the floor. But since I was actuall
y standing on the floor, I was caught as I fell by two strong spotters in the real room, who were standing there precisely for this purpose. My reaction was completely normal; almost everyone falls.

  Totally believable virtual reality is just about here. But I have been wrong about VR before. In 1989 a friend of a friend invited me to his lab in Redwood City, California, to see some gear he had invented. The lab turned out to be a couple of rooms in an office complex that were missing most of their desks. The walls were covered by a gallery of neoprene bodysuits embroidered with wires, large gloves sporting electronic components, and rows of duct-taped swimming goggles. The guy I’d gone to see, Jaron Lanier, sported shoulder-length blond dreadlocks. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but Jaron promised me a new experience, something he called virtual reality.

  A few minutes later Lanier handed me one black glove, a dozen wires snaking from the fingers across the room to a standard desktop PC. I put it on. Lanier then placed a set of black goggles suspended by a web of straps onto my head. A thick black cable ran down my back from the headgear to his computer. Once my eyes focused inside the goggles, I was in. I was inside a place bathed in a diffuse light blue. I could see a cartoon version of my glove in the exact place my real hand felt it was. The virtual glove moved in sync with my hand. It was now “my” glove, and I felt—in my body, not just my head—very strongly that I was not in an office. Lanier himself then climbed into his own creation. Using his own helmet and glove, he appeared in his own world as a girl avatar, since the beauty of his system was that you could design your avatar to look like anything you wanted. Two of us now inhabited this first mutual dream space. In 1989.