In the second place, if some savant had in fact uncovered the secret key to what went wrong in Iraq…what good would it have done either of us? Say we’d shouted it from the hilltops and convinced all reasonable men and women. That’s one to five percent of the population, none of them in positions of power. The people in positions of power don’t much care what reasonable people think, say or do.
In the third place, if we’d had the power to shorten the war…would we have wanted to? Isn’t that exactly what America did wrong the last time it tried to oust Saddam? Stop too soon, to placate civilians who thought war with actual bleeding in it was just too awful? Let’s say this conflict really was about the US ensuring its survival—securing its oil supply, or supporting the dollar, or whatever. Did we really want it to lose? Some may believe that America dominates the world economy unfairly, and that this has been bad for the world…but do they seriously think European domination would be in some way better? Don’t they know any history? America is like capitalism itself: just awful…and miles better than the second choice.
Even then, it was way too late to do anything. We had no idea what the right thing might be, and we still don’t. All the things we could do, just to be doing something, seem certain to make things worse. We have way too much information, none of it reliable. We have way too much theory, none of it experimentally checkable. We have way too many opinions, all of value zero. The noise level is starting to frighten the children. Let’s all shut up now, and pray to God that America hasn’t screwed things up too badly.
Then maybe someone will notice how, even though Air Canada went broke the very same week we privatized it, fifteen years ago, the BC government has just sagely decided to do the same thing with not just the power company, but also the only road that goes to my home, the BC Ferries system. Essential public service monopolies are now owned—owned—by people I didn’t choose, over whom I cannot ever have any influence or regulatory control, who serve for twice as long as George Bush and can’t be impeached, whose whims are unappealable, unrepealable law, and who freely admit they care only about money and will scrap my ferry, my only lifeline, unless it turns a profit. Suddenly my longtime prospects don’t seem a whole lot better than if I lived in a suburb of Baghdad. Mr. Campbell’s government now guarantees me precious few more services than Saddam provides the Kurds—BC’s medical care, social assistance, legal aid, human rights, police protection…even its power, water and road systems are all plummeting toward Third World standards. Yet everyone around me is talking loudly about events we can’t influence on the other side of the planet.
Where are the UN peacekeepers to keep the hospitals open, the lights lit and essential ferry service running for the thousands of island dwellers, here in BC? What human shields will deter the inexorable Olympics invasion? Where are the humanitarians who’ll protect me from my local tyrants?
“It claims to be fully automatic—but actually, you have to push this little button, here…”
“His bow-tie is really a camera…,” or The Future Is Not Listening
FIRST PRINTED MARCH 2000
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED in the future, and I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life—certainly the overwhelming majority of my professional life—trying to get other people to pay attention to it, too. I became a science fiction writer in part because I thought if I made speculating about tomorrow seem entertaining enough, I could persuade large numbers of my fellow citizens to think about it, for a change. I thought that would be a good thing.
Now, since the Millennium’s come, everybody and his sister’s dog is not merely thinking about the future, but talking about it at the top of his lungs. Worse, he’s starting to do something about it. And I’m beginning to wonder if I made a dreadful mistake.
It might have been better to leave the design of tomorrow to random chance and nerds like me who enjoy that sort of thing. Getting people who don’t read science fiction involved in building the future may prove in hindsight to have been disastrous. Because in our enthusiasm to recruit ordinary civilians to our cause, we told them the designers of tomorrow will make a classic buck. Inevitably, here comes the flood of fools.
The new Gold Rush is obviously underway—and in its opening stampede, common sense is being trampled under thundering hooves. Instead of being thoughtfully designed and elegantly built by sensible people like thee and me, the future is being slapped together by idiots out of mismatched parts and put on the market before the glue has set.
Consider a magazine I encountered in my optometrist’s waiting room: a Scientific American Presents special edition called Your Bionic Future. It contains an article headed “Smart Stuff.” No sense naming the author; it’s not her fault. She just wrote what they wanted her to write: progress-pimping. Look at the wonders tomorrow may bring!
Let’s.
“At Columbia University, a computer scientist is crafting eyeglasses that do more than just help you see. Want to try a restaurant in a foreign city? Glance above the restaurant’s door and your glasses will immediately become windows to the Internet, offering you a review of the kung pao chicken or coq au vin served inside. Need some help during a presentation? Look to the right, and your glasses will flash your notes…
“…repair workers who fix airplanes or cars while wearing the glasses could do without notebooks full of instructions. And down the line, when the glasses have finer resolution and tracking devices, doctors might even use them during surgery.”
Do you really need me to create a satirical little science fiction vignette demonstrating that this is one of the dumbest ideas ever? Isn’t it a case of ducks in a barrel?
Surely you can imagine just as well as I the surgeon who, bending over your incision and squinting to the right, is actually checking his stock portfolio…or looking to see if any hot new videos have been posted at www.sensuoussheep.com. I’m certain you don’t need my help to imagine yourself walking the streets with your terrified gaze fixed straight ahead at all times, lest you accidentally invoke the spray of hype that issues like ghostly radar chaff from every object you walk past. When hundreds of strangers are staring at you in expectation, waiting to hear your speech, which would you rather depend on: a stack of index cards…or something as reliable as, say, your web browser? “Moving on to the Fall line, we find…uh, 404, file not found…just a minute…shit. Excuse me—I seem to have crashed. There’ll be a three-minute delay while I reboot my glasses…”
This “Smart Stuff” article appears to have been written by Q. You know, the old bird who was always supplying 007 with pens that turned into death rays, watches that could translate ecclesiastical Fukienese into conversational Urdu and shoe-heels with a fully-stocked bar. Apparently most people feel, subconsciously, that there’s something profoundly futuristic about multifunction devices—especially if the functions have as little as possible to do with one another. And so we’re offered:
a “false fingernail that can direct robots”
(Interesting. Lose one of those, and a single hair, and you’ve given up both your ID data and your DNA. Any competent wizard can now cast evil spells on you! The ancients were right: guard your nail and hair clippings.)
“earrings that ‘check stress’ by monitoring your blood volume pulse”
a “sports bra that measures your respiration and muscle tension”
(I predict a huge spin-off market: software that hacks into her earrings and bra and lets you know exactly how you’re doing at seducing her.)
a “shoe that tracks skin conductivity, another sign of stress”
I don’t want my clothes to nag me. “You’re too tense. Listen to me, I’m your bra: you need to relax. If you won’t listen to me, ask your shoe.” I don’t want to go around wearing a ring that will instruct my coffee machine to brew a cup of Tanzanian Peaberry every time my blood-to-caffeine ratio exceeds a certain value. I want to notice that I feel like a cup of coffee, and choose to make one, and maybe this time I want the chic
ory-mix from the Cafe du Monde. I don’t want eyeglasses I can check e-mail on—as it is, I already get idiots complaining that I’ve allowed a whole eight hours to elapse before responding to their latest electronic summons. I don’t want the refrigerator to order eggs for me when I run low—maybe I’m just sick of eggs, did you ever think of that, Dr. Einstein?
Consider a 1999 Newsweek cover story, “Technology: What You’ll Want Next,” which makes it terrifyingly clear that the people responsible for creating—and selling us—our future haven’t the slightest clue what we want it to look like, and are happily preparing to force-feed us yet another endless shopping-list of horrors they think sound really keen (and lucrative). None of the stuff they’ve conned us into buying before actually works very well…but we bought it nonetheless and have not demanded our money back loudly (enough), so they’re planning to repeat the scam indefinitely until stopped by force of arms. Thus Newsweek now breathlessly hypes the Home of the Future, “A Really Smart House”—by which they mean…
(pause for drum-roll, during which I advise you to sit down, place a stick between your teeth, and take a firm grip on your underwear)
(Are you ready?)
(You really think so, eh?)
…a house in which every single system and utensil is connected to the Internet.
Swear to God: the technoweenies honestly believe what you want, and will pay a fortune to acquire, is a home in which every single thing you own behaves as reliably as your Web browser does now.
The coffeemaker, fridge, microwave and toaster “will all be privy to your schedule”…so they’ll function automatically whether you happen to keep that schedule or not; you’ll have to advise them all if you decide to sleep in. The dishwasher “will note you’ve changed detergents and e-mail the manufacturer so it can revise and optimize its own internal software”—translation: every single load of dishes will be an adventure! Your computer, says Newsweek, will be “woven into your sports jacket”—making every spilled drink a potential kilobuck disaster and dry-cleaning dangerous, as well as apprising any hacker of your every move. The very fish in your aquarium will be dependent on the kindness—and programming competence—of strangers. Even your junk will be getting junk e-mail.
Everything in your life, in short, will depend utterly on that group of humans who’ve generally proved themselves sloppy, irresponsible and short-sighted: computer programmers and software designers. (Can you say “Y2K?”) Folks who have in fifteen years made absolutely zero progress toward learning, let alone anticipating (and much less meeting), the routine daily needs of society’s most easily-served customers—professional writers (there is not one good word processing program in existence, and it’s hard to imagine an easier challenge)—are about to take on everyone’s every need.
Soon, your stereo will be e-mailing your TV to request uploads of interesting soundtrack music, and the TV will have to check with your lawyer’s FAQ program about copyrights before complying. Your closet will be exchanging devastating bon mots about your taste in clothing with your dresser, while the hamper and washing machine snicker over the latest stains in your underwear. I dare not even hint about the incestuous horrors that will occur in the dark inside your refrigerator. The VCR will tell any hacker who’s interested just which porn movies you watch, and the video camera in every room will report just what you do while you watch them.
A netspamming virus written by a mischievous twelve-year-old will corrupt the microprocessor in your pants, causing them to change size at random, and your toilet may never stop flushing. Nor will that “smart” toilet ever stop sending detailed analyses of your stool and urine samples to your doctor…and that curious twelve-year-old…or your competitors, or your employers, or the government.
In short, there will be absolutely no object in your life which will not bite you on a tender spot at least three times a day, the way your computer does now. And they will all incur charges without consulting you first. Every one of the pre-sets on your telephone’s speed-dialer will be reserved for assorted Help Lines, on which you’ll spend the bulk of every day, on hold. Assuming you ever get through, there’ll be even less help there than ever before—for the whole system will be so unimaginably complex that it won’t be even theoretically possible for even a computer program to understand it well enough to debug it, much less a human.
Mars ain’t far enough; I’m moving to Pluto.
The Internet should do what it’s good for—e-mail, data exchange and pornography—and stay out of my face otherwise. I’ll let computers run my home the day I find one that never crashes, hangs or misunderstands my intentions. Or accepts cookies from strangers.
But being a relentless optimist, I still believe good can come of technology as easily as bad. Here are some of the simple everyday miracles of tomorrow I’d actually pay serious money for—and as far as I can tell, nobody is working on any of them:
a CD player that remembers, after being told once, the order in which I usually prefer the tracks of a given CD to be played. And can also command my amplifier to advance the treble for jazz, retard the bass for hip-hop or reset tone controls to flat for classical. (It’d be nice if the sound of a ringing phone put it into pause mode.)
a computer that boots instantly. Doesn’t anybody but me think it insane that my car, stove, stereo, TV, printer, furnace and water heater all start instantaneously…but the most expensive and high-tech piece of gear I own needs three full minutes’ notice before it can let me jot down a thought?
a VCR (and/or TV) that doesn’t require total reprogramming after every furshlugginer power outage. Ever hear of PRAM, fellas?
a mass return to shoelaces that aren’t made of slippery material, so I don’t have to do twice as much tying to keep them from slipping as I used to twenty years ago.
Like many writers, I am—as you know—a serious coffee drinker. The only secret of good coffee (besides avoiding Starbuck’s beans) is fanatic cleanliness: I clean my trusty Black & Decker drip coffeemaker with a damp paper towel at least twice a day. Still, brown mung inevitably builds up on the underside of the drizzler (pardon these technical terms), and also in those ribbed channels on the floor of the filter basket. I usually buy a new machine every year or so.
It’s the damnedest thing, but apparently you can’t buy a good one any more. All the ones I’ve seen, even the current Black & Decker model, now seem to have that damn “drip-stop” feature.
This feature is, always, a catastrophic malfunction waiting to happen: a flimsy five-cent bit of plastic and spring whose inevitable failure will necessitate replacing the whole furshlugginer machine. Meanwhile it collects brown mung, concentrates it at the worst possible place and cannot be cleaned effectively. Above all, it’s unnecessary: if you absolutely must have coffee before the cycle finishes, why not just replace the carafe with your cup, then swap back again when it’s full?
They solved a problem I didn’t have…poorly…and now it appears they’ve forced the flawed solution on me.
Isn’t there some way for us to communicate with the people who’re inventing our future: designers and the industries who pay them? Wouldn’t they welcome a little help in identifying our real desires, the better to pander to them? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to sell us things we actually want to buy, and thus be able to fire half the advertising and marketing weasels? Present market research techniques simply aren’t working—again and again techno-wizards solve problems we didn’t have and fail to guess our actual needs or desires.
I fantasize a huge website, with a page for every consumer industry and links galore—a sort of perpetual town meeting. Someplace where innovators can run proposed new technologies past interested consumers…and we can protest them before it’s too late. Where we can tell companies what we hate about their present products and suggest improvements we’d actually like—or even propose new products altogether. I wish someone would offer to sell me a continuously self-tuning acoustic guitar, for instance. Or a wor
d processing program that does not force me to pay for (and waste disk space on) elaborate and powerful page layout, graphics, table, sound, video, outlining, voice annotation and mail merge functions I’ll never use.
Or a self-cleaning coffeepot. Without those mung-collecting little ribs on the floor of the filter basket…
Sting of the Cyber Trifles, or How I spent my winter worktime
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 2002
IT BECAME CLEAR that I needed a new(er) Powerbook. Even with cable access, Amazon.com took two and a half minutes to load. The computer matching my needs was hard to find. So I went to eBay. It was even slower than Amazon, but I persisted. In only an evening I located an auction for the machine I wanted. I checked the seller’s User Feedback, and it was pretty good, so I posted a bid.
Next day eBay canceled that auction: the seller was a fraud. Whoa, I thought, it’s good to see eBay has sharp security procedures in place. Those words would come back to taunt me. I found another Powerbook being auctioned by someone screen-named “Mypaltoo,” and made damn sure this one was praised by all eight previous customers. I entered that auction—and won!
The seller then identified herself by e-mail as Aleksandra Rubleva of Auburn, Washington, and insisted in very broken English that I make payment through a service called MoneyGram, which only takes cash. I didn’t want to wait for a cheque to clear, most private individuals aren’t equipped to take Visa and for all I knew Russian emigrés don’t believe in money orders. So I sent Gosphazha Rubleva over a thousand dollars. Never heard from her again.
The Crazy Years Page 18
