The Salmon of Doubt

by Douglas Adams

  Apart from doing away with endless confusion and inconvenience, the arrival of a new standard would encourage all sorts of other new features to emerge. Power points in convenient places in cars. DC power points in homes and offices and, most important, DC power points in the armrests of airplane seats . . .

  I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I’ve given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are all sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life—dimming modes, RAM disks, processor-resting, and so on—but the point is that I really can’t be bothered. I’m perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated. However, if there was a DC power supply in my armrest, I would actually be able to do some work, or at least fiddle with stuff. I know that the airline companies will probably say, “Yes, but if we do that, our aeroplanes will fall out of the sky,” but they always say that. I know that sometimes their planes do fall out of the sky, but, and here’s the point, not nearly as often as the airline companies say they will. I for one would be willing to risk it. In the great war against little dongly things, no sacrifice, I think, is too great.

  MacUser, SEPTEMBER 1996

  * * *

  We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

  What Have We Got to Lose?

  Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. Sony’s new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a lot of bulk, and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, while they’re following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are actually recorded in fast-forward mode.) The RISC chip works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of getting on with the easy stuff and leaving all the difficult bits for someone else to deal with. (I know it’s a little more complicated than that, but you have to admit it’s a damned attractive idea). A well-made dry martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of leaving out the martini.

  You also get dramatic advances when you spot that you can leave out part of the problem. Algebra, for instance (and hence the whole of computer programming), derives from the realisation that you can leave out all the messy, intractable numbers. Then there’s the new, improved U.K. directory enquiries service. A couple of years or so ago, something radical changed: when you dialed 192, you actually got a civil, helpful answer, usually—and here was the clue—delivered in a Scots accent. The whole operation had been rounded up and moved to Aberdeen, where they had a plentiful supply of civil, helpful people who didn’t have to be compensated for living in London. Somebody bright at British Telecom had spotted that the location was immaterial—the problem of distance could simply be left out of the model (something they have yet to come to terms with in their pricing structures). With a little extra cable-laying, it seems to me that they could have moved U.K. directory enquiries to St. Helena or the Falklands, thus bringing whole new possibilities of employment to areas that were previously limited to the things you could do with sheep. The Falklands could, while they were about it, put in a bid to run Argentina’s directory enquiry service as well, which would give the foreign offices of both countries something to think about.

  Almost everything to do with the Net involves spotting the things we can now leave out of the problem, and location—or distance—is one of them. Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it. Trying to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera. What else is going to fall out of the model?

  Over the last few years I’ve regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or filmmakers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time, most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into “not very much.” (“People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots of articles that they’ve no interest in reading,” etc.) But it’s a hard question to answer because it’s based on a faulty model. It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.

  Let’s think about what might happen when magazine publishing is no longer a river in its own right, but is just a current in the digital ocean. Magazines are starting to appear on the Web, but since they are just a number of interconnected pages in a world of interconnected pages, the boundaries between “magazine” and “not-magazine,” or indeed between “magazine A” and “magazine B” are, from the Web browser’s point of view, rather vague. Once we drop the idea of discretely bound and sold sheaves of glossily processed wood pulp from the model, what do we have left? Anything useful?

  From the point of view of readers, it’s useful in much the same way that a paper magazine is: it’s a concentration of the sort of stuff they’re interested in, in a form that’s easy to locate, with the added advantage that it will be able to point seamlessly at all kinds of related material in a way that a paper magazine cannot. All well and good.

  But what about the magazine publishers? What do they have to sell? What are they going to do now that they don’t have stacks of glossy paper that people are going to want to hand over wads of greenies to acquire? Well, it all depends on what sort of business you think they’re in. Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time—it’s actually in a different business from all its competitors.) And magazines are very similar: each actual sale across the newsagent’s counter is partly an attempt to defray the ludicrous cost of manufacturing the damn thing, but is also, more significantly, a very solid datum point. The full data set represents the size of the audience the publisher can deliver to its advertisers.

  Now, I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous, glaring, billboard-like pages, all of which are clamouring to draw your attention to stuff you don’t want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs, and free Labrador puppies that make them as fat and unwieldy as a grandmother’s scrapbook. And then, when you are interested in buying something, you can’t find any information about it because it was in last month’s issue, which you’ve now thrown away. I bought a new camera last month, and bought loads of camera magazines just to find ads and reviews for the models I was interested in. So I resent about 99 percent of the advertising I see, but occasionally I want it enough to actually buy the stuff. There’s a major mismatch—something is ripe to fall out of the model.


  If you browse around an online magazine (HotWired, for instance, springs unbidden to mind), you will find a few discreet little sponsor icons here and there that you choose to click on. You only get to see the proper ad if you’re actually interested in it, and that ad will then lead you directly toward solid, helpful information about the product. It is of course much more valuable for advertisers to reach one interested potential customer than it is to irritate the hell out of ninety-nine others. Furthermore, the advertiser gets astonishingly precise feedback. They will know exactly how many people have chosen to look at their ad and for how long, with the result that an unwelcome ad for something no one’s interested in will quickly wither away, whereas one that catches people’s attention will thrive. The advertisers pay the magazine for the opportunity to put links to their ads on popular pages of the magazine and—well, you see the way it works. It is, I am told by people with seriously raised eyebrows, astonishingly effective. The thing which drops out of the problem is the notion that advertising need be irritating and intrusive.

  That’s one model of how online magazines work, and it is, of course, absolutely free to readers. There’s another that will probably arrive as soon as it becomes possible to move virtual cash around the Internet, and that will involve readers being billed tiny amounts of money for the opportunity to read popular Web pages. Much less than you would, for instance, regularly spend on your normal newspapers and magazines because you wouldn’t have to be paying for all the trees that have to be pulped, the vans that have to be fueled, and the marketing people whose job it is to tell you how brilliant they are. The reader’s money goes straight to the writer, with a proportion to the publisher of the Web site, and all the wood can stay in the forests, the oil can stay in the ground, and all the marketing people can stay out of the Groucho Club and let decent folk get to the bar.

  Why doesn’t all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he’s happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch.

  The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially, just a lot of dead wood.

  Wired, UK edition; Issue No. 1, 1995

  Time Travel

  Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all around us. I’m talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we’re claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.

  Turncoat

  I’m often asked if I’m not a bit of a turncoat. Twenty years (help!) ago in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I made my reputation making fun of science and technology: depressed robots, uncooperative lifts, doors with ludicrously overdesigned user interfaces (what’s wrong with just pushing them?), and so on. Now I seem to have become one of technology’s chief advocates, as is apparent from my recent series on Radio 4, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future. (I wish we hadn’t ended up with that title, incidentally, but sometimes events have a momentum of their own.)

  Two things:

  First of all, I wonder if we don’t have too much comedy these days. When I was a kid I used to hide under the bedclothes with an old radio I’d got from a jumble sale, and listen enraptured to Beyond Our Ken, Hancock, The Navy Lark, even the Clitheroe Kid, anything that made me laugh. It was like showers and rainbows in the desert. Then there was I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and a few short years later the full glories of Monty Python. The thing about Python that hit me like a thunderbolt, and I really don’t give a toss if this ends up in “Pseud’s Corner,” was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn’t be expressed any other way. From where I was sitting in my boarding school in deepest Essex, it was a thrilling beacon of light. It’s curious to me that the Pythons came along just as those other great igniters of a young imagination, the Beatles, were fading. There was a sense of a baton being passed. I think George Harrison once said something similar.

  But nowadays everybody’s a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.

  Creative excitement has gone elsewhere—to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate. So this is my second point.

  Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And when one idea fails, there’s another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as fast as rock albums used to in the sixties.

  There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: “These scientists, eh? They’re so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know they’re meant to be indestructible? It’s always the thing that doesn’t get smashed? So why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?”

  The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium, they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb—in other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behaviour, you should try living with it) that didn’t rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.

  My turn toward science came one day in about 1985 when I was walking through a forest in Madagascar. My companion on the walk was the zoologist Mark Carwardine (with whom I later collaborated on the book Last Chance to See), and I asked him, “So come on then, what’s so special about the rain forest that we’re supposed to care about it so much?”

  And he told me. Took about two minutes. He explained the difference between temperate forest and rain forest and how it came to be that the latter produced such bewildering diversity of life but was at the same time so terribly fragile. I fell silent for a few moments as I began to realise that one simple piece of new understanding had just changed the way I saw the world. I had just been handed a single thread I could now follow into the tangled ball of a bewilderingly complex world. For the next few years I hungrily devoured everything I could lay my hands on about evoluti
onary science and realised that nothing I’d ever understood about it at school had prepared me for the enormity of what was now swimming into my view. The thing about evolution is that if it hasn’t turned your brain inside out, you haven’t understood it.

  Then to my surprise I discovered that it was converging with my growing interest in computers. There was nothing particularly profound about that enthusiasm—I just unashamedly love playing with gadgets. The connection lies in the counterintuitive observation that complex results arise from simple causes, iterated many times over. It’s terribly simple to see this happening in a computer. Whatever complexities a computer produces—modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur—it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able to watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon.

  It’s much more difficult to see it happening in the case of the evolution of life. The time scales are so vast and our perspective so much complicated by the fact that it’s ourselves we’re looking at, but our invention of the computer has for the first time let us get a real feel for how it works—just as our invention of the hydraulic pump first gave us an insight into what the heart was doing and how the circulation of the blood worked.

  That is also why it’s impossible to divorce pure science from technology: they feed and stimulate each other. So the latest software gizmo for transferring an mp3 sound file from one computer to another across continents is, when you peer into its innards and at the infrastructure that has given rise to it and that it, in turn, becomes part of, is, in its way, every bit as interesting as the way in which a cell replicates, an idea is formed within a brain, or a beetle deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest digests its prey. It’s all part of the same underlying process that we in turn are part of, it’s where our creative energies are being poured, and I’ll happily take it over comedians, television, and football any day.