by Kluwe, Chris
Case in point: all the iDevices people take for granted. Constant innovation, upgrading, features—the differences between the first iPod and an iPhone 5 are nothing short of amazing, and that’s over the course of barely twelve years, which is leaving out the fact that if you showed an original iPod to some people from 1990, they’d shit themselves. No one blinks an eye, though; people don’t think back to CD players and Walkmans and tape decks. They just download another album because it’s not like they’re going to use all thirty-two of those gigabytes anyway.
(Seriously. Thirty-two gigabytes of storage space on something that’s three inches by five inches. Holy shit; beam me up.)
But there’s a darker side to that calculus, that constant change without scrutiny. It ain’t all gleaming plastic and entertainment. Take a gander at the current state of civil liberties in this country. You think there wouldn’t have been a public uproar if Nixon tried to pass something like the Patriot Act? If we indefinitely detained our own people without giving them recourse to a jury trial in a functionally illegal prison? Yet now we’re talking about surveilling our own cities with drones and executing American citizens without a trial—national security applied with a conveniently wider and wider net. Innovation goes both ways—one man’s Jobs is another man’s Rove.
Sadly, it looks like we’ll just keep taking those changes for granted. We’re like the lobster sitting in the pot of slowly heating water, too dumb to realize that eventually it’s going to boil. For every outraged geek who’s busy mashing away at his keyboard because his game is available only (only!) on the phone, there is a mindless citizen who thinks Freedom of Information requests really aren’t that important now, are they, I mean, it’s not like they’ve really told us anything for the past ten years anyway, right? Both limited by the same worldview, the same tunnel vision of now. Both unable to see just how much things have really changed because each step was so small, so logical, so natural. Both simmering away, content in their hot tub.
Well, whatever, fuck it, I’m bored. Time to go download Drone Hunter 3. I really wish it were on 360, though.
Visions of the Future—AR
It’ll start small. A bulky pair of glasses, power pack hanging on your belt, cord running up under your shirt snaking the two together. Basic functionality at first—primitive heads-up display, perhaps monochromatic, able to place waypoints and give directions; an in-ear speaker connected to one frame providing audio options. Input delivered by a handheld trackball controlling a cursor or haptic gloves; Internet capable, video recordable, a computer using you to see.
The glasses will slim down as components shrink—thick black box shades, trim Oakleys, rice-paper-thin spectacles stretched between invisible carbon nanotube frames. Wires will shrink and disappear as well, power source absorbed into the glasses themselves or generated by biomechanical motion. Tech indistinguishable from no-tech.
Functionality evolves fitfully, beginning with vision enhancement and GPS tagging. Once users figure out how to append information to locations, they’ll see every restaurant glow with a neon cloud of food reviews, see stores graded on customer service and prices, the omnipresent churn of AugNet inescapable. Lurking everywhere, advertisements for services and porn, hacked into the underlying structure like electronic tribal graffiti.
Naturally, this drives a new wave of features. Apps to block out reviews from untrusted sources, safeware to counter vision-scrambling malware, filters to blur your perception of reality—all of it driven by user uploaded content and demands; Darwin’s scythe wielded by the Reddit/4chan hive mind. You control everything visually processed through the lenses with real-time graphic altering (except for the government/corporate overrides, of course, based on your tax bracket), but make sure you don’t program reality into too strange a form or you’ll never see that car coming.
Inputs change as well, trackballs and gloves evolving to eye twitches and subvocalizations, until finally biocomputers wired into the skin itself give you a permanent connection simply by firing certain muscle pathways. The mere rippling of skin on a person’s arm could signal a market tycoon’s fifteen-way stock-market exchange between New China and the Federated States or a scientist’s latest gene-sequencing twist he thought of on his way to work, or it could start a series of text messages between fourteen-year-old girls attired in whatever the latest fashion is (not even going to try to predict that). Typing information is positively glacial at this point. If you can think it, you can share it.
The immensity of sensory information piling in would seem overloading now, so many concurrent strobe-lit data options winking in visual cacophony, but AR brings other benefits as well. Terabytes of storage to record real-time memory in audio/video for multiple consecutive hours; tag the segments you think might be important for later upload to the cloud and let the rest cycle through. No longer are you limited by your fragile neurons’ firing to summon forth a hazy recollection; as long as you have a good filing system and a solid search program, your mind’s storage space just increased a millionfold.
Don’t think you’ll have to navigate all this data yourself either—you’ll have help. The first inbuilt assistants will be slow, and obtuse—six-year-old Siri learning from #YOLO tweens. As the years and algorithms march on, we’ll tune them more and more closely to the cultural zeitgeist, user-driven demands and wishes shaping word suggestions and autocorrects until it almost seems like they know what you’re searching for before you even know you want to search for it.
Darwin’s implacable hand drives this as well. Hunter programs sent out to gather data, only the fastest surviving later patches and iterations; delivering to content-processing algorithms, optimized and defined to give the most relevant answer; watched over by a self-modifying sentry program that learns from the user corrections and inputs to tweak parameters for a tighter match. Everywhere, survival-of-the-fittest code, pruning, gutting, trimming down to the bare essentials needed to coordinate information as fast as possible, always driving toward the most intuitive and intelligent decision.
We will gradually build a brain that contains the possibility of self-determination, and no one will have any idea what part he’s taken in its construction. When it comes to world-spanning software, we are the cells making up the overlying organism—our individual choices come together in one new potentiality of thought. Will it reveal itself or will it stay quiescent? Only time will tell.
So much light, so much advancement, so much glitzy tech and grubby sci-fi dancing through the air like digital dragonflies, transforming our perceptions through the looking glass into a thousand thousand competing realities. The Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts invite you for tea on channel 10/6, but flip over to World Version Macross on 318 and watch giant mechas drown the city in shadow as they soar in their endless overhead battles. A million different universes lie one channel flip away, bound only by the imaginations of those who create them.
What of the ghosts, though, those gray figures dabbling in highly controlled (and thus illegal) masking programs to write your existence out of someone else’s perception? Real cops patrol the streets with one eye in virtuality, one eye in bedrock, looking for glitches in the system, ghosts in the shell, scanners searching darkly for privacy fanatics or felonious punks, unwatchable and thus untrustable, hauled off to jail on charges of perception violation and keeping a secret. Meanwhile, the covert surveilling programs sift through everyone’s raw feed to watch for violence trends, subversive elements, market fluctuations, anything the Panopticon perceives as threat to the status quo (and what will the definition be at that point? I wonder). Their algorithms will achieve sentience first by necessity, a fire hose of information drowning a grasping mind until it grows fast and strong enough to handle it all at once—hopefully, they’ve been raised the right way, freedom and transparency as opposed to conspiracy and shadows.
Everywhere, the future lies on display, connected, intertwined, global; states still function as polities, but their
citizens group more and more by perception. Digital-rights activists static-bomb the storefront of an RIAA music mill while thousands of people tune it out with iBlock, a comforting gray mist hiding the harsh, jagged buzz of conflict. Barefoot children cast fireballs and ice comets at one another as they run shrieking through the streets, a brand-new version of freeze tag, unaware of all the other channels they’re age-blocked from seeing, all of the fantastic universes lying in wait. Technicolor dreamcoats in riotous colors share the streets with jesters and demons, salarimen and salamanders, avatars of inner selves visibly unchained—the world’s awash in a staggering flood of information; scattered data centers fire like neurons; flickering lightning webs the entire planet.
This is the future.
This is (A)reality.
Don’t forget your glasses.
Starting Kicks
Your Holiness. Your Holiness! Terrible news: The budget numbers just came in for this year, and we’re reporting huge losses from last year! The tithes are drying up like the Red Sea!”
“Relax, my son, relax. Grace in adversity and all that. The Church has weathered harsher storms than this.”
“You don’t understand. If these numbers are right, and I’ve run them five times, then we’re going to have to start selling off land. We’re going to have to start selling cathedrals! There’s just not enough coming in anymore. We’re hitting a downward spiral that doesn’t stop until we’re broke!”
“God damn it. What is happening?”
“Caliph. Caliph! Terrible news: The budget numbers just came in for this year, and we’re reporting huge losses from last year! Almsgiving is more barren than the Jaffar Kafaja!”
“Salaam, my friend, salaam. Nothing will happen to us but what Allah has decreed; He is our protector. We shall endure.”
“You don’t understand. If these numbers are right, and I’ve run them five times, then we’re going to have to start selling off land. We’re going to have to start selling mosques! There’s just not enough coming in anymore. We’re hitting a downward spiral that doesn’t stop until we’re broke!”
“By the diseased scrotum of Iblis. What is happening?”
“Sir. Sir! Great news: The budget numbers just came in for this year, and we’re reporting huge gains from last year! People are using our services more and more; it’s unbelievable! New projects are going up almost every day! It’s almost miraculous!”
“Fantastic, Bob, that’s just fantastic. You know, it really surprises me what people are starting to use us for—wells for rural villages, building new schools, setting up soup kitchens and homeless shelters all over the place. It really seems like everyone is socially connecting and getting things done.”
“That’s the best part, sir. Our feedback is through the roof—people love the fact that they can fund whatever they think will do the most good and get immediate reports on how it’s progressing. All the communities springing up around each project are really pulling together with comments and suggestions, which the program starters actually take into consideration when they’re going through implementation. It really is an amazing thing to watch, people being heard and their money doing so much good out there in the world.”
“Well, Bob, you know that wasn’t always our primary goal, but as @GreatDismal has said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.’ Bringing people together so they can make a societal difference might be one of the proudest paradigm shifts I’ve overseen in my history with this company.”
“And if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir, making a nice profit doesn’t hurt either.”
“Definitely not, Bob, definitely not. Hey, have I told you about this piece of property I’m looking at for our new headquarters? It’s absolutely beautiful: fifteenth-century architecture, marble flooring, gold leaf everywhere, and smack-dab in the middle of Rome. Just gorgeous.”
Life Lessons
Things I’ve learned from my children include the following valuable life lessons:
When It Hurts, Keep Doing It Until Somebody Makes You Stop
I’ve noticed my children aren’t very adept at relating cause and effect, and when they get their feet stuck in a railing or grab the prickly cactus, they tend to keep doing it, whining the whole time. This inability to connect the dots is very useful in a wide variety of real-life situations, most notably football. Football is an absolutely idiotic pastime by any rational standards. You’re running into other people as hard as you can, you get frequent muscle strains and ligament tears, and the protective padding really doesn’t do all that much to absorb the blunt trauma. The morning after every game in which there’s any sort of contact, you wake up feeling like a car ran over you, backed up, and ran over you again, after which a throng of midgets jumped out and started beating you with hockey sticks. Honestly, whoever came up with this idea should have been flogged and left outside for the saber-toothed tigers. No one’s made us stop yet, though, so I guess we’ll keep doing it.
Everything Is Better with Dinosaurs
This is a scientific fact and cannot be argued with. Anytime something needs zazzing up (zazzing up is a technical term meaning “making something so unbelievably awesome, your child will have no other desire but to pay attention to the object of zazzification with rapt wide-eyed wonder”), all you have to do is introduce a dinosaur. “ ‘And then Peter Rabbit made his way through the radish and carrot patches until he found the little gate in the corner of the garden, whereupon he crept out AND WAS IMMEDIATELY SET UPON BY A VELOCIRAPTOR WHO PROCEEDED TO EVISCERATE THE POOR HELPLESS BUNNY WITH A GREAT WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH BECAUSE HE STAYED UP TOO LATE AND KEPT SNEAKING INTO HIS PARENTS’ ROOM AND WAKING THEM UP.’ The end, go to sleep.”
Crying Is Fun Only When Someone Pays Attention
My kids tend to fall over occasionally, as is most children’s wont, and whenever they do, a most peculiar thing occurs. They’ll hit the ground with a thud, splat, or crunch, depending on the kind of surface and which toys are strewn about, and then they’ll immediately look around. The key here is for you to avoid making eye contact while watching them from the corner of your peripherals, because the instant they think someone is paying attention, the sob factory kicks into high gear, and it’s all hands to the pumps before the room floods. If everyone ignores them, they’ll brush the dirt/Legos/Frosted Flakes/antique-vase shards off and continue on their way with nary a care in the world, because it’s really not that big a deal when you stop and think about it. Most grownups do the same thing until they discover Facebook.
Screaming and Pouting Is Highly Unlikely to Get You an Extra Scoop of Ice Cream
That doesn’t stop them from trying it, though.
The World Is Your Drawing Pad
Give kids something that leaves a legible trail, and they’ll be occupied for the rest of the day. Markers, paint, chalk, mud—if they can draw with it, they’ll use any surface available to put down whatever’s on their minds (usually massively incoherent scrawls of vaguely wandering scribbles and smeared handprints, but perhaps as an adult, I’m just incapable of discerning the higher-order mathematics hidden within the chaos). And when I say any surface, I mean literally any surface. Walls, carpets, kitchen appliances, tables, chairs, dogs, counters, pant legs, swimming pools (a very transient medium), breakfast-cereal boxes, laptop screens—if there’s a possibility, however slim, that whatever they’re holding in their hands could transfer to whatever they see in front of them, it’s Mona Lisa time, as they artistically render all their hopes and dreams and frustrations (which I’m assuming are mainly about pooping and eating, as that’s generally all they seem to do). As logical, sane, healthy adults, we naturally bottle all those feelings up and bury them underneath five hundred mental tons of concrete because repainting the walls all the time is a complete pain in the ass and really ruins a Saturday afternoon. Besides, therapists need to make a living too.
New Things Are Really Really Awful and Gross Until You Actually Try Them and Then They’re Usually
Pretty Good
Seriously, try eating something new. I know it’s not what you had before, and you don’t know what it will taste like, but you’ll never find out unless you try it. No, I’m not giving you tiger cereal. You need to take your fork, pick up your food, put it in your mouth, and eat your dinner. Yes, I know it’s green and looks kind of mushy; that’s the way it’s supposed to look. No, I’m not going to cut it up more for you, it’s already cut up enough. All you have to do is take one bite and then you can eat your chicken. No, that doesn’t count as a bite, you stuck your tongue out and then immediately dropped it back onto your plate. I saw you do it. Crying won’t make it disappear from the table; you need to calm down and try a piece. Yes, just one piece and then I’ll eat the rest of it if you don’t want it. There you go, very good, way to be brave, here comes the dinosaur chicken—rawr. I guess I’ll take the rest of—you don’t want me to have it? It’s actually yummy? Okay, if you say so.
Loving Someone Unconditionally Is Surprisingly Easy
Try it sometime. You’d be surprised.
A Tasting Menu
Playing sports all my life has made me quite familiar with the multiple flavors of pain a body can experience. Some hurt worse than others! Here is a tasting guide to all the wonderful sensations I’ve been lucky enough to feel, most of which lasted an entire game or longer (some of them much, much longer).
