This morning I had an appointment with the Apple geniuses to deal with an overheating problem on my laptop (when connected to my new monitor anyway). I went in and dropped it off with them to be picked up later today (hopefully fixed, but I have my doubts). Being without my laptop for a few hours was, I have to admit, a slightly bewildering concept at first, not least of which because I am unable to do any work without it. My entire livelihood is bound up in it, and it gave me pause. Fortunately, it is a fairly easy thing to replace, but it is obvious that in the absence of fairly advanced technology, I would have no job. My personality is such a fit with this kind of work, that I wonder what type of thing I would have done with my life 50 years ago, or 100, or 500 even? Would there have even been an opportunity for me to exercise that part of my brain in the absence of fast-changing technology? How bored would I have been, how underutilized would my native abilites have been? How much of what we are good at is merely an adaptation to the culture and the time? Maybe in fact, I was born too early. Perhaps the best realization of my skill set is at some far flung distant future.
Apple just called (as fate would have it) a minute ago. It is time to pick up my laptop.
The NY Times recently ran a piece bemoaning the demise of cursive handwriting (“The Case for Cursive“), which quickly became one of their most heavily emailed articles. Presumably there is a lot of worry over the subject by creaky handwriting instructors and nervous parents and grandparents across the land, as this is a clear sign of moral decay. And then there are the articles rebutting the demise, assuring us that cursive will always exist in one form or another, and that the reason teaching it is so important is so that we can read each other’s handwriting. I say hogwash. Cursive is going away and I can’t see a strong argument for keeping it. In fact, handwriting in general is pretty much going away if you ask me. When is the last time you actually wrote anything other than your signature? When I tried to visualize the last time I wrote something down, I was unable to do so. My notoriously bad memory notwithstanding, it is because I never write by hand anymore. Really. Letters and other correspondance to friends or clients? Email or instant message or text. Paying bills by check? Scheduled through online banking. Paying individuals? Same thing, I use online banking to send checks to anyone I need to, or paypal. Leaving a note for someone with a map or directions? Easier to send them the link to a google map route. Short stories or blogging? Via keyboard at my computer, ‘natch. Shopping list? IPhone app. Taking notes? Typed or better yet spoken and transcribed by my phone or computer. In every scenario you can think of, there is no longer a need for me to write anything by hand. I will admit that not everyone has access to the full digital life complement yet, but make no mistake it is coming. Pardon the pun, but the handwriting is on the wall. And I will admit that my handwriting has suffered in legibility because of it, but why should I care? In every way typed text is more legible and with the variety of fonts at my disposal, more pleasing to the eye. The purpose of words on a screen or page is to communicate, after all. All the handwringing about what we are losing boils down to simple nostalgia and fear of change.
A little over a week ago, I bought a somewhat fancy new television set. As with many sets today, it contains some impressive technology that promises to deliver a sharper, more detailed, clearer, and smoother picture. It accomplishes this by a number of means including a high resolution screen (much higher than we grew up with), and the ability to process images fed to it so that movement on screen appears clear and in focus the whole time (this technology is called 240hz, which you can read about here). At first I was just amazed at the jaw dropping clarity of the images. But then I started to notice that things had a kind of odd, video like quality to them, even though I could see greater detail. I messed around with a bunch of settings, turning on and off motion blur correction, color settings, picture settings and the like. The more I played around with the settings, the less sure I was of what I should be looking at. I got more and more confused about what the “best” picture should be, and came to some interesting conclusions about our relationship to represented “reality”.
The idea that a moving image on a flat surface is more or less real depends on many learned assumptions about what reality looks like in the first place. Other than the standard representations that we are exposed to growing up (that change with new technology anyway), we have no objective reference point. None of it is real, and the degree to which something feels “right” or “real” is completely culturally determined. I now find myself floating in a kind of no man’s land regarding what I should want out of a picture. In some ways this is quite liberating, as I can decide how best I want reality interpreted for me by my set. And in others it is quite destabilizing, because we seem to have lost the shared language of representation that once pervaded our culture. Who become the new arbiters of the real? Who should we trust in these matters, if anyone?
One of the funny things a new technology like this exposes, despite its marketing hooey about clarity and reality, is how completely arbitrary representations are. When photography first came on the scene a couple hundred years ago, people were amazed at how much more “real” it was than painting. Ultimately, although it often carried more detail, it was no more real than a painting or a view with ones own eyes. Which is more real by the way? A present viewing or a memory? Something seen from up close or far away? I could go on, but the point is they are all equally real, and equally unreal. They each distort some understanding of a reality, even as they enhance other aspects.
And so I am left in a brave new world of uncertainty thanks to my new TV. Will I argue with friends over what the settings should be? Will I seek cold comfort in making it conform to the style of images from my youth, or some hybrid of new and old? Now that I am freed from the myth of representation, will I still relate to my peers the same way while watching a TV episode or movie? Perhaps my mood will determine whether I seek to adjust to my subjective notions of real, hyperreal, or surreal.
Several weeks ago, I was walking around with Josh and came up with a few pithy quotes, something I am constantly doing (along with the rest of this disaffected, camp and irony aware generation).
He said, “you should put those on a t-shirt or something”, and I laughed.
But then I found this site, and became intrigued by the idea.
The internet has clearly put publishing into far more hands than ever before. It used to be that you needed some pretty hefty capital investments to be able to publish anything to a large audience. You needed to own expensive printing presses or TV or radio stations and equipment. With the web, the cost of entry is approaching zero, even for people who don’t own a computer. While it is of course true that those who have a lot of money to invest will have an easier time attracting the most eyes, it is also true that billions of people can get to anything you publish on the web if they can be made aware of it. This kind of reach is unprecedented and highly democratizing.
The site I found also benefits from a number of technological advances that allow the upfront costs to be reduced significantly. Because this site will only produce items “on demand”, a tiny entrepreneur with a stupid idea (read: me) can test out all manner of idea at zero cost of entry. The company makes a profit off the base items they sell, and I make money (potentially that is) off nothing other than my ideas or artwork. As a test, I uploaded one of the dumb quotes, and will probably upload others in the next few weeks, just to see how the system works (or doesn’t). The idea is pretty interesting and allows even the laziest of entrepreneurs (read: me) to take part in the process.
If you want to see what I am talking about, go for a visit to the Satoristephen Stuff Store. It is surprisingly user friendly and professional for how little time I put in to it (oh, about 15 minutes total).
Went to see a fascinating film at the Tribeca film festival called Transcendent Man, which is a documentary about Ray Kurzweil and his attempt to achieve a sort of immortality. I won’t try to describe Kurzweil’s complex belief system here (you can read the wiki article and other sources for that), but in a nutshell he believes that the exponential growth of technology will take us to a point in the very near future (which he calls the singularity) in which it will overtake us and (with the creation of artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence) direct itself. He believes (and hopes) that at this point we/he will merge with and/or be replaced by this super-intelligence and direct our future evolution. I tend to think this will happen as well, albeit in a somewhat different manner. As I have written before, I think our technological path is leading us to a point in the future where we will be completely linked and borg like, for both good and ill (or neither if you prefer). We will at some point cease to be separate, individual entities, and will shed our humanity as we evolve into something else. I see this as a long term process that we are already well down the path towards, but I doubt there will be some single moment in time that we can point to and say, aha, this is it. Boom, we are no longer human. I believe this will happen gradually over time, as we make ourselves more interconnected, replace our body parts with bionics and such, and enhance ourselves. People will not go kicking and screaming towards this future, they will welcome it step by step, bit by bit, for convenience sake. Already when you talk to young people today about how exposed they are to the world on facebook and the like, they stare at you blankly. Why is my generation (and older ones) so bothered by our loss of privacy while they are not, for example? There are certainly all kinds of questions to be sorted out between the technical haves and have nots and the social order, and there is and will be great social upheaval, but the writing is on the wall if you ask me.
The most interesting aspect of the film however deals with Kurzweil’s body obsession and fear that he was born just a little too soon to make it to this point in time. He is obsessed with taking care of his body long enough to be able to “upload his mind”, long enough to achieve this “immortality”. It is the driving obsession of his life, as well as recreating his father (who died of a heart attack at a fairly young age) in some new virtual world. He clearly wants to experience this new world of human evolution, and yet he uses terms like “upload” or “backup” his consciousness, which always leads me to want to ask the teleport question about what happens to the original. Does it just get destroyed but that is ok b/c the copy continues on? I don’t know about you, but it would be small comfort to me to be destroyed even if a replica was continuing on with all my memories…
Or maybe it is more like the darned sock analogy. I’ve got a hole in my sock, which I get a patch for. Then another, with another patch, and so on until there is no material left of the original. Is it the same sock? In reality, over many years our bodies’ cells have replaced just about everything that we were born with anyway, so what is the difference? The difference is, in Kurzweil’s (and admittedly our) future, the sock will no longer resemble the thing it started out as at all. It will have transcended sock-ness completely. And we will have transcended humanity for something else, something unknown.