It's the Spiritual, Stupid!

Half a bee, philosophically,
Must ipso facto half not be.
But can a bee be said to be,
Or not to be... Do you see?"
--Monty Python, "Eric the Half-a-Bee"

"A thousand plastic flowers
won't make a desert bloom."
--Fritz Perls

The topic of my sermon today doesn't exactly fit the "It's the X, Stupid!" prototype but close enough. Also, the term "spiritual" may be a stretch for some; in fact I'm thinking of something closer to "Existential" myself.

A lot of the qualms people have about future technologies or their effects, don't have much to do with the technologies themselves, but rather, underlying issues in people's lives that thinking about new possibilities stir up. Often someone writing about the future will express a qualm in general terms that seems embarrassingly close to an admission of the author's own rug-swept angst.

I mean issues in a person's life like: what's the meaning of it? Or, what to do with it?

The example I'm really thinking of is longevity. "But what in the world," conservatives ask, "will people do with all that time in their lives?" I can't reproduce the horror, rebuke and utter puzzlement with which this question is asked, but that's the mix.

Deciding what life means and what to do with it is a tough one. The Existentialists came up with descriptions of the human condition that sound like horror movie scripts, captions for The Scream, or lists of imbalances of the bodily humors. The Void is scary enough that it's possible to understand why, when the prospect of more healthy lifespan is opened up, some people's first focus is on the associated voidspan.

But people horrified in this way probably haven't solved (any more than I have) the problem for life as they previously knew it, either. Technology, change and the future aren't central to the question, they merely disturb the rug. That cloud of dust, it's old dust-- it's the spiritual.

The X in "it's the X" was originally Content. Amidst new things like interactive software, hypertext, web pages, animated GIFs-- no wait-- Flash! and so forth, it's easy for a designer, an author, a company, a culture, to get lost in the technology aisle, shopping for and pasting together bits of glitter. Sometimes communicators need to be reminded that they're supposed to be getting Content across. Lately a mutant ideal says that Web 2.0 is about Community, stupid. This requires a shift from Content gear, but you see the pattern.

So by analogy, technology is only stuff to support, or stuff that distracts from... life, but what is life supposed to be?

This post isn't about answering questions like that, it's to say that existential or spiritual questions belong to us as individuals and belong in our lives. Facing The Void isn't a mistake, an imposition, a fault, or a wrong turn. It's having a seat at the table, being a player in a game whose score isn't settled. Neither technology, nor a lack of technology, nor external restriction on technology answers spiritual questions.

What I'm getting at is that "we," in any collective way, can't make spiritual choices for us, the individuals. If the issue is spiritual, then "we" have no business making decisions for us. Nor are we as people who steer technologies or policies of any sort responsible for including spiritual solution-packs with each new turn. Spiritual questions are real but personal.

The horror at new choices implies that life is a cruise that technologists and policymakers are in charge of, and that it's unfair to change the options available once the cruise is already in progress, since the new situation might not match the passengers' expectations. But life was never for anyone to plan for-- or promise to-- anyone else. The teeth-gnashing reality of spiritual uncertainty should remind us that finding meaning, or creating meaning in life is our right as individuals, one that no one else can give, take away or buffer.

The fact that nonaggressive things you do in your life may open up unexpected possibilities in my life, is part of God's own cruise package for a world with more than one passenger. I don't think the trip would be worthwhile if it weren't so.

Star Trek vs. The Jetsons

In a previous post I said the 1960s vision of a question-answering typewriter has come true with Google. Then I thought, look at the freakin' format of this blog, it's a display from Star Trek: The Next Generation, fer Roddenberry's sake.

A couple of the big items from Star Trek have come true. Mainly the cell phone. Wall-sized flat TVs that double as computer displays. Transporters on a one-particle level. Sliding doors are pretty common in supermarkets anyway. Hand phaser not, but truck-sized, repeatable laser weapons are in the bidding stage at the U.S. Defense Department. Not the tricorder exactly, but many phones contain a movie camera, day planner, calculator and GPS.

Everyone makes fun of 1950s visions of the future, the domed cities and flying cars. Sometimes the conclusion is drawn that we're uniformly very bad at predicting the future, or that the future is impossible to predict. But Star Trek proves that Gene Roddenberry's kind of prediction-- that if people need something enough and it's obvious enough, they'll work till they get it-- makes some sense.

The Star Trek communicator was simple and obvious. The domed city and the flying car, in contrast, seem to flout their strangeness. They extrapolated the most modernistic things around at the time, while the communicator extrapolated down the middle of the road.

The lesson obviously isn't that only plain things happen. Maybe plain things are safer bets, though.

Reasonable Radical

Finally I figured out what I really do. I'm a de-mystic.
--Richard St. John, Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich

I love everything technical and obscure. I just hate the fact that it's obscure. I think of the 20th century as the Sheet Metal Age, when everything's true insides were enclosed in tin shells, enameled and chromed, and sculpted to look like what they weren't-- or to look like nothing much, so long as it's not what they are. I feel about the inner workings of things like I do about literacy. We're supposed to be familiar with the world we're walking around in. Not just familiar but able to grab hold and adjust. Otherwise we would be like that character of dystopian horror, The Consumer. I also love psychology and politics. I want to know why people act oblivious, why they put up with not knowing, not having control. But also what might be possible and how.

So I developed a habit of joining discussion groups of disaffected nerds like myself, hoping, you know, that we would figure it all out and reform the world.

After a while I noticed that disaffected nerds seem to fall into two categories. The first are the grouchy sticks- in- the- mud. These people seem to carry an enormous kit of reasons why it'll never work and it ain't gonna happen. Sometimes they have particular detailed scenarios of how the world is going to go to hell. You know, that plan will never work because the Mafia will blow you up with nukes before you get started. You may wonder why the grouches stick around in groups of reformer wannabees. I wondered that.

The other type is the person who has a shining radical idea that, if only people would embrace it, would solve all our problems. But the radical never seems able to convincingly explain his ideas or give them traction, and no amount of feedback, friendly or hostile, seems to draw him out in a satisfying way. He may be blissfully self-assured, or annoyed at how everyone misconstrues his points and fails to understand the logic. He may spend his time in detailed definitions of terms each more obscure and frustrating than the last. But he's in his world and it seems far away.

(There's a third type: polite, well- spoken, interested in things, but seemingly not obsessed with knowing everything and changing everything at once. How can anyone be like that?)

I decided that if I could, I would like to be a "reasonable radical." I want to learn about new ways of thinking that cut through confusion and show simplicity at the heart of things, and yet be able to attach these ideas to points that matter, and be able to talk about them in a sensible way, without having to hole up in an obscure terminology, and without having to shield my eyes from parts of reality that spoil the story.

By radical I don't mean leftist, but just "at the root." Any idea that undercuts everything and proposes a different foundation. Here are some of my favorites:

• All living things and people are just machines.
• Our minds are just like running computer programs.
• We are clouds of matter and energy flowing according to differential equations.
• There is no externally-defined right and wrong.
• Money is the neurotransmitter of value in the world.

The "radical" part of my ideal is to be able to take ideas like that and admit their truth, to be committed to truth, grit the teeth and sweep away superstition. There are ideas that can serve as metaphors for everything, but more than metaphors, they are thoroughly true for everything, and it's important to be able to follow an idea to that point and look at the world seriously from a new perspective. Sometimes radical ideas have radical applications, but sometimes having faced up to an idea mainly serves as a reminder of fuzzy or fearful ideas you had before you faced it, in case you run across their kind again.

But the point isn't just to be punched in the gut and set spinning, or to convert to a new religion. It's still the same world after a radical idea as it was before. The same things are real and true. A metaphor for everything is also a metaphor for nothing. Hopefully you'll be set to interesting rethinking of things you took for granted before.

The "reasonable" part is not to be overly impressed or thrown by radical ideas, while respecting their power and truth. Pulling out a radical idea to impress or snowblind people can be charlitanism or self-delusion. As far as I know the only immunization against that is to have picked up, handled and filed away a dozen radical ideas oneself. The thing to do with a radical idea is to try to see how it can help you, to compare the view through it to the view around it. But also, to separate the dizziness and flinching from the real issues. "Now that we know this is true, what do we have to do?"

I think the reflex to tie free- floating ideas back to the cold ground is what sticks- in- the- mud are really up to. They've just come to assume that's all you can do, or that such effronteries must be brought down with vengeance and in flames.

Between the people who won't take in any idea, and those who wear their one idea like a suit, there isn't much useful conversation. The adversarial model of ideas is boring.

Future Imperfect

Thinking about how things change together, not in isolation, and how, when thinking about future changes, one should sight on appropriate landmarks to gain perspective, reminded me of the example in the opening paragraphs of David Friedman's Future Imperfect (note: a twenty-chapter book draft in a single html file!):

I recently attended an event where the guest speaker was a cabinet member. In conversation afterwards, the subject of long term petroleum supplies came up. He warned that at some point, perhaps a century or so in the future, someone would put his key in his car's ignition, turn it, and nothing would happen–because there would be no more gasoline.

What shocked me was not his ignorance of the economics of depletable resources--if we ever run out of gasoline it will be a long slow process of steadily rising prices, not a sudden surprise--but the astonishing conservatism of his view of the future. It was as if a similar official, a hundred years earlier, had warned that sometime around the year 2000 we were going to open the door of the carriage house only to find that the horses had starved to death for want of hay. I do not know what the world will be like a century hence. But it is not likely to be a place where the process of getting from here to there begins by putting a key in an ignition, turning it, and starting an internal combustion engine burning gasoline.

Citing Future Imperfect is enough for one post. His subject is close to mine here:

This book is about technological change, its consequences and how to deal with them. In this chapter I briefly survey the technologies. In the next I discuss how to adjust our lives and institutions to their consequences.

I am not a prophet; any one of the technologies I discuss may turn out to be a wet firecracker. It only takes one that does not to remake the world. Looking at some candidates will make us a little better prepared if one of those revolutions happens. Perhaps more important, after we have thought about how to adapt to any of ten possible revolutions, we will at least have a head start when the eleventh drops on us out of the blue.

David Friedman is one writer who deliberately applies perspective.

Speaking of sighting and citing: how is it that sounding, as in water depth measurement, was called that long before the invention of sonar? (The phrase "sound out" was derived from sounding rather than the other way around.)

Warmup: "We are as gods..."

Stewart Brand famously opened the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog with these words:

PURPOSE

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.

Brand says in the Winter 1998 Whole Earth Review:

Credit where it's due: I stole the line. Page one, chapter one of A Runaway World? by British anthropologist Edmund Leach (Oxford, 1968) begins:

Men have become like gods. Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be? How might these fears be resolved?

But at some point Leach continues,

We simply must take charge of our own fate. We must somehow see to it that the decisions which have long-term consequences are taken by men who understand what they are doing and not by bewildered amateurs.

Amateurs, of course, being exactly who Brand wanted to empower.

(I learned of the Brand-Leach connection in the excellent book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff (p. 155))

Warm-up: 87 Bad Predictions

Just saw this linked to indirectly by BoingBoing:
Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future

about ways of thinking about the future

I follow or take part in lots of discussions of the future, and besides being keen on all the juicy futurific topics themselves, I always find myself noticing the ways people think about the future, and wondering, how should we think about it?

For instance (and because I'm self-conscious about this): what do I even mean by "the future?" People are always thinking about the future: tonight's dinner, a coat of paint for the house, college for the kids... Everything's about the future; what sense making it a separate topic? What's up with treating it like something new?

So one way to think about "the future" is skepticism at the term. What assumptions is someone smuggling in under such a generality? Will they use it to excuse themselves from common sense in some way? On the other hand I'm being slightly disingenuous and dramatic because of course I think there's a Future.

Turning around now, my instinctive response to any two-sentence dismissal or debunking of a popular belief or concept, is to wonder how the supposed debunking can be used to clarify just what the wisdom in the popular wisdom is, so:

The difference between The Future and tonight's dinner is that people have planned a lot of dinners before. The Future is what's unprecedented, and not just the random exact placement of an almond sliver on a green bean, but, well there's an html thingie for a Spanish Inquisition of things like this:

• unprecidented--at least to most people
• coming soon to a theater near you
  
• important--at least to a lot of us
  
• non-random and possible to think about in useful chunks

I have seen gung-ho futurists, budding technocrats out to finally rid us of things I hold dear, and people who think that my favorite improvements will destroy everything they hold dear. Some people focus on an ironic harm to the exclusion of everyday good. People fret over piecemeal scenarios like, "What happens when everyone lives to 200 but retires at 65?" There's a particular form of optimism disguised as skepticism, as in, "I know why that's never going to happen." A lot of questions aren't so much about the future as let back out of the box by thinking about it. If everything is up for grabs, then, What does it all mean!?

Do you know the answer to that one? It doesn't do to just dismiss all the crazies and worriers-- especially if you think that anyone who isn't worried isn't paying attention. Change really seems to be happening faster, while our lifetimes are getting longer, so that more times more is being stuffed into our brains. "The future" seems to be defined by what's difficult to think about. Sometimes it's a demon who carefully tends our buried muddles until they sprout in our front yards.

I want to know, how can we think about this stuff without going nuts? In particular, are there ways to get handles on things to turn them for the better, in some qualitative way better than just building better mousetraps and bandaids, greasing the skids?

For that matter, what kind of future counts as okay, worth working toward, sufficiently grand? How can it be possible for people to see the future as something other than baffling, scary and alienating? One metaphor (getting slightly ahead of myself) is of continually re-packing for the Mayflower-- what's worth keeping and can be packed in a trunk? Can we take seeds?

I collected lists of ideas, both fallacious and hopeful, in the backs of a couple notebooks, enough to write about for at least a month. Time to dig em up and air em out.