Who Owns the Future? (24 page)

What would it mean to compose in “any” rhythm? Artists had never quite achieved an “any.” There was always some color you couldn’t quite mix out of pigments, or some sound the synthesizers of the day couldn’t yet synthesize. (They couldn’t even create convincing artificial speech yet.) Plenty of people who were into the era’s music synthesizers (this was the 1970s) spoke of them as if they could make “any” sound, but deep down we all knew that was not true.

Conlon would be one of the first artists to conquer an “any.” He did it in the domain of rhythm and he used a crazy, brilliant tool to get there, the player piano. Conlon would sit at his desk, hand-punching player piano rolls, working for months to make each minute of music.

It still amazes me that Conlon’s music isn’t better known. It has an incredible intensity, tougher and more of a knockout than just about anything else you can hear. The music has incredible textures, harmonies, and of course, rhythms. And fantasy, for it corresponds to a sensual and luscious but unfamiliar world that can’t be described or approached any other way. Most of the pieces, which he simply called “studies,” are identified only by numbers, as in “Study 27,” or “Study 36.” (Those are both good ones.)

And yet it’s difficult to share the impact of Conlon’s music today. Sure, you can find sound files online. Information is not experience, however. The way to really hear the stuff was in Conlon’s bunker-like studio, where the pianos thundered and you felt it in your body. The digital recordings that are around somehow miss the power of the music. They were done in too clinical a way, perhaps, or the tempo was wrong, or something.
*

*
I suggest you seek out the old Columbia or 1750 Arch vinyl records, which are much better than the digital recordings made later by Wergo.

You mustn’t demand that someone be able to state exactly how information underrepresents reality. The burden can’t be on people to justify themselves against the world of information. I don’t know what was different. Certainly being there with Conlon was different from hearing a recording. The edge of difference is provocative in this case since a player piano is mechanical and perhaps a recording ought to provide a closer equivalent than a recording can provide of a concert.

I would hitchhike down over the border to Mexico City to visit Conlon. Mexico was insane in neon shades, but sweet in those days long before the drug wars. On arrival, I would be so excited that I could barely speak. It amazes me still that Conlon and his wife, Yoko, were tolerant of this weird, noncommunicative, worshipful kid.

Conlon didn’t share my sense of moment. He was unassuming, even taciturn. An elegant man from an era when it was expected for men to have well-developed egos, he conveyed a regal stature quietly, declining to construct a romantic life story. He worked, he enjoyed his family, music, and life, and that was it. This came as a revelation to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be anything other than messianic. (Though on another level, I still think to myself, “Come on! He was playing a game of understatement. He knew perfectly well what he was doing.”)

To me, at any rate, Conlon’s music was the momentous first appearance of a musical “any.” Here was an example of someone who had gained precise, unlimited control of a domain and indeed he did create entirely new meaning and sensation by leaping out of the snags the rest of us navigate, onto a new plateau of generality. Who had done that before? Alan Turing, certainly. The great analytic mathematicians. Who else? Who had done it aesthetically?

It seemed to me that I must seek out any and all opportunities to find other such plateaus. What Conlon did for rhythm might be done for sensory impressions, for the human body, for the whole of human experience. That would be Virtual Reality.

CLIMB ANY “ANY”

Chasing after limitlessness had already become a central idea in Silicon Valley when I moved there not too many years later, in my early adulthood. Just as I talked up Virtual Reality as encompassing “any” external reality, or sensory motor experience, possible, a fellow named Eric Drexler was talking up nanotechnology as someday doing the same for physical reality. Another friend named Stephen LaBerge was experimenting with lucid dreaming at Stanford and offering “any” possible subjective experience to those who could learn the technique. Silicon Valley was a temple of yearning for “anyness” in those days, and remains so.

“Anyness” still commonly serves as the guiding principle of freedom, achievement, and attainment that drives Internet design. “Any” music, text, video, available anywhere, anytime.

Tablets and smartphones have fluid uses, turning into “any” device that can be accommodated by the fixed physical attributes. A tablet might be a book, a guitar tuner, sketchpad, and so on. Gradually, even the physical properties of gadgets will become more mutable. 3D printing, as explained earlier, will fabricate any shape, and perhaps eventually “any” consumer electronics product.

Even those designs might take on morphing qualities. I have worked on robots inspired by the “morphing” varieties of octopi that can change shape in order to allow your hands to feel arbitrary surfaces in a virtual world. Using such a robot feedback device, you would be able to feel virtual knobs instead of just see them, for instance.

There is any number of other examples. Synthetic biology might someday produce “any” microorganism, and then maybe someday any macro one. The true star toward which we navigate is freedom from particularity.

PART FIVE

The Contest to Be Most Meta

CHAPTER 12

Story Lost

Not All Is Chaos

A sanctioned malaise has been in effect for some decades now; it is accepted in some circles that future history will not be coherent. From here on out the human story will no longer unfold in a sensible way. We are said to be entering into a fate that will resist interpretation. Narrative arcs will no longer apply.

Lana Wachowski, cowriter and director of the Matrix movies, described a later project,
Cloud Atlas
, as residing between “the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, middle, and end.”
¹
As the turn of the millennium approached, such declarations were commonplace (as in the monologue of the “world’s oldest Bolshevik” in Tony Kushner’s play
Perestroika,
or aspects of Francis Fukuyama’s book
The End of History
—both from 1992), but it’s odd that we can still hear them today even from the most tech-oriented writers and thinkers.

You won’t find any such point of view within tech circles, however. There, one is immersed in a clear-enough dominant narrative. Everything is becoming more and more software-mediated, physicality is becoming more mutable by technology, and reality is being optimized. I have criticized aspects of our narrative, but no one can say it doesn’t have direction. The problem with it is that humans aren’t the heroes. People might merge with machines and become immortal, but that’s a sideshow. The dominant story is machine-centric. It’s technological determinism.

My view is that people are still the actors. Technology is not
really autonomous. People act in the network age either by struggling to get close to top Siren Servers in order to enjoy power and wealth, or by doing something other than that and falling into relative poverty and irrelevance. Ours is as well ordered an age as any other.

Since I’ve been thinking about Siren Servers, I’ve found that they provide a simple story line that works awfully well as a principle for making sense of our times. I might be overapplying the idea. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Nonetheless, we are entering into an age of networked information, and power struggles over digital networks will naturally be the typical stories of that age.

The reason the information age seems “fragmented” is that there are episodes in the unfolding of network power, in the rise of a Siren Server, that are genuinely chaotic and unpredictable. But these pockets of chaos are circumscribed by a simple logic. Overall, story finds its home in network-age struggles just as well as it ever did in “civilization clashes,” court intrigues, romantic triangles, or any other narrative pattern from the past.

The Conservation of Free Will

A story must have actors, not automatons. Different people become more or less like automatons in our Sirenic era.

Sirenic entrepreneurs intuitively cast free will—so long as it is their own—as an ever more magical, elite, and “meta” quality of personhood. The entrepreneur hopes to “dent the universe”
*
or achieve some other heroic, Nietzschean validation. Ordinary people, however, who will be attached to the nodes of the network created by the hero, will become more effectively mechanical.

*
A phrase usually attributed to Steve Jobs.

A Siren Server’s data must be at least a little predictive, or to put it more bluntly, the people being modeled must act at least somewhat predictably. Otherwise, the data wouldn’t be actionable at all.

One can’t say that a system that unfolds predictably, like clockwork,
exhibits free will.
*
To the degree people become predictable by a server, they won’t appear to have as much free will as “free range” individuals who aren’t tied to the server.

*
The question of whether reality is deterministic overall must be separated from the design of human society. Because of the limits of measurement, data storage, and other factors, we can’t definitively test the nature of determinism in physical systems. The two best-confirmed theories of physics, quantum field theory and general relativity, offer conflicting sensibilities of determinism.

As I have explained earlier, it is impossible to reliably distinguish study from manipulation when you occupy the high perch of a Siren Server. The difference isn’t really a difference, within the scope of business epistemology.

Ordinary people are influenced by the particular theory of optimization imbedded in a server in order to use it, and therefore become more predictable by it. Siren Servers conserve the tally of free will perceived in human affairs, since some people appear to have more of it even as others appear to have less.

Sirenic idealists browbeat those who are thought to be attempting to insert free will into human affairs in places where it doesn’t belong. This is not a new impulse, as it recalls earlier thinkers like Ayn Rand. Randian free market idealists declare that it is ridiculous to willfully address problems like a stalled economy or poverty. Charity and policy are scorned, but more generally, human will is only respected when it comes from an entrepreneur. Free will is granted only a narrow legitimacy.

What is new in the network age is the extension of this kind of thinking into every sphere of experience. New lines are being drawn between where individual agency should matter and where it shouldn’t, so the dichotomy must now be understood in an even broader way than the ancient debate about the role of government.

People trust dating sites like eHarmony to algorithmically select prospects for marriage. But people also attempt to force universal laws on each other about what kinds of marriages can be legal. If this juxtaposition doesn’t seem odd, think about this: What if the eHarmony algorithm analyzed a customer and calculated that she was gay even though she had never realized that before? That’s a type of judgment that I suspect would not be tolerated by many of
eHarmony’s users, even though the judgments they do solicit are no less intimate or consequential.

We’re setting up barriers between cases where we choose to give over some judgment to cloud software, as if we were predictable machines, and those where we elevate our judgments to pious, absolute standards.

Making choices of where to place the barrier between ego and algorithm is unavoidable in the age of cloud software. Drawing the line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.

CHAPTER 13

Coercion on Autopilot

Specialized Network Effects

Rewarding and Punishing Network Effects

“Network effects” are feedback cycles that can make a network become ever more influential or valuable.
*
A classic example is found in the rise of Facebook. It attracted people because of the people already on it, a little like the old joke about someone being famous for being famous.

*
Network effects were an obsession for those interested in the pre-digital phone system. They have become an even greater obsession in the age of digital networks. Metcalf’s Law is a famous claim that a network becomes as valuable as the square of the number of its nodes. That means value climbs with an insane, ever-increasing pitch as a network grows. The economist W. Brian Arthur pioneered the understanding of economic network effects.