The end of sitting
Paul Graham Raven
Predictive text
Simon Ings
Arc talks to sword-wielding writer and futures guru Neal Stephenson about breaking the human body out of its IT prison
Your new collection of short pieces, Some Remarks , brings together about twenty years of journalism. In that time you’ve covered the rise – and, some would say, the fall – of digital culture. Do you think that kind of Wired culture has still got room to change and develop and grow, or are the apostates right? Has old code got us boxed into a corner?
Well, Jaron Lanier’s the man to go to for a discussion of “lock-in”. My concern is a bit different: a lot of good ideas never get a purchase on the internet because of the speed at which new things are introduced. The people who could bring a sense of design to the internet just can’t move as rapidly as those who are content just to introduce new things.
I remember, around the mid-1990s, the cryptographer Matt Blaze was talking about trying to start the Encyclopaedia Disinformatica, a whole giant database of plausible-sounding but wrong material. ”Hamlet is a play about a prince of Sweden who kills his mother.” People who incorporated that material into their term papers or whatever would learn the hard way that they shouldn’t trust everything they see on the internet. It was a splendid, mischievous idea, one that would have forced some kind of self-awareness on the net. The trouble was he couldn’t implement it fast enough to keep up with what was actually happening online.
The “design” element of the internet, if you can call it that, is something we introduce retrospectively, as we take hold of Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or whatever, and start using it for our own purposes, which are usually a little bit off , a little bit different from the purposes they were meant to serve. As long as we’re constantly playing catch-up with this stuff, it’s difficult to implement all of the fixes and correctives we’d like.
The internet’s been remarkably good at doing business as usual, when all is said and done. What’s the next disruptive technology going to be? I know you’ve done some fabbing…
I know fabbers, I’ve done fabbing, and 3D fabrication is, right now, very slow. Again, fabbing isn’t a disruptive idea on its own. It becomes disruptive when people find their own uses for it. I’ve seen it suggested recently that fabs might make the entire gun-control debate a moot point. It wouldn’t make much of a difference where I come from, but in a country that does have strict gun control, what do you do when anyone can email a file to a fab company and walk out with a gun?
Is there an internet any more?
No. The internet is fractured. But that was always going to happen as we put more and more of our lives into it. Facebook still wants to think I’m one person. But nobody else does. Pretty much everywhere else, I can log out of one identity and into another. We’re responding to the ubiquity of the internet by tailoring our identities. We’re all ever more mindful of who’s going to see what.
So are we looking at a return of privacy, or a redefinition of privacy, as people get cannier about their digital identities?
They’re certainly getting canny, and there are new forms of etiquette developing. I remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle when Hope Solo, the US goalkeeper, tweeted a negative remark about a commentator. People of a more gossipy media mindset tried to blow that up into a serious indiscretion, but there were plenty of people saying, it’s a couple of tweets, so who cares? It’s ephemeral – just someone blowing off steam. So I think we’re seeing an etiquette develop in which, for example, tweets are treated less seriously than other forms of self-expression.
US goalkeeper Hope Solo fell foul of small-town “netiquette”
That’s encouraging, given the internet has the potential to recreate village life online. Village life is rough. It’s very easy to get bullied.
That’s actually the kind of dynamic I detected around our women’s soccer team at the London 2012 Olympics. There was a very conservative, village-like pressure being exerted on these women to be absolute goody two-shoes. They were to be role-models for every cute six-year-old soccer-playing girl in America. And at the same time, they were expected to deliver a gold medal. Nothing less was acceptable. And how are you supposed to square that circle, when you’re up against the toughest of the tough? There was that game against Colombia when one of the opposing players just ran up to our star, Abby Wambach, and just slugged her in the eye, in front of millions of people. That, I think, is in microcosm what you’re talking about: you’ve got villages on the internet being gossipy and censorious and wishing to impose a particular standard, and then you’ve got the internet at large, which is saying: what’s the big deal?
Your essays in Some Remarks have a fair bit to say about China: how digital networks and internal security networks map over each other, so that the idea of a “worldwide web” doesn’t have quite the feelgood factor it enjoys in, say, the US.
Yes, but you have to look at the adaptive responses, too. Chinese people are very cagey and very smart; they’ve developed all sorts of workarounds to the censorship they encounter on the net. Every controversial figure, everyone who is being actively censored, acquires this vocabulary of non-censorable code words so that people can constantly refer to them and discuss them in tweets or whatever. Set against that, there’s the manifest absurdity of the regime’s own approach to censorship. It’s self-defeating. One classic example was in June this year, when the stock markets in China were shutting and the Shanghai Composite Index fell by a number that just happened to be the date of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. That string of digits, whenever it shows up, triggers a huge internet immune response. So all these business sites that were simply trying to report the closing value of the stock were getting automatically shut down.
Actually, before we go on, it would be crazy not to mention David Brin’s answer to all this, which is the idea of sousveillance: sure, surveillance devices give power to the people at the top; but they give proportionately more power to people at the bottom, enabling them to keep tabs on what the people at the top are doing. Every time we see webcam footage of some repressive atrocity in Syria, we’re seeing sousveillance creating trouble for people who, in a previous generation, had been able to control all media. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon. This is the story of the last half of the 20th century.
Right now I’m reading Piers Brendon’s book The Dark Valley , about the 1930s. He describes how French fascists tried to assassinate a leftist by surrounding his car, dragging him out and attacking him. Afterwards they said he’d tried to run them down. But there just happened to be someone there with a film camera. He filmed the entire thing. In this one case, then, truth prevailed. What were the odds that somebody would be there with some Rube Goldberg-style film camera at that moment? Now, you can pretty much guarantee you’re on camera. Especially in London.
David Brin’s The Transparent Society is still a very provocative book. I’m naturally uncomfortable around surveillance but when I say to people “what if the solution is more surveillance?” the cognitive dissonance is huge. People polarise really quickly for and against this notion…
Well, there you go: technologies emerge first. Then comes this period of rapid adaptation, and it’s this that determines a technology’s ethical payload, far more than the capabilities of the technology itself. Which, I suppose, is why that payload is so hard to predict or control. Take quadcopter drones. It’s quite easy to envision any number of scary uses to which we could put those. Yet they’re being hurled out onto the market with no particular concern for all they damage they could do. Which is, frankly, good. It’s healthy. It’s realistic. The assumption – and I think it’s correct – is that the technology is going to happen anyway, so the best thing is to get it distributed as quickly as possible and see what people use it for, and keep an eye out for any problems that arise.
There’s no sense any more that the state or society can hold anything back out of fear of the consequences – and given fear is a really lousy tool for prediction, I don’t think we need miss it much. But it makes you pause sometimes; I mean, if the Manhattan Project existed now, it would be out in the open and the people running it would be trying to build uranium enrichment plants on every corner. Let the chips fall where they may.
If we are becoming a society of autodidacts, kitchen-sink inventors and so on, do we need schools anymore? Now that we have the web, should we just simply encourage everyone to surf?
I think schools actually work extremely well for one subset of children, and we know who they are. They’re the people who can sit quietly in class and pay attention and behave and soak up information. The next task is to find something for people who aren’t such a good fit with conventional schooling, particularly people who like to get up and move around a lot. They’re typically the boy in the class who is always in trouble, not because he’s stupid, but because he just can’t sit still for very long.
There are efforts being made in some schools to accommodate kinaesthetic learners, but really these are doing little more than kicking back against a physical regime that, at least in my country, is getting ever more clamped-down. Recesses are getting shorter, and there was a big controversy a few years ago when, all over the US, school districts started issuing edicts against running and playing tag, because it was seen as too dangerous.
Then there are those kids who are kind of mentally restless; they want to surf from one topic to another and learn a lot of things at once, instead of following a linear curriculum. I would hope that we could find ways to accommodate all of these people because if you’re not a classroom sort of person, you’re going to find it harder and harder to find a worthwhile alternative. What interesting manual jobs are there now, really?
The intellectual demands made of manual work have just been dropping through the floor. If you look at what an engineer did 40 years ago, even…
Bring back the English Wheel. This is the kind of thing we’re talking about, isn’t it? A piece of metalworking equipment – a big C-shaped thing. In the jaws there are two rollers and one’s like a hammer, one’s like an anvil. You put a piece of sheet metal between those rollers and move it back and forth and bend a flat piece of metal into a three-dimensional curve.
According to legend, Rolls Royces were made by a man with an English wheel and a big pile of flat sheet metal and some templates of what the fender or whatever was supposed to look like. It was very intellectually challenging. We would just have a robot, stamping them out. Now, while we can’t and shouldn’t try to turn back the clock, I do think that what’s next around the corner, in terms of work, is something very different to what we’re used to. We’ve gone about as far as we can to automate human effort. Any more and we’ll be suspending ourselves from cables. We’ll end up looking like something out of Coma . From here, all we can do is begin to recall that we’re inextricably tied to physical bodies, and that our brains only begin to make sense of the physical world when they’re properly integrated with it.
Culturally, right now, we’re like a pendulum at the top of its swing: we’ve pushed sitting down as far as it will go, and now we’re going to go back the other way. At least, I hope and think we will. I’m a follower of Antonio Damasio when it comes to this kind of thing. I won’t try to summarise all that he has to say, but he argues, I think, for a richer, more organic connection between mind and body than your average Cartesian might argue for. Kinaesthetic interaction with the environment is not abstractable. We know this: why else is there this flourishing of interest now in new ways of cooking food? Why else are we hunting out new tastes and all manner of tactile experiences?
Lying about with nothing to do: Michael Crichton’s Coma (1978)
I imagine this feeds into Clang, the one-on-one sword-fighting game you’re promoting through Kickstarter.
I wasn’t consciously thinking in those terms when I went to work on that game , but there is a philosophical connection there, absolutely. Now that we’ve reduced games to the tiniest possible movements of fingers and thumbs, the only way to go is to inhabit a game world in a more holographic way, and move in a fashion that genuinely recalls the movements of the game character. I hope that will add to people’s feeling of immersion, and make the game a more interesting experience.
How did you get into… Actually, what is the correct term? “Martial arts” is a bit vague.
The sort of terms people use are HEMA, which is Historical European Martial Arts, or WMA, which is Western Martial Arts. It’s swordplay, basically: historical sword fighting. Like many people, I acquired a general, casual interest from movies and books. Then, when I was working on the Baroque Cycle , I wanted to make sure the sword-fighting sequences were accurate. So I started hunting out historically valid information about how people used to fight with these blades. I remember I picked up a couple of videos at the Tower of London, but it quickly became clear that watching wasn’t going to be enough. That’s how I got patched into the HEMA movement, which was just coming into existence at that time.
A lot of people in different places all over the world had been scratching away at this on their own and now, because of the internet, they suddenly found each other and began sharing resources and meeting. There’s been a real ferment around sword fighting in the last 15 years: one of those delicious unforeseen side effects of having the internet.
What’s your weapon of choice, and why?
Better to ask what system I’m learning. The one I spend most of my time on was written down 600 years ago by an Italian named Fiore dei Liberi . There’s a section of his manuscript on unarmed fighting, and a lot of stuff about the dagger. Back then, Italians devoted a large mindshare to worrying about being stabbed by other Italians with daggers. Then there’s the long-sword, which is a two-handed sword about four feet long. This is the main weapon we work around. There’s a proper martial art built around that, beginning with a set of stances, then moving on to manoeuvres, blocking manoeuvres, patterns and counter-patterns, and so on. Different people are interpreting this book in different ways, and different schools have emerged.
I was about to say we should drag this conversation back to the future, but that’s not fair, is it? Swordplay is part of the future, if a rather unexpected part.
And space travel is the past. Science fiction about space travel speaks more to our sense of nostalgia now, than our sense of what is imminent.
Do you mourn that kind of science fiction?
It’s not about certain subjects going away or coming back. It’s about the kinds of stories you can tell, and how fluent you can be with them. Space fiction is really charismatic and, quite frankly, easy. For a start, it involves big, exciting pieces of hardware that shoot fire and fly through the air, hero figures called astronauts and a physics palette that’s relatively easy to understand.
When Robert Heinlein wrote Have Space Suit – Will Travel , even though none of the technology actually existed at the time, he could comfortably posit certain very reasonable things about how long it would take to make a trip from Earth to the moon and how the spacesuit would work.
And more than that: there’s a very clearly marked out ladder of achievement that we know we’re going to have to climb in order to reach the stars. Sounding rockets lead to suborbital rockets lead to orbital missions and, eventually, a trip to the moon, to space stations, and trips to Mars. A teleology like that – a set of forced moves, if you like – creates this wonderful environment where a lot of people can write works of science fiction that all speak to each other and reinforce each other.
A golden age: the Mercury missions were a natural jumping-off point for science fiction
The technologies that seem important to us now don’t have that same quality. They’re not charismatic. They’re about how we sculpt invisible things and hide them inside of appliances. Plus, where are the forced moves? Where’s the teleology? Where’s the ladder? The closest we’ve got to that is maybe the idea of the singularity. Information becomes seamlessly connected with itself, and unaccommodated human beings haven’t the remotest chance of knowing what is really going on. That’s a lot harder to write about than landing on Mars and finding some Martians. This awareness has put a particular kind of science fiction into a tailspin. Predictive science fiction is hard to write at the moment. What is writable is a scenario in which you drastically reduce the space of possibilities by bottlenecking everything through some specific future event. You may not be able to predict what the internet’s going to be like in 2030, but you can say, well, if ninety-nine per cent of the world gets wiped out by a virus and we end up having to make fire by rubbing sticks together, then I can at least write a story about that .
And that, I think, is why we’re getting a preponderance of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction: it’s a mechanism for narrowing down the possibility space and making it manageable. You don’t have to predict so much. Rather than juggling a whole ecosystem of future technologies, you work from just one contingent event. As for what to do next, I have this sneaking suspicion that teleological science fiction is due for a comeback, and infrastructure will turn out to be our next outer space.
It could supply us with a lot of what outer space used to supply us with. Does this tie in with the Hieroglyph Project you’re working on?
Yes. In February 2011 I was at a conference called Future Tense, held at Google’s offices in Washington DC. It was co-sponsored by Google and Slate magazine and Arizona State University (ASU) and something called the New America Foundation.
The Deepwater Horizon blowout had got me annoyed, and I started running my mouth about these problems of technological lock-in, and our seeming inability to get big things done. This led to a conversation about what practical utility, if any, science fiction might have in helping to change the future. And two ideas emerged. One was conventional: SF inspires people to become scientists and engineers. The other was a question: can a science-fiction writer provide a coherent vision of a future: something future builders can work toward? The idea was, maybe a story can get the iron filings to line up in a way that’s harder to do with long meetings and interminable PowerPoint presentations.
One of the other people at this conference was Michael Crow, president of ASU. He’s been doing some interesting things, reorganising his university along unconventional lines . We decided we’d curate a kind of operant science fiction. We would get some writers together – some of the usual suspects who write hard SF, but other kinds of writers, too. And together, we’d try to write fiction in a more constructive and optimistic vein about future developments and future inventions, informing the fiction with some useful ideas from engineering and physics provided by a newly created entity at ASU. The pilot project for this has been the idea of building a tower 20,000 metres high.
It was Geoff Landis who wrote some papers about ten years ago, pointing out that, by launching from a tower of about this height, you could halve the cost of putting a payload into orbit. That would be a pretty big change in itself, never mind the fact that it could facilitate other kinds of launch technologies besides conventional rockets. Whether payload savings are enough to pay for a project this big isn’t clear. Chances are they won’t be. So the assumption then becomes that this tower is a sort of Christmas tree on which to hang every type of monetisation scheme you can come up with. Let’s just heave it out there into the world and wait for people to think of ways to make money from it. Tourism, power generation, who knows what?
So I’ve been working on this idea with a structural engineering professor at ASU. He tries to figure out what’s possible, then I try to construct some fiction around that. As he becomes acquainted with the challenges of building something that tall, they get incorporated into the actual content of the story. We’re hoping that there’ll be enough such projects to fill out a proper anthology.
One problem with teleological science fiction at the moment is that we don’t altogether like where the logic ladders are heading. Leaping among the stars is one thing, but where do you end up once you start, say, manipulating the human genome? There’s a pretty obvious risk attached: our habit of normalising and standardising everything. The risk to human diversity is quite large.
If I had to put on my predict-the-future hat, I would foresee a certain amount of narrowing, followed by a big bang, like maybe the emergence of an almost separate species. I’m still getting over the fact that, because my ancestors came from Northern Europe, I’m almost certainly part-Neanderthal. And whenever you get a discovery like that, you can pretty much guarantee that there are twenty similar discoveries around the corner.
So even if we do succumb to the temptation to standardise ourselves, it won’t last, because by then we’ll have found out so much about all the other sorts alternate forms of humanity we’ve already interbred with in our evolutionary past. Plus we can count on another irresistible human habit: we just love customising stuff. Human variety may take a knock in the short term, then it’s just going to kind of explode. Let’s get rid of Type I diabetes first. And after that, all bets are off.
Interviewers: Paul Graham Raven & Simon Ings