I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.
We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.
Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.
We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.
Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.
I recently concluded my brief tour of the classic, nay original cyberpunk series Max Headroom. The brevity of which had nothing everything to do with the Digital Archive Project preserving this show in varying degrees of quality, and my media player’s only being able to handle a few of them.
Of course, it’s just been released on DVD, so that should by rights now disappear, and I’ll be obey the Golden Rule and buying myself a copy (or asking Santa to sort that out.. either way). (Despite this collection not including the original UK movie, which spawned the series; and is far superior.)
These past few weeks have also seen the wife and I re-watching, for the first time since it was broadcast, seminal biopunk (and cyberpunk) series Dark Angel.
By comparing and contrasting these two shows some interesting observations can be made about how the Future is depicted in a sf series; some lessons to learn and some points to focus on.
But first, a quick run down for the uninitiated.
Max Headroom is set in a world here everyone is glued to their televisions (in fact it’s illegal for them to have an off-switch). It’s the tale of Edison Carter, top news reporter for the top rating network, Network 23. While trying to escape from some punks who were trying to kill him, preventing from broadcasting a particularly controversial story, he was collided into a boom gate, nearly dead.. the last thing he saw, the words Max Headroom. Brought back from a body bank, his brain is scanned by young computer genius Bryce, and the AI Max Headroom is born. The show explores this world, usually with a story Edison is working on, with help from Max who can appear on any TV screen, and his controller Theora, who can relay him information through his camera and guide him around (much like the Operators in The Matrix).
Dark Angel is the story of Max Guevara, created in a secret military base, bred and trained to be the perfect soldier. Now working as a bike messenger in a post-apocalyptic Seattle, she tries to find her fellow escapees, further understand just what she is and evade the evil government agents who are constantly trying to capture or kill her.
Commonalities & Contrasts
Most obviously, both these TV series are depicting a projected future; an extrapolation based on the then present.
Max Headroom screened in the mid-80s, so is very much a projection of Thatcherite England (for the UK movie) and it’s compatriot, for the TV series, Regan America. It is ambiguously set ‘20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE’, as each movie is subtitled, and as each ep of the TV series is introduced.
Dark Angel, on the other hand, commenced screening in 2000 and is explicitly set in 2019, referring back to events in 2009 (Max and her teammate’s (part of the X-5 series) escape from Manticore).
Both are set in cities divided in sectors. Both have a backdrop of broken cities… citizens hustling in makeshift markets, burnt out cars left on the roads.
Or gathered around stacks of TVs.
The rebels of Max Headroom’s world are the Blanks. Punk kids, subversives and alternative types that want out of the system, erasing themselves the central computers.
In that other Max’s world, people are struggling to be re-inserted into the system, especially those requiring Government benefits. One ep features the rebel group S1W raiding a veteran’s office, seizing control of the computer and entering in their data, which was being stalled by officials demanding bribes.
The Setting & Depiction of the Future
It’s the depiction of the Future that instantly dates Max Headroom on watching it today.
Using then cutting-edge technology, the poorly rendered, by contemporary standards, character of Max Headroom, could probably be out-done today by a talented child. The Controller’s computers display everything in wire-frame or is otherwise simply rendered.
There is no Internet, which existed then, so could have been used, but was then a purely Military and Academic technology; but, remember, War Games screened several years earlier. Instead, all hacking was of broadcast signals. Yet, as Annalee on io9 shows, it’s stunningly prophetic.
The dystopia is almost purely social; a world of zombies addicted to their televisions and fast food. A Consumer Nightmare! It’s explicitly stated in one ep that nothing new is built anymore, everything is recycled. Nearly all creativity is gone, it’s a world of the race to the bottom. The only new sports are descents into further brutality; people demanding death of the competitors.
Yet an active space program is referred to; something that, with a then new Space Shuttle fleet, was considered an inevitable future event. This was the era of Reagan’s StarWars program. Space was the place.
One of the few technological innovations shown is the baby-bag; bringing a fetus to term inside a nutrient bag, with some degree of control it’s features (gender for example). This is pitched as perfect for the upwardly mobile couple, wanting an instant family; ie Yuppies, scorn of the 80s.
And, of course, the famous Blipverts.. advertisements with information so compressed that they cause some people to explode on viewing them.
It’s also far from an environmental utopia. Rubbish litters the streets, smog the skies. Edison travels everywhere not in a flying car, but in a helicopter.
In short, few people would want to live in the world of Max Headroom.
Dark Angel’s world is that of the post-Apocalypse; the US after an EMP bomb wiped out the country’s computers, taking them back to a new Dark Age (much like the end of Escape from LA).
It’s broken world is more believable, especially as the US still teeters on the edge of another economic depression. (One my favourite lines in the show is Max’s narration in the pilot that ‘they call this a New Depression, but no one seems that depressed to me..’)
Progress is shown to be still occurring outside the US. The Steelheads (the most cyberpunk element of the Dark Angel universe, a subculture of body-mod enthusiasts) import a cyborg arm from (of course) Japan, for instance.
With that millennial focus on genetic engineering (something we’re still calling the NextBigThing, 10years later) the transgenic super-soldiers are the main objects of Futurity. They are depicted using speed-up film and standard fight choreography in a way that doesn’t really horribly date the show at all; especially when compared to that mid-1970s future-human show, The Six Million Dollar Man.
One thing that does date the show is it’s title sequence (even worse in season2). Trim that down in a post-Lost style and you could easily screen this alongside Dollhouse.
It can be argued that recent events make it even more contemporary. Remember, this first screened pre-9/11, a 21stC state crippled by a terrorist attack was still pure speculation. By placing it in a post-Apocalypse, it’s use of contemporary technology doesn’t age it at all; it makes sense. Society is patched together from whatever functioning tech has survived. The sweet exoskeleton Logan ends up with is explicitly said to have been salvaged from a warehouse. Despite them being rare at the the time, a few LCD monitors (vs the standard CRT) appear. No smart-phones obviously, just the occasional dumb mobile phone. It, like Hackers, uses pagers as the main means of mobile comms. But, again, this is easily rationalized.
Perhaps the main thing to date it is it’s signature use of barcode tattoos.
Extrapolating from today, we’d use RFID chips.
Judging by the number of people that did go out and get barcode tattoos, a lot of people would be happy to live in the world of the Dark Angel.
Lessons
Focusing on the positives from both shows we can conclude the best ways to depict the future. Don’t do too linear a projection of technology. Project, but allow a bit of drift and some imagination. As Annalee points out, Max Headroom predicted much of the state of today. It did so by imagining the social and cultural implications of the technology of the time. This is science-fiction at it’s best; not what does the Future look like, but also how does it feel, what problems does technological change solve and what new ones does it create. This can be the source of drama.
The further you extrapolate ahead, the less the technology of the present should appear. The Fountain’s spaceship is possibly the best futuretech-as-magic I have seen in recent TV or film; it’s just a guy sitting by a tree in a giant bubble floating through space. Brilliant!
Be wary of including that Future which seems imminent. Max Headroom alluding to a functional space program is a future lost; largely due to the Challenger disaster, but also the collapse of the Soviet Union took the race from space. The year 2000 was the era of the DotBoom; a linear projection would’ve been of a fully wired world, but it’s post-Apocalyptic setting is what keeps Dark Angel contemporary.
But, but, BUT.. the post-Apocalypse, with all it’s appeal, is kinda played out now.
What this does mean though is to avoid the Singularity. Not because it’s un-writeable, but because.. let’s face it, with reasonable historical knowledge about humanity’s twists and turns, it’s really not that probable; instead something else will happen to surprise us. A sit-com about a person and their sentient appliances does have it’s appeal; but it’s also basically The Jetsons.
Dark Angel teaches us to cheat. Hide the objects of Futurity in objects of the present. The X-5’s are designed to pass among humanity, so they require no fancy make-up or props to depict, just a talented actor and good costuming.
How would I pitch a truly Futuristic series, a show that would rock my socks off? I have some ideas. It may look something like L5, which I’m very impressed with.
To begin with though, it’s important to identity what does and doesn’t work (and holds true over time) in other shows. This post is part of that process.
This article (and the many before like it) hits a nerve with me, in that it perpuates a lot of ideas that I’m sick of hearing. In short, I TAKE UMBRAGE, SIR!
Given Bruce, ironically, tweeted this.. let me appropriate his style of dissecting emails and posts in his blogs (and earlier, emails).
All emphasis mine, etc etc.. let’s pick this baby apart:
Blogging is falling out of favor among the young’uns these days as they move to quicker-moving social networking sites. At the same time, older adults are getting into blogging and teens still aren’t hot on Twitter, at least according to the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life project.
Only 14 percent of teenage Internet users said that they blogged last year—that’s half the number from 2006. Similarly, teen commenting on blogs is way down from 76 percent in 2006 to just over 52 percent in 2009. It doesn’t matter whether the blog is on Blogspot or buried within MySpace, either—blogs in general are definitely not the new black.
Firstly, if you’re a millennial, blogging is old media. It’s not a radical change to the media landscape, it’s just part of their world that’s always been there.
Secondly, seriously.. was blogging ever really popular with teenagers? It was definitely rating high in the early 20s+ demographic in the late 90s/early 00s.. and that’s your cut-off for that (micro)generation of digital natives. As they came online, blogs was teh way to share your life. Now-a-days, yes, it’s Facebook and MMOs.
Lastly, 14% blogged last year.. what’s the actual value? That’s half percentage-wise, but everyone! knows that the population is going online at a logarithmic rate. Don’t confuse the public by using selective statistics to sensationalize the issue.
This isn’t surprising, especially given the fact that teenagers have been flocking to social networking sites in recent years. Almost three-quarters of American teens use sites like Facebook and MySpace—up from 55 percent in 2006—and the numbers are virtually the same for young adults (those between 18 and 29).
I said MMOs.. I’m guessing Pew don’t even know about X-Fire. How about some stats on people fleeing Yahoo! chat for MSN? Exactly.. irrelavant!
What they are not doing, however, is using Twitter, or at least not in large numbers. Only 8 percent of Internet users between 12 and 17 use Twitter, while a full third of those between 18 and 29 do so. This data reflects a previous Nielsen report from mid-2009, as well as a report from Morgan Stanley, both of which noted Twitter’s relative unpopularity among the younger Internet-using audience.
Mashable did a prety decent breakdown on this a while ago – Why Teens Don’t Tweet. Quick summary – they’re talking to their existing social network (ie their friends) NOT into the void.
The trend away from blogging seems to go against data from just two years ago that said the number of bloggers in the world was growing rapidly. What happened? For one, emerging markets like China, Taiwan, Korea, and India are bringing more and more Internet users online by the day, adding to the ranks of bloggers and social networking users alike. Additionally, despite teens getting turned off from the medium, Pew found that older Internet users are actually moving towards blogs—11 percent of users over 30 now regularly maintain a blog compared to 7 percent in 2007, and overall “adult” blogging rates have remained steady.
(Hold that thought – I’ll get back to this part)
Wait for it..
This may be reflective of older users’ interest in reading and writing more in-depth content than 12 one-sentence one-offs in a day, but Pew seems to agree that blogging is quickly becoming the thing that un-hip old people do. “Microblogging and status updating on social networks have replaced old-style ‘macro-blogging’ for many teens and adults,” Pew researcher Amanda Lenhart said in a statement. “The fad stage [of blogging] is over.”
They just ended with “kids today...” On one hand we’ve got them attempting to burst the bubble on the twitter hype, ’cause the kids don’t use it.. then they turn around and sledge those same kids for being of too short an attention span. I could bust out the popularity of Twilight and Harry Potter to show that tweens are quite happy to read long works. The massive growth of Young Adult literature. Etc. Ad nausea.
The (again, missed) point is that we are sharing more, not reading less. Short and long form. That brilliant, random thought need no longer lie hidden in a notebook, unread by the masses; off to twitter it goes, where it can take on it’s on life.. be faved or retweeted.. lurk in the subconcious for years, bring a smile or spark an intense debate or…blog post even! This is the new ecology of thought and discourse.
But enough parenthetical micro-ranting…
(OK, I’m back)
Onto the actual point that enraged me enough to write this in the first place; LEDE = BURIED!!!
Can we please forget coveting the cool cachet of the all important t(w)eens!?! This is The Conversation and, as was just shown, more people from the World and from a greater age range are engaging in it. This is what it means publicly publish your thoughts in a manner that is open and searchable.
Instead of counting the number of blogs, can we dig deeper and look at the content. For Cthulhu’s sake, don’t we want the older generation uploading a life’s worth of experience and knowledge.. isn’t that something pretty fucking valuable? Not to denigrate the contributions of the young, but it’s a fair bet that any blog/MySpace page/Facebook profile entry of the average 17yo is more likely to be about the latest it-band/movie whatever.
Again, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that twitter is some holy medium of pure truth – all the prosecution has to do is present the Trending Topics argument. Sturgeon’s Law applies to all things. BUT, just because teens aren’t using a technology, doesn’t mean it’s a bad/broken or useless tech. We should celebrate that more people than ever are online and talking to each other.
CAN WE PLEASE JUST ABANDON THIS ARGUMENT THAT BECAUSE TECH CHANGES SO FAST, WE MUST CONTINUALLY LOOK TO THE YOUNG TO UNDERSTAND IT!?!
Let me hand the mike over to Craig Ferguson:
Addendum :- Cyberpunk Elder Bruce later posted, via twitter, a link to http://gregor.us/california/used-rainbows/ - proof of the continued strength and value of blogging by ‘old people’ and it’s vitally as a medium of expresion.
The population now lacks a reason to believe that ‘history’ is ‘progressing’ in any particular direction, so a mix-and-match, cut-up, splice-up techno-aesthetic makes sense.
