Identity/Destiny.

by Richard Thieme

“Identity/Destiny” was published in Prophecy Anthology, Volume 1“  a full-color book featuring sequential art by artists such as Shannon Wheeler, Scott McCloud, Sho Murase, Yuko Shimizu, Nathan Fox and Bernie Mireault by Sequent Media (2004). The text accompanied wonderful graphic narrative.

Identity is destiny.

Identity is designed.

Our destiny then is to design our identity and …

how we design our identity determines our destiny.

Existence precedes essence. Our existence as conscious beings enables us to create and recreate ourselves (within constraints, of course) in our image(s).

Constraints include how we are constructed as cognitive and sensory systems and the deep structure of our biological and cultural inheritance, the context of which we are the contents.

Translating that deep structure which is “unknown and unwritten” through symbols into “known and unwritten” or “known and written” is a primary task of human civilization.

Identity is also a function of boundaries.

How do we choose to think of ourselves? As colonies of organs or glandular systems? as individuals whose skins are a hard delimitation of where we begin and end? as nodes in a network or members of a tribe or nation?

Our identity is determined by the line around ourSelf, our Selves.

[see the short story, Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time, at www.thiemeworks.com for sequential images of this moving target]

“Individual” is a notion-come-lately. “Individual” is a renaissance invention like the modern “self.”

Now we are again thinking of ourselves as cells in bodies, nodes in networks. Selves are becoming ourSelf again.

Boundaries are determined by technologies of information and communication.

Boundaries draw themselves at the levels of complexity of our social, economic, and political lives appropriate to the speed of the flow of information and the size and shape of the structures needed to manage that flow.

The printing press came to England in the late fourteen hundreds and transformed regional peoples into one people-becoming-English. Nation states were not thinkable before the printing press turned languages into dialects and chose one dialect to be a language, creating a unified framework for a “people” who recontextualized their former identities, now included and transcended, in something larger, something unimaginable prior to transformation.

Today England is fighting not to become part of Europe but England is already over. Using euros or translating pounds into euros is the same transaction.  The boundary has shifted.

Privacy is the illusion of containment. We radiate information about ourselves everywhere and always. We are systems of energy and information. Or we are one system of energy and information.

Language made us human. Language is the glue of the human universe. To be human therefore is to be social.

Even the Unabomber wrote letters. A human alone is a brain in a bottle.

There are four eras of the Technology of the Word: speech, writing, printing, and electronic communication. Fractal-like, self-similar at all levels.

The last era began with the telegraph, the first of the network-generating electronic technologies.

McLuhan talked about television a lot because that was his Internet.

Human beings and all other organizations are systems of information and energy. How energy and information flow determines the structure(s) of the system.

The era of electronic communication creates communities of identity on the fly, undermining prior identities. Cognitive dissonance is the result.

We do not know at any given moment which identity is speaking through us (in the sense that we do not speak a language but language speaks us).

Am I writing this as an American or as a trans-national … non-American?

What am I becoming? What is its name? Not-being-something is not an identity.

Nietzsche said creative thinkers see what is emerging and give it a name just before the herd sees it. Naming is a primary act of creativity. Names set boundaries and boundaries determines identity.

New names have not yet been invented.

Today our identities are modular and fluid because the networks in which we are immersed are modular and fluid. We created them but then they created us in their images. Our relationship with our technologies is symbiotic.

There is more to it than that, of course.

We are already cyborgs, fused with numerous made-bones, manufactured skin and artificial joints and implants in heads and hearts. Artificial and natural are no longer useful distinctions. Chips will be embedded in muscles, organs, brains to monitor or correct health. Optimal health will be redefined in terms of the kinds of intelligence, talents and skills we want to have. Whether ingested in chemicals or designed by genetic engineers or nanotechnologists, our redesigned fields of subjectivity will determine how we experience our selves as possibilities for action in the world.

We are cyborg selves with enhanced cognitive and sensory functions. We are it, the objects of our own design.

How can it not know what it is? asked Deckert of the replicant Rachel in Bladerunner.  Deckert did not yet suspect that he was a replicant too.

Not only Rachel-as-Other but ourselves-as-Deckert use photographs to frame our identities. At the micro level, photos remember who we are. At the macro level, conceptual images from PR, propaganda and psyops inside and outside our societies (there is no inside or outside anymore – whoops! there go the boundaries!) determine our collective memories, not our history but our shared myths.

History is not bunk. History is a manufactured field of collective subjectivity useful for managing the herd.

There’s more to it than that, of course.

A trans-planetary culture is already emerging in our midst like a fifth column, Viet Cong emerging from hiding in Saigon after the fall of the city.

Here is a direct quote from an intelligence agency analyst:

“The evidence for a cultural intrusion over a long period of time from other planets or dimensions is overwhelming.”

It does not matter if “we” go there or “they” come here. “We” and “they” are transformed in the encounter. Whether socially through neighborhoods or economically through trade or politically through alliances or biologically through interbreeding, a trans-planetary culture is the lead-edge of a transformation of earth identity into a trans-galactic identity.

Where are the Picts or the Celts?

Our designer progeny will ask, where are the Americans? where are the earthlings?

Picts, Celts, Americans, earthlings, all live on in story and song, memories helpful for managing nostalgia.  Nostalgia is how we manage transitions. Some are nostalgic for the days of a single planet. Some are nostalgic for individual species before we realized we shared the life of all higher primates. Some are nostalgic for the days before we knew that all sentient life shares an awareness.

Identities – humans, nations, trans-planetary alliances – are momentary states designed on the fly in specific cultural contexts to manage transitions from one state to the next. We swim from island to island  but we know too that islands are also made of water.

Identity is destiny.

Identity is designed.

Our destiny is to design our identity and

how we design our identity will determine our destiny.

Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine

by

Richard Thieme

published in the National Catholic Reporter

When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation – not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring – it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring for our most cherished religious traditions, symbols, and beliefs because they feel like skin on the bone and changes in them feel like a threat to our very being rather than an evolutionary necessity.

But transformations will happen and afterward, when the skin is gone but the bone stays, when our essential selves and spiritual commitments stay, only then will we see that God is still God and can not be equated to the image of God or idea about God to which we became so inordinately attached.

In this brief exploration of the impact of information and communication technologies on religious life, I hope to distinguish skin and bone.

The impact of these transforming technologies on our identities can not be overstated. In turn, our identities – who we think we are when we don’t even think about it – determine what we believe we are capable of being and doing. Identity is destiny, and our technologies by defining those identities frame the parameters of our lives, disclose our horizons.

Here’s an example of how that works.

I am a middle-aged man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and begin writing stories as a teen.

When I tried to find a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer’s Market, to locate magazines. Now, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not. That book, the Writer’s Market, was itself a textual artifact which clearly defined my horizons of possibility. I internalized the information in it – markets in North America, markets to which I could send stories typed on paper by mail – as the limits of my vision.

Flash forward to the early nineties when I wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the impact of the internet. They printed 500 words and gave back 4500. I sat in front of my word processor, hooked up to a telephone modem, wondering where I could send an article using those extra words.

Then the light bulb went on. DUH. I could use the Internet to find markets for my article about the Internet.

I surfed the nascent web and located magazines in South Africa, England, Australia. I offered articles by email and within a week had contracts and had become a writer with a global presence.

Now, this is the point: that light bulb would never have gone on, I would never have discovered possibilities that shattered my old vision and disclosed those new horizons, had I not engaged with the technology and allowed it to disclose those possibilities. The technology itself over time restructured my beliefs.

That sounds obvious now, ten years later, but then it was revolutionary. The breakthrough came when I realized that I was using the new technology like the old technology, as if a word processor were a typewriter, as if new wine could be squeezed into old wineskins. After I had engaged with the medium for a time, the information implicit in the transaction itself broke through to my conscious mind and I had an epiphany.

That’s what technologies are doing too to our notions of spirituality, our religious and spiritual practices, and the organizational structures of our religions.

How does this happen? The way Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt – gradually, then suddenly. We never see what’s obvious until it is unavoidable. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and told the world where to find it, astronomers searched through old photographic plates to look for the coordinates of Pluto’s orbit. Sure enough, there the planet was and there it always had been, right in front of their eyes. But no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The foundations of our religious traditions are undergoing a profound transformation but we are still using word processors as if they are typewriters.

This is fourth great era of the Technology of the Word, as Walter Ong calls it. The first was the era of speech and the co-evolution of tongue, larynx, pharynx and brain which enabled us to create that first “virtual space,” something like the one we are inhabiting as I write and you read these words. The creation of linguistic symbols and the creation of a meaningful universe from those symbols in which we then live in as if it is real made us humans.

Speaking humans lived in oral cultures for thousands of years, populating a vast unknown pre-history that existed before writing. When writing emerged, everything form oral cultures either disappeared or found itself translated into written form.

We know that religious images, artifacts, and rituals were part of oral cultures but we only know those images and words that were translated into written symbols. That may sound obvious, but the implications are important. It is not coincidental that the persons associated with the world’s major religions as we currently define them – Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Abraham or Moses, Mohammed, and all the others –emerged into human consciousness through the written word which transformed our ancestors and the internalized images of self and God formed as they engaged with written text. In every instance, a flesh-and-blood human being was transformed through writing into a “textual being,” a being with whom or which we engage in and through the text.  Theology implicitly became hermeneutics, the study of how texts mean, because interaction with written texts forms an image distinctive to the technology that created the text.

It is also no coincidence that world religions like our “majors” ceased to emerge once the era of writing passed except as subsets of prior religions.

When the printing press with movable type was invented, another revolution took place. The unique historical person Martin Luther may have been essential to the Reformation, but the being we call “Luther” is a print-text being mediated by type just as Jesus is a textual being mediated initially by writing. But print-text and the changes to which it contributed including the Renaissance generated a different sense of self and, once again, different notions of God. The fractal-like replication of Catholicism in the image of Protestantism was a prototype for how hundreds of additional denominations or religions were generated, an inevitable consequence of the power printed text gave to people to recreate themselves. The Reformation is literally unimaginable prior to the emergence of the printing press and those who used it to print the Bible like Gutenberg himself had no idea what a revolution had begun. Gutenberg would have been horrified to know what he had spawned. When he first printed the Bible, however, only 2% of Europe’s population could read, so it would have been impossible to forecast religious practices based on people reading silently to themselves and learning thereby a method of personal interpretation that was as alien to the prior culture as the notion of an individual with rights, intellectual property, or all of the other emergent properties of the Renaissance that are now being challenged by electronic communication.

In the same way that “individuals” with “individual rights” were an emergent property of technological change, “a personal relationship with God” became possible only after an “individual” could think of him/herself and God as distinct beings, neither mediated by a community. Paradoxically biblical literalism emerged relatively recently and the “original text” to which it claims to be loyal is one interpretation among many that developed centuries after the fact.

William Caxton brought the printing press to the British isles in the 1470s. When he looked back in his sixties on several decades of profound change he wrote that he could barely recognize the landscape of his youth, so radically had it been altered. But he was not speaking only of moors and downs, he was speaking of the interior landscape and the transformation of identity through which he had lived.

On a fundamental level, the choice of a dialect with which to print helped determine an “English” identity rather than identities based on smaller populations, each speaking a distinct language that they did see as a dialect. They experienced themselves as a single people with regional dialects only when a supra-identity defined by a nation state had emerged.

In the same way, according to McLuhan, Catholics and Protestants would never have seen themselves as a single tradition before television created ecumenism and the distinctions we now take for granted just as the word “Judeo-Christian” did not exist before the second half of the twentieth century.

A nation state like a global religious organization is defined by a boundary drawn around a more complex unit which organizes political, economic and social life at a higher level of abstraction. Nation states emerged after the Renaissance in part as a consequence of the print-text revolution. because society demanded organizational structures appropriate to a higher level of complexity. The speed of the flow of information is a primary determinant of the organizational level of a society or civilization. The transformational engine of electronic communication is now challenging national boundaries but we do not yet have names for the fluid, modular way of life with rapidly morphing identities that is replacing a prior way of being.

Think of time lapse photography on fast forward and think of nation states, religions, everything changing in relationship to the technologies that generate and sustain them. The England of the preceding paragraphs is now part of “Europe,” passports are no longer examined at borders that are more than porous, and most of Europe uses the Euro instead of a national currency.

The fourth iteration of the Technology of the Word, electronic communication in all forms, began with the telegraph, the first time human communication moved faster than people (or their animals and artifacts) could move. It continued with radio, television, wired and wireless transmission, and now the Internet, the most recent iteration and the one most in the forefront of our awareness.

This is what Langton Winner said about the impact of technology on people and society.

“To invent a new technology requires that society also invents the kinds of people who will use it; older practices, relationships, and ways of defining people’s identities fall by the wayside and new practices, relationships, and identities take root. In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression.”

When we translate his insights into implications for religious organizations and images of identity, human self, and God, we see that this radical restructuring must profoundly impact who we think we are, how we imagine God, and how we define our experience of ultimate meaning.  “Reading the Bible” does not port or translate to an experience of immersion in an iconic flow of information in a virtual environment. The latter experience is generating  dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, and when we try to say what we see, what we experience ourselves to be, we will need to invent a new vocabulary. Pioneers of the spirit, as Nietzsche noted, are those who see first what is coming over the horizon and give it a name which the rest of us then use as if they created what in fact they merely discovered. It was impossible to predict precisely how the encounter of Greek and Hebrew worlds would create Christianity because it was unthinkable inside both of the prior paradigms. In a more mundane way, when the U. S. government wanted to encourage people to fly on airplanes then subsidized by the government for delivering mail, it needed to change the word “aeronaut” which designated the bold courageous pioneers who were willing to fly. They needed a word into which everyone could project his or her identity and came up with “passenger,” a word we now use unselfconsciously to refer to an activity we take for granted. In the same way, astronauts going into space will be replaced by space tourists and travelers and Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the others will find new names for the new spiritual modalities and religious structures we are generating in networks and electronic webs.

Let’s call them/is DPs (digital people, as opposed to print-text people.) DPs will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text-Gods (i.e. worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered,  integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons, and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation,” now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular, and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular, and fluid too.

Think of the common spiritual practice of “journaling,” for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today bloggers engage in a  web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over forty ever accepted his theory. In religious life too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example,  have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves ongoingly is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and “shop for churches.” We used to stay married but more and more people are divorced and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime.  In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

So the question is not, will new technologies and specifically digital ones turn religious, political, and economic structures on their collective ears, but will our identities persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before? Or  will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not resemble the one we used to see?

The implications of this article are not trivial. We are moving together like it or not through a zone of annihilation that challenges all of the ways we hold ourselves as human beings and possibilities for action in the world. The transformational energies of our time will become a fire storm when core proclamations about our beliefs begin to smoke and burn. If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. Perhaps claims to exclusivity and universality will survive the fire, but perhaps not. Perhaps those claims will both intensify and diminish, intensify because some can’t help but cling to the past and diminish because we are all nevertheless being recontextualized in a way that will remind us unceasingly that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish while everything in this life including our ideas about God are transitory and passing.

Richard Thieme (rthieme@thiemeworks.com) speaks professionally, writes, and consults on the human side of technology and the work place.

Hacking Chinatown
By Richard Thieme

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed.

“Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, is a fine film: it defines an era (the thirties in the United States) and a genre — film noir — that is a unique way to frame reality.

“Film noir” is a vision of a world corrupt to the core in which nevertheless it is still possible, as author Raymond Chandler said of the heroes of the best detective novels, to be “a man of honor. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

“Chinatown” also defines life in the virtual world — that consensual hallucination we have come to call “cyberspace.” The virtual world is a simulation of the “real world.” The “real world” too is a symbolic construction, a set of nested structures that — as we peel them away in the course of our lives — reveals more and more complexity and ambiguity.

The real world IS Chinatown, and computer hackers — properly understood — know this better than anyone.

There are several themes in “Chinatown.”

(1) People in power are in seamless collusion. They take care of one another. They don’t always play fair. And sooner or later, we discover that “we” are “they.”

A veteran police detective told me this about people in power.

“There’s one thing they all fear — politicians, industrialists, corporate executives — and that’s exposure. They simply do not want anyone to look too closely or shine too bright a light on their activities.”

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, known for its political machine and cash-on-the-counter way of doing business. I earned money for my education working with the powerful Daley political machine. In exchange for patronage jobs — supervising playgrounds, hauling garbage — I worked with a precinct captain and alderman. My job was to do what I was told.

I paid attention to how people behaved in the real world. I learned that nothing is simple, that people act instinctively out of self-interest, and that nobody competes in the arena of real life with clean hands.

I remember sitting in a restaurant in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago, listening to a conversation in the next booth. Two dubious characters were upset that a mutual friend faced a long prison term. They looked and sounded different than the “respectable” people with whom I had grown up in an affluent part of town.

As I grew up, however, I learned how my friends’ fathers really made money. Many of their activities were disclosed in the newspaper. They distributed pornography before it was legal, manufactured and sold illegal gambling equipment, distributed vending machines and juke boxes to bars that had to take them or face the consequences. I learned that a real estate tycoon had been a bootlegger during prohibition, and the brother of the man in the penthouse upstairs had died in Miami Beach in a hail of bullets.

For me, it was an awakening: I saw that the members of the power structures in the city — business, government, the religious hierarchy, and the syndicate or mafia — were indistinguishable, a partnership that of necessity included everyone who wanted to do business. Conscious or unconscious, collusion was the price of the ticket that got you into the stadium; whether players on the field or spectators in the stands, we were all players, one way or another.

Chicago is Chinatown, and Chinatown is the world. There is no moral high ground. We all wear masks, but under that mask is … Chinatown.

(2) You never really know what’s going on in Chinatown.

The police in Chinatown, according to Jake Gittes, were told to do “as little as possible” because things that happened on the street were the visible consequences of strings pulled behind the scenes. If you looked too often behind the curtain — as Gittes did — you were taught a painful lesson.

We often don’t understand what we’re looking at on the Internet. As one hacker recently emailed in response to someone’s fears of a virus that did not and could not exist, “No information on the World Wide Web is any good unless you can either verify it yourself or it’s backed up by an authority you trust.”

The same is true in life.

Disinformation in the virtual world is an art. After an article I wrote for an English magazine about detective work on the Internet appeared, I received a call from a global PR firm in London. They asked if I wanted to conduct “brand defense” for them on the World Wide Web.

What is brand defense?

If one of our clients is attacked, they explained, their Internet squad goes into action. “Sleepers” (spies inserted into a community and told to wait until they receive orders) in usenet groups and listservs create distractions, invent controversies; web sites (on both sides of the question) go into high gear, using splashy graphics and clever text to distort the conversation. Persons working for the client pretend to be disinterested so they can spread propaganda.

It reminded me of the time my Democratic Party precinct captain asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain.

Are you retiring? I asked.

Of course not! he laughed. You’d be the Republican precinct captain. Then we’d have all our bases covered.

The illusions of cyberspace are seductive. Every keystroke leaves a luminous track in the melting snow that can be seen with the equivalent of night vision goggles.

Hacking means tracking — and counter-tracking — and covering your tracks — in the virtual world. Hacking means knowing how to follow the flow of electrons to its source and understand on every level of abstraction — from source code to switches and routers to high level words and images — what is really happening.

Hackers are unwilling to do as little as possible. Hackers are need-to-know machines driven by a passion to connect disparate data into meaningful patterns. Hackers are the online detectives of the virtual world.

You don’t get to be a hacker overnight.

The devil is in the details. Real hackers get good by endless trial and error, failing into success again and again. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the electric light, invented a hundred filaments that didn’t work before he found one that did. He knew that every failure eliminated a possibility and brought him closer to his goal.

Listen to “Rogue Agent” set someone straight on an Internet mailing list:

“You want to create hackers? Don’t tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don’t, comfortable to stay within the bounds of their safe little lives, fall by the wayside.

“There’s no knowledge so sweet as that which you’ve discovered on your own.”

In Chinatown, an unsavory character tries to stop Jake Gittes from prying by cutting his nose. He reminds Gittes that “curiosity killed the cat.”

Isn’t it ironic that curiosity, the defining characteristic of an intelligent organism exploring its environment, has been prohibited by folk wisdom everywhere?

The endless curiosity of hackers is regulated by a higher code that may not even have a name but which defines the human spirit at its best. The Hacker’s Code is an affirmation of life itself, life that wants to know, and grow, and extend itself throughout the “space” of the universe. The hackers’ refusal to accept conventional wisdom and boundaries is a way to align his energies with the life-giving passion of heretics everywhere. And these days, that’s what needed to survive.

Robert Galvin, the patriarch of Motorola, maker of cell-phones and semi-conductors, says that “every significant decision that changes the direction of a company is a minority decision. Whatever is the intuitive presumption — where everyone agrees, “Yeah, that’s right” — will almost surely be wrong.”

Motorola succeeded by fostering an environment in which creativity thrives. The company has institutionalized an openness to heresy because they know that wisdom is always arriving at the edge of things, on the horizons of our lives, and when it first shows up — like a comet on the distant edges of the solar system — it is faint and seen by only a few. But those few know where to look.

Allen Hynek, an astronomer connected with the U. S. Air Force investigation of UFOs, was struck by the “strangeness” of UFO reports, the cognitive dissonance that characterizes experiences that don’t fit our orthodox belief systems. He pointed out that all the old photographic plates in astronomical observatories had images of Pluto on them, but until Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto and said where it was, no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The best computer consultants live on the creative edge of things. They are path-finders, guides for those whom have always lived at the orthodox center but who find today that the center is constantly shifting, mandating that they learn new behaviors, new skills in order to be effective. In order to live on the edge.

The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.

When I looked out over the audience at DefCon IV, the hackers’ convention, I saw an assembly of the most brilliant and most unusual people I had ever seen in one room. It was exhilarating. We all felt as if we had come home. There in that room for a few hours or a few days, we did not have to explain anything. We knew who we were and what drove us in our different ways to want to connect the dots of data into meaningful patterns.

We know we build on quicksand, but building is too much fun to give up. We know we leave tracks, but going is so much more energizing than staying home. We know that curiosity can get your nose slit, but then we’ll invent new ways to smell.

Computer programmers write software applications that are doomed to be as obsolete as wire recordings. The infrastructures built by our engineers are equally doomed. Whether a virtual world of digital bits or a physical world of concrete and steel, our civilization is a Big Toy that we build and use up at the same time. The fun of the game is to know that it is a game, and winning is identical with our willingness to play.

To say that when we engage with one another in cyberspace we are “Hacking Chinatown” is a way to say that asking questions is more important than finding answers. We do not expect to find final answers. But the questions must be asked. We refuse to do as little as possible because we want to KNOW.

Asking questions is how human beings create opportunities for dignity and self-transcendence; asking questions is how we are preparing ourselves to leave this island earth and enter into a trans-galactic web of life more diverse and alien than anything we have encountered.

Asking questions that uncover the truth is our way of refusing to consent to illusions and delusions, our way of insisting that we can do it better if we stay up later, collaborate with each other in networks with no names, and lose ourselves in the quest for knowledge and self-mastery.

This is how proud, lonely men and women, illuminated in the darkness by their glowing monitors, become heroes in their own dramas as they wander the twisting streets of cyberspace and their own lives.

Even in Chinatown, Jake. Even in Chinatown.

Hacking Chinatown
By Richard Thieme

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed.

“Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, is a fine film: it defines an era (the thirties in the United States) and a genre — film noir — that is a unique way to frame reality.

“Film noir” is a vision of a world corrupt to the core in which nevertheless it is still possible, as author Raymond Chandler said of the heroes of the best detective novels, to be “a man of honor. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

“Chinatown” also defines life in the virtual world — that consensual hallucination we have come to call “cyberspace.” The virtual world is a simulation of the “real world.” The “real world” too is a symbolic construction, a set of nested structures that — as we peel them away in the course of our lives — reveals more and more complexity and ambiguity.

The real world IS Chinatown, and computer hackers — properly understood — know this better than anyone.

There are several themes in “Chinatown.”

(1) People in power are in seamless collusion. They take care of one another. They don’t always play fair. And sooner or later, we discover that “we” are “they.”

A veteran police detective told me this about people in power.

“There’s one thing they all fear — politicians, industrialists, corporate executives — and that’s exposure. They simply do not want anyone to look too closely or shine too bright a light on their activities.”

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, known for its political machine and cash-on-the-counter way of doing business. I earned money for my education working with the powerful Daley political machine. In exchange for patronage jobs — supervising playgrounds, hauling garbage — I worked with a precinct captain and alderman. My job was to do what I was told.

I paid attention to how people behaved in the real world. I learned that nothing is simple, that people act instinctively out of self-interest, and that nobody competes in the arena of real life with clean hands.

I remember sitting in a restaurant in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago, listening to a conversation in the next booth. Two dubious characters were upset that a mutual friend faced a long prison term. They looked and sounded different than the “respectable” people with whom I had grown up in an affluent part of town.

As I grew up, however, I learned how my friends’ fathers really made money. Many of their activities were disclosed in the newspaper. They distributed pornography before it was legal, manufactured and sold illegal gambling equipment, distributed vending machines and juke boxes to bars that had to take them or face the consequences. I learned that a real estate tycoon had been a bootlegger during prohibition, and the brother of the man in the penthouse upstairs had died in Miami Beach in a hail of bullets.

For me, it was an awakening: I saw that the members of the power structures in the city — business, government, the religious hierarchy, and the syndicate or mafia — were indistinguishable, a partnership that of necessity included everyone who wanted to do business. Conscious or unconscious, collusion was the price of the ticket that got you into the stadium; whether players on the field or spectators in the stands, we were all players, one way or another.

Chicago is Chinatown, and Chinatown is the world. There is no moral high ground. We all wear masks, but under that mask is … Chinatown.

(2) You never really know what’s going on in Chinatown.

The police in Chinatown, according to Jake Gittes, were told to do “as little as possible” because things that happened on the street were the visible consequences of strings pulled behind the scenes. If you looked too often behind the curtain — as Gittes did — you were taught a painful lesson.

We often don’t understand what we’re looking at on the Internet. As one hacker recently emailed in response to someone’s fears of a virus that did not and could not exist, “No information on the World Wide Web is any good unless you can either verify it yourself or it’s backed up by an authority you trust.”

The same is true in life.

Disinformation in the virtual world is an art. After an article I wrote for an English magazine about detective work on the Internet appeared, I received a call from a global PR firm in London. They asked if I wanted to conduct “brand defense” for them on the World Wide Web.

What is brand defense?

If one of our clients is attacked, they explained, their Internet squad goes into action. “Sleepers” (spies inserted into a community and told to wait until they receive orders) in usenet groups and listservs create distractions, invent controversies; web sites (on both sides of the question) go into high gear, using splashy graphics and clever text to distort the conversation. Persons working for the client pretend to be disinterested so they can spread propaganda.

It reminded me of the time my Democratic Party precinct captain asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain.

Are you retiring? I asked.

Of course not! he laughed. You’d be the Republican precinct captain. Then we’d have all our bases covered.

The illusions of cyberspace are seductive. Every keystroke leaves a luminous track in the melting snow that can be seen with the equivalent of night vision goggles.

Hacking means tracking — and counter-tracking — and covering your tracks — in the virtual world. Hacking means knowing how to follow the flow of electrons to its source and understand on every level of abstraction — from source code to switches and routers to high level words and images — what is really happening.

Hackers are unwilling to do as little as possible. Hackers are need-to-know machines driven by a passion to connect disparate data into meaningful patterns. Hackers are the online detectives of the virtual world.

You don’t get to be a hacker overnight.

The devil is in the details. Real hackers get good by endless trial and error, failing into success again and again. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the electric light, invented a hundred filaments that didn’t work before he found one that did. He knew that every failure eliminated a possibility and brought him closer to his goal.

Listen to “Rogue Agent” set someone straight on an Internet mailing list:

“You want to create hackers? Don’t tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don’t, comfortable to stay within the bounds of their safe little lives, fall by the wayside.

“There’s no knowledge so sweet as that which you’ve discovered on your own.”

In Chinatown, an unsavory character tries to stop Jake Gittes from prying by cutting his nose. He reminds Gittes that “curiosity killed the cat.”

Isn’t it ironic that curiosity, the defining characteristic of an intelligent organism exploring its environment, has been prohibited by folk wisdom everywhere?

The endless curiosity of hackers is regulated by a higher code that may not even have a name but which defines the human spirit at its best. The Hacker’s Code is an affirmation of life itself, life that wants to know, and grow, and extend itself throughout the “space” of the universe. The hackers’ refusal to accept conventional wisdom and boundaries is a way to align his energies with the life-giving passion of heretics everywhere. And these days, that’s what needed to survive.

Robert Galvin, the patriarch of Motorola, maker of cell-phones and semi-conductors, says that “every significant decision that changes the direction of a company is a minority decision. Whatever is the intuitive presumption — where everyone agrees, “Yeah, that’s right” — will almost surely be wrong.”

Motorola succeeded by fostering an environment in which creativity thrives. The company has institutionalized an openness to heresy because they know that wisdom is always arriving at the edge of things, on the horizons of our lives, and when it first shows up — like a comet on the distant edges of the solar system — it is faint and seen by only a few. But those few know where to look.

Allen Hynek, an astronomer connected with the U. S. Air Force investigation of UFOs, was struck by the “strangeness” of UFO reports, the cognitive dissonance that characterizes experiences that don’t fit our orthodox belief systems. He pointed out that all the old photographic plates in astronomical observatories had images of Pluto on them, but until Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto and said where it was, no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The best computer consultants live on the creative edge of things. They are path-finders, guides for those whom have always lived at the orthodox center but who find today that the center is constantly shifting, mandating that they learn new behaviors, new skills in order to be effective. In order to live on the edge.

The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.

When I looked out over the audience at DefCon IV, the hackers’ convention, I saw an assembly of the most brilliant and most unusual people I had ever seen in one room. It was exhilarating. We all felt as if we had come home. There in that room for a few hours or a few days, we did not have to explain anything. We knew who we were and what drove us in our different ways to want to connect the dots of data into meaningful patterns.

We know we build on quicksand, but building is too much fun to give up. We know we leave tracks, but going is so much more energizing than staying home. We know that curiosity can get your nose slit, but then we’ll invent new ways to smell.

Computer programmers write software applications that are doomed to be as obsolete as wire recordings. The infrastructures built by our engineers are equally doomed. Whether a virtual world of digital bits or a physical world of concrete and steel, our civilization is a Big Toy that we build and use up at the same time. The fun of the game is to know that it is a game, and winning is identical with our willingness to play.

To say that when we engage with one another in cyberspace we are “Hacking Chinatown” is a way to say that asking questions is more important than finding answers. We do not expect to find final answers. But the questions must be asked. We refuse to do as little as possible because we want to KNOW.

Asking questions is how human beings create opportunities for dignity and self-transcendence; asking questions is how we are preparing ourselves to leave this island earth and enter into a trans-galactic web of life more diverse and alien than anything we have encountered.

Asking questions that uncover the truth is our way of refusing to consent to illusions and delusions, our way of insisting that we can do it better if we stay up later, collaborate with each other in networks with no names, and lose ourselves in the quest for knowledge and self-mastery.

This is how proud, lonely men and women, illuminated in the darkness by their glowing monitors, become heroes in their own dramas as they wander the twisting streets of cyberspace and their own lives.

Even in Chinatown, Jake. Even in Chinatown.

Straight Talk

I write an column called “Islands in the Clickstream” that is disseminated over the Internet. It’s about our interaction with new technologies and the larger issues of our lives that they raise. One reader wrote that more and more of my columns were emphasizing sentiment, rather than technological issues.

He was right.

So I found myself asking, what are the issues occasioned by information technology, not as it is defined inside the disciplines that create and sustain it, but as we experience it fired at us every morning at point blank range from the barrel of a gun? How do we define those issues from our everyday human point of view?

The real issues of technology are human issues. Due to rapid changes in technology, the possibilities of our lives fan out like the paths of sub-atomic particles. The ones that become real are those we choose to make real. But in the meantime, the number of options confronting every task from choosing a new television to resolving complex issues of work, parenting, or being in relationship cause much of the underlying stress so many of us feel.

The changes in technology, after all, are not happening in a vacuum. We bring to them (1) our genetic heritage, equipping us to adapt to change at different rates as individuals and within a set of ranges as a species; (2) what we have been habituated to believe is possible by the experience of our lives, which will be different depending on our ages and points of reference.

My experience is that most people mean by the word “technology” what has been invented since we were about ten years old. That’s when we begin noticing what’s around us and that becomes our point of reference for what’s “normal” for the rest of our lives. We can adjust that baseline on the basis of reflection, but we can’t change the “feel” of what’s right. Since the technologies which define our environment, our habitat, our “space,” define also how we hold ourselves in the world as possibilities for action by disclosing the horizons of possibility implicit in those technologies, it is no surprise that a real contextual shift in what is possible for humanity will be a traumatic event to which we will respond – depending on our genetic code – with everything from excitement to a frenzied Luddite attack on the devil-machines that symbolize the coming of Armageddon.

Fritz Perls, one of the fathers of gestalt psychology, defined excitement as anxiety plus oxygen. The task of adding oxygen to anxiety and fear and pumping it up so that we can cross the invisible barrier between no! and yes! is a daunting one. Yet that adventure requires a focus on the human user and how he/she adapts, not on the technology that threatens or excites them.

We are all realizing that reinventing ourselves is not a one-time event, but an ongoing affair. The task of asking who we are and how we will work and live is serious business that requires time and energy – which is often the last thing we feel we have to give. It requires bracketing time and space and setting aside both as a kind of sacred spacetime which is inviolable once we enter it. A retreat is not merely getting away, it is getting into a particular kind of environment which triggers reflection, contemplation, or the wu wei (“not doing”) of being still and allowing things to evolve rather than trying to push the river toward the sea.

We can adapt to technology best by periodically stepping back or stepping down to an environment shaped by prior technology to recollect ourselves so we can come back to the brave new world that is emerging. Religious retreat centers often have wooden chairs, natural surroundings, less than state-of-the-art communication networks. That’s all intentional, all part of the design. Behind the scenes, the networks hum and God sings through the wires of a trans-planetary net. But in that space that we need in order to remember who we really are, it’s best to keep the foreground simple and spare.

Less is more.

The digital world is an evolutionary segment of the era of electronic communication. I don’t think the prophets of digital revolution have gotten it wrong so much as gotten it narrow. Digital technologies are linked to telegraph, radio, television, and other modalities of electronic communication which constitute the fourth great evolutionary era of the Word. The first was speech, the second was writing, and the third was printing. Printing was not a simple single event in the fifteenth century but an evolutionary trajectory which included the rise of commercial publishing and cheap portable books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no less than the invention of the Gutenberg press with moveable type. These eras overlap one another and each recontextualizes how we understand the prior era.

The digital world, like the print world before it, is assimilating us into its radical and powerful way of manipulating symbols, and since we are symbol-using creatures, every dimension of our lives is in transition. The digital world is interactive, modular, and fluid, which means that aspects of our lives that previously carried an illusion of fixity are becoming interactive, modular and fluid to a greater degree.  So what we once experienced as optional – the need to step back and see the Big Picture, taking “time out” to journey into the deep places of our hearts by journaling, engaging in intentional conversations with trusted others, or just having the courage to pay attention to the disruptive events in our everyday lives – is no longer an option. Some kind of personal or corporate retreat is as essential to intentional living as strategic planning is to business.

Because we often don’t know how to build in that time or do that task, that “space” in our lives is something more often talked about than created and used effectively. We hire personal trainers to build up our bodies but hesitate to employ coaches to assist us in clarifying values or refining our personal vision and examining how our behaviors do or do not align with them. Yet those deeper realities affect our day-to-day lives more than the incidents and accidents to which we pay so much attention.

The simple truth is, we can not have it all. No matter how many books are written pretending that we can … we can’t. Child-having and child-rearing – although we may be the last generation on earth to be merely born – still take lots of time and energy for our big-headed slowly-growing species. So do relationships. So do families and communities. We have to make hard choices and that often means real and painful sacrifice. So many popular modalities of spirituality and personal growth are popular precisely because they promise growth and fulfillment at little or no cost. But life is not like that. Life is not an endless cocktail party with gracious servants replenishing trays so we can eat whatever we want throughout the night.

In my sixteen years as an Episcopal priest, I often winced when people spoke of “heresy” and sounded like the judges of an inquisition, as if they alone knew right and wrong. Serious study of religious traditions reveals that heresies are a lot more subtle than that. Heresies are doctrines that are almost true, programs that are really really attractive, but miss the mark by just a little bit, leading those who follow them to miss the mark by a lot. One thing all real heresies have in common is that they make a disciplined or rigorous commitment sound a little easier. They take the guts out of the crucifixion myth, for example, by making it sound as if you can trot around the cross and arrive at bliss by a short cut. They make the journey of transformation sound like a trip to the spa.

In the world of religion and spirituality too, caveat emptor. Buyer beware. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and the way we find that out is by trying it out and discovering in the crucible of our experience what does and doesn’t work.

Some older people felt secretly relieved and gratified by the dotcom meltdown. That wasn’t because they wanted to see a bunch of young millionaires get their comeuppance – not exclusively, anyway – it was in part because they were hearing on all sides that the rules of reality had been suspended. Those who had been through manias before know that isn’t so. But when the mania is building and the stock prices are soaring, the force field of greed and unreality becomes intense. It sucks in people who know better but can’t help hoping it’s true, this time. And it never is.

But none of that takes away from the fact that a real revolution is taking place that is changing life in fundamental ways. It just means that the implementation of some of those technologies must evolve in lockstep with the social realities that will enable them. That means, once again, paying attention to the human dimension.

Take WebVan, for example. It wasn’t a bad idea, it was just an idea that couldn’t quite work that way at this time. When I was a child I used to telephone a grocery store and ask for food to be delivered. No one thought anything of it. But if someone had suggested doing that when the telephone was invented, it would have sounded preposterous. The telephone was not understood to be a personal communication device even by its own inventors. Telephony needed time to teach us, its users and its nodes, how to be telephonic. Once that had happened, groceries were ordered over the telephone just as they will be ordered over the web. But it will be a subset of the grocery business, not all of it.

Choices about technology begin with choices about people. Technology is about technology only in the abstract. Even technophiles, the people we used to call “hackers” before that word was hijacked and used to mean vandals and break-in artists, can live within their constrained domain because the rest of society allows and enables them to do that, just as Hippies once crowed about “living off the land” because a capitalist society generated sufficient surplus to enable them to eat without working too hard to produce what they ate.

Technology in fact is always about people – people who are changed by it, people to whom it discloses new ways of being human. Yet it is precisely the human dimension that is often ignored as we distribute workers into simulated nodal space in cubicle cities, where they sink into the quiet desperation of interfacing only with simulated digital humans over telephones and networks.

Meatspace still permeates cyberspace. We still live in our bodies as well as our heads.

Think of the other evolutionary changes in the technology of the Word and you’ll see that this challenge isn’t new. When I was a child, people warned me not to read too much or live in books alone. One of the first novels of the world, Don Quixote, is about a man who went crazy reading all those newfangled printed texts about knights and believing what was in them. Cervantes lived on the cusp of a new era just as Shakespeare did, which is why they could see so clearly what was emerging. They could see it in contrast with what was already passing the way the terminator on the moon illuminates both darkness and light at the edge where they meet.

But Cervantes and Shakespeare were artists. That means they saw into the life of real people, not their enhancements or attachments. Not everybody can do that.

Before the millennial shift, at a meeting of representatives from various organizations working on Y2K issues, a COBOL programmer said:

“I have been working on Y2K for three years, but until I saw today’s topic, ‘the human dimension of Y2K,’ it never occurred to me that there WAS a human dimension of Y2K.” The programmer surfed the Internet and was astonished to discover a cottage industry spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in order to increase their short term profits. They had never noticed before that it existed.

Think of it … three years working on code without ever thinking of how those lines of code would combine into massive structures of behavior-changing modules that would constitute a distinct culture and demand of human users significant changes in thinking, feeling and behaving.

Implementing enterprise software like SAP restructures a human culture as radically as a merger between different businesses, yet in the old days of a few years ago, the culture of the software – often implicit in the assumptions it brings to the humans who will use it – always won. It was easier to dismiss employees who could not adapt to new software than adapt software to the humans who use it.

Only now are we seeing corporations bite the bullet, absorb immense losses when enterprise-wide software doesn’t work as planned, and search for new solutions.

In the short run, the technology has the upper hand. But in the long run, humans do. The technology must facilitate generally better ways of working or living or people will stop using it.

Take computer security, an area where it’s easy to see how widespread our unacknowledged commitment to “invincible ignorance” has become. Computer security is a contradiction in terms. Those who work in the dark heart of the global network manifest an “appropriate paranoia”  because they know, they really know. Yet again and again, real security is the last item on corporate priority lists. Quick fixes like firewalls or intrusion detection systems will cover the buns of anyone called to justify procedures after a theft or major act of espionage.  But those in the know know that firewalls and intrusion detection systems in and of themselves do not do squat for real security because the weakest link in a network is the human user, how humans think about security, how humans love to outwit the electronic network. Every study of “security events” tells us that insiders, not anonymous attackers, are the biggest threat to the network. It’s people who are angry, greedy, or unhappy that act up or act out, not the technology, and it’s always motivated by the same old human emotions that have motivated us from the days of the Neolithic.

Most users operate out of an obsolete trust model that is not congruent with how intelligence and counter-intelligence, disinformation, espionage and sabotage is done in the digital world. It is the difference between showing an ID to board a plane in the United States and showing up in Israel hours early to be interrogated. Israel knows what shadows lurk in the hearts of women and men and acts accordingly. Israel knows it is Israel, whereas the United States still thinks it’s the United States.

But that too is changing, albeit slowly. The pressures from the marketplace are enforcing demands for security that stern lectures couldn’t accomplish. Businesses in the financial sector increasingly require compliance with stricter security or they won’t do business with a company. Just as automobile manufacturers did not provide seatbelts or airbags until the marketplace (and regulators) demanded them, the human needs of the human network for security in order to be functional will drive network security too.

As the digital world assimilates us more and more into its looking-glass ways, we ignore the human dimension to our peril. We human beings, digitized and distributed, are not who we used to be, nor is human civilization. The real issues of computing are issues of identity and self, and that’s where planning and strategy, personal and professional, should begin. To fulfill its promise, usability must cease to be a separate discipline or domain of expertise. Usability must disappear into the network and its interfaces just as security will disappear. Usability must become transparent to the user on whose behalf it must ultimately become the essence of the act of computing itself.

SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY

BY RICHARD THIEME

Originally published by the Village Voice March 22 – 28, 2000. Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.

Smells Are Ready for Their

Online Debut-But Is the World

Ready for Them?

Digital scents will make plenty of dollars if DigiScents has its way.

Sitting right at your desk, you’ll soon be able to smell the roses-or baking bagels or honey-roasted nuts or crowded subway platforms-using DigiScents’ new iSmell, “a personal scent synthesizer.” Now in beta testing, iSmell is a peripheral device you plug into a computer the same way you plug in speakers and printers. If you visited a Web site offering a whiff of fresh chocolate cake, for example, iSmell could pull down the code it needs to mix chemicals in just the right way and then release the designer aroma while you work on the Net. Or you could invent your own scents and add them to e-mails or a short story.

DigiScents’ wafting digital scents may make every media experience immersive and

wraparound, more real than reality. Scents work for perfume advertising in magazines, says DigiScents president Dexster Smith, and they’ll certainly work when software re-creates them. “What we’re about is allowing people to have control or mastery and a heightened awareness of smell,” Smith says. “It’s a very powerful part of us, and it has been in the hands of a very select few. This is a revolution of the senses, and we are bringing smell to the everyday person via digital control. It’s another example of the opportunities for democratization through technology.”

The mere suggestion of digital smell sounds crazy. But every good idea does-at

first. Like adding video to music and making MTV. Like downloading Bombay

footage from satellites and making a New York newscast. Former Motorola CEO

Robert Galvin once observed that each breakthrough idea during his tenure began

its life as a minority opinion. At first, the new ideas couldn’t even get heard. Then

they were ridiculed, and the people who birthed them were attacked. Finally,

everyone agreed they’d believed in the ideas all along.

Perhaps interlacing scents will become as much a part of the digital realm as pictures, music, and robo-voices.

DigiScents isn’t the only company working to digitize smells, though it may have the best plan for convincing consumers that shelling out a still unnamed number of bucks for aromas is a smart idea. Two years ago, Adobe released its Net sniffer, Odorshop, and received little fanfare. RealAroma’s Web site (realaroma.com) hypes a smell box that uses something called “Real Aroma Text Markup Language” and can run on a modem as slow as 14.4K. Macintosh CEO Steve Jobs has announced that he wants future generations of his company’s machines to be able to handle odors, just as they’re now equipped to play CDs.

What separates DigiScents from the pack is its commitment to putting smells on the Net. The company has joined forces with RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer turned online tunes from a vague concept to a near essential for savvy surfers. Taking a cue from media portals, DigiScents promises to launch a world of odors at Snortal.com. Finally, you’ll have something to whiff out there.

Mainstream consumers may not share Smith’s enthusiasm for digitized smells. Just as store owners use the right blend of soft rock to make shoppers reach for their wallets, advertisers will use scents to promote products from cognac to perfume to leather jackets. “Bringing scent to everything may not be everyone’s cup of tea,” says Dr. Graham A. Bell, director of the Centre for ChemoSensory Research at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “People are wary of the unsolicited intrusion of odors, pleasant and unpleasant, in their lives. The shopping mall of the future may draw in customers by proclaiming, ‘No manipulative odors are permitted on these premises!’ ”

But for people who love technology, adding smell to the array of sensory riches is a natural.

Game developers may be first to make use of scents. Imagine inching your way through a cold basement as the smell of mold seeps through the damp brick, or rounding the corner of the track as tires squeal and the burning rubber stinks. Like the pulsing music in Jaws that made us anticipate the shark, scents will serve as clues or cause fear and foreboding in haunted houses.

Sex sites won’t be far behind. Using digital scents, we’ll make our own perfumes, candles, and lotions. We can even e-mail our own musk. Imagine being lost in digital sex with a chat-partner or wandering an online adult channel when pheromones flare your nostrils and make your heart race.

Scent detonates the power of suggestion, unlocks buried memories, and stampedes lust. Smells fire primordial urges to run, fight, or make love. Smith envisions the day when a standard greeting card blossoms with the scent of roses, or when aromatherapy threaded through meditative music and archetypal images transports a viewer into an altered state.

Some question whether that dream is suited for mass consumption. “There are difficult hurdles ahead with regard to digitizing smells and replaying them in the comfort of your home,” says Bell. “The replay device must produce smells faithfully. Technically, this is very difficult, as most odors we encounter in everyday life are composed of hundreds of components.”

Scent is subtle, after all. The olfactory system can distinguish thousands of odors that travel from receptors in the nose to the brain. The new iSmell will come with 128 primary scents that can be combined in recipes for the aroma of everything from fruit to mildew. When the chemicals run low, just put in a fresh cartridge the same way you’d replace a cartridge of printer’s ink.

Smith thinks digital smell can become a part of routine life. Why should we have only beeps and written messages when our computers boot up or turn off? Why not add scents? People “can associate, say, coffee with a start-up smell,” Smith says, “and the ocean or a fireplace when they shut down.”

Digital scents will have uses outside the domain of commerce.

Bell has been developing a “chemical camera” that could sniff out harmful  chemicals or the presence of disease in a patient. He says the goal is to detect “loose molecules” that may not have a smell.

And then there’s the creation of multisensory immersive environments for their own sake. Smith calls the art of using smell “scentography,” and expects aroma to be used even as a scent track to add emotional resonance to films. Since smell is so closely linked to memory, he argues, aromas mixed with sound and images will create virtual worlds complete with memories as real as, well, memories.

But first we’ll have to be taught to distinguish odors as elements of a work of art, the way we learned to distinguish “sound art” from music. Industrial noise once sounded like nothing, literally nothing. Over time, we learned to listen to ambient noise as elements of sound sculpture, changing what had been perceived as merely context into primary content. Scent may one day speak to us that clearly.

Originally published by the Village Voice March 22 – 28, 2000. Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.

In Defense of Hacking

by

Richard Thieme

Computer hackers are a prototype of twenty-first century humanity.

Real hackers, that is.

Real hackers embody the attitudes, skills, mind-sets, and realized possibilities that the digital world makes possible and rewards. Hackers reveal the kind of multi-dimensional thinking an information society demands – one in which all of humankind is fused with the wireless world and created in its image, enhanced by implants and genetic engineering and distributed like a multi-nodal network throughout the solar system and beyond.

We’re talking about cyborg-humankind, not some cyborg of science fiction, not some Star Trek Borg saying, “We will assimilate you” – but something very near to that: cyborg-humankind, not in the future, but here, now.

The future is arriving at the present so fast that soon the future and the present will be virtually simultaneous like some time lapse movie gone mad.

So let’s get our definitions straight. Last week a wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks interfered with the operations of well-known web sites like Yahoo, E-bay, and Amazon.com. DDOS attacks are not the work of real hackers. Real hackers don’t park thousands of cars on the freeway and run for the exits. Real hackers don’t call up everyone at the same time and create busy signals for a few hours. That’s the work of  “script kiddies,” whatever their motives. Real hackers sneer at “script kiddies” who download ready-made tools from the Internet and use them to do invasive, annoying or damaging things without any end in mind beyond the inflation of their egos and the power rush that tells them (and us) paradoxically how powerless they really feel.

No, real hackers don’t simply use tools strewn about the internet like bones around a fire. Real hackers build those tools and take them apart and build them again, just as they have cobbled together the Internet itself out of bits of information. They do it because it’s fun, because it’s a challenge, becausethe  doing of it constitutes their identity and self in the digital world.

Real hacking is how we learn how the digital infrastructure works. And how we learn how ANY infrastructure or complex system really works.

The hacker lineage runs from Leonardo da Vinci through creators of the Internet, like Tim Berners-Lee, who designed the first web protocols and wrote the first browser code. But no one exemplifies the real hacker ethos more than Richard Stallman who some think has just never grown up but others call a genuine saint, as single-minded in his dedicaiton to open source software as any religious martyr. Stallman inaugurated the GNU Project (“GNUs’ Not UNIX”) so that robust powerful and open souce operating systems could remain in the hands of programmers who build code because they love to contribute to the world and make something worthy of their best efforts. The LINUX movement, currently getting lots of attention because LINUX users reached critical mass and ignited a firestorm of applications with commercial viability, grew entirely from the hacker ethos, based on the insight that any complex organic system must be open, evolving, and free in order to reach its full potential.

But hackers are fighting a battle they may have already lost to retain the word “hacker” as it used to be used, to denote a project worhty of their wit, intelligence, and the long hours of effort. Hacking isn’t so much work as endless play, more fun than sex for some, full of humorous asides.

The fact that we need to define “real hacking” to distinguish it from hacking as malicious mischief points up the problem. People usually become that conservative only when a new sun has already risen.

So how can we distinguish real hackers from doers of malicious mischief, the vandals who get off on slowing down or crashing web sites, those whacked-out loners hunched over glowing monitors in the middle of the night, cackling like Beavis or Butthead as they break into your bank account?

Hackers are characterized by a real hunger for knowledge, a passion for knowing and growing wholistic visions of complex systems, seeing things whole, understanding how things work. Hackers need to get inside the skin of a system, any system, and take it apart to understand how it fits together.  Hackers need to see how things connect in complex systems.

Nothing typifies the hacking spirit better than the brainstorm sessions at secruity firms like Secure Computing. Some of their Professional Services experts cut their teeth on system hacking. Faced with a difficult problem from a client – they work for corporate giants and three-letter government agencies – their brainstorming sessions go far into the night, they group turning the porblem around in their group-mind to see it from all sides, using all the arcane knowledge and lore they learned in the land beyond midnight when, for example, they explored some ancient application with its back doors or unknown exploits, an applicaiton that is still connected for no real reason to a clients immense network. The way they feed off each others insights in those late-night sessions replicates the stucture of the electronic network which taught them how to think and work together.

That’s why we can say that people who grew up digital were formed in their thnking and behaving by the networks they explored. Those who explored them most deeply were most deeply affected. The possibilities for action disclosed by the network became part of the repertoire of possibilities for action that humankind can now entertain.

The power of real hackers derives from critical knowledge of those networks, knowledge that leverages all other knowledge and recontextualizes it in a new framework. Edward O. Wilson said that the best scientists are characterized by a passion for knowledge, obsession and daring, and that’s a good definition of hackers too. They’re jkust like the rest of us, restless and wandering, wondering what’s beyond that next hill. But the landscape they explore is inside, it’s our entire field of subjectivity, how we humans define ourselves in the world – the increasingly complex terrain of digital humanity is created and discovered by those who made it n the first place and discovered themselves changed by their work.

That’s the real paradox of all this. That’s what tricky.

When electronic networks first evolved, hacking behavior was not considered criminal because no one thought about it that way. When genuinely new things emerge in human experienc,e we do not at first have the vocabulary to describe or define them.

A cyberlawyer was venting his frustration at lunch the other day at the kinds of precedents being cited in cases of intellectual property rights. “We’re trying to catch an avalanche coming downhill. The snow is bigger than our baskets,” he said. “Try applying ‘If your ox wanders out of your field into your neighbor’s orchard …’ to the music industry and MP3.”

For many in today‘s digital generation, their first toys  were computer games for early Apples or Ataris. The protection schemes were easily cracked and became as much a part of the game as the game itself. Once computers were networked through telephone lines and slow modems, Bulletin Boards (BBS) emerged in the sea of digital information like volcanic islands rising in the ocean. They became crossroads where cyber-travelers left messages for each other. In effect, the network itself was forming a symbiotic relationship with its users and bootstrapping itself to higher levels of complexity. To the degree that the human users were leapfrogging old ways of thinking about information and the way it disclosed opportunities for action, teaching and learning from one another, the network itself reinvented education and work as a cooperative venture.

“The most important thjing I need to know,” a hacker once said, “is what I don’t need to know. Because there’s too much for anyone to know. That means, though, that I also need to know who knows what I don’t so I can get it when I need it.”

That hacker located real power in the wired world in his ability to see patterns, discern the Bigger Picture, and know how to work in the human network to exchange data and turn it into information. Inevitably over time, as hackers matured, that ifnormaiton – seen in the proper perspective – turned into wisdom.

It was no surprise, then, when I was consulting with a multi-billion dollar financial firm recently and the head of IT start telling war stories of phone-phreaking in the old days (getting into the telephone system) and hacking old UNIX systems. Most of the bright men and women in the business learned how to hack by – what else? – hacking.

In those “good old days,” the boundaries between people and machines were intended to be semi-permeable. That’s why nhetworks were powerful. That’s why they worked. The Internet was invented as a trusted network among colleagues in business, educaiton, and government, an outgrowth of a military mindset that saw the need for distributed computing. It was built for easy access. It evolved into a culture, a way of thinking and behaving, like moving to China and having your neighbors swarm into your apartment and open your drawers to see touch feel who you are.

It’s a different way of living together. A different way of working. The network itself trained people, both liberating and constraining their thinking and behavior, just like another culture taking over after a merger.

Naturally those who thrived on this adventure learned how to maneuver through programming languages down to the level of the machine itself and down to the darkness of “not knowing” where cmplexity seemed to become chaotic … and they learned to wait patiently until the darkness became visible, self-luminous. Every hacker knows the power rush that comes when a puzzle is solved, when pieces that had not fit together suddenly clicked.

The only way to know then how the network worked was to explore it.

“No kid could afford a Solaris workstation then,” says Tom Jackiewicz who helps to administer the upt.org Bulletin Board. Some of the best minds in business and government learned by doing, and the only machines available were those connected to the network.

“A lot of the old reasons to break in just aren’t there any more,” Jackiewicz says. “Nobody can say they can’t afford a UNIX box when all you have to do is throw some free LINUX

onto an old PC.” UPT maintains an extensive system of networked Windows, UNIX and Sun machines (available at upt.org – the Internet playpen descended from the Bulletin Board where some of hacking’s best and the brightest honed their skills before graduating into corporate and intelligence ranks. Like many hackers who have matured, he prefers to secure systems agaijnst would-be jhackersd and dare them to bypass multiple levels of security, escape the cul-de-sacs that look like entire systems but are really traps set by the adminiustrator.

Hackers thrive on that kind of challenge, and perhaps the biggest challenge of all is the gauntlet thrown down by Microsoft which claims that Windows NT is secure. Nothing violates the hacker ethos like the fusion of lies and greed, and that’s what many see when look at MS.

Groups like the l0pht gained fame when they illuminated exploit after exploit that could be used to violate Windows NT. Two of their members, Mudge and Weld Pond, testified before Congress about security risks on the Internet. The ad hoc “corporate hacking” of the l0pht did not need validaiton from others in the hakcing world because their work was its own validation. But others in more conventional channels took notice when the l0pht joined with Cambrdige Technology Partners in receiving an infusion of venture capital that transformed them all into @stake, a computer security firm.

So when is a hacker not a hacker? When somebody gives them ten million dollars and validates their efforts?

Cult of the Dead Cow (CdC), a noted hacker group, rolled out an application called Back Orifice 2000 (BO2K) last year at DefCon VII (the annual Las Vegas convention that draws thousands of  hackers, would-be hackers, journalists, and corporate security and intelligence types). BO2K was a piece of work of which any programmer could be proud. It’s classified as a Trojan Horse because it can be loaded stealthily on a network, then give a remote user “root” privileges or control over the network. So is it a hacking tool or a useful security testing and administration tool? BO2K is similar to Microsoft’s SMS which does pretty much the same thing – and can also be hidden while its being used, something Microsoft attacked in BO2K as the mark of a hacking tool  – but does SMS does it in a much messier fashion, according to Dildog, the primary architext of BO2K. SMS is larger, clunkier, and harder to hide.

So why did CdC develop and release BO2K with such fanfare? In the current environment of ubiquitous distributed computing – which means networks and nodes everywhere – Dildog says, no operating system provides a good solution to the problem of stealthy executables. Such a solution CAN be layered on operating systems that exist, using a system-level auditing sandbox to run suspect programs to see what they’ll do before they’re loaded into the system. Cult of the Dead Cow generated all that publicity in the hopes that BO2K would stir the industry into action.

That‘s a lot different than using the tool to attack a network and not tleling anybody what you’re doing.

It ought to be clear by now that real hackers have become leaders in the digital world. Leaders have always seen first what was coming over the horizon and given it a name. When the government wanted to cut back subsidies to airplanes that were paid to fly mail, they needed a new name for the “aeronauts” who caught rides on the mail planes. So they called them “passangers” instead. Then the rest of us could think of ourselves as “passangers” and do what passangers do, i.e. buy tickets and go places by air.

But leaders do more than discover and name these emergent realities. Leaders literally create them too, creating from nothing the structures in which we believe. That has always been the task of leadership, but the digital world takes the game to a higher level of abstraction. We are real birds in digital cages, and those who surrounded us with digital images can lead us where they like – so long as they leave us enough room to fly to have the illusion of freedom.

In the same way, Eddie Bernays, the “father of spin,” working primarily with images and print, invented “public relations.” Bernays was hired by New York publishers to enhance book sales. Rather than advertise books, he went to some leading intellectual lights and asked them to affirm that literacy was critical to a civilized society. Then he took their testimonials to architects, who agreed to do what they could to sustain civilization. Thus it came about that built-in bookshelves began to appear in new houses. Soon tenants were buying books without even thinking about it.

That’s the digital world too. By building the infrastructure that discloses new possibilities to the rest of us, hackers are building virtual bookshelves and we buy books without even noticing.

Most of us take the words and images on our monitors at face value. But those icons are made up of pixels. Pixels behave the way programs tell them to behave. Networks organize the way informaiton moves from computer to computer. Those who have the courage to descend into the tangled wires of the network and see how these nested levels of informaiton and meaning connect to each other have their hands on the power to change how we think and behave.

That’s why real hackers create as wlel as sustain the consensus reality most of us are starting to take for granted and call “common sense.” When a focus group of students in a university dorm was queried about the want ads they consulted, it did not occur to any of them to find those ads in a newspaper. Because their experience was online, they didn’t even see it as an option. They simply saw it as “reality.”

In the same way, IT people are being included – at last – in the decision-making prcoess in corporations. Leaders are realizing that structure of informaiton and communicaiton are not “added on” to a business but are intrinsic to the architecture of the system from the inside out. Those who build it had better be included in planning and creating the future.

So something paradoxical is taking place. One one hand, the world that hackers built is becoming everybody’s world, but on the other hand, the attempt to secure and defend that world as it is bricks and mortar is contraining the freedom that brought that world into being in the first place.

Hacking was not criminalized behavior because it was behavior mandated by life lived in distributed networks. Power is exercized in networks by contributing and participatingf, not by dominatiung and ocntorlling. That’s the genius of LINUX and the GNU project, the genius of open source software, the genius really of our species.  Confusing the antics of a few malicious “script kiddies” for the actions of real hackers is shortsighted and contrary to our best long-term interests. Those script kiddies are would-be hackers gone bad, not real hackers, but crackers, criminal hackers. They download a few scripts, find some open dors, and click click click … then revel in the after-effects of a media feeding-frenzy like an arsonist getting off on a fire.

Once it may have been necessary to cross those boundaries in order to learn, but now, real hackers know how to look but not touch. Only the immature ones, the sociopaths, get kicks from malicious damage – not just leaving graffiti and heartfelt manifestos on web sites or playing mischievous pranks, but hurting people, breaking things.

So life during these difficult transition is tricky. Hackers do break many of the old rules, but many of the old rules just don’t hold anymore. Some do, of course, but while we sort out which do and which don’t, it would be a mistake to throw out the babies with the bathwater.  Every savvy businessperson is either becoming a kind of hacker of necessity or learning to hire hackers in order to make it in a digital economy.  The way information moves and links and forms patterns in our networks is dissolving boundaries and transforming our old roles. That’s why intelligence agents, businesspeople, journalists, advertising and marketers, are all becoming indistinguishable from hackers. Our social roles are converging toward new identities that do not yet have names.  Hackers create and disclose new possibilities for human action and the task of leadership is to give those possibilities names.

Hackers are more than cyberpunk heroes of infowar scripts. Today, all war is infowar. The skills and attributes of hackers — a love of adventure and risk, a toleration of ambiguity, an ability to synthesize meaning from disparate sources, a passion for knowledge – are needed by the network, but don;t forget what that hacker discovered – people are the network, and knowing how to interact with human motivations and intentions in mind is always the challenge.

Originally published (edited significantly) in the Village Voice, February 16 – 22, 2000. Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.

By Richard Thieme

Wearable computers and ubiquitous wireless environments will undermine independence and compromise security.

“1984 was a beta version of what’s coming next.”–Chris Esposito, Boeing

Today’s threats to security and privacy will seem tame by comparison to those of the next millennium, when we are living and working in ubiquitous wireless networks, where home, office, transportation, clothing and even our bodies are seamlessly connected.

Digital “space” will consist of large, open, public places under constant surveillance; semi-private areas that are easily accessed; and personal and corporate nets that require deliberate behavior to maintain what remains of security and privacy.

Already, PDAs, cell phones and portable computers are merging to become “wearables,” their functions blurring as the interface disappears into the infrastructure. The infrastructure itself is becoming a seamless network threaded with millions of nodes.

Today, researchers at MIT are building complete social environments contingent on real-time data exchange. For example, Bradley Rhodes’ Remembrance Agent is a personal secretary/diary/interactive agent that will collect and filter relevant data. It will be able to notice a face or voice, and then whisper a name. Rhodes claims that keeping the data in real-time will maintain security.

Getting Personal

It’s true that information that isn’t collected can’t be compromised, but obviously that’s not the case with data we want to store and backup. The future will see centralized databases generated by streams of details broadcast from the minutia of our lives–itineraries, telephone calls and time of arrival at work, home or toll booth, All of this will make current data-mining practices look primitive.

The most valuable information is the most personal. A network that collects data from our behaviors will know more about us than we know about ourselves. Buried in the data of our lives, we’re blind to our patterns and what they reveal. This, however, is just one of a number of possible risks.

Jim Cannady of the Georgia Tech Research Institute envisions a dystopian future. Competitive political, economic and military intelligence is making the data marketplace harder to define as nations and multinationals cooperate for mutual advantage. When digital identities and the need to be connected anywhere at anytime are fused through “wearables,” terrorist attacks will take the form of “drive-by shootings,” using high-energy RF pulses to disable systems.

But it’s worse than that. We will become totally dependent on other human beings not only for the social construction of reality, but also to determine what’s “real” to our senses. What we think is “real” could be the output of a constant digital flow.

And what will happen when data–often compromised in networks now–consists of simulated percepts coming directly to our brains? We will have to trust the intentions of data-providers with even greater faith. This is a daunting prospect in the face of recent stories of widespread illegal wiretaps by the Los Angeles police.

How can we protect ourselves? Solitude and isolation are still options. We can refuse to allow information to be collected by the system, but that will become increasingly antisocial or illegal. We can also avoid particular places, manage our itineraries like spies with the focused consciousness of a Jedi knight. That level of intention, however, is beyond the reach of most. As the social environment is transformed, definitions of mental illness will change as well. Insanity is contextual: Rebels who unplug from the network may be diagnosed as sociopathic.

The biggest problem, then and now, is that people are and will continue to be in denial about the risks of an insecure environment. Many simply operate out of an obsolete model of trust. The “appropriate paranoia” known to computer security professionals is not yet as widespread as the network.

For many, security is the last priority. CEOs want quick fixes–a firewall, an intrusion detection system–while administrators hope to keep up by applying patches, rather than making security intrinsic to system architecture. In the next millennium, the increased dependence on network connectivity will magnify current vulnerabilities by orders of magnitude. Real risk will increase and the consequences of a lack of vigilance will be absolute.

PREDICTIONS

Fully computerized homes will be as hackable as Web sites. With the network always “on,” there will no way to unplug. Embedded systems, like spoken languages, will become filters for primary experience. Stealing tools that contain data will be easier than stealing data. If you don’t want the data to get out, you won’t collect it.

This article originally appeared in the November 1999 issue of Information Security magazine (www.infosecuritymag.com). Copyright 1999. All rights Reserved.

If we are fortunate, there occurs at least once in our lifetimes a “moment
of clarity” in which we observe ourselves with our own eyes and see how
narrowly we have lived in contrast with how we might live if we fulfilled
the possibilities of our best selves. We see that we have come to
everything – work, relationships, even the Internet – with an intention to
use or exploit it to meet our needs. We see that it is possible to come to
the world with an intention to expand the options and possibilities of
others instead of our own.

Most people familiar with hacking culture know the name of Richard
Stallman, founder of the GNU project. GNU = “GNU’s not UNIX” although it is
a robust UNIX-compatible operating system that is – remarkably — freely
available to the entire world.

Stallman was honored at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference for
his consistency and the magnitude of his contribution. His speeches and
informal conversation suggest that this particular Don Quixote is equal to
the long-term demands of his improbable vision. The GNU project is no
sprint for Mister Stallman.

What distinguishes Stallman from visionaries who have nothing but ideas is
that Stallman is implementing his ideas. His words have become flesh, his
vision is incarnate.

The GNU project is unfinished and needs programmers and donations, but even
if another line of code is never written, GNU has achieved so much more
than anyone – except Stallman – might have dreamed.

Some dismiss him as just another brilliant programmer stuck in the sixties
culture at MIT where he learned what it meant to be part of a real hacking
community in which everyone’s work, ideas and computers were open and free
to all. Like the source code that Stallman thinks ought to be available to
everybody always.

Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho Panza, would insist on a reality check, and
maybe we ought to listen to him. I grew up in Chicago, after all, and
people like Saul Alinsky, the late great community organizer, reminded us
that we all act on our own self-interest. We may use the vocabulary of the
righteous, he observed, but we always vote our advantage. He would have
scoffed at Stallman’s vision of free software owned by all who use it.

Alinsky’s contemporary, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was often attacked by
opponents from what seemed to be high moral ground. After they had screamed
long enough, the mayor frequently invited them to his office. He asked one
question: what do you need? And after he listened for a while, he asked
one more: But what do you really need?

Alinksy knew what we needed, but Stallman knows what we really need.

Once we have had that moment of clarity and our energy shifts, flowing out
into the lives of others in a way that meets our own needs too, we
experience a feedback loop that is mutually nourishing, that grows
exponentially. Once we have experienced that shift, we can never again
come to others only to exploit them without knowing it and knowing that we
have a choice.

The GNU Project is wildly unrealistic. People just don’t give themselves
over to a project like that. Our economic system uses money to measure our
contributions. Cash flow, like dye in the arteries of our efforts, tells us
how we’re doing.

At least that’s how it looks from inside the old paradigm.

The digital world is changing how we use money. Not just replacing the
exchange of paper for an exchange of electrons, but redefining how we do
business. Electronic commerce, according to the vision of Robert Hettinga,
a financial cryptographer, might bring into being a geodesic society. The
intermediary between any two entities will be secure electronic commerce.
Financial cryptography, secure electronic commerce, and a geodesic society,
he suggests, might reinstate character as the true basis of financial
transactions. If one person tries to defraud another in an electronic
transaction, their identity would be exposed, but if their word is good,
the transaction closes, their identity protected.

Stallman’s vision of software owned by all is similar to Hettinga’s vision
of electronic commerce as a system that rewards trust. Yes, we are all
self-interested, but when we act collectively, when our projects include
and magnify the talents of everyone who participates and contributes, we
discover a mutual self-interest that transcends our individual self-interest.

It’s difficult to talk about all this from inside the old paradigm. We
begin projects like programming thinking of our “selves” as individuals,
authors of our “own” work, as the printing press and copyright law taught
us to think. But when we lose ourselves in the digital collective, in the
kind of fulfillment that Stallman upholds as the ultimate good of our
lives, then the boundaries between reader and writer, software author and
user community blur. The collective authorship of which Stallman speaks is
similar to monastics working together on an illuminated manuscript. Who
owns the perpetually unfinished product? We speak of software “authors”
but a group creates the software and the whole world owns the code.

Sometimes what feels like going backward is really going forward. Sancho
may be a realist, seeing through our fanciful dreams, but Don Quixote stirs
our hearts and inspires our best selves. Quixote went crazy from reading
too many books and believing them, only 150 years after the printing press
was invented. Maybe Stallman has written too many programs. Maybe he’s come
to believe that what he feels when losing himself in something of
inestimable value to the entire community is what we ought to use to
measure all our efforts. It’s difficult to distinguish a child’s refusal
to accept the adult world on its own terms from a crazy kind of sainthood,
the kind that insists that we belong to one another, that dreaming and
thinking take place today on a network, and that we are all cells in a
single body.

The End of Television

by Richard Thieme

published online by Freed November 1997

A funny thing happened on the way to this article about television.

Television disappeared.

I don’t say that lightly. I was the last kid on my block to get black-and-white television and the first to have color. We won a huge RCA color television with a tiny screen in a raffle. We set up folding chairs in the living room and all the kids came over to watch Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows.

There must have been thirty people jammed into the living room. We took turns playing with “HUE” and “COLOR,” turning pink faces green, and when the title words for the program turned bright yellow, everybody cheered.

So when I say television disappeared, I say it with some regret. My world was defined by the miracle tube that hypnotized the peoples of the earth, turning us all into stone.

When I looked for the category called “television” in my mind, there was … nothing there. Television as a singular thing, a bracketed experience, a discreet category, had morphed.

Once information becomes digital, it can be reconstituted in any form. The interfaces are as arbitrary as the names we give them. That’s what “convergence” means. Simple one-way transmission of sound and image is no longer a useful distinction.

Emergent realities ought to be named with verbs instead of nouns, they change so quickly into something else. We started with “television,” then used modifiers to distinguish different kinds — color, cable, public access. Then, like American colonies turning the edge into a new center, a modifier becomes a noun and a new thing.

“Convergence” points toward that new thing.

It’s hard to talk about at first.

Internet cars, for example. The automobile is becoming an electronic artifact riding on a mechanical platform. Using GPS, the car will be an extension or unit of the Intelligent Highway, resembling a mobile office, playroom, or home more than a self-guided vehicle. Spam in a can, we’ll be passengers in a moving room, connected through wireless technology.

The auto, the home, the office will be modular constructs distinguished by function. Each will be able to morph into the other.

I was talking about this at a conference on technology and education. On a platform next to a split screen, I repeated questions from a live audience for a Texan who talked on one screen while he showed slides on the other. A question about wiring the campus for distance learning caused him to smile.

“We don’t build campuses any more, then add a computer interface,” he said. “The campus. the buildings individually and collectively, are a digital construct built from the inside out.

“All learning is distance learning.”

Old categories of thinking slip and slide with imprecision. The digital campus, the digital house, the digital office, the digital car mesh in a seamless web of energy.

Spacetime contracts like someone pulling a drawstring. The names — “office” or “home” — blur. We define spaces by what we do in them while we’re there. Some will be mobile, some anchored.

Digital humans are vortices of intentionality determining by our momentary focus the names of the spaces around us. We are like transparencies turning in a kaleidoscope, our identities and even our selves as protean as the courses of our digital lives.

Television … television … television … a one-way transmission of images and sound … the word is already … losing its meaning.

“Web TV” is a word for simply using a digital interface in two ways. But every digital interface will both send and receive. How do you want to reconstitute the data? In what form and for what purpose? Plug-ins will add sensory enhancements, virtual reality, multiple dimensions.

It’s all a matter of marketing.

“Interactive television,” like “distance learning,” will become an oxymoron. When every classroom has a tracking camera and questions of accreditation and economics have been resolved, it will no longer be a question of, ‘who is accepted at Stanford?’ but ‘who has taken that course and passed it?’ Why should the benefits of a course be restricted to those inside the confines of a lecture hall? Why shouldn’t courses be modular and ubiquitous, a mix-and-match opportunity for self-directed life-long learning?

All television will be interactive, but it will take a while to figure out how to get it right.

We use new technologies as if they’re old ones. Then as we interact with them the technologies teach us how to use them, as networked computers are training humans to work in partnership with them.

The first motion picture cameras were pointed at stage plays. Over time we moved the camera, zoomed in, changed lightning, and — bingo! — Pulp Fiction.

Alexander Graham Bell, asked about a use for the telephone, said we might call the next town to tell them a telegram was coming.

The telephone was not understood to be a means of personal communication until it taught us that it was, any more than main-frame computers were seen as the network into which they evolved.

The first attempts at interactive television are predictably poor. We’re just adding button-pushing or telephone calls to a medium we still think of as one-way. Over time the real possibilities of group interaction in virtual spaces will emerge.

It will not be space that determines the primary uses of “interactive television” but time — rhythm, frequency, modulation — the ways we engage as actors and reactors in the context of the medium.

Take sex, for example, always the first big content for any new technology (VCRs, photographs, printed books — and words?).

A still photo elicits one kind of response. The looker turns the photo over and picks up another. Flash those photos faster and faster until they become motion pictures, and a different kind of interaction happens.

The Internet enabled people to download images in relative privacy. Then came slow jerky video and users paid megabucks per minute for a simulated strip tease, the user typing commands to the tiny figure on the screen. Then came full-screen two-way interactive video sex.

As intervals between action and reaction decrease — as the “space” contracts between the actor and a simulated response — the essence of the medium shifts until it becomes something entirely else. Television using a remote control is not the same as a television you had to approach to change channels. So the question is not, are television and PCs merging? Stand-alone PCs will be as obsolete as TVs. The question is, what names shall we invent for the arbitrary interface du jour?

Television is a box out of which, alas, new life forms have already crawled, and we’ll never convince them to go back.

Find the Answer Within

published in .net Magazine (UK)Summer 1997

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one

word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new

world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of

the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the

first time.

The Flatline, a.k.a. McCoy Pauley, is a firmware construct,

a set of instructions arranged in a memory bank, giving the dead

man’s memories sequence and form. The construct simulates a

gestalt, Pauley’s personality and knowledge, molded into a shape

something like the potato-shaped universe described by Einstein -

- finite but unbounded. The horizons of the Flatline’s world are

fixed, but inside that world, the friendly ghost seems as

limitless as a live human being. The Dixie Flatline is a persona

fixed in a silicon chip in a way that lets Case interact with his

wisdom.

I imagine Case in his loft at twilight, slotting a ROM chip

into a socket in his skull for a direct feed from his dead hero.

That image fuels my expectations when I jack in to the World

Wide Web. Alas, my dreams are too big for the current Web to

address.

New technologies take a long time to teach us how to use

them. When the telephone was invented, it was thought a way to

call ahead to the next town to say a telegram was coming. The

motion picture camera was used to film stage plays. As we used

those technologies, entering into a symbiotic relationship with

them, they taught us how to extend our senses.

Now we’re trying to extend our minds and brains throughout

the Net. Extensions of our brains, nodes by the millions in a web

of glowing filaments, the Net is a mirror of our hive brain.

Participating in it takes us to another level of corporate

consciousness. So the Net ought to feed back to us reflexive

knowledge about the trip itself. We ought to encounter our hive

brain in a way that lets us recognize ourselves, included in

something bigger that is at the same time reduced to symbols that

enable us to see our new selves.

Ought to. Right. But what in fact do we find when we explore

the mind/brain in cyberspace?

There’s a lot of snake oil out there, more ore than gold.

Caveat emptor. Let the netsurfer beware. If you meet the Dixie

Flatline at a web site, slip him a virus. It isn’t the real

McCoy.

Patience is a requisite when you enter cyberspace hoping to

interact with constructs promising to blow your mind, train your

brain, or simply enhance your health.

It’s a shame, really: if ever there’s a natural fit, it’s

cyberspace and our hunger for growing our minds and training our

brains. Our minds expand naturally into the shimmering non-space

of the Net. The glowing screen seduces us into a night that never

ends. I stay up way too late, following luminous breadcrumbs

through the forest, but often I’m disappointed.

Maybe I’m jaded. My eyes have been trained by fractals,

after all, cycling through millions of colors, kaleidoscopes of

unimaginable complexity. I want the same rush, the same insight

into the nature of things, when I click from site to site

searching for wisdom.

Books are fine; books are good; but when I’m on the Web, I

don’t want books. I want interaction. I don’t want to keep

hitting home pages selling herbs and dubious kinds of healing,

hawking new age postures and potions for body and soul. But nine

times out of ten, that’s what I get.

H. L. Mencken said no one ever went broke underestimating

the intelligence (or was it the taste?) of the American public.

For America, read “world.” When they’re selling symbolic

constructs – promises of better health, wisdom, or transformation

- it’s easy to sell the menu as if it’s the meal.

Typical of sites offering guidance in meditation is FISU,

the Foundation for International Spiritual Unfoldment

(http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/ea80/fisu.htm). Typical too is

their blend of true and even obvious statements about the

benefits of meditation (“most meditators agree there is an

overall improvement in health”) with claims that can’t possibly

be true unless the site’s webmasters are literally gods. Like

Transcendental Meditation and its “customized” mantras, FISU

markets a generic product masquerading as a set of techniques

tailored to each individual’s “unique vibrations.”

Generic information can be packaged as unique and life-

changing because it is keyed in to “arcane secrets of the

Masters.” The claims would be more believable if the interactive

potential of the Net was used for a demonstration. Instead, most

of these sites are electronic billboards selling products.

Cognitech Corporation

(http://www.interstar.com/health/cognitech.html) offers

Brainware, a technology that promises greater mind/body control,

reduction in stress, increased energy, better concentration,

improved business performance, enhanced memory and learning, etc.

– all this from something that sits on your head like a squid,

its lights flickering and blinking. (They do warn off epileptics

– the device might trigger a seizure). The squid costs a mere

US$340 plus postage.

There’s a broad pattern to these virtual presentations:

It begins with information or real research into what helps

people feel better or take more responsibility for their own

well-being. Often the decision to take responsibility and do

something – anything – mobilizes our resources and gives us

energy and hope. So far so good.

Some of this information is linked to the ancient wisdom of

hallowed traditions. Yoga sites abound, offering journals,

archives, and pathways to classes, workshops, and products

(tapes, books, “meditation pillows”). Spirit-WWW offers links to

all sorts of alternative paths, such as theosophy, lightwork,

extraterrestrials, channelings. Their Yoga Paths page

(http://www.94.20.164.5/spirit/yoga/overview.html) takes you to

the teachings of myriads of gurus.

Who has the right to teach the techniques and philosophy of

Vedic Yoga? Hard to say. Credentials are not easy to come by at

these sites. Instead we are clued in by a new exotic name that

our teacher, once an ordinary bloke, is now an enlightened

master. The home page of Robert Green was renamed when his Guru

Swami Shyam named him Amarnaath (http://www.hookup.net/~greenr/).

He offers selected words of wisdom and a catalog of products.

If the ancient wisdom is truly ancient, there will be a

living breathing connection between masters and disciples, long

lines of adepts who hand on their teaching and practice. Genuine

teachers will gladly provide mundane details like bios,

credentials, and references. It pays to check them out.

Other “traditional” movements play the “exotic” card. The

more primitive and esoteric the tradition, the more potent it

promises to be. Check out the Tribe of Love

(http://www.turnpike.net/metro/tribo/) whose goal is nothing less

than “an international cultural revolution … a humanistic

transformation by giving access to a higher quality of

being/consciousness.” Their promo piece invokes rites of

transformation, Reichian psychotherapeutic techniques, modern

management techniques like reengineering, and shamanism to

provide access to Tropical Bioenergetics, in turn based on the

even more esoteric BioTantra.

Does it work? Evaluating these cosmic claims is like putting

together an investment portfolio or raising children. By the time

you have the data you need, it’s too late to change what you’re

doing. So keep an open mind. Suspend both belief and disbelief.

Doubt everything. In the long run, the truth will out.

Information is easier to provide than creative interaction.

The information may be sound, but it’s often converted into a

model of the universe or cosmololgy. Then something that is in

fact helpful is subtly turned into an invitation to make a

commitment to a belief system or cultic community. In carnival

terms, the WWW site tries to “turn the tip,” i.e. turn the crowd

attracted by the free show — fire-eating or sword-swallowing –

into paying customers inside the tent.

WWW-Spirit, for example, offers links to the World of

Dolphins. Alien Cultures. and Healing Ways. At “Dolphins,” Birgit

Klein shares her experience channeling messages from dolphins.

Telepathic connections open up to spiritual experiences which in

turn are opportunities to heal not only the individual but the

entire planet. The same is true if you follow the link to

Lightworks and read accounts of starseeds and walk-ins (varieties

of extraterrestrials disguised as earthlings, here for cosmic

purposes). Telepathic communication begins with practical advice,

leads to a spiritual connection, and ultimately discloses a new

belief system. Visitors are invited to revise their version of

reality accordingly.

What’s going on here? Channelings from discarnate entities,

visitors from the Pleiades, and whales and dolphins all teach the

same or similar content. It’s always “sandbox stuff:” be nice to

each other, preserve the environment, don’t hit.

In domains that traffic in symbolic constructs, such as

healing, meditation, and spirituality, anybody can say anything

they please and no-one can contradict them. In fact, whether the

mediating structures are angels, dead ancestors, dolphins,

discarnate beings, or extraterrestrials, something beneficial

often happens. The mediating structures, it seems, simply have to

be “good enough” to get helpful truths and tools to people who

need them. The efficacy of the practice is not contingent on the

absolute truth of the belief system with which it is fused.

In short: take what you need and leave the rest.

Most sites provide lists of benefits. Buy this book, watch

this video, wear this squid, and all these good things will

happen.

The Real Life Shark Cartilage Information Exchange proclaims

the value of shark cartilage in treating everything from cancer

and AIDS to psoriasis (http://www.electriciti.com/~reallife/).

After the benefits come testimonials – quotes from

individuals whose lives have been changed. The standard

“conversion formula” — this is how it was, this is what

happened, this is how it is now — is followed.

A final click of the mouse will take you to an ordering

form. Have your credit card ready.

Used judiciously, resources on the Net can help you sort all

this out. The Meditation Information Network

(http://minet.org/newsgroup/) has plenty of critical reflection

on programs associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The articles

on Deepak Chopra alone are worth the price of connect-time. They

reveal the mixed motives behind the promises of healers who in

fact are businessmen making a great deal of money. In Hawaii it

was said of the missionaries who came in 1820, “They came to do

good and they did well.”

The wisdom of the ages is consistent with what you already

know. There’s little new under the sun. The Self-Help and

Psychology Magazine (http://www.well.com/user/selfhelp/) has a

page of twelve suggestions for taking care of yourself. They’re

simple, they’re basic, and they make sense (“learn to say no,”

“change jobs if you’re miserable at work,” and “avoid comparing

yourself with others.”)

So if practical wisdom is plain common-sense, and a mystic

is just someone who found out what’s so, why go into cyberspace

at all?

Because wisdom is always mediated through communities. Good

health is a function of connecting with others in positive ways

and taking responsibility for one’s own life. Isolation is

ubiquitous today. The Net is often criticized for increasing

isolation, but it’s a bad rap. Every transformation of the

technology of the Word, from writing to the printing press,

increases our distance from one another but simultaneously makes

available the means for connecting at deeper levels. The Net

separates us and also mediates new opportunities for intimacy and

community. Connecting with each other and hearing what others say

is in itself healing and therapeutic. Then it’s up to us to act.

Good health doesn’t come from knowing what to do. It comes

from doing what works. But remember, as you pursue the truth that

sets you free: if something sounds too good to be true, it

probably is.