Barnett Weekly

“Hello, this is Larry. Hi Mom, hold on, my other line is ringing.” “Hello, this is Larry. Hi Bill, hold on for a minute, my cell phone is ringing.” “ Hello, this is Larry. Oh hi, Amy, can you believe I’m talking on two other phone lines? Can I call you back? Oh, OK, then. I’m putting you on hold.”

“Mom, you still there? Hold on again just for a minute while I get another call finished. Sorry!” “Bill, what’s up? Hmmm, can I call you back and we’ll talk about it? Great. Call you soon.” “Amy? Hello? Hello? Damn!”

“Hi Mom. Yeah, I’m back. Wait…hold on somebody is calling me on Skype. Skype? It’s a video call. Yeah we can see each other…hold on Mom, really sorry.” “Hey Dan, looking good today! Nice shirt. Hold on, my mother is on the phone. Yes, my mother, she’s 88. Give me a minute. Thanks.”

“Mom…I’m back. Damn, there’s my cell phone again…I’m really, really sorry, hold on. Of course I want to speak with you Mom, just give me a minute, it’s crazy here.” “Hello? Oh, hi Amy. No I got back on and you were gone. No, I couldn’t hear you. You could hear me? Weird. Listen Amy, my Mom is still on the phone, can you make it fast? Oh, ok, I’m putting you on hold again. Keep your fingers crossed, I’ll only be a minute. Whoops, there goes Dan!”

“Hello, Mom? Mom? Oh, hi. Yeah, I’m getting hit from all directions. I don’t know if that means I’m popular Mom. Yeah, sure I have friends, but most of this is business. No, I know you are not business Mom. Crap! The other line is ringing. Can I call you back? Of course I have time to talk, I just need to call you back. Ok. Fine. Soon, Bye.”

“Hello, this is Larry. Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Mr. Barnett, how can I help you? What? Can you speak a bit slower, please? I can’t understand you. What? I said speak slower please. Hello? Hello? Aacck!…Goodbye.”

“Amy, you still there? Amy? Oh hi, sorry, can you believe yet another call came in? This is so crazy. It happens to you to? Why do you think calls come in at the same time? A call wave? What’s a call wave? Funny! So what’s up? No, Tuesday won’t work. Thursday? Let me look. Jeeze! Skype is ringing! Really, you want to hold? Ok.”

“Hey, Richard! Nice to see you. What time is it there? 2 AM? What are you doing online at 2AM? Really! You got to be kidding. Did you try calling him? Ahh, too early. Well, why are you calling me? Yeah, I like seeing you too. Really. Yes, I really do. Have you been drinking, Richard? Can you speak a bit slower? Damn, you’re getting pixilated. Hello? Richard? Hello?”

“Hi Amy, I just lost Richard on Skype. Yeah, it can be funky. Ok, we’re trying for what, Thursday? No the afternoon is jammed. I know. Yes, I know. Well, I…crap! No not you, the phone is ringing. I’m not going to answer. Yes I can see the number… cripes, it’s my Dad. I gotta take it, call you back. Yes, 90 years old. OK, bye.”

“Hello, this is Larry.”

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I have no Facebook page. I do not post tweets on Twitter. My cell phone number is a secret, and I don’t blog.

All this is true despite the fact that I have been in the website development business for 13 years and working with new technology is my daily occupation.I help my clients with all of the above, and even recommend how to work with new technologies in the most efficient and effective ways. Just as I can teach my friend Stanley how to make meatloaf despite the fact that I’m vegetarian, my understanding of new technology does not mean I need personally consume it. Though privacy is disappearing and being seen by 10,000 “friends” has become a world-wide obsession, I believe that anonymity will soon be the new celebrity.

The 60s pop art artist Andy Warhol was clearly wrong; he said everyone would have “fifteen minutes of fame,” but it turns out it’s only fifteen seconds. Actually, with two-hundred million people on Facebook, uncountable millions of daily blog postings and never-ending minute by minute Tweets, even fifteen seconds may be too much. In short measure, fifteen milliseconds will be the average.

The avalanche of online communication represents an all new phase of human evolution. The opinion of strangers now outweighs all paid advertising, and online viral marketing is quickly supplanting traditional media campaigns. Newspapers, the past’s great leap forward in mass communication – dependent upon traditional advertising for profits – are folding all across America. The web’s rumor and opinion mill moves far faster than a printing press, and the iPhone and BlackBerry have morphed into powerful mobile mini-desktop computers.

When I Google myself, I see thousands of results, online testament to twelve years in public office and my name in digital print. Soon everyone will fill the Google index with entire lifetimes of data, a vast repository of daily minutia extending from one’s toothpaste preference to bowel habits. In some strange way this might prove useful from an anthropological data-mining perspective, but I must confess that on a personal level I find it a great bore.

It’s been said that in the past people lived lives “of quiet desperation” and I suppose the web’s incessant chatter simply reflects today’s lives “of noisy desperation.” Indeed, there is a desperate quality to obsessive Tweets and blogs and Facebook pages, as if documentation of living is a substitute for life itself. I suppose that if, as it is for some, such online life is constant, then it truly has become life – life as a record of itself as a record.In time then, the great curiosity will be the anonymous undocumented life, a life lived invisibly. This will be a monumental non-achievement that must by necessity be unnoticed and not acclaimed; a life outside of life – an existence that cannot be proven – an art form all its own. Like colorless paint on a blank canvas, such expression will not be understood because there will be nothing to understand – the celebrity of emptiness.

When we are gone only memories remain, and in time those too will fade. Perhaps the fevered online world, then, is actually about our age-old pretensions of immortality. For assuming that the Google world lives on, dear ones, the blog post will live forever.

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I find myself in a bit of an emotional quandary. I am one of the tens of thousands of heart patients walking around with an electronic pacemaker-defibrillator implanted in his chest, yet I can’t help feeling somewhat uneasy about where we Post-Darwinian Men and Women are headed.
 
My conventional self, created by my “mind of separation,” effectively relegates the small computer monitoring and regulating my every heart beat to just an imbedded chunk of metal and not part of the “real” me. However, my subtler non-self “mind of unity” reveals that the line dividing me from technology has effectively all but dissolved.

The evolutionary shape of things to come is techno-biomedical: gene analysis, splicing and replication; stem cell creation and cloning from ordinary cells, nanobots so small as to be able to circulate freely within and between cellular structures; artificially created DNA; Mini Me and Mini You.

Some of these things are already happening, and all of them will be achieved within the next decade. The human laboratory will replace natural selection as the primary engine of mutation and change. Interestingly, as the human population continues to explode (are we the Kudzu of the animal kingdom?), the rate of natural mutation will continue to increase as well. Our rapidly multiplying billions are generating an ever accelerating number of new DNA combinations so we continue to naturally evolve. Looking ahead, though, the by-product of the combination of human-made and nature-made evolution is entirely unpredictable, and is likely to produce outcomes well beyond our expectations. As per usual, our science fiction points out where things are going. X-Men Comics may well be a fair depiction of the future.

While computer and electronic technology are micro-sizing rapidly, an even greater computing efficiency will be provided via techno-biology in the future. The computational and storage capacity of cellular memory makes the most advanced computer “chip” look like steam locomotive compared to a jet aircraft. Beyond that bio-technological frontier lies quantum computing using the ever-present underlying transformational wave structure of existence, an oscillation-based storage medium of almost infinite smallness. By then, our Post-Darwinian species will have morphed into something resembling nothing.

I have a hard time imagining what the world of our first grandchild, Isabelle, will look like when she is sixty years old. In my sixty years, we have moved from printed books to flat-screen computers, airplanes with propellers to rovers on Mars, grandfather’s dying of heart attacks at 62 to grandfathers kept alive by implanted defibrillators. Should Isabelle live to be ninety, the changes will be as dramatic as those experienced by my father, who has seen horse-drawn carriages used to carry messages morph into Skype and eMail.

Buckminster Fuller, the brilliant and prescient twentieth century futurist and inventor, constructed a time line to document the acceleration of technology, beginning with fire. He easily demonstrated that each new technological innovation hastens the development of the next. Yesterday, the robots began building the robots. Today, the robots are building us. Tomorrow, the robots will be us.

“More human than human, that’s our motto,” says Dr. Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation, manufacturers of human replicas in the futuristic sci-fi movie Blade Runner. “More human than human.” I wonder what that means?

And this, dear reader, is when I begin to feel uneasy.

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In his far-reaching and prescient 1996 work “The Network Society” author Manuel Castells opined that society will increasingly form around electronically processed information networks. Society has always involved the formation of networks, but in the past these were generally personal and socially driven. Even when such networks became national in scope, interaction and contact were personal, either by letter, telephone or face-to-face visit. Moreover, the depth of information that was available within any network was constrained by the physical limitations of printed materials and their mode of transmission.

Today’s networks are driven by the likes of Facebook and MySpace, YouTube Yahoo and text-messaging. Likeminded individuals retain anonymity behind screen names, exchange thoughts and ideas, create forums and spawn online “communities.” Few participants, however, will ever meet face to face. The 2008 presidential race will largely be funded, conducted, won and lost online.

A rapid cultural transformation is taking place and our conception of self is changing alongside it. The conception of self has always been mutable, its definition and expression dependent upon the social framework surrounding it. Some find self-expression within a group, while others find it outside. Though we view ourselves as autonomous individuals, the content of social networks we inhabit becomes the reference points for our definition of self. The nature of the all-encompassing electronic network society is so far-reaching, diverse and global, however, that traditional cultural reference points are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Countries, regions, cities and neighborhoods are receding as formative frames of reference, while topicality and niche interest boldly assert themselves.

A new electronic form of cultural opinion-making has developed, loosely called “Webocracy.” Webocracy utilizes the collective expression of internet opinion to establish a hierarchy of ideas and values. By tracking the popularity and the expression of “themes,” sentiments and user activity within blogs and websites, analysts determine trends in the movement of ideas within networks on an ongoing basis. Far surpassing pre-web paper-based sentiment surveys or periodic ballot voting for example, webocracy mines the entirety of communication across and within online networks, continuously sorting and arranging information and data so that it can be reviewed easily. It is then possible to quickly adjust marketing strategies, news feeds, propaganda, and advertising campaigns in response to the collective “sentiment cloud” continuously forming and dissipating in cyberspace.

Our humanity is merging with machine intelligence. Granted, we have always inhabited the uncertain territory of trying to distinguish that which has emerged within self from that which has emerged without; it is through this give and take we define ourselves. Yet as today’s electronic network supercedes historically traditional social groupings in a continuous and accelerating spiral of input and response, pinpointing the source of self emergence is becoming more difficult. The rapid-fire, aggregate collective outpouring of individual expression is increasingly forming the content and context of self, and we now share a near light-speed mutual experience of virtual life, unencumbered by distance or physical contact. Body language, non-verbal cues, pheromones, tone of voice, and sexual contact are, however, sadly lost in a webocracy of disembodied relationships. Perhaps this is how it feels to be a ghost.

Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil has dubbed the complete convergence of self and machine technology “singularity,” and, he says it is near. Strangely, I think I can smell it.

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