Brave New World?
Looking back now, 1997 marked a great divide in pop tech journalism. Before
1997, computers were rarely seen in the daily press. They were the domain of
coke-bottle glassed geeks in grimy little warrens of academia and as a result
they were easy prey for multi-culti, liberal arts theorizing. At schools like
MIT and Carnegie Mellon, you could see all those philosophy and English majors
eyeing the computer lab greedily, dreaming of the wealth of sweet pathology
teeming inside.
As a result, the stories about computers in mainstream media, taking the
early Wired and its precursor, Mondo 2000, as powerful examples, as well as the
rare tech-heavy article found in the "Style" section of the daily paper,
featured a bright future full of electronic vibrating phalli, cyber-sex and -art
(often one in the same), the end of paper, and the amazing new technology that
will change the world (touch screen handhelds, flat panel monitors, keyboards
that don't click when you type on them.)
Then the geeks came home from college and told their older brothers about
some super thing called the Internet. It was a great medium for porn and allowed
lonely boys (in college) to hook up to the celestial porn box and go nuts. Porn
led to online payment systems, that led to ecommerce, which ultimately led to
the marriage of man and machine in the form of Ask Jeeves and Amazon.com, which
received more mainstream publicity than some presidential declarations of war.
But even though mainstream media were slow on the uptake, all this time, the
comparative lit types were still churning out treatises on the wired world.
Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, edited by Bruce Grenville and
produced as a supporting document for a Vancouver exhibit of the same name, is a
book chock full of these half-pop/half-intellectual riffs on technology, and
makes for a pretty good read even outside of the classroom or gallery. It's got
Important Art on the cover, so somebody must have put a lot of thought into this
one.
Uncanny's focus is on the dehumanization of man by machine (think of
the blue light of the monitor in a quiet dorm and we roll all the way back
around to the porn idea). Grenville believes that everything coming out right
now, from Palm Pilots on down, is a Western form of slavery that far surpasses
the capital gains ever produced by the former, messier slavery we had in this
country and that some countries still practice. Instead of chains, we're wired
to our cell phones. Instead of buying and selling our hides, the fat cats hold
the threat of lay-offs over us and pacify us with digital cameras and the
strident call of Eminem, and Grenville, to follow the drinking gourd straight
out of Detroit falls on deaf ears.
In order to prove his point, he collects a number of articles and clips
including an article by Freud on infant neuroses also entitled "The Uncanny"
and a few chapters from the seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. Couple
that with the story of an autistic boy named Joey who believed he was connected
to a giant machine by wires and hoses and had to "maintain" a machine made of
scrap parts that he laid out on his bed like a post-modern mandala, and there
you have the extent of man's slavery under the iron will of machines.
Why read The Uncanny? Well, first off it's a good look at non-mediated
thought on technology, which we all could use. Almost all major newspapers have
technology sections and the fetishizing that goes on there is almost R-rated.
It's important to step back and take an alternate view, that cheap printers
aren't a good thing and that we're all going to hell. Ultimately, the thesis
fails under its own weight. Geeks create technology to one up each other, not to
control the universe, and they usually just want to make something cool to show
at the next computer club meeting. To ascribe plans of nefarious neo-slavery to
Bill Gates and Microsoft is deluded and anyone who does so probably hasn't
suffered as Word chewed up a term paper. Hell, William Gibson wrote
Neuromancer on a typewriter. Anyway, you can't enslave someone with buggy
technology. They never had to reboot the lash and the shackle.
So what is this book good for? It's a lucid look at the fears that plague
academics everywhere: Will I be replaced by a computer that can theorize in my
place? Will my laptop break, causing me to lose a life's work in an instant?
Will robots take over the administration of the school and will I lose tenure to
an intelligent toaster oven?
Well, Mr. Grenville, never fear. Technology will never leak into academia. There's
no money in it.
— 30 October 2002
