Where Have all the Implants Gone?
by Estragon
So as I write this, I'm in a 747 at 33,000 feet, heading east over Tokyo. It's been a nice few days in Seoul, but now it's back to life and job in the U.S. of A. Some thoughts struck me just now, though, that I wanted to write about. I wanted to start with a question: Where have all the implants gone?
This is 2005. Not only did we make it to the 21st century more or less intact, but the pace of change our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through in the 20th century is continuing. That said, why the heck do I need to be here typing instead of just thinking my thoughts directly into cyberspace? Wasn't I supposed to have a slew of bio implants to take care of these humdrum aspects of modern life?
While I'm asking, where are my robots - and not just that automatic vacuum thing (though I admit, those are pretty cool?) What about nanobots to clean out my bloodstream? Hell, I saw a commercial ten years ago from AT&T promising that I'd be able to roll my whole shopping cart through a checkout, and something like RFID would tally it all up. Did any of this happen? Well, at Home Depot they think it's pretty cool that they can have one person watching four separate people struggle with self-checkout, thereby taking about twice as long to get through the process than if a professional checker-outer handled it. This is great for Home Depot, but isn't exactly the type of technology that Bruce Sterling was excited about when he wrote Islands on the Net.
There is some pretty cool stuff going on. No cure for cancer, but those MRI machines are neat and give a pretty good picture of people's insides. Have you noticed that automatic defibrillator machines are available in many public places lately? And cell phones - woah! O.K., so AT&T couldn't make enough profit to avoid being eaten by one of their offspring (in true Oedipus-style), but they were always pretty hopeless anyway. But did you know that more people are buying custom ring tones for their phones than are buying we music? And the tones are about $3, but the tunes are mostly under a buck! Purists will observe that the tune you buy comes with all types of digital rights management strings attached, and therefore are a waste of money. But who has a phone more than two years old? Ever heard of copying your downloaded ring tones from one phone to another? But I digress.
Where are my implants? To talk in my cell phone, I need an earbud or other headset and microphone, instead of being able to hear from a cochlear implant and talk into a microphone implanted in my lip. Or maybe to sub-vocalize to pickups at the back of my throat. Sure, I really want machines that can read my thoughts and act on them - at least enough so that I can think about typing the word "euphonious," and have it show up on my screen without me needing to carpal tunnelize myself. Not that I don't love Emacs, but sometimes it's good to have an alternative other than Vim!
I played with an EEG in 1994 (electroencephalogram machine - that's a brain wave reader for the uninitiated) that controlled a mouse cursor on a computer. Is the problem that there are marketing geniuses that know how to sell dozens of brands of nearly identical colored sugary bubble water at a profit, but nobody thought it would be sufficiently cool to, say, just think your way around a kitchen? Or a factory? Or an air traffic control tower? Sheesh, you could put EEG sensors in a baseball cap and think/navigate your way around some web pages. So why am I still using a mouse or touchpad?
Part of what the marketing geniuses evidently think is that most people are too lazy or stupid to figure out how things work, or to want to change them. These folks were born and bred on P.T. Barnum's edict that nobody ever went broke by underestimating human intelligence. They know quite well that half of the population has a below average intelligence.
But wait! What about the other half? The half of above average intelligence? Remember what Mr. Spock told us: "Superior ability breeds superior ambition". O.K., so now we're starting to talk about some people who, like me, might enjoy an implant or two. Who might want to do a little tweaking of their physical and virtual environment. Maybe some folks who see "no user serviceable parts inside" as a disappointment - or even a challenge.
Walk down any street, and you'll see people who are prepared to hack their own bodies. O.K., so a body piercing isn't an implant, and getting a tattoo today isn't really much more high tech than what the ancient Egyptians enjoyed. But people want to hack their insides, too. From ginseng tea to diet pills, pep pills, pheromones and, of course, natural male (or female) "enhancement." You can even get one of those electronic muscle stimulators that Neal Stephenson wrote about in Snow Crash, though I have it on good authority that they're almost exactly as useful at improving your body's performance as the rest of the dreck mentioned in this paragraph.
Computer games are cool, and Moore's Law for the doubling of density of transistors on a microprocessor doesn't look like it's in any danger. But did the Mattel Power Glove of 1996 turn into a general purpose device (with much higher resolution) for doing stuff in cyberspace? Nope - in fact, today's high resolution virtual reality gloves are still about $10,000 each. If you want to interact with your electronics remotely, try "The Clapper."
If you ever talked with someone who grew up during the 1950s (or are such a person), they can tell you about a lot of similar promises broken. The keyword was "progress." From the 1939 New York World's Fair through the Vietnam War era, it was all about promises. From cars that drive themselves, to kitchens that cook for you. Technology would create a vastly more convenient world.
Somehow, stuff that didn't seem hard (neither then nor today) didn't happen. Stuff that seemed impossible is now everyday. Consider: you can buy a microchip controlled greeting card at any card shop for a couple of bucks and throw it away with impunity. But if you want to read the latest good book, you'd better not like trees too much - since that book is probably only available in print, not for download. (Despite the fact that the book was created end-to-end otherwise on a computer. Don't get me started.)
Is it just profit motive that's preventing me from, for example, always knowing my blood pressure and cholesterol count, just by pointing my friendly watch-MP3-GPS-Bluetooth-phone device at my implant? Is it the U.S. FDA, stifling products by making them too expensive? (Did you know that you can microchip your dog or cat in the U.S., but you can't microchip yourself or your relatives? The FDA hasn't approved microchips for human use, even though you can get them in many other places, like Mexico. Did you know that many people get the wrong treatment in U.S. hospitals every day, and that microchips would be a great way to help make sure everyone gets the right treatment?)
Hackers of the world: unite!
We need to challenge the dominant paradigm and break down the bars of technical illiteracy. I started writing today because I was about to pass over Sendai, and was wondering where the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace deck of Neuromancer was. It's not in the Yongsan Electronic Village in Seoul - I just looked. I've also looked in the electronic district of Tokyo, and in Silicon Valley. I happen to know some people at the Department of Defense and they don't seem to have one either.
Who's going to build this stuff if not us? The building blocks are there - they're just hidden behind stickers that say "warranty void if removed."
Do you think William Gibson was thinking of something like Google when he wrote about cyberspace? I don't think so. In fact, something like Google was thought of in the 1940s - check out As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. V. Bush was hung up on microfiche, the hot technology of the day, but he had the main concepts right: he wanted to make machines that would function as an extension to human memory. Bertram C. Brookes named this "exosomatic memory" in a 1975 paper. In Gibson's cyberspace, people immersed in a virtual environment where they navigated information space rather than physical space - but even better, since there aren't any physical limitations. This sounds like it would beat the heck out of dreaming up the right few search terms for Google.
Do you want to look back on 2005 in a few years and talk about how cool Slashdot was (or Kuro5hin or your favorite blogs or whatever)? Personally, I want to look back and talk about how this was the year that things started to change. About how this was the year that the dreams of 1939 through 2004 decided to not rest in peace because talented people realized they couldn't wait. Not only is Sony not going to start selling a cyberdeck soon, they're working as hard as they can to make sure that everyone - and this means you - will be a PlayStation'd, Viacom'e, CD/DVD'd couch potato, who is too busy being entertained and overfed to know their brain is turning to mush. They want you too busy wondering about the next version of your favorite game, or the next Blockbuster movie, to realize that you don't even own the stuff you've been buying.
Just like the fable of the frog who slow-boiled without realizing it, the whole world population is becoming homogenized zombies - with a growing number of poor and disadvantaged to make sure the fat cats keep riding high. The worst part is the robbing of opportunity. Opportunity lost behind stickers saying "may only be repaired by qualified service technicians." Opportunity lost by outdated textbooks in the classroom. Opportunity lost by locking down the network connections and computers at school, at home, and in the dorms.
The fight for the future is being lost on multiple fronts. As Spike Lee said, "Wake up!" The 1999 Seattle WTO protests were a major turning point, more so than even the 9/11 attack. That was the event when "they" realized that global communication technology threatened the power structure like nothing else since the Gutenberg press (hey, how did you think Martin Luther printed his Ninety-five Theses to post them on the church doors anyway?). Since then, the U.S. hegemony, World Bank and other (((shadowy powers))) have used their economic and military might to pursue their own singular agenda: continuity (or growth) of power. The gloves came off. In every protest since then, worldwide, people engaging in peaceful demonstrations have been clubbed, pepper-sprayed, water-cannoned, and otherwise abused for trying to shape a better world.
It's all about the information. Every time you get your own news, from Indymedia, or Free Speech Radio News, or a blog or mailing list - without Fox, CNN, NBC, NPR, or your other favorite local monopoly as gatekeeper and agenda setter - you threaten the status quo by becoming informed. If you took the next step of creating the news, you threaten even further. The Fifth HOPE t-shirts said it all: "I am the Media." A literate and informed population truly is the only way out.
If you don't want to end up like Blank Reg in Max Headroom, you better get busy putting together the pieces for one of those live and remote cameras. As many discovered during the RNC convention in New York last year and at Gitmo and thousands of other improvised prisons and torture camps, the revolution will most assuredly not be televised. At least, not on DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, etc.
Pick up your soldering iron! Grab your EEPROM programmer! Figure out how to fix and improve your stuff, rather than throwing it out and getting another at Walmart.
Face it: if the powers that be figured they could sell us something like $3 ring tones for our implants, we'd have 'em already. It's about power and about technology. Like always, those in power want to keep it. Maybe an implant isn't the biggest threat to power, but the fact that I'm still waiting for the checkout lady at Kroger, and still paying Cellular One, and watching every darned packet take the same exact route over the Internet, are all symptoms. The promise of technology has only been partially delivered. It's up to us to be the deliverator.