SO, what's changed in the last five years?
Computer science has become pop culture. Web locator addresses that are evocative of Unix directory strings accompany pizza ads. Being computer savvy is now a debutante hobby, like being a pop psychologist or an interior decorator. Everyone does it.
Computation has become the universal metaphor. The brain, the economy, evolution, and politics all feel like computer programs to an awful lot of people, even on the street. For instance, the libertarian view of capitalism has become so exalted among tech types and bright young people that it isn't even contested anymore - it is just the common air we breathe. This is in part because it is the most algorithmic of the alternatives: automatic, amoral, and perfect - at least in theory. The same bias benefits the Dawkinsian view of evolution as well as game-theory models of politics. Memes and sociobiology are given a technological imprimatur; this allows them to serve as the preferred metaphors for our culture and our relationships.
This development is flattering to computer scientists, but it still annoys me. The world is narrowed when a single type of metaphor becomes too dominant. In an algorithm, every little detail makes sense. Tiny algorithms can spin out a huge amount of apparent complexity. Reality isn't necessarily like this. Sometimes complexity isn't reducible. Sometimes a free market crashes, an anatomical trait makes no sense, and the better idea loses.
The Internet has created the most precise mirror of people as a whole that we've yet had. It is not a summary prepared by a social scientist or an élite think tank. It is not the hagiography of an era, condensed by a romantic idealist or a sneering cynic. It is the real us, available for direct inspection for the first time. Our collective window shades are now open. We see the mundanity, the avarice, the ugliness, the perversity, the loneliness, the love, the inspiration, the serendipity, and the tenderness that manifest in humanity. Seen in proportion, we can breath a sigh of relief. We are basically OK.
__ A good kind of anarchy, __ we now know, is possible. It's been said before, but it isn't stale yet: The Web was built by millions of people simply because they wanted it, without need, greed, fear, hierarchy, authority figures, ethnic identification, advertising, or any other form of manipulation. Nothing like this ever happened before in history. We can be blasé about it now, but it is what we will be remembered for. We have been made aware of a new dimension of human potential.
__ Pop style __ stopped happening. This is the first period of the century without a distinctive new pop musical style, without a characteristic style of furniture, hair, or clothing. What's new about the last five years of style is not what it looks like, but how it's made. Artists of all kinds now work in digital tools. They cut and paste from the whole of human creation. In the distant future, when movies are made depicting the '90s, the only way filmmakers will be able to indicate the period is by putting vintage computers on the set. The trend started among the tech-savvy young people of the late '80s, but in the last five years it has conquered the mainstream along with digital technology.
Style used to be, in part, a record of the technological limitations of the media of each period. The sound of The Beatles was the sound of what you could do if you pushed a '60s-era recording studio absolutely as far as it could go. Artists long for limitations; excessive freedom casts us into a vacuum. We are vulnerable to becoming jittery and aimless, like children with nothing to do. That is why narrow simulations of "vintage" music synthesizers are hotter right now than more flexible and powerful machines. Digital artists also face constraints in their tools, of course, but often these constraints are so distant, scattered, and rapidly changing that they can't be pushed against in a sustained way. There are exceptions: video is so high bandwidth that it's still hard to produce on most computers - so artists can still push against their tools, and MTV gets to have a distinctive '90s visual style.
Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.
__ Software isn't freedom. __ Software was supposed to open up a universe in which whatever can be imagined can be made real, if you have the right I/O devices. Alas, it isn't so. Software has its own divisive natural history: bad software can become locked in; good software can become unusable because of platform drift. Two great pieces of software desperate for merger can be eternally separated by a chasm of incompatibility. (Note that this point appears to be in contradiction to the previous one; it is too early to know how this will play out, but the natural history of software will probably be a prime influence on the future of style.)
__ Software has gotten worse; __ computers have gotten slower. The drive to coerce users into buying unneeded upgrades has resulted in bloated tools to do simple things. Bad software has often canceled out gains in hardware speed. I realized this recently when I talked to a secretary who complained that her wordprocessor used to be faster and easier to use before she got a Windows/Pentium machine. A computer might be faster in theory, but if it's not more convenient from a human perspective, the gain is illusory. It's not a quantity problem, but a quality problem. We've even reverted to the command-line interface - complete with cryptic "=strings.*" - for important tasks like searching the Net. Meanwhile, the desktop interface is becoming more cluttered and confusing, thanks to Microsoft.
__ Digital monopolies are inevitable. __ The dynamics of standards are brutal. A digital product that survives long enough has no competitors. The only way it can die is if its niche dies. In the last five years, Bill Gates has become the richest person in the world and software has become a vital element of American economic power.
__ Our notion of productivity has changed __ in a subtle way. The new information economy values people who move information around and manipulate it, even if no real work gets done. This is a positive development. Were it not for this sleight of mind, computers would cause the most severe unemployment crisis in history. Instead, information technology has finally produced a vision of how we can have a form of leisure and capitalism at the same time.
__ There is no global village. __ We have finally seen what happens when information technology permeates the whole world. A village is stable; everyone knows his or her role. What's happened instead is that everything has become more fluid. Consider the business world. In the new environment, executives change jobs as frequently as do migrant laborers. Corporations are transnational, merging and splitting like slime molds. An environment of fluidity demands new values. With so little permanence in human relationships, abstractions like the brand name have become the only constants. The fluidity of people has resulted in brands being deified.
Kids are smarter. Not all kids, alas. But the ones on the favorable side of the curve are zooming. Five years ago we already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults. What we're seeing now is that they don't even need to be taught. It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language. My favorite anecdote concerns a 3-year-old girl who complained that the TV was broken because all she could do was change channels. The first generation of postconsumers has been born.
__Adults are more terrified. __ They fear losing control to a younger generation that is more digitally nimble. Because parents can't understand what their kids are doing on the Web, there are calls for a level of censorship and control of communication that no dictator has ever enjoyed. There have been hysterical reactions to young cyberpranksters. What needs to be remembered is this: We are witnessing the most productive, intelligent, and optimistic example of youthful rebellion in the history of the world.
__ High technology, __ just maybe, has started to have a pacifying effect. I don't want to overstate this, but media is starting to provide the thrill, the test, and the ritual we once needed violence to find. The military has been driven by cool-technology lust ever since Hiroshima. The coolest tech the military could make in the past was a weapon; now it's a VR system. Even the Serbian nationalists let go of a war when they saw the simulation. Americans, meanwhile, have lost all tolerance for even the smallest amount of ritual letting of our own actual blood in foreign adventures. Of course, I could be completely wrong. It is tragically easy to find counterexamples. But give it a chance - maybe these are the early signs of a way out of war.
__ Social conflicts __ are now just as likely to be about the technologies of identity - think abortion - as about the divvying up of resources. In the last five years, MTV reached the whole world and was transmuted into the bombs of fundamentalists. But all those bloody movements resisting Western culture aren't really afraid of rock, Coke, and Levi's; in fact, their members usually love those things. People all over the world are, instead, becoming aware and afraid of technologies that will give them the power to redefine themselves at a deeper level, thus killing their present identity. Birth control, abortion, satellite TV, and the Internet are only the early warning signs. They fear they will soon start having sex-change operations, neural implants, and designer children. It is not just leaders who sense the impending crisis, but everyone. We have begun to see a worldwide resistance not to imperialism, but to the conflicted longings of each self.
