The Future and Its Enemies
by Virginia Postrel
Free Press, 265 pages, $25

When Things Start to Think
by Neil Gershenfeld
Henry Holt, 225 pages., $25

The De-Voicing of Society
by John L. Locke
Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $25

The Pitch

Ours is a magnificently creative era, Virginia Postrel writes. But that creativity produces change, and that change attracts enemies, philosophical as well as self-interested.

Once a computer becomes continuously available on the body it literally becomes part of the fabric of our lives rather than just an appliance for work or play, Neil Grshenfeld posits. It is a very different conception of computation.

Intimate talking, the social call of humans, is on the endangered behaviors list, John Locke argues in The De-Voicing of Society.

It's time to call the Millennium Game in play. The Future and Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel, Forbes' testy columnist and editor of Reasons magazine, brilliantly imagines the two teams already bashing each other in exhibition matches. The winner will claim the hand of Ms. Millennium, who is steadily tramping down to our level.

On one side, Postrel lines up an assortment of eager entrepreneurs, right-wing "progressive" pols (spiced here and there with a pro-tech liberal or leftist), inventors, programmers, Sillicon Valley/Alley visionaries, and "artists." This is the "Dynamist" squad, ready to roar down the field toward 2000 without any plan or clear-cut goal. If one play doesn't work, say a long lateral to the tight end, they'll try a 65-yard field goal next. But they're a playful, hedonistic, charming lot, win or lose.

On the other side of the field there's a morose band of nay-sayers, Postrel claims, willing to gamble on high-tech invention, free markets and genetic engineering only if they can keep them under disciplined control, corporate, political or moral. This "Stasist" squad knows its playbook, knows where it's going and relentlessly punches out short yardage up the middle. But Stasists aren't given to quick strikes: they want to keep control of the ball, and hold off radical change.

Though most of Postrel's enemies are left-leaning Greens, socialists and technocrats, she loathes anti-free-traders like Pat Buchanan and big-government Republicans like Bob Dole with equal passion. When Newt Gingrich, apostle of "freedom," complains that Sillicon Alley innovation "is difficult to develop into a coherent picture," she slaps him like a jilted lover.

I hate to say that Postrel's view of the importance of this game is correct, but it is. She is a Dynamist bigot, conceding not a gram of brilliance or poetry to the other side. She is willing to trample on our rights, our leisure, our souls, our pocketbooks and anything close to protection from the untamed, inhuman free market. But she is our primer for the moment, so I will dutifully listed her heroes and villains, even though I don't agree with them...most of the time. For good or for ill, we must hear this madwoman out. Once we do, we can resist her game plan, or join it. Best of all, we can assign every new player on the field a proper place.

Thus two striking little books were born in the same month with The Future and Its Enemies: Neil Gershenfeld's cozy manifesto, When Things Begin to Think, pure Dynamism, and John L. Locke's The De-Voicing of Society, textbook Stasist terror. You couldn't pick either one apart without Postrel (or this essay). Gershenfeld and Locke hold down the two opposite goal posts of this match. But you'll be surprised when you learn at the end who crosses their hatchmarks.

Here are Postrel’s teams, their ideas and fetishes:

Dynamists
Fredrich Hayek, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Ted Turner, Steve Jobs, David Dowe, Malcolm Forbes, Jack Kemp, Robert Rubin, Quentin Tarrenino/Pulp Fiction, pornographic websites, biblical websites, silicon gel breast implants, Ms. magazine, Excalibur Technologies, Intel, Southwest Airlines, Federal Express, Sillicon Alley/Valley start-up companies, low or no taxes, uncoupled singles, genetic engineering, unplanned surprises: the Web, "form follows failure," unbridled creativity/anarchy

Stasists
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bob Dole, John Kenneth Galbraith, Daniel Bell/The Contradictions of Capitalism, Robert Moses, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Unabomber, Christopher Lasch, Ross Perot, E.F. Schumacher/Small is Beautiful, William Greider, greens/environmentalists (cf. jeremy rifkin), labor unions, IBM, General Motors, French Minitel System, Neo-Puritans, Neo-Conservatives/The Weekly Standard, public education, academic tenure, job security, long vacations, Communications Decency Act, EEC/the Euro, tariffs, free or subsidized health care, central organizing principles, clearly defined objectives or goals/Utopia

Why the Future Has Been a Remote Goddess

Because she has been, until yesterday, at once radiant and untouchable. Until the advent of the Web, the Mac and the PC, only a tiny percentage of us had our hands on the future. When I wrote an off-center book in 1973 about the "merger" of art and technology, it detailed a series of half-failed attempts to employ advanced tools for esthetic rather than functional ends, usually by forcing a shot-gun marriage between an artist and a reluctant engineer or company. I called it Art and the Future because "the future" was far off, in another tense. Now the tenses are merging.

When the Mac landed on my desk in 1984 I needed only Photoshop and Quicktime to begin to change the world. The same holds true for you, your PC and your cell phone. Even highly advanced tech is getting closer to our most personal concerns: genetic engineering; web access to books, sex, science; artificial wombs; digital gloves (I can touch you across the world). New tech turns us on, directly. And we don't need a mediating engineer to use it.

Yes, Virginia Postrel's book is charged with uncritical enthusiasm, but it's nonetheless grounded in a widely shared set of experiences. When she describes David Dowe's demonstration of tiny computer programs sailing out into the digital jungle, eating and blending with other little programs, she leaps for rhetorical joy: "Dowe is selling life: fluidity, variety, competition...spontaneously emerging order."

The point is: we're getting closer to the next tense. THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE ARE MERGING. Every night Ms. Millennium knocks on my door, briefcase in hand. Around midnight she climbs into my lap and gives me a vampish stare.

Gerschenfeld, who leads the Physics and Media Group at MIT's Media Lab, where computer chips are slipped into shoes to monitor bodily processes, may have his hand up her dress. "The Digital Revolution," he writes, "is an incomplete story."

Playing Partisan Politics With the Future

Magnificently, both Clinton-Gore campaigns did precisely this, the first billboarding "the information highway," the second an endless bridge to the next century, while their opponents glorified the past. Of course this enrages Postrel, who desperately wants to find a Republican visionary to lead her charge and settles, finally, for her publisher, Malcolm Forbes, whose charisma is muted, to say the least. But she bashes Clinton-Gore (along with Greens and liberals of several stripes) for a more serious reason worthy of debate: they dare to call for political controls on entrepreneurial imagination.

Postrel is surely right to ask for hands-off inspiration: nothing else would have given us the Web or RealPlayer while European and Japanese bureaucrats fiddle, plan and fume. But she is surely wrong to think that entrepreneurial managers can do no wrong, once they have the "killer ap" in their hands, forked over by untrammeled genius.

Mostly the Silicon CEOs are moving now to dominate markets and raise prices, after a brief period of handing out low-cost samples to seduce us. Postrel derides Clinton for seeking funds to provide "every child with a computer," but does she really believe her wealthy corporations will hand out machines to low-income schools?

Postrel's partisan brilliance roars into white heat when she takes on Green sentimentality about "pure nature." She contends that nature needs taming and improvement as well as conserving - that nature is a man-made "virtual" product. Almost certainly "nature" in the next century will be a nature we make, as Daniel Botkin, a Dynamist ecologist, says over and over. Alas, I agree. This is a critical argument for us to hear after a year when the globe has warmed to record levels, calling on us for active intervention, not passivity. But Postrel's dewy-eyed belief in profit-minded progress ignores a raft of oil spills and poisoned rivers demanding populist as well as elitist-commercial intervention. It's no wonder in the face of events like this that John L. Locke rages on against telephones, videophones and chatlines like a reconstructed Luddite.

Postrel's great strength is her lust for audacity and outrage; her vice is hearty tolerance for late capitalist harassment - bordering on abuse - of non-consumers. The party of the future must be partisan in behalf of the powerless as well as the powerful, of the uneducated as well as the hyper-educated. The "Party of Life" named by her idol Hayek must embrace those in danger of losing life, as well as those who exploit it.

The Future Belongs To Technology, Not Technocracy

Postrel is rightly fanatic on this point. But it is not the Gateses of the world - or the ever-escalating features of Windows - that will move the revolution in any specifically innovative way. It is the MAN OR WOMAN who both devises the Killer Ap and then executes it. In its final dimension, you and I made the Web and the chatline where most of its users congregate - not the technocrats who supervised it. In the most personal sense, the chatline is re-invented every night for you by AB1971 in Bogota or HotSam in Spokane. It is not that the technology has a mind of its own: we are the mind.

Postrel quotes with scorn Jeremy Rifkin recoiling against the use of genetic engineering to save children from cystic fibrosis (by reprogramming the genes that produce it). But his position - "once we decide to begin the process of human genetic engineering, there is really no logical place to stop" - is well-founded. Given a technology, you and I will take it to unimaginable ends. To date we have empowered ourselves. We have nothing to fear - in these cases - save ourselves. The thrust of When Things Begin to Think is to define a post-digital, post-dumb-desktop-box evolution that further enhances direct personal control: "the revolution so far has been for the computers," writes Gershenfeld, "not for the people."

The Future As Body/Brain

On our desktop and at MIT's Media Lab - the beneficiary of Gershenfeld's sly self-promotion - we're reaching toward a closer linkage between brain-computer-and body. In the past, the playful experiments at the Lab with intimate "wiring" of students and faculty might have been dismissed by the barons of finance and industry. But my guess is they will be more excited by this primer for 2001 than Postrel's celebration of 2000.

Gershenfeld begins by describing Steve Mann, an early MIT cyborg, wearing glasses that are display screens for both for his computer and a pair of digital cameras mounted on his fanny pack. His entire body is covered with sensors feeding information about his life-system into his eyeglasses, so that he is fully aware of his constantly evolving internal mechanics. Thanks to a handheld keyboard, Cyborg-Mann can write, send and receive email as he walks, sleeps or engages in foreplay.

Yet he is only the beginning. Gershenfeld's eloquence loses its academic cool and heats up when he describes the potential downsizing of Mann's rig into a chip fitted into a shoe. The "brain" in the foot exchanges information with a wristwatch and the brain. At this point, the body/mind is fused, extending human control over more points of life and the world than ever before - completing the evolution launched by eyeglasses, hearing aids and cel-phones. Here the computer is fused into the fabric of our lives. It ceases to be an appliance: it becomes us, in effect. "Wearable computers are a revolution I am sure will happen," Gershenfeld declares.

He also argues that the fusion revolution will cause our machines to feel and respond to our bodily moods as well as our typed, conscious commands. Virtual and real will have no distance. The tramp is no longer simply sitting on your lap: she is wrapped around your chest. Postrel speaks vividly of the crucial importance of what she calls personal "sticky knowledge" - the kind of insight that allows a Bay fisherman to predict where the fish will migrate, or an artist to settle upon one image more striking than any other. But when the mood and "sticky" personality of the self integrate into the virtual-real mind, there is surely no predictible end for human knowledge, or investigation. On this crucial point, Postrel and Gershenfeld are Dynamists aligned.

The Future of the Book Beyond the Book

It's fairly obvious now not only that the book won't die - having survived the supposedly apocalyptic arrival of tv and the "paperless" office - but that it has just begun to find its full powers of expression. Conceived of as a dense, sustained and portable package of expression, the book is barely beginning to make creative use of the Web, as an interactive partner in research, reading, interpretation. As computers continue to evolve in their ability to speak with and to us, it's obvious our books can read themselves aloud to us on demand as we move through space. The MIT Lab is using a process it calls microencapsulation to create "smart paper" that uses electronic ink to renew itself constantly, printing out new texts called down from a web library or tomorrow's newspaper.

Postrel quotes Morrris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World-I in behalf of an environment empowered by intelligences linked, at best, to our intelligence. And it's also obvious, as Gershenfeld notes, that the expansion of the "electronic book" into an instantly accessible virtual reality lessens our dependence upon the book as sited object or the library as place. In this sense the Library of Congress - already accessible on the Web - can be our enveloping world, not simply a recondite refuge.

The Future As Linked Voice/Body/Face

In his de-construction of technology and urbanization John L.Locke, neuro-linguist and "communication scientist," announces that more of us live alone, uncoupled, than ever before (about one-fourth; add single parents left alone when the kids sleep and it's many more). In this situation, he argues, our direct voice has lost its immediate audience. We no longer gather in parlors, churches and meeting rooms to woo, inform or gossip. But he ignores the telephone, e-mail, the resurgent coffee shop - and the Web chatline, networking minds across vast spaces.

Once the quantitative and qualitative power of this vast linked phenomenon is taken into account - millions of people reaching each other who never spoke before - the reverse might in fact be argued, anti-Locke: that the future belongs to Dialogue. Further, in the personal sense, your future and mine belongs to the Other, that is the partner in a form of exchange that cannot exist without him/her.

As to whether contact with a distant or unknown Other involves "intimacy," the word begs for definition. Nearly always when we are directly in front of our audience, we are tongue-tied: when the lights lower, when space or a medium comes between us, the tongue loosens. Here is Locke describing - with apparent approval, if not sympathy - a "direct" parting between a man and his mistress, standing before her door in London, recorded by a hidden mike:

He: Night, darling...night.
She: Love you.
He: Don't want to say good-bye.
She: Neither do I, but you must get some sleep.
He: Bye, darling.
She: Love you.
He: Bye.
She: Hopefully talk to you in the morning.
He: Please.
She: Bye. I do love you.
He: Night.
She: Night.

Beside this thrilling example of direct voicing I would like to place the chance chat I had a few weeks ago with a woman in Ulan Bator, whom I contacted through a friend who has worked in Outer Mongolia, making documentary video films there. I haven't the slightest notion to this day how old she is or what she looks like.

She: What can you be doing now? I can't imagine it.
Me: Sitting in front of my Mac, chatting with you.
She: I don't mean that. I mean your life. What can you be doing with your life?
Me: I am an artist and a writer. So are you. Don't you make films?
She: Yes, but what do you make art about? I want to know about what you in the West call your soul. What is in your soul?
Me: Many things. Many, many things. Life is very complex for me now.
She: Color. Give me the color of your soul.
Me: Many colors. Red, Black, Orange, Brown. I guess these are the main colors. What is the color of your soul?
She: White, all the time white. Pure white.

Case settled. Not because She and Me are more acute than the man and woman standing in front of her London door. No, we were moved to unload ourselves by distance, anonymity and the rarity of the occasion (we both knew we might never speak again - we haven't). The point is that "networking" is now a wider, more varied experience than ever before in history. And it is certain to expand in all dimensions, moving into sound, sight and certainly touch - when the digital camera and glove begins to spread.

Gershenfeld describes the excitement he found one day when a group of students at the MIT Lab made videoconference contact with a similar group across the world. I have often experienced the same elation when I cross students with grainy voices and faces in places like Russia or Alaska with New Yorkers. It is furiously false to say that the linking means afforded us by technology is diffusing or destroying communication. Rather, our linked voices, faces, and bodies will become dependent on each other. A future without networking at its center is almost impossible to imagine, even in 1999.

The Future As Play

If science is defined as analytic observation - that is, finding truths based on nature - it is possible, as John Horgan and others are pointing out, that we are near "the end of science."

But both Postrel believes, and I agree, that we have not even begun to test the boundaries of technology or art. For one simple reason: neither of these disciplines depends on the discovery of new empirical evidence. Both are engaged in re-packaging and re-combining "found" materials and subjective experience. This is where the Dynamist ideology, prejudiced in behalf of wildness, wit and unleashed vulgarity, is most convincing.

Postrel adores Newt Gingrich's display at the 1996 GOP convention of Kent Steffles, gold-medal champion of beach volley ball. Later Gingrich was ground into the dust for this pop art effrontery by the high-minded neo-conservative palace guard, led by The Weekly Standard.

Daniel Bell's dark premonition about late capitalism - that it would desert "heavenly Protestant values" for hedonism - is similarly anathema to the Dynamist determination to enjoy. Let’s share this neo-radical euphoria, central to creativity at all times, as long as we don't find our minds and souls handed over to entrepreneurial profiteering. "Discovery requires esthetically-motivated curiosity, not logic," writes Cyril Stanley Smith, the pre-eminent historian of science, "for new things can only acquire validity by interaction in an environment that has yet to be."

Amen. With qualifications.

The Future As Prediction Or As Unknowable Anarchy

We know for certain that John L. Locke is wrong: society in fact is now voiced to a degree never before anticipated. We know that Postrel, despite her mad polemic brilliance, errs by assuming that the next decade belongs to unregulated start-up CEOs (who are not basically responsible for our flourishing wealth anyway). Even in the most pro-capitalist society on Earth, the voters don't trust unleashed capitalists, as poll after poll, election after election proves (we don't trust unchained bureaucrats, either, of course). The true future is discernible several layers below Gershenfeld's prediction that "peripherals are central" to the future - down where our environment will soon be ringed around with thinking appliances wired into our bodies, telephones, groceries, doorbells, lingerie, drugs, etc. I am not surprised to hear Andy Grove of Intel lately agreeing with this conclusion, while irritating Bill Gates: The desktop computer, says Time's Man of the Year, is dead.

Two of these three books sing this song in one rhythm or another. The third warbles so plaintively against it that we know the post-revolution is here. Nature is giving way to "nature," increasingly sensate and responsive, surrounding us with protective intelligence. You and I will soon be the metaphorical equivalent of Edmund Spenser's radiant heroine walking nude through the Forest with plants and animals clearing her way: we're the Faerie Queene, in brief, in drag. We are the rising Radical Middle. We're a highly literate, linked community of voices, bodies, brains, genders, images and ideas in every society. Can you imagine how many more literate, tuned-in people now populate the globe than in 1900?

You can't imagine. This truth is too big.

Let's go back to the half-truth beautifully expressed in these three books. To that list of Dynamists and Stasists, a list that ought to be both expanded and exploded, that has to take into account the left-center/not just the right-center vision of a society where Dynamists, Stasists and Vagabonds, Dreamers, Desperates (because poor or sick) will be admitted, if not sponsored.

The Future, In the End, is a Tramp.

She's too close to be distant or pure. Depending on your age and gender, she is mother, father, sister, mistress, master. And she's sitting in your lap, right now - not far away, not in some far-off tomorrow. What will you do with her? That is the only question that matters, now.