#28: The Fiberoptic Freeway
Last week, Ian Bogost wrote the best piece I've read in a while about software's so-called consumption of the world and a more recent frontier of its advancement: objects that have no clear business connecting to the internet, such as toasters and garden hoses. Bogost observes that we don't need to wait for some Singularity event or runaway AI takeover; computing has already effectively conquered the world, often in more subtle, prosaic forms, and we voluntarily place more activities under software's purview all the time. “Today, people don’t seek out computers in order to get things done; they do the things that let them use computers."
Put that way, our rampant enthusiasm for involving computers in everything reminded me of the last century's most important technological revolution, the automobile, which turned out differently than it began. Like computers today, cars were once so novel and promising that we "did the things that let us use cars" rather than the inverse. That honeymoon period lasted long enough (and for some it hasn't ended yet) to entirely and permanently remake the infrastructure of cities, the most familiar example being the wave of support that enabled Robert Moses to slice New York apart with expressways. By the time the car's real problems became visible—traffic, pollution, physical danger, and social atomization—it was too late to reverse its complete dominance. Most of the rebuilding was already done.
Right now, we're building a digital infrastructure that rivals the physical one we built for cars, just as fast and with equally uncritical enthusiasm. If freeways prioritized cars at the expense of people, this prioritizes bits similarly, no less because we've all begged for it. Of course, it's still too early to say what the internet version of gridlock and global warming will turn out to be once its saturation of society is complete. Referencing the Turing test, Bogost also points out, "Instead of machines trying to convince humans that they are people, machines now hope to convince humans that they are really computers." If, in another fifty years, we aren't worshipping Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, we might be comparing them to Robert Moses.
Reads:
The bad logistics beneath Bodega (thank you, Kyle)
A cool back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of manufacturing the iPhone X in 1957 ($150 trillion!)
Until next time,
Drew