#32: Motionless in the Matrix
As someone who thinks a lot about transportation, I've never considered Facebook a major participant in that domain, but apparently Mark Zuckerberg does, as he explicitly proclaimed in his Oculus Connect 4 keynote last week: "A lot of people have ideas about how to make transportation better: self-driving cars, hyperloops, and don’t get me wrong, I love all of that stuff, but it’s 2017, and the biggest trend in transportation is that it’s a lot easier to move bits around than atoms." Whoa.
When I say "whoa" I intend for you to hear it in Keanu Reeves' voice, because the philosophy articulated here is one we encountered in The Matrix, which VR promises to fulfill: that the human body will become increasingly stationary as it decouples from a correspondingly unfettered sensory experience. The former might eventually float in nourishing, womblike pods, but in the meantime it can watch Netflix and order delivery, the crude precursor to that ultimate equilibrium (I apologize for comparing something to The Matrix, I promise I'm not a stoned college sophomore). As I've explored at greater length here, there is a strain of technological utopianism that seems to wish for the disappearance of the body and all the constraints that "meatspace" imposes upon it.
If you have a hammer, it's tempting to view every problem as a nail, and it's similarly appealing to believe that most of our toughest, most persistent challenges have software solutions for that reason, but they don't all move so easily from the realm of atoms to that of bits. Transportation certainly doesn't, and postulating its eminent digital absorption requires the privileged assumption that we're all already physically located somewhere comfortable. Just a few days before the above keynote, Facebook caught flak for a livestream in which a cartoonish Zuckerberg avatar virtually dropped into Puerto Rico to survey the post-hurricane wreckage, stopping short of meeting anyone who was physically trapped there. When you died in the Matrix you died for real, but who cares when there's not even power to keep it running?
Reads:
The surprisingly positive effects of online dating's rise, such as more interracial relationships and stronger marriages.
A detailed Atlantic piece from 2015 about how economic inequality among American cities got so much worse during the past century.
File under "people behaving like bots": a strangely addictive game in which you play an artificial intelligence trying to make as many paperclips as possible.
Until next time,
Drew