Sour Grapes or, I hope Social Computing in 2020 isn’t anything like this
UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project just released the winners of their Social Computing in 2020 competition. I’d put together an entry for this, based on the rise of animation as a medium for non-lingual knowledge formation and transmission, but apparently the folks at Santa Barbara have a rather constrained vision of social computing (read Facebook), as well as too much exposure to science fiction and not enough exposure to dystopian literature. To wit, their winners consist of:
First Place – A hypothetical tool to manage the privacy settings of your on-life.
Now, this is the most technologically feasible of the winning entries, which isn’t saying much once you find out what took second place, but the idea that you can one day prevent your boss from seeing your drunken MySpace pics isn’t exactly groundbreaking, earth-shattering or radical. It is, however, highly unlikely, given that the growth of social computing and the Web in general have eroded the concept of private life both from a technological perspective (It’s hard to hide who you are once you begin to take part in the connected world) and from a social perspective (More and more people think once incredibly private details are not such a big deal in the connected world). People already manage the privacy settings in their on-life (Their on-line life, I’m coining that term right now, you all owe me $.05 every time you use it) by using multiple email accounts, signing up with monikers on their various social web sites, &c, &c. If I was a judge, I’d give this entry a B for feasibility, a D for novelty and a C- for need.
Second Place – Recording Sensations for Fun and Profit!
Okay, so we’re going to assume that someone will create a “sensation suit” in the next ten-twenty years, that will record “experience” and allow you to replay it. If you’re thinking of a particularly crumby movie starring Ralph Fiennes, you’re not alone. Let’s just imagine that such a technology is within our reach–wait, no, feasibility was one of the hallmarks of this competition, you can’t just assume that somebody will perform alchemical sorcery and create a magic SensoSuit. How the heck do you expect this technology to work? The entry includes erotic activity on its list of experiences, so apparently the suit can transmit sensations particular to men and women. How’s that work? Is it a unisex suit? At least the sci-fi that’s dealt with this kind of thing acknowledges you’ll need to tap into the brain to do it, in which case even the Johnny Mnemonic possibility is still out of reach, but at least it’s hypothetically feasible. Alright, alright, let’s say somebody makes these suits (dry-clean only, I hope) then what? Is it just a pressure point and pin-prick system (The Full Body Acupuncture Experience, now at Disney World!) and if so, is that really what an “experience” is? I hate technological optimism, that’s why I think The Truth Machine is an amazing work of fascist fandom, but the amount of technical mastery necessary to create a dubiously structured version of experiential knowledge is, in my mind, a bad mix. F for feasibility, C for novelty (Again, I feel the need to point out crappy movies and literature from the depths of science fiction) and, I don’t know, a B- for need, just because I acknowledge that porn still rules the Internet (A sad shame and a case for the ultimate failure of a major tenet of the Enlightenment) and that doesn’t show any signs of letting up.
Third Place – RFID in Your Colon
Okay, so one of the other reasons I hate technological optimism is because it completely ignores the misuse of technology. I call it the Nazi Substitution Hypothetical. Nazis plus microwave ovens? Not much difference. Nazis plus nuclear weapons? Big Mistake. If the Nazis had your miracle technology, would they be geometrically worse or exponentially worse. Again I have to point to the Truth Machine, a novel based on the premise of the invention of a machine that could unerringly determine if the subject was lying. Oh, that’s great if we live in a happy world of unicorns, but think of how much easier it’d be to run a fascist state if you had that? So this entry proposes putting RFID chips in EVERY ORGAN IN YOUR BODY so that some, assumably benevolent, controlling power could track the function of your body. The write-up on the Social Computing site doesn’t include a specific social computing aspect, and seems to assume a classic governmental agency approach, and really, why would all your twitter fans want to know about your gall bladder efficiency? And who’s going to willingly subject themselves to three hundred and twenty-eight RFID insertions? We bristle about the possibilities of an authoritarian state looking into our backyard, much less our prostate. D for feasibility (I have to average the feasibility of creating the technology with the feasibility of a free society subjecting themselves to it), F/A for need (F if you think The State will ever turn bad, A if you live in a hippie utopia where your spleen is everybody’s spleen) and a B- for novelty (Tracking the physiological function of the polity is another staple of sci-fi–heck, even Aliens did it).
Knowing my luck, this will all come to pass, so at least my boss won’t know the function of my kidneys while I record my ride on the most dangerous rollercoaster in the world.