Imaginary Worlds - Imagining the Internet

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

We were promised flying cars but we got Twitter instead. That's the common complaint against science fiction writers and the visions of the future they presented us in the 20th century. But many sci-fi authors did envision something like the Internet and social media -- and we might be able to learn something about our time from the people who tried to imagine it. Cory Doctorow, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton and Arizona State University professor Ed Finn look at the cyberpunks and their predecessors, and artist Paul St. George talks about why he's fascinated by a Skype-like machine from the Victorian era. Featuring readings by Erik Bergmann.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. In the summer of 2008, I went down to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge to see a work of art called the Teletrascope. It looked like an enormous Victorian telescope that had emerged from the ground after tunneling across the Atlantic. And when I got to the lens at the front of the telescope, I could see a live feed of people in London waving back at me.

The artist behind the work was Paul St. George. So you could say that they were Skyping between London and New York, but the emotional response and the excitement was as if they had encountered a completely new invention. And as if they were, I think you went there to the Brooklyn end. I did. And it didn't even occur to me how I could just go home and do the same thing. No, no, no. We're not going, hey, Eric, wow, wow. You know, it's just, I don't believe it. Paul is fascinated by telecommunications,

particularly the way that inventions follow our desires for these things to exist. Or at least they used to. In fact, he says you can go back and look at 19th century cartoons and see fantasies about technology we have today. I've got a fantastic one from, I think it was 1875, where some people are watching their daughter play tennis in South Asia, and they are in a living room in London. And they have this screen up, and they're watching them play tennis, and they're having a conversation. And the really neat thing about this work of art, the teletrascope,

is that it's based on a real patent from the 1890s. Now, the device would never have worked, but the story behind it really fascinated Paul. There was a guy called Figuier, a French journalist working in America, and he was typing up a story which he had misheard. The true story was about something called an electroscope, and he put a T in front of it and called it a telecoscope, which didn't exist. He thought it was a device for the suppression of absence, which is pure poetry as far as I'm concerned. It is a great phrase, the suppression of absence, meaning that people were feeling that the absence

of their loved ones living so far away was an unbearable problem that demanded a technological solution. So all of these amateur inventors picked up on this thing called the teletrascope, and they drew these designs for what would have been basically a steampunk version of Skype. And that is how Mark Twain learned about the telescope. And he incorporated it into a short story called From the London Times of 1904. And it's generally considered to be the first work of science fiction to imagine the Internet. His mind was always busy with the catastrophe of his life, and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telectroscope and divert his mind with it. He had his wish.

The connection was made with the international telephone station, and day by day and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another and looked upon its life and studied its strange sights and spoke with its people. And realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument, he was almost as free as the birds of the air. Although a prisoner under locks and bars. I've been thinking a lot about the telescope lately and how it made me feel wondrous about technology because I've been feeling disillusioned by the internet lately. I'm just exasperated by these angry echo chambers, information bubbles, and this whole issue of fake news. I usually pride myself as somebody

who keeps up with technology, but I've been feeling technological whiplash. And I know this is wrong, but a part of me is actually annoyed at science fiction writers because I feel like they didn't prepare me well enough for the future. I mean, I was ready for flying cars, not swarms of trolls on Twitter. I don't think many of the negative and the complex things that the internet has given us were really predicted. And I also think it happened very, very, very fast. The novelist, Jo Walton. I'll read a 1963 book with moon bases that is set in 2017. But on the other hand, they've only got one computer and it takes up half the moon base. And if it's doing really well, it can, you know, do some math. I talked with Joe Walton and a bunch of experts because I wanted to know which writers imagined the Internet.

And is there anything we can learn from those stories that could help us deal with the issues of our time? So get ready to take a deep dive into the past, or at least the past idea of the future, which is our present. That is just after the break. If I'm going to look at the history of the internet in science fiction, I knew I had to talk with Ed Finn, who's a professor at Arizona State University, with a pretty great job title. I am the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination.

Ed says the next writer to imagine the internet after Mark Twain was E.M. Forrester. Yes, that E.M. Forrester, the guy who wrote A Room with a View and Howard's End. Now, if you only know his work through the Merchant Ivory films of the 1980s and 90s, you might think of him as a guy who wrote quaint period pieces. But when those novels came out in the early 20th century, they were not period pieces. They were about people living at that time. Because Forrester was very interested in the world around him. And in 1909, he began to think about how the emerging middle class had these new kinds of jobs where they could sit at a desk all day instead of manual labor. And they had lots of leisure time to write letters. They could be quite prosperous without ever actually going anywhere. So in his short story, The Machine Stops,

Forrester added one more thing to those desks and those rooms, a screen that people could gaze at. So people live in these rooms where everything is automated, and you basically spend your whole day basically living your entire life in Facebook. So you attend lectures and you deliver lectures, you FaceTime with your friends and going outside, doing things in the physical world, visiting people physically is initially frowned upon and then eventually it's deprecated entirely and people just spend literally their whole lives online. But it was fully 15 seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow.

A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple. And presently, she could see the image of her son who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her. Kuno, how slow you are! He smiled gravely. I really believe you enjoy dawdling. I have called you before, mother, but you are always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say. What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post? Because I prefer saying such a thing.

I want... Well? I want you to come and see me. Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. But I can see you, she exclaimed. What more do you want? There's this entropy story, which is a classic science fiction trope that, you know, we build these magnificent sandcastles, but then sooner or later things start to fall apart.

And part of it is also about complexity. You know, we build the thing to be so complicated that nobody understands how it works anymore. So things fall apart and nobody notices because everybody's invested so much faith in the machine. And actually, the machine becomes a religious object, a kind of God by the end of the story. Having an almost religious devotion to a technological brand, not so far-fetched. Although if it doesn't work, I can't imagine people continuing to worship it. Now, there isn't another story that imagines the internet for a long time.

We have to jump to 1946, when Murray Leinster wrote a short story called A Logic Named Joe, about a machine in everybody's house that could answer any question. And the story is really about people getting information that they don't actually want, getting insights that they don't want to have that are uncomfortable or inappropriate. The logical extension there is like, well, what if everybody had access to all knowledge? And it turns out that society is constructed around that not happening. Society is constructed around certain kinds of knowledge not being accessible to everyone all the time. This fella punches. How can I get rid of my wife? Just for the fun of it. The screen is blank for half a second. Then comes a flash. Service question. Is she blonde or brunette?

He hollers to us and we come look. He punches. Blonde. There's another brief pause. Then the screen says, hexametacrylaminoacetine is a selective poison which is fatal to blonde females but not to brunettes or male of any coloring. This fact has not been brought out of by human experiment but is a product of logic service. The screen goes blank and we stare at each other. It's bound to be right.

Despite the 1940s lingo, or maybe because of it, I'm amazed that the story is basically about a search engine. And I think it's quite prescient that the computer is named Joe to make people feel comfortable about putting it in their homes. That's right out of Steve Jobs's playbook. But Ed says a lot of these stories fail to imagine a key component of the Internet. They didn't realize that in the future, information would be able to flow in all directions. The metaphor, the adaptation was of kind of the masses of the 20th century. You think about radio, you think about TV.

You know, there's just like a large group of people who are a collective block and they're going to believe the same things. And actually, the Internet is way more complicated than that. Again, Jo Walton. What you tend to have in science fiction generally is you'll get something that's like Google, but the answer that you get, it's like looking at an encyclopedia. It isn't the correct answer. You don't get 57 million random answers. Some of them right and some of them wrong and some of the people arguing about what's right and what's wrong. In other words, they imagine computers as one trick ponies, which may be why the Wild West nature of the Internet took us all by surprise.

Now, you might notice I'm making big leaps from 1909 to 1946, and we're about to jump to the 1970s. But first, I want to have a brief sidebar. Because the novelist Ada Palmer has an explanation as to why Western science fiction isn't dealing much with telecommunications. Because most Western science fiction at this time is preoccupied with the rise of fascism, civil rights, and the Cold War. But she says writers in Asia were exploring technology much more. Her favorite example is Osamu Tezuka, who created Astro Boy in the Phoenix series. He has a number of stories that involve issues of robots being able to communicate instantly over distances while humans can't yet, robots being able to communicate instantly over distances while humans can't yet,

or computer intelligences being able to communicate over distances while humans can't yet. And she says we shouldn't be so literal at looking at whether these stories talked about certain technologies. Some writers were imagining the problems of the internet with pure fantasy. Science fiction lets us fight our moral battles in advance and science fiction tries out therefore many many many many many different ideas and then explores what the social and moral and political consequences of those might be and kind of gives us a preview you know so let's imagine that we didn't have any science fiction anticipating social networks in fact we did but let's imagine that we'd had none but we did have science fiction imagining what would happen if you could teleport and therefore communication speeds suddenly changes and community shapes suddenly change. And that

helps us understand social networks to some extent because it's similar. And for that reason, we are well prepared for unfamiliar social changes and moral change. And exactly the way the Middle Ages weren't prepared for this because they never speculated about what if the world were different from the way it is now or what if the world changed radically in an unprecedented and new way. And that kind of thinking about telecommunications and all the moral battles that it would create reached its apex with a cyberpunk novelist. Joe Walton's favorite example from that time is the 1973 story The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr.

You might remember I did an episode about Tiptree, who was actually the pseudonym for a writer named Alice Sheldon. Living a double life and pretending to be a man allowed her to imagine that someday it might be useful to have what we would call now an online avatar. It's a wonderful story that is terrifying and awful, and it's the kind of thing you read it and shudder. But it's also quite amazing how many things she got right in terms of reality TV and companies creating false instant celebrity people who can become powerful, but they're still under the control of the corporations who've created them. The story is about a guy who falls for a hot celebrity who is actually a reanimated corpse wirelessly controlled by a deformed woman in a lab. Or to use modern language, it's about a guy who gets catfished.

Can't you take what I'm explaining to you? They've got the whole world programmed. Total control of communication. They've got everybody's minds wired to think what they show them and want what they give them. And they give them what they're programmed to want. You can't break in or out of it. You can't get hold of it anywhere. I don't think they even have a plan except to keep things going round and round. One great big vortex of lies and garbage pouring round and round. Getting bigger and bigger.

And nothing can ever change. If people don't wake up soon, we're through. And if I'm going to talk about cyberpunk, of course, I have to talk about the groundbreaking novel, Neuromancer by William Gibson from 1984. I asked Ed Finn if there's a scene that feels particularly prescient to him, and he loves the moment when the protagonist, Henry Case, who is a cyberspace junkie, finally gets back online. And then there's this moment where he jacks in and you get that sense of the rush, that sense of vertigo, that sense of elation. And in a way, that sense where Case has suddenly become someone else. You know, he was one person before. He was kind of this spiraling denizen of the underworld. And all of a sudden, now he's a superhero in this virtual reality space again.

He's more alive. He's more himself online than he is offline. With his deck waiting back in the loft at Onosendai Cyberspace 7, they'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, the crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Onosendai, next year's most expensive Osaka computer. A Sony monitor, a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice, a Braun coffee maker. Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.

And it's funny because a lot of the cyberpunk novelists were the very first people online. And once they experienced the internet, they updated their thinking very quickly. Werner Wenge was on an early version of the internet called Usenet, and he incorporated that into his 1992 book, Fire Upon the Deep. And when Jo Walton read that book, she thought this internet bulletin board thing was just something he had made up.

I read that before I was online. And then when I got online and discovered Usenet, I was so happy. It was actually real. It was amazing. So to me, this is a fun exercise, seeing who got it right and who got it wrong. And then I talked with Cory Doctorow, the novelist, political activist, and co-editor of the website Boing Boing. And he challenged all of my assumptions. First, he reminded me that science fiction writers are not psychics or fortune tellers, which I know.

But he was like, yeah, you're still treating them that way. And he says when we look back at science fiction, it should be obvious to us that those writers are just reacting to the moment in which they're living in. I sometimes compare it to what a doctor does when she teases the back of your throat with a swab and then rubs it on a petri dish and then leaves it for three days and comes back and looks at it. She gets to find out something about what's going on in your body, not because she's made an accurate model of your body, but because she's made a really usefully inaccurate model of your body, where one factor in it has eclipsed all other factors in its significance. And I think that that's what happens when science fiction writers pluck a single technology out of the world and grow it to encompass the whole world. It doesn't tell us how we'll interact with all the other complexities of the world, but it does give us a moment in which we can maybe inhabit the emotional lives of people

who are being upturned by it. I mean, of course, the best science fiction writers have their thumb on the pulse of changes that turn out to be important. But he thinks the cyberpunks resonate today, not just because they're writing about telecommunications, but because they were writing about economic changes that would define our era. Because people were telling all the different stories in 1980, but the stories that we paid attention to were the ones in which the rich became super rich and speciated from us, and in which corporate power metastasized to unimaginable levels. And maybe it's because we were living in that moment and we could sense it. And the story spoke to us.

And maybe now, in hindsight, we can look back and understand them. He also doesn't share my feeling of technological whiplash. He takes the long view and thinks that the internet is changing things for the better. I think the internet is the nervous system of the 21st century.

It's like a single wire that delivers free speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, access to education, to tools, ideas, communities, every other accomplishment that we use to measure whether or not a society is a good one. And hope is a thing that I think is familiar to anyone who's ever plotted a novel. It's the idea that if works. You know, like the future is not on rails, right? Like we'll get a different future depending on what we do. The only way science fiction could be predictive is if the future didn't change based on what we did. In other words, science fiction can only rehearse the future. It's our job to make it a good one. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Joe Walton, Paul St. George, Ada Palmer, Ed Finn, Eric Bergman, who did the readings, and Corey Doctorow, who says just because the cyberpunks were skeptical of capitalism doesn't mean they wouldn't sell out. In fact, a German soup company agreed to publish Neuromancer if William Gibson would add scenes like this one, where the character Molly Millian says, All right, boys, now let's take it easy and get out of here quick. But first, who wants soup? And the Panther Moderns say, What kind of soup have you got? And she says,

Oh, we've got all kinds of soup. We've got beef barley. We've got chicken noodle. We've got tomato. We've got broccoli and cheddar. And they say, that soup sounds amazing. And then they all eat soup for the rest of the page. And then they escape from the SenseNet pyramid.

Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at E. Malinsky. Now, talking to all these really smart, interesting people, there was a lot of stuff that I couldn't fit into the episode. And if you pledge to support the show on Patreon, you can actually get access to a Dropbox folder which has all the full interviews.

Now, Ada Palmer had a great anecdote about how she runs a LARP every year at the University of Chicago where her students play out the papal election of 1492, which is full of Machiavellian scheming. And that exercise helped her students understand the 2016 election better. Now that part I'm actually going to put as bonus audio available on the show page for this episode at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

page for this episode at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.