“To hell with more, I want better”

I wrote a newspaper column—for a physical paper!—for almost 4 years, beginning in 2013. There are maybe a dozen or so of those columns that are worth revisiting, now from what feels like a historical perspective. I’m going to republish them relatively unedited, except for a clunky sentence or two, since I often had to edit a lot for length.

I’m preserving my old thinking, unedited, as cringe as it might be (especially for me), and I’ll just tell you how that thinking has changed over the past decade or so, and I’ll add some relevant links (you can’t link in a print-first newspaper).

The original link is gone, so I can’t remember what title the subs gave it.

I still believe

• That humans determine tech more than it determines us, and I’m still as frustrated by deterministic doomerism as I am by nostalgia for “simpler times” (I grew up in the 1980s and can confirm it was pretty shitty).

• Nobody wants to subscribe to their refrigerator.

• There Will Come Soft Rains is relevant pretty much every time we go through another hype cycle.

In 2024, I would no longer

• Understate or elide the power of the people who control the tech narratives and the companies that peddle them.

• Express the fatalistic idea that a tech is here and we have to just live with it, or at least, not so glibly.

• Hold back making fun of smart fridges, which have still yet to find a market after almost 25 years.

• Underestimate how much the tech billionaires are using sci-fi as a manual, and deliberately building the Torment Nexus from Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.

Originally published, January 26, 2014

“In the living room the voice clock sang, ‘Tick tock, seven o’clock. Tick tock, time to get up,’” begins Ray Bradbury’s story, There Will Come Soft Rains, part of his collection, The Martian Chronicles. The story is set in August 2026, in California’s Bay Area, shortly after a nuclear explosion. It contains no people, just the ghosts of human life preserved in the functions of a fully-automated, password-protected home, performing its duties as chirpily as ever. The only sign of life is an emaciated dog who tracks mud into the house, angering the robot mice who emerge to clean its pawprints from the floors. 

It could have been written last week, but there’s no WiFi router, no Netflix, and the clocks still say ‘tick tock’. 

But he wrote it in 1950, soon after the first stirrings of the Nuclear Age. The general public knew about the destructive potential of nuclear technology, but he wasn’t preaching to a necessarily worried congregation. Atomic tourism was real. Watching the early-morning nuclear tests in the Nevada desert was such a popular activity that some early postcards from Las Vegas feature mushroom clouds in the distance

1950s postcard from The Pioneer Club, Las Vegas, from UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives

Technology is only scary if it falls into the wrong hands, right? Let’s go watch it be exuberantly destructive somewhere else. The drinks are always free while you’re playing. 

By leaving people out of the story, Bradbury tapped into our anxieties, not just about war, but about how machines don’t depend on us the way we depend on them. 

It’s not technology we distrust, it’s other people who deserve our suspicion. People build every piece of this, from apps to network cables to wifi-enabled hardware, and create the narratives we act on. 

Last week [as in, January 2014], someone hacked an LG ‘smart’ fridge, the kind that texts you to buy milk because research shows this is a huge problem for customers who have too much money and no milk. Hackers used it as part of a bot-net to send 750,000 spam emails. What part of this should worry us? The hackers? The fridge? That our kitchen can get along without us? Or that the story came from a press release by—wait for it—a network security company?

A fridge doesn’t get hacked because it’s always a bad idea to network things, but because people hack things. How do you protect your things? You could put a firewall into the fridge, or you could build a more secure network. Which one you want depends on whom you trust with your security gates -- LG, or your ISP? Then, who can access the data about your fridge? And, are you sure we’re out of milk? 

Technology doesn’t determine us, we determine it. But the Internet of Things brings the same anxiety that underpins so much of technology-based science fiction: what happens when we no longer need to be the intermediaries of decisions made within technologies? 

If there’s one thing that irks me more than the default reverence for all new technology, it’s the use of it as a hook for profound nostalgia for ‘simpler times’, or scaremongering that we’re just a tweeting fridge away from everything unraveling entirely. That’s silly. 

Bradbury’s story has been adapted so many times that you could spend a whole day enjoying it in different incarnations (the best: Leonard Nimoy reading it aloud, and an impossibly beautiful 1984 Uzbek animation of it). It captures something about our conflicted relationship with the technology we build, use, fear and love. Technology isn’t the danger, but it does sometimes manifest the danger we represent as human beings, or from the human beings who make decisions about the technologies that affect our lives.

As we move into an age when our possessions communicate without our intervention, we should be asking what stories they’ll be creating, whose norms they reproduce, who will access them, and how will they act on them. We don’t need to be explicitly cynical about Google’s recent purchase of Nest—the overreach is real— in order to ask what happens when Google knows how warm you like your house.

Like it or not, the Internet of Things is here. Bradbury envisioned it, not because he understood the mechanics of technology through engineering, but because he understood people. “People ask me to predict the future,” he said, “when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it…You look around at the people around you, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more, I want better.”

This is a version of a column that was first published in January 2014, in the Business Post (original link is, unsurprisingly, lost)