We will someday see the [cyber]species that we make as being as beautiful as a butterfly … Our chief chore is taking on the duties and responsibilities of gods … I believe technology is unadulteratedly good in our world, just as life is good on our planet.
I’m the goddamn wannabe Luddite who wonders what America will look like if every rich person has a sprawling compound in some gloriously beautiful – and ecologically fragile – state like Utah while cities are abandoned to the poor. And yet, I’m actually living the “electronic cottage” dream of the Gilders, Gingriches and Tofflers. I’m turning on, logging in and crashing out here in my own little nest. I’m a “prosumer” in the infoweb, absorbing great gobs of data and disgorging a little of my own every day … I’m human, a social animal. I’m not a god, I’m a hairless chimp with a messianic complex and a mouse. I need human contact and simple pleasures. I need to eat, poop and see people smile … But instead of returning to the basics, I, like many of us, am spending more and more of my time with my face bathed in monitorglow, getting my fix of digital junk. Won’t someone please unwire me before it’s too late?
A cloud … is building, a hurricane of over-information that threatens, if it continues, to serve as nothing more than nonsense deforesting large tracts of our national acreage … To focus the amount of information we are producing on a weekly basis, which probably exceeds that produced in most of the preceding centuries, would take an enormous lens, or perhaps a million rather tiny ones.
Take that convergence of the computer and the television, a coalescing of technologies that should allow us to shunt around all those movies, spreadsheets, video shots, and “picture” telephone calls on one screen. “It’s a bit like talking about the convergence of the horseless carriage and the modern automobile,” says Grove. “The proper word is replacement. The computer is taking over the television.”
You, Inc. is a reality.
Globalization and the information revolution run the world. What can we do? Adapt or die … We need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder to cope with this new world. That doesn’t mean accepting disorder, but rather, working with the disorder to introduce order.
Watch for a nascent culture of virtual reality that underscores the ways in which we construct gender and the self, the ways in which we become what we play, argue about, and build. And watch for a culture that leaves new space for the idea that he or she who plays, argues, and builds might be doing so with a machine.
The coming decade may put a collective spin on technobabble, but this lexicon is here to stay. The only development that may eventually stanch its spread is the disappearance of computers as we know them: boxes connected to screen, keyboards, and peripherals. When and if that happens – when computers become nothing more than a component of the “integrated home entertainment center” – will much of the lingo now needed to talk about and explain them be necessary any longer?
One could argue that some aspects of technobabble hold the potential to form a universal language of technology – a sort of “High-Tech Esperanto” that might actually succeed.
Technobabble’s real victim could be the industry itself, which is in danger of sliding into the same semantic swamp in which wallow lawyers, civil servants, military officers, socialogists and politicians.