Meet Your New Data Courier: How Envilope is Challenging Our Most Imaginative Authors’ Visions of the Future
I remember the first time, as a teenager, that I read science fiction author and father of the “cyberpunk” movement, William Gibson. A few pages of his breakthrough novel Neuromancer were enough to forever alter my perception of literature and the future of both technology and our relationship to it as a species. I went on to quickly consume his entire catalogue of work from novels to short stories to essays.
The way Gibson envisioned the future of electronic information and how humanity would interact with the online world was stunning. The adventures of “jocks,” as he called them, were thrilling. I was captivated by the idea of people with cybernetic devices implanted in their bodies and brains that allowed them to “jack in” and virtually enter Gibson’s fully immersive version of the internet.
One of his short stories in particular, “Johnny Mnemonic,” comes to mind. It concerns the titular information courier, who physically transports his client’s most sensitive data from one location to another via a storage implant embedded in his brain. Even if you’re unfamiliar with Gibson, you might be aware of the film adaptation of the story starring Keanu Reeves, memorable more for its marvelous cheesiness than dystopian merit.
My personal favorite scene will always be a harrowed Keanu, who has just narrowly avoided being crushed to death by a falling VW Bug, launching into a monologue lamenting his circumstances by screaming at the top of his lungs, “I want…room…service!”
The film offers a thrilling premise, however, as Johnny detrimentally chooses to upload to his brain an amount of data that far exceeds his human storage capacity. He spends the rest of the movie racing against the clock to find a way to download the protected payload from his brain before the seepage kills him. This is all while several interested and lethal parties pursue him for what’s in his head, willing to literally remove it if necessary.
Even as a teenager, I remember reading that story and watching the movie version. While I enjoyed them very much, a question nagged at me: Even if we someday have that kind of cybernetic technology, won’t there be much easier ways to accomplish sending information securely?
It was an entertaining yarn, but it also seemed like unnecessary hassle. Digging out part of your brain and replacing it with hardware seemed extreme. I want technology to be less invasive, not more invasive. And how practical is it to hire a stranger to physically move electronic data across continents? Doesn’t that take time and energy, and aren’t those resources better dedicated to making electronic sending methods more secure?
Regardless of what ardent fans will tell you, science fiction rarely predicts the future. Although, the genre’s most imaginative works can and do influence creators and innovators who affect our future. The technologies that inform our everyday lives have to be practical, not literary. They aren’t designed for dramatic effect or to drive a thrilling plotline. They are designed to work, to be convenient and portable, and to make the tasks we perform easier.
Those technologies are also limited by the capabilities and infrastructures of the present. The necessary science to transport a human consciousness into a machine and back again has yet to be invented, and may never be perfected to match those found in cyberpunk literature.
It begs the question: What will the real-life version of William Gibson’s technological future look like?
I recalled Gibson and that question this year when I experienced a demo of Envilope, the virtual envelope developed by the world’s first blockchain-based postal service. Utilizing the latest in blockchain technology to create immutable records and military-grade encryption to secure and monitor payloads, Envilope is poised to change online sending by restoring privacy, security, and control to the user.
You can send any form of digital content in an Envilope — emails, documents, media files — while maintaining control over who views that content, as well as when and where, even after you’ve sent it.
I received an Envilope from founder and chairman, Mark Allardyce that only I could open. It contained several types of files. They opened and viewed easily. That is, until Mark, with the touch of a button, vaporized every single file in my Envilope. The content I’d accessed so readily just a moment before was gone without a trace. Then, just as quickly, Mark restored every single file from his end of things, and I could once again open and view them.
It was nothing I’d ever seen before. I watched that and thought, “Wow, this is the real-life Johnny Mnemonic. This is the data courier of the future.”
And you know what else? It was dramatic. It was literary. It might not have been an action movie with chases and shootouts. But for the real world, in which we generally wish to avoid such things, it was an engaging and thrilling thing to witness. It was a rare experience of technology in which form and function was matched by spectacle and showmanship.
Genres like science fiction are as influenced by the present as they are by the future. The greatest works in the field reflect the issues of their day and use futuristic concepts to express them. Whether it’s X-Men as a metaphor for the intense racism of the 1960’s or Planet of the Apes as a cautionary tale about Cold War-era nuclear arms posturing.
The most exciting and innovative technology of the day has always been a huge influence on our imaginative stories of the future. I can envision noir-soaked science fiction stories in years to come about blockchain detectives who investigate data theft using an extrapolated version of the virtual Envilope the way pulp detective characters of the 1940’s wielded their snub-nosed revolvers. I can even see today’s most talented sci-fi authors taking it one step further and imagining the future of this new and game-changing technology in spectacular ways we can’t yet conceive.
Who knows, I may take a stab at writing our technological generation’s version of “Johnny Mnemonic” myself.
