4. Alice and the Assault on Reality (Part 4 of 12)
You have landed right in the middle of John Mulholland’s parody of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you wish to start at the very beginning of their adventures together, you should click here to follow them down the rabbit-hole.
Chapter Four — The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she grew no larger: still it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy.
‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.
I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole — and yet — and yet — it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!
I do wonder what can have happened to me!
When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!
There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I’ll write one — but I’m grown up now,’ she added in a sorrowful tone; ‘at least there’s no room to grow any more here.’ [19]
Here is a vision of the Internet for the masses, in their hundreds of millions and ultimately in their billions. In it, the Internet is no longer just a publishing, entertainment, or personal communications medium, but rather a fundamental and indispensable engine that drives social and economic life.
It is an industrial medium that enables automated monitoring and reporting on factory-floor production; a home security and emergency response medium far more reliable than today’s phone system; a medical medium through which patient treatment plans are automatically routed to relevant providers; a consumer appliance and office equipment medium that checks the status of devices and initiates electronic repairs and a utility management medium in which power usage is read and managed remotely.
The Internet will become essential to every application.
In this vision, the Internet is at last set free from the straitjacket of the personal computer; cyberspace is transformed from just another communications platform into a glue that binds the whole of society into a truly connected civilization — and the key to this is invisibility.
“If you want the Internet to be everywhere, it has to be visible nowhere. It has to be unseen, unnoticed, undiscussed.” [20]
For David St. Charles, president, and CEO of Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI), the $100-million market leader among embedded systems developers, this sort of cheap Internet conductivity opens up enormous new possibilities.
St. Charles regards the current iconization of the Internet in media and cultural circles as a sign, not of its assimilation into social and economic life, but of how far it still must go to become a medium of commerce and communications for the masses.
In his view, we will know when the Internet has truly arrived when there are no more Internet cafes, no more Internet seminars, and no more Internet magazines. After all, you do not see any magazines called Dial’a’Tone monthly featuring the latest ins and outs of the Net’s closest cousin, the telephone — we simply use it, thinking only of what we want to do with it. Technology, in direct proportion to its becoming a central fact of daily life, has become invisible.
“Invisibility, you might say, is my business. It’s what I do for a living — I make technology disappear.” [21]
Once referred to as the “Microsoft of hidden computers” by Forbes magazine, ISI’s technology appears concealed everywhere.
“Most people have no idea what our industry does or how deeply our work affects their lives, despite the fact that in many ways it has probably done more than Microsoft and the whole personal computer industry to bring technology into people’s day-to-day lives.” [22]
But will the embedded Internet only be realized in the far distant future? Apparently not. ISI has already built Java and HTML capabilities into its open-embedded operating system, known as pSOS. And the company has already signed a deal with Philips for an under-$300 Internet-communicating browser appliance.
It is also said to be in talks with a number of other telecoms, industrial, and consumer electronics firms to embed Net-ready computer systems into everyday consumer products, from smart kitchen appliances that communicate among themselves to automated automobile diagnostic systems that inform mechanics about necessary repairs.
As Oliver Morton, one of the speakers at Future Gazers, says, “Soon the embedding of information processing and communications abilities into an object will be as routine as the forming of plastic or the riveting of metal.” [23]
The information revolution is heading in a new direction. This means that objects will no longer remain static; they will not be conscious or sentient, but they will not be completely passive either.
They will remember what happens and act upon the memories. They will be able to adapt and interact, to reciprocate in the shaping of their use [24].
They will become experiences.
Amid such products, the idea that there is a separate world of information, rather than an ever-present flow of information in the world, will seem archaic. But as the information revolution heads in a new direction so it grants new capacities to the machine world on the basis of its animation, if not its life.
There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself, and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top, with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else. [25]
Next: Chapter Five — Advice From a Caterpillar
References
[19] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), p.46.
[20] The quotation is from David Kline The Embedded Internet (Wired 2.11 p.54), David St. Charles sees the secret of the embedded Internet as invisibility, p.56.
[21] The quotation is from David Kline The Embedded Internet (Wired 2.11 p.54), p.57.
[22] The quotation is from Oliver Morton, Speaker of the Future Gazers (Design Council, 1996).
[23] See John Rennie, The Solid-State Century (New York: Scientific American Inc., 1997); Philip Yam, “Plastics Get Wired,” pp.90–98. Investigators worldwide are laboring to turn organic polymers, the stuff of plastics and synthetic fibers, into lightweight, durable replacements for silicon and metals in circuits.
[25] The quotation is from Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan & Co., 1995), pp.57–58.
