Tech’s alternate histories
NOVEMBER 20TH, 2016 — POST 314
The present we inhabit is just one of many that were possible from our past. Or, for those that are seduced by the determined nature of our world, there exist possible worlds that are unlike ours, results of a timeline that could conceivably have splintered at pivotal moments in history. One of the most popular to think about is what the world might be like if the Axis powers had won the Second World War. This is the springboard off of which Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle leaps, for example. There are less instantaneous “moments” that elapsed over decades which we understand to have remade the world. These moments, like the Industrial Revolution, too are ripe fodder for fiction. The genre of steampunk is based on a “What if?” in which oil is never discovered and steam powers all sorts of wild technology.
But we can get more granular still. In As We May Think, an article published in the July 1945 edition of The Atlantic, engineer Vannevar Bush paints a distinctly analog vision of the future. He takes the project in the piece of predicting technology’s development in the wake of WWII, wondering where the engineers, scientists, and inventors that were so valuable to the war effort “will find objectives worthy of their best.” What follows is a surprisingly prescient vision of the computational revolution. But there’s a lot more in this for us beyond simply tallying up the right and wrong predictions. As Bush’s premonition is based exclusively in an extrapolation of technologies around him, the piece elucidates possible paths down which technology could have travelled but more critically can serve to caution our propensity to jump to new technological paths without due consideration of the ones we’re on.
After predicting the GoPro as adored by “The camera hound of the future” who “wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut”, the first system Bush describes for data storage too centres on photography, specifically the capacity for enlargement film possesses. He imagines the printed page, shrunk “by a linear ratio of 100” so that “The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet either and one-half by eleven inches.” The concept of microfilm — a sheet as thin or thinner than paper — is a path we never went down. And yet, the path we instead went down — with digital reproduction, manipulation, and storage — doesn’t actually sound that different from the future Bush imagines.
The main point of all this photographic compression of information for Bush is its central place in a device he calls the “memex”. Bush writes:
“Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
“It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.”
Whilst photographic compression is the means by which the memex stores and processes information (which Bush outlines in incredible detail, including a description of “trail” which seem to make use of a prototypical incarnation of hypertext) most curious to me is the form factor of the device. Like Bush latches onto contemporary photographic technology to found his notions of compression, here he seems to latch onto the specific posture of work. In describing a vision of a PC, one which the real world wouldn’t be able to deliver with much verisimilitude until the mid-1970s, Bush’s vision carries with it the artefact of work done in one location, sitting at an ordinary desk.
These carried artefacts are there in all futuristic thinking. And whilst they can give us pause to consider the artefacts we’re carrying with us in predicting the future, these artefacts also do something else: force us to pause and understand our current technological moment as the result of creative decisions and market forces, not as something that ought to have been inevitable. The lack of inevitability of the technological present then allows a comparison to be made between those moments that could have been and that in which we find ourselves. Most interestingly for me, those paths of innovation that weren’t pursued given “something better” coming along can thus be seen as made of soil that had not dried up, had not been pillaged of all its value, but simply were simply abandoned for some believed to be greener grass.
To banish some of this headiness with a recent example, the laptop — a clamshell with keyboard and trackpad input — as a form factor is now largely subservient in market potency to touch-based handhelds (smartphones mainly). Despite the conventional wisdom that if you had nothing, you’d take a phone first, a lot of people still spend a lot of time at a laptop. But because the touch-based handheld came along, the laptop path was diverted, the then-eventual innovations forever locked in an alternate history. Forget wondering what the world looks like if Hitler wins. I’m more interested in wondering what the laptop looks like if the phone never happened. A MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar arguably never gets made in that world.
The reason I think this kind of thinking is useful is that it resolves the diluted focus that has invariably plagued Big Tech, a disease we as users have caught. Apple isn’t “the Mac company” or “the iPod company” like they once were, and they’re far too visible and the market too saturated to simply still be “the iPhone company” (though the impression is this remains their own image of themselves). This kind of thinking returns an agency of choice to the user, demystifying the moves of hardware manufactures as just made by mere mortals. Whilst we might not be able to forge the paths Silicon Valley long pulled off from, we can certainly set foot in them. The way technology is prescribed today is just one of myriad possible prescriptions, a prescription you can just ignore. Like the Amish who don’t deny the Industrial Revolution but rather believe it to be a mistake and a corruptive force, you can become a “digital Amish” and deny the corruptive prescriptions of dominant technology.
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