New Episode: Unraveling Humanity’s Quest for the Unknown
A journey with Hercules, Charles I of Spain, and the history of Windows reveals humanity’s insatiable curiosity from ancient times to the ever-expanding digital frontiers. The second season of our podcast begins here.
In this season, we explore how people began to inhabit the Digital Environment. From the pioneers of the digital revolution to the power of smartphones, we have created a space that is more transformative and exciting than we could ever have imagined. But what does it mean to live in an intangible world? Can we control the Digital Environment and protect our online life?
Embark with us on this episode’s fascinating journey through humanity’s innate desire to explore and push beyond boundaries. Let’s examine how our fascination with the unknown has taken us to remarkable heights and depths, fueling our curiosity in the continuously evolving digital environment.
Join us as we uncover the limitless potential of human curiosity and venture further into the unknown.
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Read the episode transcript right here:
Episode 7: Foundations
In ancient Greek myth, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to perform twelve labors in order to be freed from bondage. These labors required the hero to travel to increasingly remote places. The poets tell that the tenth of these labors took him to an archipelago in the westernmost edge of the known world. There, as a symbol of his grueling voyage, Hercules erected two famous columns that bear his name and an eloquent inscription: non terrae plus ultra, which means “no land further beyond.” This myth represents a cosmogony that envisaged clear limits for human exploration, the prevailing perspective in the ancient world. This is the worldview that was challenged when Europe was informed of the existence of a new continent.
In 1519, after bribing the necessary electors, Charles I of Spain became Emperor, King of Spain, and Lord of the New World. Charles I took the idea from Hercules’ columns, from that monument that marked the end of the traversable world, and incorporated it into the crest of the Spanish Empire. This act fit with a change in Zeitgeist. However, the phrase written on the columns lost its first two words, and therefore the meaning changed radically. Plus ultra, or “further beyond,” became the motto of the Spanish crown, signaling its drive for conquest.
In these two stories, we can identify a mindset that has always been a part of human nature: the obsession with drawing a line at the edge of the world is nothing but the pure desire to explore the world up to its very limits and leave our mark there, as well. We can think of the moment when humans first placed one rock on top of another or somehow demarcated a territory as one of the first steps in human culture. Marking a space, whether by erecting a vertical structure, creating a road, or building a house, is evidence of our existence. Someone was here.
Throughout history, adventures have been undertaken that embody this spirit: conquering virgin territories like the Antarctic, climbing Everest, exploring the impenetrable heart of jungles, and sinking into the infinite darkness of the ocean. Later, with the feeling that there were no more unmarked territories left on the planet, we cast our eyes toward space and sought to place human symbols on the Moon. We sent probes with messages to the outer planets and rovers to Mars.
Something in our humanity drives us to seek out the furthest limit. It seems that we need to know where our reality ends in order to assign it meaning and thereby understand where we are.
As a first step, we might ask why human instinct is driven toward those spaces and not others. If there is a desire that pushes us to establish our presence in the new places that we discover, why do some seduce us more than others? Although the ocean is a familiar ecosystem, we do not understand it well. Why, then, is there no real interest in studying how to make the ocean a habitable environment for humans? If we consider the present and real possibility of rising sea levels, we might think that studying how to live underwater ought to be a priority. However, we are more interested in exploring outer space or moving to Mars. Could it be that it is not only about exploring the unknown but also exploring what the unknown can offer us?
In that sense, humanity undertook the exploration of the Digital Environment some decades ago. In many ways, it is still a novelty whose limits we can continue to explore. It is a blank canvas. It will be a long time before we can erect columns that confirm we have found the furthest reaches; for now, it is a constantly expanding territory. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the moon, he said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As in all processes of discovery and reconnaissance of a new environment or territory, there are those who disembark first in representation of all others.
Like those first settlers who set out for virgin lands and began the conquest of the Americas, there were people in the 20th century who glimpsed the possibilities of the network and moved ahead of the rest. Once the Digital Environment was understood as a “land of opportunity,” there were people who dove in and bet everything. For example, the period between 1997 and 2001 was a golden age for the founding of Internet-based companies, called dotcom enterprises, that tried to imagine what the Digital Environment could be and look like. However, it soon became clear that their imagination was ahead of the technical possibilities. Most of those companies did not prosper. Was this attempt at progress solely commercial? Probably not. The rush to plant a flag in the digital sphere cannot be explained only by the desire to do business, to be the first to arrive. We can see a genuine desire to dive into that space. What potential did we imagine for it at the outset? Was there some intuition about what we would achieve there? Simple curiosity does not seem sufficient justification for setting up shop in a new environment. When we sail with no fixed destination, it is impossible to know if we are moving in the right direction.
Today, more than two decades later, we can see that this initial curiosity was rewarded, although we have still not discovered all the possibilities the Digital Environment has to offer us. Like an echo of Charles I’s motto, the Zeitgeist fostered by the development of digital technology at the end of the last century fed our curiosity to explore, understand, and appropriate that environment that we saw emerging before us.
What are we talking about when we talk about exploration and appropriation of the Digital Environment? They are two distinct processes, and the difference between them is crucial: exploration is a much more limited way of connecting oneself to a space. Perhaps a brief review of the changes made to the most widely used operating system of the 1990s, along with those that occurred in the workplace, can help us to distinguish some central concepts with which to analyze this process. At the same time, it will allow us to associate these ideas with a tool that many of us have used and which transformed our experience with computers.
By the late 1980s, Microsoft had established itself as a leader in the operating system business. When screens with text over a dark background were everywhere, Windows 3.11 provided a visual interface for tools that could be used for working, drawing, or even playing games. This came alongside the popularization of computers, making them more attractive and accessible. Many people remember their first experiences with a mouse as they tried to draw in Paint, dragged cards from a column, or clicked on grey squares with hidden mines. Workplaces around the world were not yet marked by the presence of computers.
A few years later, Microsoft spent 3 million dollars on a launch event: Windows 95 was coming onto the market. This new version was a leap toward definitive dissemination. It is significant that this was the first version that used the year as a name: the number 95 simultaneously symbolized the present, novelty, and the future. Those years saw a boom in office software services. Computers began to be seen as indispensable tools for office work, and it is no longer possible to think about a workplace without these machines. From that moment on, opening Excel or Word became a sign of starting the workday. In that context, Windows 95 also became synonymous with home computing. People were closer to the exploration of that digital world we saw as mysterious, as something that lived behind the screen. The first Internet connections arrived, but they were still not consolidated as a complete experience. We ran up against the limitations of a very elementary Internet.
But the Internet began to grow. Other operating systems became popular, and, in an ever more connected environment, Microsoft managed to canonize the system it launched in 2001: Windows XP. The name is derived from the word “experience,” and the operating system’s logo was designed in three dimensions, set above a grassy green hill. The experience had become more concrete. At that time, the Internet connected nearly all the world’s computers, and there was the growing idea of an alternative space, one that was hyperconnected and to which we all had access. Exploration became a bit more mainstream, more real. We witnessed the disappearance of many limitations.
This is an example of what happened in the world during those years with regards to digital development. While the first Windows allowed us to peek into processes and organize them, and Windows 95 let us appreciate the power of a tool, XP invited us to experience the new environment we were getting a glimpse of. However, there were still some limits left. It was a window, not a door.
It is no coincidence that the first web browser was called Netscape Navigator and had a ship’s wheel logo, or that the direct competition was called Microsoft Explorer. This symbolism points to the experience: we were exploring a new environment; we were taking the first steps necessary to make it our own, even though we were still highly limited by technology and our notion of it. As we navigated the Internet those first few times, we were like sailors in Charles I’s Spain: unsuspecting explorers thrown into learning about a new space that no one had yet named and that some did not even acknowledge. However, even if unconsciously, we were always determined to humanize the world we were moving through, to put our mark on it and transform it in accordance with our desires, our needs, and our rituals. Throughout that process, we saw limits and began to surpass them little by little.
In the next episode:
Discover two historical events that changed the way we view the Digital Environment and launched us into a new digital era.
