Posthuman Blues

Bruce Sterling has ceased his Schism Matrix blog in favor of greener blogging pastures at Wired, although a Google search doesn't turn up the new domain. I assume it's in the works. Here are his parting thoughts (8-25-03):

"Ladies and gentlemen, after two, full, glorious, eccentric years, it's time for me to lay aside my Schism Matrix microphone.

"To my mind, blogging is like stand-up comedy -- it's a performance art. In that line of biz, you should always do your best to scamper off the boards while they still want more."

I can understand that. The curious thing is that I've never gravitated to celebrity blogs, Sterling's included. William Gibson, my literary hero since high-school, has one -- and I very seldom read it. (My teenage self would have been positively dumbfounded by this admission.) Blogs by famous authors are sort of like the gratuitous "behind the scenes" material included on DVDs; for example, I have the special edition two-disc version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and I've never once even thought of popping in the "making of" DVD. Part of me doesn't want to know. Yes, I realize that the UFOs in the movie are merely special effects, but I still want to suspend my disbelief, thank you very much.

Too much "behind the scenes" commentary and the illusion loses some of its luster. I want to keep my literary/movie-watching life rich but uncluttered. It's a matter of deciding when to draw the line. How many streams-of-consciousness can I take it without falling to the ground and twitching from sheer information overload?

Ideally, I could link a version of myself to the Net, let it soak up as much information as I could possibly desire, and have it upload a full report to me on a daily basis. Technology along these lines is making headway in the form of "intelligent agents," which will effectively extend the human sensorium into cyberspace. Search engines are a crude analogy. Eventually, humans will require computer-enriched brains just to survive. Look at us now: Palm Pilots, cellphones, laptop computers, GPS tracking systems and MP3 players (and combinations thereof) litter the technosphere. If consciousness is an emergent property and not something "spiritual," then it seems likely that our brains are wired for it simply because it's the simplest, most efficient way of dealing with disparate sensory input.

There are two obvious alternatives for dealing with the increasingly massive amounts of information we'll be confronted with in coming decades. We can augment our minds to deal with the flood or choose relative seclusion. Information may want to be free, but an awful lot of it seems to want to be dumb as well. (How many ads for penis-enlargement medication have you deleted from your in-box in the last week?) Easy access to lots of information doesn't mean that we'll find much of interest; even the most discerning intelligent agents may balk at the prospect of excavating nuggets of value from cleverly disguised spam.

I think our current collective fascination with electronic gadgets, as manifested by the current zeitgeist, will prove surprisingly short-lived. We will continue to use global networks and user-friendly electronics, of course; we may even merge with them in ways that challenge the present definition of "human." But there will come a point where the sheer novelty will dissolve, like so many discordant pixels on an aging computer monitor. Expecting Western culture to carry on its love affair with state-of-the art, imminently portable electronics is like people of the 1950s expecting their children to inherit a world of flying cars, cheap interplanetary travel and 3-D television. The technology will still be there, but it will have migrated into the background: invisible, ghostly -- and unobtrusively omniscient. Its value as fashion will have expired. And that's when things start getting really fun.