Technology 3 | unobtrusive lucidity

Divesting Facebook

I suppose that I was a relatively early adopter of social media. I remember when Twitter functioned primarily by text message, but my roots go back even further. While I never boasted a MySpace account, I joined Facebook during grad school, when it was only available to students and faculty. I’ll be honest…I joined because one of my colleagues told me that it was a great place to meet girls.

Turns out that she was right: I met Karen on Facebook. As it expanded and grew, I found, or was found by, more and more old friends from the past (oddly, though, never anyone from my undergrad days). I posted to those friends updates to our 24-hour labor experience when our first daughter was born. Facebook was a huge part of my life for a long time.

As I became more and more aware of how carelessly the network regarded my privacy, though, my use of it waned. My profile sat for four years with no use, save the occasional professional necessity. Facebook was obviously becoming a rough neighborhood, even before recent scandals, so, a little over two months ago, I finally followed through with what I had wanted to do years prior. I deleted Facebook.

I feel more free already. pic.twitter.com/qCivn8SAXY

— Dave Brown (@truthscribe722) November 14, 2018

I wasn’t careless. I exported my data, I confirmed that what I wanted to keep was present, I sorted photos to make certain everything was there. Karen wanted to preserve our chats from when we were dating and engaged, but those were sadly unavailable…apparently Facebook doesn’t keep messages beyond a certain point. Then, I clicked delete.

For those of you considering this, Facebook gives you 30 days to change your mind. All you have to do is log back in! And certainly I was tempted…so much of my life was invested there, recorded there. I held firm, though. I didn’t need the noise in my life.

I was then forced to return to what I suppose would be considered an older way of doing things. I still ascribe to the belief that you should never delete anyone from your address book, personal or professional. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I am old enough to remember keeping a hand-written address book. I intentionally reviewed many of those contacts to make certain that I had them…the groomsmen from our wedding, for example. I’m also still connected to several of these people on other networks…LinkedIn, or Twitter…but there are some that I realize now that I missed. I mourn that I may have lost connection with those people, one the person who recommended that I join Facebook in those early days, the person one could say was responsible for Karen and I meeting.

Even more do I mourn the fact that we have permitted a state of affairs in which losing contact with loved ones is as easy as leaving a social network. We’ve allowed someone else to hold that most valuable part of ourselves for their profit, certain to lose some or all of our connectedness unless we choose to be complacent to their nefarious motives. I wish that we had kept this, were intentional about caring for one another deeply enough to make certain that we know how to keep in touch with each other….and then following that with the action of doing so. As revolutionary as social networking was, and as ubiquitous as it has become in our daily landscape, the effort of keeping addresses, and even of writing letters, meant that we truly stayed in touch.

I hope that I can find the space in my life for that intentionality once again.

Image attribution: Alatr0n under Creative Commons.

Data-Driven Mystery

There’s a phrase…I’m certain that you’ve heard it…that says something to the effect that magic is simply science that we don’t yet understand. The underlying premise of this statement is that we can explain everything if we try hard enough, if we think logically enough. This is a premise that leaves no room for the unknown, that makes failure to understand something wrong, perhaps even difficult to forgive.

I’ve been really drawn to the fact that Marvel’s on-screen adventures, both large and small, have began to explore paranormal characters of late, largely because these characters are in such stark (pun only slightly intended) contrast to the technology-driven and scientifically altered characters that have dominated the broader audience’s exposure to these heroes to date. Part of the reason for my affinity toward these paranormal adventurers is that they are a metaphor for something beyond the physical, a deeper part of our existence that is outside of what we can measure, touch and feel, something so far removed from my profession.

As Lewis told us, the physical part of our world is only a part of the whole, and so much less real in so many ways than the spiritual.

When I was young (read: I’m totally still this way), I used to love post-apocalyptic stories in which science and magic co-existed in the world that had emerged from the ruins (think the world of Thundarr the Barbarian, as an off-the-cuff example), because they symbolize the truth that the physical and the spiritual work together, complement one another. Without either, humanity doesn’t work. To abandon one, or to minimize one in favor of the other, is to set the stage for us to be less than intended. As much as I love my toys, I’m reaching the conclusion that technology ultimately leaves us empty, because it focuses exclusively on the realm of the physical. Technology is our own finite creation. We’ve built it, we can know everything about it. Technology leaves us in the role of God, but pre-supposes that we are gods over a tiny kingdom that appears to us so much larger than it actually is.

Working in technology is creative, don’t get me wrong…as creative as any of my other pursuits. I get to write code that builds some really cool things. Technology, however, takes a poor view of mystery, because mystery implies something that we do not understand. Software can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be released with things that we don’t understand, so not understanding is weakness. If mystery remains in a project, then it is removed and replaced with a different approach that does not contain mystery. Technology is physical, and not only can it be quantified and measured, but must be. The spiritual cannot be. It must leave room for mystery.

Mystery, in technology, cannot be permitted to exist. Interestingly, we view technology as an extension of our lives, lives in which we thus have a perceived need to measure and quantify everything. We don’t want to permit mystery anywhere else, then, either.

Yet mystery is beautiful, because it helps us to understand the limits of our own lives. The fact that our control is illusion, that we are not, in fact, gods.

Because when we understand that, we begin to recognize that there is something so much bigger than us, something beyond our physical world, something that we cannot measure. What we don’t know is as beautiful as what we know, because what we don’t know leaves room for belief.

And belief leaves room for faith.

And faith leaves room for us all to be so much more compassionate, understanding, and…human…than we currently seem to be. I’m sure we can find data support that.

Raising the Space Bar

Photo-Jul-09-11-03-58-PM A couple of years ago, I had a debate with a colleague about a comment that I made. The comment was that “our generation” had arguably seen the most significant technological change of any generation in history. He disagreed, feeling that the industrial age had brought more. Whichever side of the debate you might fall on, my rationale was that my grandmother, when she was still alive, seemed to somehow experience an arresting of her ability to grasp technology more advanced than a land-line telephone.

When I was young (and hold on, because I’m about to date myself), my family had a “party line.” That is, we shared a telephone line with my grandmother. If she was using the phone from her home miles away, and we picked it up to make a call, we could hear her conversation, and knew we had to wait until the line was free.

I had my first mobile phone when I was college. It was one of those huge bag phones that went in your console and connected to an antenna on the exterior of your vehicle. 60 free minutes was a big deal then, and I’m still in the realm of ancient history for many of you. I remember my grandmother calling that number and being baffled by the concept of voicemail. I would have messages from her asking if I was there.

When I was very young, I typed DOS commands into a huge, clunky computer in my bedroom. Now, the phone that I carry in my pocket has more processing power than computers that rendered the original Star Wars films.

My point is that, more than an explosion of technology, people of my age have seen an exponential increase of information, and a fundamental change in how we access that information. We forget what it was like “back then.” The idea that we used to keep a hand-written address book for all of our contacts is foreign, the fact that I went through undergrad taking notebooks to class for note-taking bewildering.

Karen and I got rid of cable almost immediately after we married, because there were just too many other ways to watch what we wanted to watch. As such, our daughter has grown up her entire life with no idea of television being anything other than a streaming video service (she knows the difference between Netflix and Amazon). And, yes, I understand that her entire life has been five years, but this has still been her entire life. When we were setting up utilities for this new apartment, however, we got a good deal by agreeing to subscribe to cable also (poor cable providers, struggling so hard to keep an ancient business model alive). We agreed and, for fun, I connected the box, mostly to remember what it was like to watch something on a network’s schedule again.

While we were watching something together a few weekends ago, my daughter and I decided to get a snack during a commercial break. As we got up to go into the kitchen, she pressed the space bar on the computer keyboard to pause the program. It didn’t pause. She pressed it again. It didn’t pause. She gave a confused look.

My attempt to explain the concept of “live TV” to her failed in almost every way, as there is no reference point for her, no scaffolding upon which she can build the idea in her head. It’s amazing to me to think of the lightning-fast pace at which our concept of “normal” accelerates, of how easily we forget…forget in a way that my grandmother, I think, did not, because we forget even the foundation upon which is built our current state of “normal.”

I wonder what our daughter will consider normal when she is my age? I wonder how antiquated the idea of streaming episodes of her favorite programs on Netflix will seem then?

I wonder if that memory will even exist outside of an entry in an external storage device.

I wonder what we will have lost with all of that progress.

The Photography of Reality

Embed from Getty Images

There was much fallout late last month in the photography community when Nikon Singapore awarded a prize to a photo that was quite striking at first blush: an airliner captured through the tunnel of a ladder looking upward at exactly the right moment. One of those shots that’s too good to be true. Of course, it was too good to be true, and photographers worldwide quickly revealed it for the bad photo editing that it was. There have been statements and apologies…not really the sort of thing that bothers me, but rather something of amusement.

Photography is a medium for which I’ve always pined for a talent. When I think of the creative pursuits that I wish I could master, it ranks right up there with the electric guitar. I’m still an ad-hoc family photographer, and I’m perfectly adept with Adobe’s software, but I just don’t have the talent for recognizing the composition of a beautiful photo in everyday life.

I know several photographers, and I know that what they have…that ability to perceive and create a shot as life moves…is a gift, the sort of thing that you either have or you don’t. I don’t. I’ve gotten better with some practice, but every good shot that I’ve ever captured has been pure luck. I’m a creative person, but that is an entirely different sort of creativity with which I am not blessed.

During mine and Karen’s wedding, one of our photographers laid down between us as we held hands and kissed, and took a photo up through our hands with the sky in the background above us. It’s one of the most amazing photos we have of that day, very much one of my favorites. That’s the sort of creativity that I mean.

A couple of years ago, while I was in school yet again, the arts school where I was in attendance held a photography exhibit. I remember looking at many of the pieces that were on display, all of which were very high quality, and thinking that they weren’t really photography. That’s to say, they were extremely creative image manipulations that began with photography, and melded into something different. I felt, though, that I was at an art show, not a photography exhibit.

And I don’t for a moment think that’s a bad thing, but I think that we should perhaps guard what we call photography a bit more carefully.

When I was in undergrad, many of my friends were fellow theatre majors or art majors. Most floated easily between departments and projects as the disciplines intersected. I remember a show in which one of them built a functioning R2-D2. He entered under “mixed media.” I thought of that when I saw the photography exhibit two years ago, labeling the images as mixed media to myself. There were skillfully sought after images there, and equally skillful artistry with Photoshop utilized afterward to arrive at the finished pieces. They were art, something new and fresh.

They weren’t, however, borne of the same skills that brought Karen and I that amazing image from our wedding.

Maybe this is all a trivial attempt on my part to categorize things, but I think it’s important. Being a great digital artist doesn’t make one a great photographer, although I’ve met many artists that are both. As someone who has no talent, but a keen appreciation for, photography, I think there’s something important about keeping the medium pure. Like all disciplines and mediums, it connects beautifully with others. Yet, it is still a distinct medium in its own right.

Artificial Intelligence

In Brian Michael Bendis‘ story arc for Marvel’s 2013 graphic novel Age of Ultron, we are presented with an unexpected present that one would initially guess to be an alternate future. The artificial intelligence run amok known as Ultron has succeeded in destroying most of humanity. The handful of people who have survived in the world’s major cities have an even smaller handful of heroes among them, hiding underground and attempting to form a strategy to overcome Ultron. While Bendis deals with many themes in these pages, one of the most prominent is the need for what we view as progress. Bendis makes us privy to the internal dialogue of Hank Pym, the Avenger known as Ant-Man and the creator of Ultron, as he wrestles with the potential to benefit humanity that he sees in the concept of the Ultron artificial intelligence. The reader is left feeling…skeptical…of what Pym wants to achieve, understanding that his hopes are mis-placed. However, his motivations are clearly pure. He wants to help.

When faced with this extinction of humanity, Wolverine makes a more difficult choice. He wrestles with the decision of whether or not to travel back in time and end Pym’s life before he can create Ultron. The reader is even more dubious of these intentions, but Wolverine sees no other real alternative. The choice between one life or millions of lives is clear to him in that moment.

In the 2015 cinematic version of Age of Ultron, Tony Stark encourages Bruce Banner to assist in exploring the artificial intelligence that will become Ultron. He presses Banner to accept that this is who they are, the “mad scientists,” and must do what they do.

That is the intelligence that I would find artificial.

C.S. Lewis points out a sound philosophical truth: just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Yet, the logical fallacy that “can” must necessarily lead to “do” drives much of what we view today as progress. Humans as a race are always pressing forward, always confronted with our own mortality, seeking to make life more palatable not only for ourselves, but for our successors, our children. Once we discover that we are capable of something that we perceive as good, we feel an overwhelming drive to do that thing, hang the consequences.

Part of the tragedy of the character of the mad genius is that s/he works in isolation much of the time, experiencing an absence of feedback from other people about their plans. No one can see all of the failings of their own plans…everyone needs another party to hear their ideas, to proofread their work, as it were.

I think that our decisions, sometimes very important decisions, are becoming rushed. A desire to help others is a noble thing, but not every wonderful idea to better mankind turns out to be such a wonderful idea. In short, innovation must be checked by wisdom, and that wisdom is in short supply when crowd mentalities rush to gather around what is popular, without giving careful thought to what it is that they might be supporting.

I’ve been accused of being a futurist, because I become excited about the potential of what new discoveries and technologies can offer us. I see the problems that they solve, and dream of how much simpler life might be with that problem solved. Then I have to pause, I have to step back and examine whether or not my excitement is equivalent to Pym’s excitement as he dreams of Ultron. Sometimes I continue to see minimal negatives, and sometimes I feel uneasy, a misgiving that gives pause, and is usually justified when I think the issue through carefully. I’m no inventor…I don’t build exciting new things. I’m certainly no entrepreneur…while I dream of new stories and worlds, I don’t formulate new strategies to change the world as we know it. So, granted, I’m not in a position to truly understand many of these things. I am, however, a critical thinker. I believe in examining things through a lens of close observation. I think of what great science fiction writers have written, warning us of the potential outcomes of some of our innovations, and I recall Tillich’s observation that artists are the prophets of our time, warning of dangers before the rest of us can see them.

And I wonder about the dangers, unseen in the excitement over the good.

I wonder.

Photo, by Pascal, is public domain.