Feed
I recently read and did one of my mini-reviews of a book by MT Anderson called Feed. When I first read the book in a sitting, I was really turned off by it, and in some ways I still am, but I’m completely glad I read it. I’m not going to spoiler (yet) in terms of the plot, but I do want to explain a bit about the state of the Earth and its humans in Feed.
In this future setting, humans have chosen to augment their brains with networked connections to all manner of information. People can order facts, entertainment, or blue jeans from the “feed” but it seems for the most part that they choose to order consumer goods. After the feed, people didn’t feel like learning was important, because they could access it on their feed, and the government didn’t want to pay for education so school became the sponsored School ™ where students learned how to find and acquire the things that they want. Lesions are developing on everyone and become a fashion statement. Terrible things are happening outside of the bubbles humans have created to protect them from a scarred, terrible Earth, but no one really knows what, because they don’t care to find out. Language has degraded to the point where they are all now “big” dumb.
My problem with this is not a perceived yuckiness of augmented reality, but my disappointment at how it is expected to turn out. John (the boyfriend) writes a lot on this topic. And while I suffer from a lot more reservations than he does about how we can begin moving forward instead of backward on the evolutionary ladder again, I find myself endlessly hopeful about networked consciousness, because while my personal processor is quick as a whip, my memory stinks. I’ve learned so much since I got my iPhone because now I am completely free to learn about a topic of interest when the thought strikes instead of forgetting to look it up when I get home. I use Wikipedia to look up everything. (I check sources if the info warrants it.)
I’ve spent a lot of time considering our potential futures since reading this book. And even though I’m a little afraid that the book will turn people off to the potential of this kind of technology, I believe that it’s important that people consider actually possible negative outcomes, and not just the fact that they think it sounds icky. In this way, after (if?) people get over the fact that “it just doesn’t feel right” and have read this book, they’ll be considering other problems and hopefully possible solutions.
Sixth Sense
So after spending a lot of time day dreaming about my future super powers, I was excited to watch Pattie Maes’ demo of the Sixth Sense at TED.
Hopefully wearables like this will offer us slightly more private information in a less conspicuous manner soon. And I’m sure they yuck people out a lot less, as well.
Google comes into the picture when you consider how many things today are subsidized by advertising. Google has money, an advertising network, and tons of information about me and my shopping habits. And now, to be more helpful to me, they’ve launched an a new ad system. Google will detect what types of websites I visit in my browser, and feed me ads more relevant to the things in which I am interested. I’m once again stuck between horrified and fascinated. I mean, it is definitely helpful to be notified about things I care about, but my privacy is fading just a little bit more. And if they knocked off the cost of my “Sixth Sense” to feed me advertising, they could know what products I looked at in stores and “help me” there, as well. For Google now, though, I can even fill out a survey to help them out from the beginning, and I was terribly tempted to throw them off with crazy recommendations. And what does this have to do with Feed? That leads me to a major…
SPOILER ALERT!
If you are at all serious about reading Feed, which I recommend, then you should stop here. Because, this is like a major event at the end of the book. It’s big. I will ruin the book for your right now if you continue on for one more sentence. Seriously. Okay. A major character in Feed is Violet. She’s a bit different. Her family is holding on to traditional learning, and she wasn’t implanted with the feed until late when her father realized at what a disadvantage she would be. Violet gets the crazy idea to throw off the feed by asking for all kinds of information about products that she would never need. (It’s like your recommendations list on Amazon after Christmas shopping for your family: completely off target.)
Well, Violet’s feed is damaged after an attack because of her late implantation, and it begins to paralyze her. Her family can’t afford to fix it, and they ask the company who implanted the feed to replace it, but they refuse and suggest she finds sponsorship elsewhere, but all other companies refuse to help her because they don’t feel like they can get an accurate enough reading of her likes and purchases to believe that they could make a profit on her existence in the long run. And that is why I filled out my Google Ad Network information like a good little robot last week.
by John
20 Mar 2009 at 07:11
I had the same reaction to FEED that you did, and at the end of the day I agree that its probably a good thing for people to read it. Like the markets, technological progress may seem to be guided by an invisible hand, but it is always us, always humans making decisions about what we really value that guides the hand. If we value ease and profit, then voila, you get Dumb World. If your values are more noble, maybe that technology leads to something more beautiful. One thing that FEED does really well is that it shows us the consequences of just letting things happen.
Also, thanks for sharing the Sixth Sense TED talk. That was amazing. If I could choose anywhere in the world to work it would be in the MIT Media Labs.
by A'Llyn
21 Mar 2009 at 11:54
Cool post! The book sounds interesting…I'll have to check it out one of these days. Once I'm done with my current spare-time project, which is knitting.