This observation, it turns out, is beside the point. By the late '70s, it had become clear that the onrush of molecular technologies would one day lead to thorough control of the structure of matter, including molecular machine systems able to examine and repair biological structures molecule by molecule. Suddenly Ettinger's case made sense. When I finally read his book, I found that he had anticipated molecular-level repair of the sort we now see how to develop. "Can mammals revive from freezing spontaneously?" is the wrong question, once molecular biorepair enters the picture. For us, the key question is instead, "Does freezing somehow erase the information content of the brain?"-- which it clearly doesn't.
This idea of long-term, low-temperature first aid, a.k.a. biostasis, is catching on, especially among those who think of their minds as information processes. Watch for those medical bracelets (freely translated, "In case of system crash, do not discard; call...."), especially up here in Silicon Valley. The San Jose Mercury News has called this a "Silicon Valley trend."
Soon after realizing that biostasis would work, I came across an impressively false work of prediction: Entropy, by Jeremy Rifkin (Viking, 1980). It explains that our world is doomed and that human action must be severely limited, due to the inevitable "dissipation of matter" described by the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. Senators, academics, and futurists endorsed the book, but it turns out that this "Fourth Law" isn't in the textbooks and is simply false, making the work an edifice of the purest piffle. Rifkin later fuzzed his justifications, but his call for salvation through oppression stays clear.
In their discussions on the future of technology, authors Chris Peterson and Gayle Pergamit observe: "If a thirty-year projection `sounds like science fiction,' it may be wrong. But if it doesn't sound like science fiction, then it's definitely wrong."
Keep that in mind when you read Marc Stiegler's forthcoming Earthweb (Baen Books, April 1999), a novel that plausibly portrays a key part of the future. Stiegler sketches what the Web can become when it grows up--a fast, flexible marketplace of ideas and reputations. He combines the "idea futures" work of Robin Hanson with the "information markets" work of Phil Salin to depict a new and productive spontaneous order. The infoworld Stiegler describes may arrive in the next 10 years, soon enough to shape much of the next 30.
Imagine what the world might be like if good ideas more consistently won and bad ideas more consistently lost. Better media and incentives can help.
K. Eric Drexler is chairman of the Foresight Institute (www.foresight.org) and author of Engines of Creation (Doubleday) and Nanosystems (Wiley).
Charles Paul Freund
More nonsense has been written about television than about anything else in the last 30 years, perhaps in the whole of human history. TV, while indisputably reordering life, has purportedly made its audience stupid, inattentive, illiterate, violent, and worse. Choosing the single most ridiculous book on the effects of TV is a challenge, but Jerry Mander's 1978 rant, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Morrow), is in a class of its own.
Between the covers of this one book are assertions that TV: is a form of sensory deprivation; is addictive; "trains people to accept authority"; is physically unhealthy; suppresses the imagination; hypnotizes its public; is the equivalent of "sleep teaching"; "redesign[s] human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form"; and much, much more. Mander wanted TV banned--literally banned--because it was turning people into passive zombies who would do anything they were told. Was he right? Ask the broadcast networks.
James B. Twitchell doesn't like TV much more than Mander does, but he understands it a lot better. "The purpose of television," Twitchell writes in Carnival Culture (Columbia, 1992), "is to keep you watching television." How does it try to achieve that goal? By showing us whatever it thinks we want to see. "Television is where we go to be hooked," he writes. "It's our carnival."
Twitchell's book isn't about TV; it's about "taste," and what has happened to it in recent decades. According to him, what happened was the collapse of the old taste hierarchy, the empowerment of the cultural consumer, and the triumph of the "vulgar." There's great power in the vulgar, he reminds us, which is why it was once institutionalized at the margins--as in the annual medieval carnivals--by those who sought to control culture. Now, he writes, thanks to modern media and the freedom made possible by technology, the popular carnival has displaced the high church of good taste.
Where are we and such media taking each other? Sherry Turkle is investigating an interesting line of possibility. In Life on the Screen (Simon & Schuster, 1995), Turkle sees whole new forms of personal liberation becoming available online. Not only new communities of people, but new people. Life online, she suggests, makes possible a re-evaluation of identity itself.
Turkle's work concentrates on multi-user domains and the great variety of selves that users can experiment with in such environments. This is a new dimension to our relationship with media and with technology, she argues, one that is shifting our understanding of self, other, and machine.
Turkle may or may not be right about what will happen in the next 30 years, but she and Twitchell are both right about the power that will shape the cultural future: It belongs to media's users. Mander's idea--that such users are the dupes of a technological oligarchy--has been virtually sacralized by a dyspeptic anti-media, technophobic class. But if there's one cultural lesson that the past 30 years have to offer, it is that however much this class pouts, the future doesn't care.
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