Swimming the Streams
"SWIMMING THE STREAM" DAVID GELERNTER Author of Mirror Worlds, which anticipated the World Wide Web, founder of Mirror...
...Personal desktop computers emerged in the 1970s and we're one generation later...
...Apple hasn't had a thought since 1984...
...There was more information in a smalltown public library or an elementary-school library than any school kid would ever need...
...It was fulfilling its obligations to its children, meeting its moral responsibilities better...
...But there's been a change since September...
...Even in a business environment...
...When I was designing this originally, it was really time order plus search...
...But our systems were designed in 1977...
...How can a morally honest person come out of the 1970s and still be a Democrat...
...Why not...
...You respond by just throwing things away...
...It's going to disappear just as the device drivers for the printers will disappear...
...but that's strictly an effect of' ignorance...
...It's our job to have the morality...
...If I want to go back and watch it five minutes behind real time or search back and watch something five years ago, I can...
...A large powerful company is reactionary by definition...
...Our legitimate threats concern our moral standards, our inability and unwillingness to reach moral judgments...
...A computer scientist, he has wrought new languages (Linda), realms (tuple-space) and a radical new challenge to the dictatorship of the desktop: the lifestream...
...I know...
...What about the browser"browsing" or "surfing the Web...
...Passion is the only basis for breaking new ground in any area...
...I was raised in a Democratic family I was liberal...
...So new metaphors-not new code, new specs, new business clients-need to be written...
...To invest autocratic or tyrannical powers in a machine is a bad idea in engineering terms, just as to invest such power in a human being is a bad idea in philosophical and political terms...
...What is truly alarming is how many Americans are unable or unwilling to do that...
...Conservatives aren't supposed to be going on about new institutions...
...This pencil is value free...
...The box will be cheap and powerful, delivering blindingly fast performance...
...Anybody who looks around and says, "This isn't good enough...
...We have been enthused about their response...
...Socrates talked about learning as an erotic experience...
...The circuit that you solder together is vastly more complicated-it's got a chip with 10,000 or a million transistors...
...It's simply not enough to have ideas...
...E-mail shouldn't be a pain...
...We have exactly that same view of time right now...
...Putting them in the Gilder stream doesn't remove them from any other stream...
...I think they love truth and beauty...
...And it's got to be trivial for me to browse that stuff without taking the time to open each document...
...It would be crazy for me to make commercial predictions about the company...
...In the early 90s, it was hard to get anybody to pay any attention to this stuff...
...If they're right, the field can be shaped right...
...You don't, anymore than you make moral nerve gas or you make moral tanks or moral hydrogen bombs...
...It's not up to me to figure out, to remember where I put it...
...And the stream has a future as well as a past...
...I think the right wing has a monopoly on IQ in this country...
...Microsoft would be irresponsible if it tried to lead a technology revolution...
...This university has in many respects been enormously condescending to Bush, as it was to his father...
...It was more at peace with itself...
...Because technology is human nature...
...People from different institutions will cut across the grain of existing institutions...
...Whether they're universities or newspapers or the New Yorker magazine...
...Except that intellectuals have asserted their sovereignty over low or popular culture also, and they have essentially dismissed high culture...
...Exactly...
...Wiring things together with hyperlinks is not an organizationall strategy...
...The consummate nerd and author of several dense and original computer science texts, he evoked an attack from the Unabomber and emerged bent but unbowed as a yet more active and eloquent voice in the public square...
...And anybody in the world has the option of doing exactly what I'm doing here...
...But today industry is desperately trying to figure out what the hell to do with this thing...
...I don't know if the company will succeed...
...But don't count on Microsoft leading this transition...
...Links are myopic...
...Exactly...
...It's all part of a robust, flexible form that is tremendously valuable in converting the z 2w .naterial of words into the reality `,' information that people can use...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 Today there are jetsetters, people who travel around a lot and go to faraway places...
...They love each other...
...America has never been in a more passive relationship in the world of technology, and in the world of the intellect in general...
...In this sense, the United States has experienced a catastrophic deterioration...
...How did you get into this business...
...It was a breath of fresh air, moving into the commercial area...
...It's much simpler to build a Web site than change a sparkplug...
...Doesn't the building of "substreams" make me a file clerk again...
...We as an American society have chosen to turn our cultural institutions over to intellectuals...
...Computer processors are so cheap, disks are so cheap, that they're going into every house...
...Why is time order the true path...
...And then big companies will end up dominating the landscape and not much happening...
...How does your software help...
...Sure, there will be practical advantages to understanding how the mind works...
...But there are a zillion websites- Aren't those are the new publishers...
...I understand that obsession...
...Have you seen mine...
...It was a crazy thing to do...
...The fact that they have so little choice today is not because of Microsoft...
...It's coming...
...Today, the NFL 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 simulator games my young boys play are vastly more sophisticated than the operating systemthey have software two or three generations beyond anything I ever do.The fact that it's the 10year-old boys who are getting the power out of these machines, while adults struggle with 1976 software, is bizarre...
...We think it should be a stream, but whatever structure it assumes, it's got to be accessible from anywhere...
...When such a new item arrives, I don't want to have to treat it as a file clerk with a file cabinet...
...Can technology lead the way...
...I'm not blaming anyone...
...The world is seen as being in the state of decline, with technology to blame...
...What does this actually look like...
...It does what it needs to do...
...Nowadays the people who are not just indifferent to literature but who actively hate literature, are in English departments...
...They know what the table of contents means...
...Well, you have written three dense textbooks of computer science, invented a software language and the Trellis information structure, and contributed to dozens of collections...
...As long as encryption and identification algorithms provide a reasonable approximation for the level of security that I'm happy with in the paper world, then that's good enough...
...It's not just an amplifier...
...So there's a "now" line where things occur, which drifts naturally into the past...
...People worry that software can get out of control-even the terminology the field uses (such as viruses) supports the illusion that we're dealing with a quasiorganic substance that can get out from under us...
...This is an irrational technology...
...We observe constantly in modern life how the withdrawal of passion causes the degeneration of intellectual or artistic enterprises...
...Just do whatever the hell you want," and let progress lead us.You see that in the cloning controversy...
...To see people setting out on the ocean in rowboats and to go on as we did, business as usual, is morally incomprehensible...
...The Desktop was a brilliant idea 25 years ago...
...We want each of these objects to be appended to the end of a growing time-ordered stream...
...And progress in some conservative circles is anathema...
...Just saving everything in itself is useless-the question is, did you save it in a context that makes it possible not only to find what you want, but to know what you're looking for...
...Coming up with the right image is vastly more important than the technical details...
...Why n the basement...
...Do ^~e shape, technology o= does technology shape us...
...We order people to throw their e-mail out after a certain amount of time," because there are legal issues here...
...Intellectuals are known for their obtuseness, and have been known for centuries to be out of touch with reality...
...The industry is making excuses for itself in blaming Microsoft...
...But it was designed for a world in which computers were rare and expensive, disks were small or nonexistent, memory was rare and expensive, and processors were slow...
...So we have the gap, high culture and low...
...As the future flows into the past, it becomes an archive...
...But it goes beyond that, because we've reached a point where the intellectual caliber of people in technology and entrepreneurship is strikingly high, as lots of people notice...
...I've got to have e-mail messages be first class, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder alongside files, so when I need everything related to the Joe Schwartz meeting I'm having later, I can have a complete collection of Schwartz-related e-mail, appointments, files and memos, whatever...
...and the answer is always the same, "It's on the stream...
...I'm not a lawyer...
...But right-wingers are just smarter than leftwingers...
...It's a tremendous advantage in a million ways...
...television, internet, pornography-this notion that somehow technology has contributed to oar failen state...
...Is this technology corrosive...
...Such a person is a conservative, because conservatives don't think this is good enough...
...It is a very big change in our view of time...
...We have been amazingly fruitful in generating new commercial institutions and amazingly dead in generating new cultural institutions...
...If we're doing our jobs, we shape technology...
...I don't feel any need to justify that curiosity by saying once we know that, we'll be able to build this software and that software...
...I want options-to go to the computer store and buy a stream box, and then plug it in, in the basement or somewhere...
...It falls off into the dark quickly...
...It builds on top of Microsoft, and the stable platform provided by Microsoft is a huge technological advantage...
...1+ term...
...And so conservatism is forced to be a broad intellectual tent...
...Technology is often associated with the notion of progress...
...People sometimes say, "Why don't you ever talk about computer art or technology in art...
...It works...
...That's probably true, but I don't need to get ahead in conservative circles...
...It's also crucial that I not be limited to this stream in my basement...
...It goes all the way back to my birth certificate...
...But the level of interest in how the machines work and what they ought to be doing is extraordinarily low.Yes, they're complex...
...Or perhaps a depoliticized university, which teaches history for the sake of history, as opposed to leftist ideology or even conservative ideas...
...For instance, they've dropped JAVA support from the new XP...
...We could do with more such people...
...Each e-mail message is a separate item on the stream, and must be JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 instantaneously searchable and readily browsable...
...We can do better than this...
...each e-mail message I get...
...Whenever I need anything, whenever I need any kind of document, I ask, "Where is it...
...We can do better today...
...I don't buy the argument that the asymmetry is necessarily wrong...
...But to build machines that can solve hard problems, we're going to have to build machines with fake emotions because we can't solve problems without bringing our emotions to bear...
...But in the larger political sense, the world of the left today, the mainstream world, is the status quo...
...And there are false things the Neu, York Times does print...
...I don't want to buy disk space...
...Like people who travel versus people who don't...
...The machine's job is to do what we tell it to do...
...On the hardware side, what enables this to become a reality and what else do we need to make it an easy and practical reality...
...I want to tune in your stream also and a million other streams, remotely...
...DAVID GELERNTER: It's a strange thing about technology...
...But today it's just wildly obsolete...
...And that was a centralization, an amazing phenomenon...
...So even in the radically different and more limited computer world of the 1970s, the desktop was a stretch...
...Sure...
...Not copies of me, but more people who are skeptical rather than blown away by computers and software...
...It should make things easier, not harder...
...How do you find something in the stream...
...But it's remarkable how bad most people's memories are...
...If I have a new company with ten employees or twenty, I need a stream that will accumulate all the stuff that defines the company's life...
...In The Muse in the Machine I claim that it is the emotional footprint of two very different objects that allows me to associate them and come up with a new analogy...
...This is an unstable situation...
...It could be in however many other sub-streams it wants to be, and it continues to exist forever until I get rid of it...
...If you create a "Gilder" stream, the machine sweeps through everything, however many hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, however many documents are in the whole sys tem, and automatically puts the right ones in the Gilder stream...
...If anything, a slight deterioration in the position of conservatives, at least at Yale, which was riding high, partly because of its relationship to Mr...
...The idea that the instant you get bored with something-click and it disappears and you're somewhere else-brings out all the worst overtones in our cul ture...
...Because to change a sparkplug, you need some understanding of what an engine looks like and how it works, where the different parts go...
...We will be in bad shape if we tell scientists and technologists, "You're the bosses...
...But we have chosen to put all of our cultural institutions in the hands of institutions like mine...
...The institution will be what a university in the future will be: a group of people and framework in cyberspace that can glue them together...
...But this country used to be composed of engineers...
...And as far as my publications are concerned, if you were going to accuse them of bias, they would tend to be anti-technology...
...It's a moral transition, an inevitable result of turning this country over to the intellectuals, which is what we did beginning with the universities in the late 1950s and 1960s...
...The new generation of operating systems doesn't kick out Microsoft...
...You said something once about intellectuals being passionless...
...I can't worry about finicky searches in which t may come back with a huge number of documents...
...Parents today must raise children in an environment they know is not as good as the environment that they had when they were children...
...We want to make sense of all the electronic stuff that enters your life and mine: all the drafts and memos that I write...
...It's a thing we didn't predict...
...What about the consumer environment...
...The question will not be can people afford them, but can they think in these terms...
...Predictions that it will wither away are attractive but hard to believe, because processors are so cheap...
...Dissident writers are conservative writers...
...A lot of people didn't feel that they could say it...
...each digital photo I put online: and each fax and voice mail message that comes into my life...
...Links press my nose in the dirt...
...A monopoly...
...There have always been fewer suppliers than con sumers in all information exchanges...
...We still deal with many companies that say, "We've got to throw everything out...
...In the future, there will be fewer of them-and maybe we'll learn something...
...And this blank spot is in the twentieth century, which is within living memory...
...It's all too easy for people in technology or writers to pontificate about legal questions they know nothing about...
...We want to know what it is to be human...
...Until now you basically had what you could haul around in your head or in a few boxes...
...They know how to skim through it, how to find the pictures, how to look up something in the index...
...You go through the door, you're in a completely different environment...
...I doubt that we'll see intelligent machines that have minds in the sense of being conscious...
...Can the passion you seek be oriented toward technology...
...The obvious explanation is that there's so much more money...
...76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 Existing universities will make the transition, but the important players will be new universities...
...Over the course of human history technology has had no net effect on moral standards...
...In the wake of the terrorist disasters in September, we had several companies with stream systems up and running...
...It's much easier to blame than to, say, look at what their own labs are producing-essentially nothing...
...It's cheaper to keep them than to throw them out...
...Maybe some people who don't read what f write and who sort of vaguely know who I am, might be suspicious of me...
...What other thi will they have to have...
...I'll put the name on it...
...It's not acceptable to have to store certain things on certain machines...
...But blaming technology is ridiculous...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...SWIMMING THE STREAM DAVID GELERNTER THE SPECTATOR INTERVIEW 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 Author of Mirror Worlds, which anticipated the World Wide Web, founder of Mirror Worlds corporation, which may well reshape it, David Gelernter is a demiurge-a creator of worlds, not merely their reflector...
...When you sweep a document with a cursor, a summary of the document instantaneously pops up in what we call a "browse window...
...Until September, I would have said there has been no real change...
...They love art, which delivers truth and beauty...
...We use three techniques that reinforce each other...
...Is part of the problem with the Net as learning device that you're not developing emotional connections to the subject matter...
...My house stream with all of my personal stuff and my wife's and my kids...
...All the devices, PCs, laptops-everything will be wireless...
...The topics that I write about are art, culture, and history to some extent, and religion...
...It doesn't care how much power it has...
...Corporate memory is being flushed down the tubes even though storage is dirt cheap and all sorts of drives are 98 percent empty...
...We need to get over being so transfixed by the power of the stuff that we warp our lives around it, instead of shaping it to our own needs...
...I developed this in The Muse in the Machine...
...So Microsoft is not part of the solution...
...For a while, this was a research project atYale, then it became a commercial-development project...
...Look at the penetration of the VCR-anyone who wants aVCR can have one...
...I want to sweep the cursor over and see very quickly what these things are...
...You're talking about a kind of electronic alter ego, scooping up everything you do...
...That would be okay, but whether Mirror Worlds is a multibillion dollar hit or not, this is a game with lots and lots of players that will support these streams...
...There's no way to unplug nerve gas or anthrax or...
...But it is nowhere near a full solution...
...What about the Web...
...They don't want to build things...
...He is one of the great men of our era and an incandescent talker...
...Instead r f taking the e-snail and copying it into an address book, I just figure, "Well, it's in the e.,nail...
...Do you think it's coincidental that you could say the same thing about the market, which is a way to decentralize economic systems...
...Where is Microsoft...
...Now the technology market is in a slump and so the university is much less interested in technology...
...We have a responsibility to regulate, in the interests of our moral standards, what technologists and scientists do...
...On the other hand, it's also the case that the only progressives today are conservatives, who are optimists, and to be progressive one must be an optimist...
...So : can go backward on an NBC stream...
...If I have a virus on my machine, if I'm not careful, I can let it loose, and lose a lot of data...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: As a conservative and a technologist at a liberal arts college like Yale, you're a kind of double pariah...
...Solar eclipses were truly terrifyin,, before we understood them...
...It doesn't make me do good things or bad things...
...The idea that we need to dump more information on top of them, and make it easier for them to skate from site to site, is perverse...
...People don't love computers and they never will...
...Education is the most fadridden area in the world...
...No more dilemmas about throwing away old e-mail...
...It's also searchable and browsable...
...We think of our lives in temporal terms...
...He can also build a hydrogen bomb and blow us all up...
...And you're backing into the future-you don't know what's going to happen...
...It's tiny and you can't take something off the screen and park it somewhere else, on the screen next door.You can put it in folders, but the whole point is to have things where you can see them...
...He made it impossible for me ever to really make common cause with my fellow students...
...Understanding how the mind works is its own reward...
...Can't someone with an outside viewpoint identify a metaphor that has led us astraymetaphor revision...
...It needs Microsoft...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 You write a lot about beauty in technology...
...They'll be able to integrate themselves into my life in a way they can't now...
...But when you add browse into the mix, you take a tremendous burden off of search...
...it dematerializes...
...Flipping around the other way-in some conservative circles, an excessive interest in technology can be as suspicious...
...I can search back and find earlier things...
...There is no point in fighting it...
...But they can be wrong, and then the field is shaped wrong...
...But I think it's a separate problem, really, from the practical software issues that we're faced with...
...Why should you...
...Fifty years ago there was more information in the Times and the Herald Tribune every day than a school kid could possibly use...
...Edward Rothstein published an impressive piece in Commentary last summer, which I had my class this term read sentence by sentence...
...I want to see them...
...We all have memories, of course...
...We live in time...
...It's despised now, because intellectuals are more or less in charge of culture and intellectuals have always hated this sort of stuff...
...My goals in designing the stream were to invent a beautiful technology, one that was simultaneously simple and powerful.Whether I succeeded is not for me to say...
...But those small screens are an important part of what is driving the commercialization of the lifestream technology...
...I think storage becon es a more sophisticated, higher level of service...
...I'm content with current-generation encryption systems for storing my personal papers on a server on theWeb.The information I store in my bedroom isn't perfectly secure either...
...What does that mean to you...
...Are we going to have people who have streams versus people who don't...
...It's a nonstrategy...
...Nor is the information I store in my office in a file cabinet...
...I've never seen any good computer art...
...Define oassiue...
...Bush also is a Yalie...
...But let's be fair...
...You don't have to love Microsoft to say that Microsoft didn't impose itself on the world...
...Instead of thinking about that problem, the industry, the academic field, the press decided that the Web was the only interesting topic in technology...
...Maybe that's because the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal are industrial-age artifacts in centralization and the future is more of a free-for-all...
...If you approach something passionlessly, you're condemned to pace back and forth over ground that's already been broken...
...I mean, I gained enormously from the insularity and parochialism of the technology world, where people have no idea what my political views are...
...I was enmeshed in the New York Times basically, which has huge weight on this campus.You can dissent from the Times, but still you read it everyday.You read it on Sunday...
...How will we find it...
...But as a business, maybe I want someone else, a storage company, to handle this...
...Certainly there are hardcore traditionalists in the conservative community...
...For better or worse, our storage technology will expand our view of time the way the industrial revolution expanded our view of space...
...A stream will run through your 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 home...
...That could be seen as being more than just reactionary...
...And lots of boxes all over the place will support the dynamic creation of new groups.That is part of the trend toward peerto-peer computing...
...Yeah, but there's no way they can prevent me from writing JAVA code if I want to...
...The press will describe it as a "conservative" university...
...The Future Doesn't Need Us" [April, 2000...
...What about the need in the industry for elegant, simplifying ideas...
...Describe...
...Our science allows us to do much better...
...It's not bad for technology to have some people in it who don't think like technologists, who don't particularly enjoy playing with computers, who don't have patience for figuring out how software works...
...In part, it means respect for the tradition that created you...
...Throwing our lives out, the record of our daily transactions and our daily experiences, is no longer a rational strategy...
...The two things are really independent...
...That's exactly what the art world is suffering from-intellectualization...
...How is the Web itself as a metaphor...
...Engineering used to be a highly honorable activity...
...Microsoft isn't going to force me to run Windows or confiscate JAVA...
...They will have more choices in the future...
...Who cares that he can do it...
...He always reminded me that there was a lot in the doctrinaire intellectual environment that was just anti-Americanism...
...NBC publishes stuff in stream form, and the TV is a filter with the stream rushing past it and showing me moving images...
...I worked obsessively for the last year on a piece about the aesthetics of Judaism...
...Intellectual life is generally suppressed on the left-by disdain for scholarship, hatred of art, disdain for good writing, disdain for the intellectual tradition...
...It would be hard to describe this society as intellectual at all...
...So is Bill Joy right...
...If I get an image of a document, such as a fax, I've got to be able to search on any word in a document, not just key words...
...I don't know if our version will succeed...
...But I don't want to be forced to use search to pinpoint a document...
...It used to just go away and you couldn't call it back...
...I don't want to buy file space or directory space...
...So I don't think I'm that much of an outcast...
...How will the culture get beyond this worldview...
...But there were very few leftists who said, "Maybe we were wrong about Vietnam...
...Kids aren't learning to read or write properly, they don't know any history...
...I've heard more than one person comment, "The smartest people I know are all conservatives...
...It stores my local stream...
...A stream will capture the information flow of the company...
...But as author of six mainstream books, he also commands the mind of a fiercely personal thinker and creator, artist and author, art critic and short story writer...
...So I wasn't that liberal...
...But there's the plug right over there, and if I'm really worried, I'll unplug it and that will be the end of my problem...
...It's a huge part of your world view Until you make the transition of saying, "You know, there are true stories that the New York Times does not print...
...And yet every school in America is putting its kids on the Web...
...But I think his lVred article...
...Current trends in computer science-peer-to-peer, distributed systems-all point to decentralization as a model...
...But clearly your other electronic devices, such as TV, have to be integrated, too...
...The hyperlinks at the heart of the Web are ultimately bad, because breadth instead of depth is a recipe for intellectual disaster...
...It's a tool...
...It's a fine line though between being conservative and being an obstacle to change, isn't it...
...You don't sound like a conservative...
...The issue is what to do with them...
...We do technology not because we believe it will change the world, but for the same reason we eat and drink and breathe, because that's what human beings do...
...I'm presuming that you've had some discussions with Microsoft about Mirror Worlds...
...I don't deny there's a threat, but in the ranking of threats, a computer virus scores zero compared to the threat of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons...
...And what about security...
...The operative metaphor is the most important thing in technology...
...Delete the Web and they've still got five orders of magnitude more information than they can handle...
...In practical terms, why do we need to understand how the mind works...
...I'mr= undan>entally disorganized...
...I don't think the Web is going to change that...
...Dissident artists are conservative artists...
...How will all these streams of information be stored...
...And the stream represents our attempt to mirror as organically as possible the natural human flow through life...
...Everybody's home videos, local songs and whatever they publish won't be of interest to the whole world...
...It's a concrete form of the company's life and existence...
...A new approach to core information management...
...So technology "valu,e free...
...Assume that everybody has a terabyte drive...
...That's a crazy, crazy thing to do...
...The forces at work are the same...
...So whenever a new e-mail shows up or I write a new draft of a memo, it gets popped on the front.When I put in a photo, it gets popped in front, so the stream keeps growing...
...As new things arrive, they get popped on the front...
...And there was very little e-mail, no Internet and no Web...
...The university, what is its future...
...What are the prospects...
...Microsoft was not above reproach and committed unpleasant acts...
...In desk top computers we've got different types of engines, but we're a long way from anything that looks like a modern airplane...
...Limitless, cheap information storage does for time what the Industrial Revolution did for space...
...It seemed inconceivable...
...I hate to put it in such bald terms...
...Yeah, and there's more to a Proustian world than just the data...
...They're just not adequate to today's environment...
...It's made us richer on the whole, but not happier...
...The difference is that the computer is a neutral agent...
...So what you're saying is, "We've invented this vast ability to store information, and now it's too big to do it the computer's way...
...If we subtract artistic discrimination and sense, we just get information, not art...
...That's exactly what it does...
...They did have a choice...
...We provide that level of information to everybody, only as an individual and as a member of any group he's a member of, which has its own memory narrative in body and casual form...
...When the time is right...
...The American Spectator spoke with him in his office atYale...
...Our shrinking attention spans, our superficiality, our unwillingness to come to grips with real issues, our insistence on bite-size chunks of everything...
...There are so few publishers...
...The browser and the Web site are obsolete...
...That's the issue...
...And it doesn't excuse us from our moral responsibilities...
...The company's website will probably just be a sub-site of the stream...
...No, we don't talk a lot to Microsoft...
...believing one's self to be powerless, incompetent...
...nor has the rest of the industry...
...We, humans, have to do it our way, in a way that's natural to us...
...I'm not an engineer by nature or by training...
...They don't love technology...
...This is a community that admires IQ, and when push comes to shove a lot of people here would admit that they admire Bill Buckley and Paul Wolfowitz.You'd have to torture them for three days to get them to say it publicly...
...The JAVA community is thriving and developing its tools, making its choices, buying its platforms...
...Then I had a light-switch moment in the late 1970s when I saw people in the workers' paradise of Vietnam put into sea in rowboats...
...A computer used to be just a file cabinet...
...And that if it was okay to oppose the war in Vietnam, if you started clicking over to the other side and saying, "I wish the Viet Cong would win," you were committing an inexcusable sin...
...As indeed it has...
...So just by sweeping the cursor over twenty or thirty documents in a stream onscreen, I can glance at each one in seconds...
...PCs will become more ubiquitous, in fact...
...We never ask, "Where is it...
...For lack of a better would you Call i university...
...Not the computer, not the operating system...
...What about the average high school kid building a Web site...
...The transition of the universities will be a lot messier and complicated because the physical structure plays an important role...
...just a chaotic bunch of links stuck together...
...It's because the whole industry has been looking at the wrong problem...
...But I think the absence of marketing passion and outreach is the reason that the field is so crowded and there's so much garbage in it...
...If you had that much cash in the bank and that many rich stockholders, you'd be crazy to do anything different...
...Even also from the computer at the supermarket, on the street and at the airport-You need to be able to walk up to any computer and tune in your whole cyber life...
...Information has to come in a collection that makes sense, that I know how to navigate...
...This is a serious break with history...
...In the late 90s, you could barely get undergraduates to stop to put on their pants before forming new companies and becoming billionaires...
...Most people never traveled away from the villages where they were born, and even for those with the means to travel, it was slow And there was no photography to give people an idea of what lay outside their spot-lit space...
...Nonetheless, we have something that people demonstratively want...
...The parade also continues behind me in the future-my schedule...
...Eventually, it will be peer-topeer, by which we mean not on a server, but distributed around the Net...
...The make-or-break factor in intellectual history and technology is not ideas...
...Proust was just minding his own memories...
...But the basic process hasn't changed that much, we don't put the emphasis on it that we used to...
...But since September, it has become slightly easier to admit that you have your doubts about some aspects of the liberal agenda...
...Presidents have the burdens and the advantages of being constantly shadowed and connected...
...thoug you woe id put it all out thereon t"e Net You could, but there's what I call the dandelion problem.You may not want dandelions, but there really is no way to eradicate them...
...I mean obviously we'll buy from Mirror Worlds anyway, so...
...People are ready to abdicate their moral responsibilities when some scientist says, "I can do this...
...One could be bitter and say, "What good is my work in technology when what I really need is marketing skills...
...So what does the stream box in the basement do...
...With the desktop metaphor, we do remember this sinking feeling of, "Have you seen our desk...
...NBC will produce a video stream, and the TV will be a stream-viewing device...
...If I look into the future, I see what NBC is planning and at twelve o'clock they're going to broadcast this and one o'clock they're going to broadcast that...
...If we have centralized intelligence, we have a potential point of vulnerability and failure...
...You can get a good view of a stream through a peephole and then can tune in the stream using a Palm, even using a "WAP" web-phone...
...He makes a compelling case that the government, in prosecuting Microsoft, didn't know what the hell it was talking about...
...The question really is security before and after encryption...
...We'll all be living our own Remembrances of Things Past, our own little Proustian lifestream...
...Yet we have trouble coming up with software that will reliably run even a single PC...
...We do it because that's just what we do for a living, for a life, in our lifestreams...
...But why bother with having it on site...
...It's clear when people look at their Palm device or they're looking at their cell phone, there's no way that the desktop model will work on the tiny screen...
...People read The American Spectator because it's a package that they like...
...And everything that constitutes the house itself...
...People who are not just indifferent to art, but who hate the whole idea of art and great artists, reside in the art history departments...
...Okay, but on the other hand, being a conservative techno gist is not an easy row to hoe either...
...I'm a writer and a painter and that's the way I approach everything...
...We're all getting snowed under by it...
...Human beings care about human beings...
...It's up to the software to help me...
...All the network wires will plug into that one box...
...In my 1991 book, Mirror Worlds, I was early to obsess about the global network...
...And they're correct in the following important sense: The United States was a better and happier nation when I was a child in the 1950s and the early 1960s than it is today...
...Mirror Worlds seems to he taking a major step in this direction...
...My book 1939 was mainly about that topic...
...It just was too weak to do anything other than accept files passively and say," Okay, tell me the name...
...So, if I had something that talks about Gilder's writing about joy and I had a "Bill joy" sub-stream, it would already be on the joy sub-stream...
...But it's run by people who think of themselves as intellectuals...
...Are you saying it's a question beyond technology...
...When my kids were a little younger-they're 11 and 14we had a lot of fun with electronics kits.You can teach a boy how to solder and what a resistor is and what a capacitor is, just as you could do in 1935...
...We've dealt with technologies of mass murder...
...Does unlimited storage change an individual's relationship to time...
...They say, "Jump through this door...
...Does asymmetry worry you---the fact that bandwidth into and out of homes may be very unequal...
...It is exactly where a large company has to be...
...How do you do archeology when you're confronted with the lifestreams of a billion people...
...You don't have to target the search to a bull's eye...
...Under the name Scopeware, it is in the hands of beta customers...
...It is always "on the stream...
...Like his software, his mind can recreate vividly a lost era, as in 1939, his book on the World's Fair, grasp an elusive value, as in his book on Machine Beauty, or pen a bold discourse on sex roles in his incendiary autobiography, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabornber...
...Their every utterance, unless they turn the damn thing off...
...TAS response March, 2001], was crazy...
...You get a handful of stuff, and two seconds later you've found this memo from May of '98 or that spreadsheet from last week...
...Microsoft provided a service that people chose to pay money for...
...In fact, many people who don't want it, will have it...
...One of the things we talk about in selling people Scopeware, the trade name for lifestreams, is the idea of communal memory and your own history: if you're using it, everything that happens to you online is saved routinely...
...My desktop shows a certain gradual evolution in a sense that I'll create a new folder, add more documents, and create more and more of an impenetrable mess...
...Exactly...
...When I want to watch CSPAN, I don't care if it's on a Hitachi or Toshiba TV Your information has to be available on any computer at home, at work, on your laptop, on your cell phone, on your Palm...
...he telephone...
...Boxes are what the computer industry is good at selling, and what people are used to buying...
...Arguably we are coming out of a golden age of technology: Do you worry that we may be exit that age of heroes, that the stock market busts will somehow cause technology to go out of fashion for 50 years...
...The past used to recede...
...Microsoft did what it needed to do-it provided a stable platform on which we could build my first-generation "lifestream" alternative...
...Nothing the stock market does, nothing anybody does, nothing any institution is capable of doing, no army or navy and or air force or police department is capable of stopping technology...
...Only in the sense that, once a successful new type of operating system emerges, the live operating system that shows you information as it emerges, then I'm sure Microsoft will build a great version...
...Yeah, but there are no websites with the influence of the New YSrker, or The Will Street Journal or the Neu,York Times...
...And politics...
...They will have full bandwidth multimedia lifestreams...
...One generation after 1903, when airplanes were invented, we developed the DC3.The first modern commercial airline didn't emerge until 1935...
...What about all the millions, billions of existing files...
...Software is just a footnote compared to those other things...
...What does this mean to age industry...
...But I'm not running for anything, so it doesn't really matter...
...This kind of technology will not be restricted to five or six immensely powerful individuals...
...I wish that I could read something about what it was actually like to be in the Australian-Hungarian Army in 1914 and 1915one of my grandfathers was...
...We know the spotlight shines brightly on today and last week and next week...
...Clinton and the mainstreaming of 60s liberalism, 60s leftism, which had the effect of making orthodox, garden-variety leftism more respectable...
...You've been speculating for many years what it would mean to put one's entire life on the Net...
...So people who read what I JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 write know I don't have a technologized world-view...
...I can only say what my goals are...
...I know that something like this technology will be on 95 percent of the world's computers in ten years...
...Have you taken a position on the antitrust issue...
...The White House swings a lot of weight, obviously...
...Onscreen a stream appears in receding perspective...
...Stream is the obvious answer...
...Gelernter's startling vision does for time what instant global telecommunications and jet travel have done for space...
...Software is scary in a funny way to somebody who doesn't know much about it...
...It's not acceptable for me to walk up to a voice-mail machine and have it say, "There are twelve messages and if you want to know what they are, listen to them...
...It is exciting...
...It is our responsibility...
...But we know nothing...
...This system needs a focus knob...
...But any computer can fail, so it makes more sense to limit the potential damage...
...Did it affect the way you did this project...
...Use "iife.st:rearris" to make this more concrete...
...It's got $36 billion in cash and a 95 percent market share and a complete knowledge of the technology...
...The industry still does not understand that the problem is not how to conserve storage, but how to squander it creatively...
...I respect Bill Joy He's a very smart and fine person...
...I don't want to give it a name, put it in a directory, worry about where to put it and where to search for it when I need it...
...That's silly...
...is anyone doing it...
...There's no intrinsic reason why a creative society shouldn't create new universities just as it creates new businesses...
...It looks like a parade of documents...
...In 1800 a man's view of space was fuzzy except for his immediate locale...
...I'm not in a position to allege that the stream is beautiful technology, anymore than I can say that paintings in a show are beautiful pieces...
...When their first-line data systems were wiped out, they were able to reconstruct what they had...
...Clearly there are many blank spots in our communal memory...
...These have been the shaping concepts-the metaphors shape the field...
...It's ideas plus someone who's interested in them, who cares about and talks about them...
...The field is brand new...
...High culture is what is in charge of the intellectuals and no one goes to...
...I mean, they want their memories...
...Not as rapidly or as casually, but why shouldn't there be a significant number of new universities and new cul tural institutions...
...I want to know at a glance what is in a file or other item arriving at my computer or into my lifestream...
...For ten years people have been obsessed with the Internet and the Web...
...Software may be scarier...
...Usually we're too passive and don't bother...
...And there's a "future" where your plans are-a calendar with your travel or appointments...
...But will Internet decentralization erode the great centralized institutions...
...Explain that...
...Not just random email or links-a coherent structure...
...If I'm looking for something Schwartz once wrote about zeppelins, I don't want to type a long, detailed query that will give me the one thing I want...
...Presidents of the United States have had that for the past forty years...
...New information comes in all the time...
...And yet Microsoft hasn't done much to help us escape it...
...It's going to happen...
...Liberals were once dissidents, but today they are the establishment...
...I just don't give a damn about computer art...
...A significant constituency among conservatives today supports progress, economic growth and technology...
...Most are consumers, not producers, of information...
...A computer screen has none of the flexibility of a real desktop, with other spaces around it, bookcases, the floor...
...The caliber, the interest, the excitement, the enthusiasm, the whole energy level is much higher than it was in the academic world...
...Whereas, other people may have no lifestream at all, because they can't afford it or they live in the wrong place...
...So an institution like the New York Times or Yale University can make a transition...
...Technology has always been the distinguishing feature of human beings...
...People are just going to vacuum all that stuff up and put it in streams, which will continue growing, and you'll never have to make up another name, another directory...
...Emotion is what allows us to draw analogies...
...Listen carefully...
...To be a dissident today is to be a conservative...
...But I was never an orthodox liberal because of my grandfather, who came to the United States as a very young child from Russia...
...We know Microsoft is paying attention to this project-for a long time, Microsoft's been a number-one visitor to our website...
...You're indicting Microsoft' The fault is not Microsoft's...
...Most computer users and programmers were commercial data processors...
...Do you see that as a problem...
...I think this issue is attitude and education more than the cost of the technology...
...The idea that a world that has successfully lived with the threat of thermonuclear weapons for fifty years, is now going to panic because of the threat of software is insane...
...But as early as 1990 we were already long overdue for a new operating system...
...and Mrs...
...We're not proposing that you take documents and throw them out...
...Microsoft was absolutely right: It is a trivial piece of software...
...Universities used to have nothing to do with Hollywood or the art community, and little to do 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 with publishing...
...We will be losing something when we go beyond it, but the country desperately needs new universities...
...For newspapers and magazines, the transition will be particularly graceful, because they will be able to deliver stuff they can't deliver now...
...We have a proposed solution...
...The fact that George Gilder-a first-rate analyst and philosopher of technologycomes from the right is not a weird anomaly...
...I don't think so.The Neu' Darker was where the best authors published...
...in thi cnviro m n hat c future of the PC The PC is an embarrassment to the industry today...
...Software is no good because we have engineers but no designers...
...Or publishers...
...Until you make that transition away from having your whole worldview fed to you by the New York Times, it doesn't matter what you call yourself, you are a liberal, really...
...What will matter will be information structures...
...Marshalling the immense advances of computer storage, his Scopeware enables its users swiftly and elegantly to move between past, present and futuresummoning all the files, e-mails, documents, and images of a past epoch or the plans and promises of a future time-in a translucent three-dimensional array...
...But the core of the govern ment's case was built on misconceptions: the idea that Microsoft saw Netscape as a threat because Netscape would be a platform to replace Windows...
...It's a burglar alarm, a cell phone, a fire detector...
...Yes...
...When you buy a new computer and plug it into the wall, you will bring up your stream...
...The Neu'rorkTimes and Hillary Clinton are thrilled because they're running the show, and you know they don't want it to change...
...Right-it'll just be vacuumed up onto the stream, whether there are 15,000 documents or 400,000 documents...
...Not only were the leftists wrong, but the boat people ended up being savagely kicked and beaten by the left and abandoned to die...
...The idea of the desktop, the idea of the file tree, the idea of the Web site...
...We need to invent a form, kind of like a book, which is as valuable for manufacturers, who know how to build it, as it is for authors.We don't have to decide, "Should I write a single, long sentence or stack the words this way...
...New information gets generated and put on the screen...
...That's exactly our goal-to make the Net and the comput er disappear...
...But the general trend is for technologists to be less outcasts than they were before...
...They all have the latest computers and they know how many megahertz the processors cycle...
...And of course, it's usually archived or lost or I can never find the data...
...To be liberal is status quo reactionary...
...It's got nothing to do with technology...
...Of the twelve messages on the screen, I can see that the first eight are irrelevant and the ninth is from somebody important...
...Both on the left and the right, there is the ongoing notion that science is dangerous, freedom is a luxury that we cannot afford, technology is something that has to he contained...
...How do you make moral machines...
...The stream is ordered in time the same way my life is...
...Hypertext is very useful in its place...
...Well, being a conservative, in part, means that you don't believe that your generation is the greatest thing since sliced bread...
...This platform running UNIX, running LINUX, is not a Microsoft platform...
...It's like a tape that keeps recording and you look at the most recent bit...
...It can and I think it will...
...That's exactly it...
...Don't n ince words...
...But whenever I turn on hfestreams, I see the twenty or thirty emails, memos or postings that most recently arrived...
...And I think some nonconservative scholars will be part of this effort...
...I want to buy stream-storage capacity...
...My goals are aesthetic...
...It's hypothetical, but you can almost taste it...
...Readers buy a book and know how to operate it...
...Because the sub-streams are created automatically and they persist...
...Every 15-year-old boy could tune up a car, change a sparkplug, have some sort of relationship to the technology of the day...
...Its combination of content and form was tremendously successful and we haven't seen that online...
...Uninterested, disengaged...
...Low culture is what everyone goes to and is debased by...
...Is lifestreams on the market...
...It is possible to teach the truth, leaving politics to the side...
...They were educated in certain ways and do certain kinds of work and tend to see things from a certain point of view They are the most powerful group in society today because they run the universities, and the universities are the key players in peopling the elite...
...And I say, "Why should I? What's through this door...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
