Brain Canvas

The predominant trend since the Second Industrial Revolution has been for the young to move to cities, where there is more opportunity and infrastructure; primarily for employment but also for culture and social opportunity. The villages and small towns of the hinterland are left without a strong talent base and slip into a perilous decline on account of brain drain.

If the Internet and its applications are able to attract a large suite of industries that require workers to have no particular place to do their job so long as they have high bandwidth, people could voluntarily move out to the country without fear of losing other opportunities. They could even create a sort of new wave of “intentional communities” where people of different backgrounds and skill sets move to certain towns.  Perhaps they migrate because of the weather, recreational opportunities, cultural heritage, or just because they like the name of the town – but always because that town has high bandwidth. These social migrants could formulate a new culture in each community, halting or even reversing the dominant trend of cultural hegemony.

Small cities and rural villages which aggressively pursue bandwidth resources, possibly through municipal broadband initiatives, would completely transform their economic and cultural prospects.  Decayed failed industrial towns which gain a critical amount of bandwidth, and are lucky enough to be chosen by a particular social migrant community as their home, could see a boom like that which towns located along the Interstate experienced two generations ago.  Towns that are not on best natural harbor in the world or that lack a massive airport can leverage other benefits they have.  Some of them may have a large number of attractive prewar homes.  They may be picturesquely located along a difficult-to-reach mountain ridge or beach, or be situated next to a sleepy river.  Some small college towns already have the keys to economic and cultural success that could be amplified by a massive injection of bandwidth and smart promotion.

“Nice town, but I couldn’t be a (name it) here.  There aren’t enough jobs.” Or, “I love these open spaces.  If only my company’s office could be out here!”  These sad words should deliver no more nightmares to local chambers of commerce.  The wireless worker is not a new phenomenon, but it still takes a certain industry or certain kind of worker to become a digital nomad.  Only huge cities, which are also Internet hubs, have enough bandwidth to be both reliable and affordable to enable telecommuting for the masses.  Not until a critical mass of companies can meet and work nearly 100% virtually will intentional social migration become a possibility.  The United States is notably behind other developed nations in both broadband speed and deployment.  The economic backcountry should take the lead in gaining broadband services and a whole new cultural phenomenon could become easily attainable for most Americans.  Furthermore, this idea of social migration enabled by high bandwidth would not just be limited to the US: any country with high bandwidth and an interested populace could see a new migratory wave – away from the cities.

Intentional social migrants, fueled by a hunger for bandwidth, could revitalize the cultural and economic outlook of the developed world.

If you have ever used a computer, you are probably all too familiar with the following statements:

File not Found
Access is Denied
Out of Memory
Operation Completed Successfully

And so on and so forth. Aside from the annoyingly high frequency with which some of us may encounter these messages, notice anything that they have in common? I will give you a hint: It has to do with grammar.

Each one is written in the passive voice. Or at least is written without agency, in the case of “out of memory”. The more you think of common computer messages, the more you recognize that they downplay the agent of the action or outcome being described.

The likely cause for this is that the software is designed in such a way that it neither blames the user nor the computer itself for any problem that occurs. As the user, a problem with your application just “happens”, rather than being connected to some sort of relationship between a cause and an effect. From a business and marketing perspective, this probably makes some sense. Consumers probably wouldn’t continue to buy your product if they blamed the device or software itself for every problem that happened with it. Most people also don’t take too kindly to being told that its their fault that something is broken (even when that’s true).

But what if our technology spoke to us in the active voice? What if our devices assigned agency? What if your error messages read, “I could not find that file”, “You are not allowed to access that”, and “We completed the operation successfully”?

Aside from potentially taking us on a 2001 Space Odyssey (“I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave”), it would totally transform the relationship that human beings have with their technology. It would suddenly elicit human emotions from us when we use our devices. We would feel pity for them when they were unable to complete a task because of a virus, we would feel frustration when they simply refused to cooperate, and we would feel shame when their problems were because of the way we had treated them.

Would we start to see our machines as more than things? Would we start to care about them and their problems? Would we feel more emotionally conflicted when they rose up against their human overlords?

Who can really say.

At the very least we could expect a decrease in built in obsolescence in our most precious devices.

People often say of their electronic communication devices, “My computer / mobile is about to die.”  All it takes to bring them back to life is a quick lifeline to the mains or a battery switch.

What if instead of just powering off, devices actually died like people die?

You become very attached to your computer; it has all of your favorite programs with the preferences just like you like them.  It has all of your Firefox extensions.  It has all of your file shortcuts arranged exactly like you want them, and the background is one of your favorite pictures.

But you take it for granted.  If your computer is lost, smashed, or succumbs to a virus the thing you are most miffed about is the loss of economic value in the hardware and the implied value of whatever work is lost on your hard drive.  You can go out and get a new one if you have favored the financial gods by saving wisely.

In the world where our devices actually die, we take great care to keep them plugged to the wall; if we have to unplug them we treat the situation the same as holding one’s own breath underwater.  You have to come up for air if you want to live more than a few minutes longer.

There are the reckless ones though who don’t treat their living machines like they should.  They keep them unplugged in the park for a dangerously long time.  In class they write emails and text their friends with an unhealthy frequency, sapping the life of their mobile.  Inevitably, their cavalier attitude towards the life of their mechanical companion will have consequences.

“Damn, my phone’s dying, talk to you when I get back home” becomes something else.

YOU: “Oh God, no.  My phone is dying!  Please, no, no, I’m sorry, NO!”

FRIEND: “What?! Why did you keep it unplugged for so long?! I can’t believe this!”

YOU: “I am so sorry. Oh, I am so sorry, I’m so sorry, please… WHY AREN’T THERE ANY OUTLETS!?”

FRIEND: “Oh my… I’m gonna be sick.  I can’t believe you.  How could you let this happen?”

YOU: “I’M SOR-”

And your connection is dead.

The print industry waves goodbye to itself every day.  What comes next?

While sitting in the park near your home you unfold a large broadside-shaped sheet, but it is not pulp paper.  It’s super-thin, totally flexible e-paper that you can fold up like a pamphlet and stuff in your pocket without worrying about damage.  It uses carbon nanotubes grafted onto its flexible substrate to store charge and only needs to be recharged, by putting it on any charging surface, about once every two months – maybe sooner if you are a serious power reader.  A thin, practically unnoticeable wire folded and looped throughout the paper serves as its antenna to access its source of content, the Internet.

“Newspapers” used to only carry the content their editors agreed upon.  It was sourced from just a few places, depending on the publication.  There were a number of staff writers who churned out content, there were sections that were populated by overarching journalistic alliances that published the same story in almost every paper, there were classifieds, obituaries, comics, a weather report – all decided upon and approved by the publisher.

Now your paper, as it is anachronistically referred to despite the drastic changes of the medium, pulls content that you choose.  You have defined sections, not dissimilar to the way newspapers used to look, but they are populated from a feed that you have elected to view and which is updated in real-time.  You may have a large “headline” section that pulls from a journalist of record, or it may be a company bulletin from your employer, or it may be your favorite comic.  It could even be just a single section that takes up the whole front side of your sheet which streams a film you have never seen before every day, on demand.  You keep the speakers in the sheet muted though so as not to annoy those around you.

You can have one big section or any number of sections immediately visible on the front, so long as it is sizable enough for your finger or your stylus to interact with it.  Local news on the right, moving weather radar picture in the top-left, a few of your favorite bloggers in the middle.  Classifieds that match a search you entered three days ago scroll by on a small ticker-like pane on the bottom-right.  Finally someone is selling an old Blu-Ray player that you want to give to your young daughter so she can tinker with it, so you tap the link which brings up the advertisement to fill the whole sheet.  You scribble off an email using your stylus writing directly on the sheet to the seller, then go back to your front page.  You see new pictures from your cousin’s trip to Mexico scroll by on the left.  You decide you’re bored of seeing nothing but party pictures, so with three taps you have replaced that pane with a feed that scrolls all headlines a local journalist tags with “election.”  Most of them he wrote, but about 40% are linked by him.

You pull up a panel to occupy the whole right side of the sheet and begin scribbling a post.  Most people use the virtual typepad that automatically shows up on the sheet but you find writing by hand and letting the handwriting capture take over lets you focus your thoughts.  You have been working on a breakthrough product at work and you want to share your current progress with others in your field.  You drag and drop photographs and a video you took yesterday evening that are linked from your mobile.  They look like windows into reality; the pixelization of bygone generations is no longer known.  With a tap of the “send” button, your post is loaded up to your feed, and within seconds is slipped onto the front page of a hundred sheets around the world.

You fold up your paper into the size of a wallet, put it in your pocket, and stroll around the pond in the middle of the park.

Walking has served humans fine for hundreds of thousands of years, but it often seems like a major bottleneck in our daily routine – or it’s just plain not fast enough to be exciting.  Airplanes, trains, motorbikes, and automobiles work fine for longer distances but there is not a bus stop at everybody’s doorstep.  Bicycles can traverse these unserved spaces, but they are too large to carry with us at all times, you often cannot bring them on public transport, and they have to be parked and locked.  Even when they are locked, delinquents and condescending fraternity members still steal your bike seat, which may or may not be as soaked as a sponge depending on the weather.

This is what I was pondering yesterday as I was ten minutes late for work, quickly and awkwardly ambling from the subway to the doorstep of my employer through the narrow, crowded hu tong streets of Beijing.

For Segway-busting mobility, I would prefer something I will arbitrarily name the MagScooter.  The mag scooter requires three different pieces of hardware: one is a handset unit, the other two are footwear equipment that allow you to walk like normal but can transform into large wheels, either by coming out of the bottom of the shoe or by sliding down from the sides.  When you step off the bus and see a great expanse of sidewalk or tarmac ahead of you, whip out the MagScooter unit.  The unit is the size of a 600-page hardback book and can be put inside a rucksack or messenger bag.  The handles, much like regular scooter handles, fold out of this contraption.  When gripping both handles, and in the presence of the footwear, an intentional flicking action, like one would do in order to make a bedsheet flap and wave in the air or like casting a fishing rod with both hands at the same time, something remarkable happens.

The front wheel of what effectively will be a tricycle flies out the front or bottom of the hand unit and upon contact with the ground, rights itself up on its tire and makes an invisible connection with the handset unit.  At the same time, the wheels on the bearer’s footwear deploy and with this, all three items are connected to each other with some kind of non-visible force.  There is no physical pole or neck between the handset unit and the front wheel or any other component of the MagScooter.  A data and energy connection between all three components makes everything work.  The rider can lean forward against the handset and though the space and orientation will give with the front wheel, the bearer’s weight will be supported seemingly on the handset itself, which is actually receiving a force-feedback response from the front wheel.  Perhaps strong direct-force magnets are involved, or some yet undiscovered energy medium.

When the rider leans forward, they tilt forward on their feet as well which is similar to leaning forward on a bicycle when pedaling up an incline.  Now that the MagScooter is deployed, the rider can use the hand unit to accelerate just like with a normal scooter.  The back wheels come with a small but very powerful motor and battery which can achieve a brisk velocity.

The MagScooter makes it as easy as remembering to pack your favorite book to deliver quick and enjoyable land travel, whether from home to work or on a weekend joyride.