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Douglas Coupland: 'I miss my pre-internet brain'
The internet has made it possible to find the answer to almost any question within seconds. But at what cost?
9:00AM
BST 14 Sep 2014
The
shuttle bus from the local hotel drops me off outside what appears to be an
architecturally unmodified early Eighties facility for making robot housewives.
But I’m actually standing in front of Bell Laboratories – Bell Labs, the
research and development arm of the telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent.
A sprawling collection of brick buildings the colour of a wet golden Labrador,
Bell Labs stands in the centre of suburban New Jersey’s belt of once-utopian
corporate campuses that began springing up in the Fifties, the acme of the
military industrial complex era.
I’m
discombobulated this morning: I forgot my iPhone, so have that homesick,
disconnected feeling you get when you realise you’re phoneless. I’m also
jet-lagged and I’m concerned because the date on the shuttle bus’s dashboard
clock reminded me that it’s already February. Time is moving too quickly these
days – and yet, at the same time, it’s moving too slowly. And it’s not just
that I’m growing older. Quite simply, my brain no longer feels the way it used
to; my sense of time is distinctly different from what it once was, and I miss
my pre-internet brain. The internet has burrowed inside my head and laid eggs,
and it feels as though they’re all hatching.
Welcome
to the early 21st century, a world where the future somehow feels like…
homework.
What’s
really happening is that, after more than 10,000 hours of exposure to the
internet and digital technologies such as my iPhone, my brain has been rewired
– or, rather, it has rewired itself. Science has a name for this process: Hebb’s
Law. When neurons fire together, they wire together. It’s no coincidence that
the 10,000-hour rule has recently entered our culture’s popular imagination,
explaining to us that after doing something for 10,000 hours, you become an
expert at it, because that’s how much time your brain needs to fully rewire
itself to adapt to a new medium.
Ask
yourself if you’ve spent 10,000 hours on the internet, then think about your
own brain. It’s clear there’s a new neural reality. If you’re in doubt, look at
people younger than you. Do they interact with other people and the world
differently from the way you did when you were their age? Of course they do.
So, sometime between then and now, big changes have occurred. Our attention
spans are collapsing: we want movies; we want music; we want unfiltered
information. We want season four of Dexter. And we want it all now.
I
think of this while watching Bell Labs workers bustle into the building.
They’re flowing up mainly from the lower parking lot where they parked a fleet
of silver, white and black sedans. Many are carrying briefcases and messenger
bags containing laptops – these days you bring your own computer to work.
I
enter through gold-tinted glass doors on the west side of the building, and the
early Eighties fantasia continues. The high-ceilinged concrete space is filled
with display cases filled with artefacts filled with astonishing significance:
the world’s first transistor (1947); the world’s first laser (1957); a replica
of the world’s first satellite (1961). A plasma television displays in real
time the current number of patents generated by the building’s occupants:
29,002 as of this morning.
Most
of us have never heard of Alcatel-Lucent but, essentially, it builds and
maintains a huge chunk of the internet. The company was formed in 2006 by the
€25 billion merger of France’s Alcatel and the American firm Lucent
Technologies. It employs 80,000 people in 130 countries and has annual revenue
of €16 billion. Alcatel-Lucent helps us transmit our voices, our movies and our
data between landlines, mobile devices and the internet.
In
this sense, it’s a platform company: it doesn’t provide content, it provides
channels. You likely interact with Alcatel-Lucent hundreds of times a day
without knowing it.
Alcatel
is an embodiment of the new Western neural condition, and at the same time is
its mirror. It is transnational, decentralised and emotionally neutral. It
feeds on information, has a perpetual urge to upgrade and is always
dissatisfied with the present. It exists purely to go forward. It demands and
fosters ever more speed; ever more information saturation; and, especially,
ever more networks.
In
the old days, people communicated across distances with church bells or sent
each other paper missives by way of a postal service; if the need was urgent,
there was the telegram, which still required a person to bring the message to
your door. These days, we do it with networks. A network is not something you
buy in a box. It is a sprawling, messy, planetary machine with countless
interdependent parts. There’s wire and fibre to carry traffic – enough optical
fibre has been laid to circle the globe 11,000 times – and there’s an
astonishing amount of highly unglamorous equipment and devices such as
switches, routers and satellites overseen by governments and regulatory bodies
– all so you can look up the lyrics to Bon Jovi songs any time you want and
then buy novelty smartphone ringtones on impulse.
Of
course, a global network is not something out of science fiction that would run
forever if people disappeared from the planet. The network needs millions of
people to define it, build it, maintain it, manage it and adapt it to meet the
ever-morphing demands of seven billion human beings – a number that is only
growing.
Fleetingly,
I wonder if the Bell Labs building has free Wi-Fi, but I wonder that wherever I
go now.
The
glamorous Deb McGregor takes me on an elevator from the cafeteria to a
fourth-floor office that’s a flawless hybrid of neutrality and casual neglect.
I’m gratified to find out that this office does not belong to Markus Hofmann,
head of Bell Labs Research. Hofmann is a cheerful man in his late fifties who
tells me the office we’re in belongs to nobody. “We don’t really go for offices
here in Bell Labs admin. Your office is basically wherever you are,” he says.
“We use whatever one is empty.”
Hofmann,
still a competitive water polo player, has spent 13 years at Bell Labs. He
hails from Germany and has a PhD in computer engineering and a master’s in
computer science, both from the University of Karlsruhe. He is highly involved
with the IEEE (pronounced I-triple-E, the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers), a professional technological association headquartered
in New York City.
He
looks like a school principal who’d discipline you without resorting to
corporal punishment, and his eyes tell me that, at any given moment, he’s
probably figuring out the natural logarithm of his Visa card number or what his
lunch might look like connected by strings into the fifth and/or sixth
dimensions.
Hofmann
tells me that the company’s administration practises what it preaches. “We
create global communication systems, and we use all of them ourselves.” I
mention that the nomadic existence of the Alca-Loo staffer is certainly
different from Microsoft’s 80-hour-a-week staff being ball-and-chained to a
Douglas fir tree in Washington State. Hofmann smiles. I look at the desk, where
I notice a Trump Taj Mahal pen that reminds me I’m in New Jersey. I ask Hofmann
what Bell Labs is currently working on and how it fits into Alcatel-Lucent.
“Bell
Labs is a toolbox. Every day we ask ourselves: ‘What do we want to build?’ And
we can ask this knowing that what we build will have real-world deployment
through Alcatel-Lucent.”
Genuine
fun fact: in 1992 when I handed in a manuscript, I was reprimanded by the
editor for using a fax as part of the plot. “Not everyone can afford a fax
machine, and including it here seems elitist and unfair to readers who can’t be
expected to either afford or understand what a fax machine is.” In general, I
try to include up-to-date technology in novels. Rather than dating them, it
time codes them. People picking up, say, Microserfs two decades later enjoy the
book for its tech fidelity as for anything else.
I
ask Hofmann what he thinks the long-term effect of access to so much
information is going to be. “Currently, all Bell Labs staff members remember
the pre-digital world; our ideal remains a hand-held plus a pen and paper. But
that’s us. Obviously, we’re seeing more and more smart young people absorbing
massive amounts of information, and we’re unsure what the long-term effects
will be.”
I
mention my theory of “omniscience fatigue”. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, for
the first time in the history of humanity, it’s possible to find the answer to
almost any question, and the net effect of this is that information has become
slightly boring. (We have to face the fact that God might actually be bored by
knowing all the answers to everything.)
Hofmann
gives a dry chuckle. “We need deep, solid foundations and deep thinking to
reach our next human level,” he says. “Yet time is now the ultimate
consideration. You can’t go deep and solid without giving ideas time. But
manufacturing competition is crazy, and we have such quick feedback now.”
This
schizoid new future doesn’t seem to disturb Hofmann. His enthusiasm says he’s
more than willing to face it head-on.
One
can look back on the print era and witness true poignancy: readers the world
over were determined to see their lives as stories, when, in fact, books are a
specific invention that creates a specific mindset. Most people can’t find the
larger story in their lives. Born, grew up, had kids, maybe, and died… what
kind of story is that? There’s a maxim in the world of urban planning that if
you let your city be planned by bakers, you will end up with a city of
bakeries. If you have a culture whose brains are “planned” by books, you’ll
have a citizenry who want their lives to be book-like. If you have a culture
whose brains are “planned” by digital culture and internet browsing, you’ll
have a citizenry who want their lives to be simultaneous, fluid, ready to jump
from link to link – a society that assumes that knowledge is there for the
asking when you need it. This is a very different society from one peopled by
book readers.
Yet
the residual need for one’s life to be a story persists from the print era,
especially in people born before 1970. Print-era holdouts see the non-linear
children of the web as shallow and emotionally impoverished. Young people “born
digital”, with no vested emotional engagement with books, view print holdouts
as souls adrift in a useless sea of nostalgia.
This
is an edited extract from Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent,
published by Visual Editions.
===========================================Good Netiquette And A Green Internet To All!
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