Reading with a Vingeance

I am almost finished the latest novel by one of the best sci-fi writers working today, Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. It's not bad--but I like it more as a view of how society will be changed by technology in the next 20 years than as a gripping drama. Admittedly, there is not much plot in the book (and what there is seems kind of half-baked), so once the novelty of the "new world" wears off, it's kind of slow-going, but I think it's worthwhile just for Vinge's view of the future and the future of media.

I've only read one other book by Vinge (the space epic A Deepness in the Sky, which was fantastic and highly recommended--it won the Hugo for Best Novel), but he is one of the biggest proponents of the "singularity," or the notion that we are quickly reaching the point where technological progress and change occur faster than our ability to understand it. Vinge taught computer science for years at U.C. San Diego and he is a popular speaker and writer, both in the areas of science fact and science fiction.

More rambling below the fold.


In the 2025, says the book, most people (especially young people) are "wearing"; that is, their computers are woven into the clothes they wear and wirelessly connect to displays embedded in contact lenses. Subtle tics, body movements, and eye movements control menu items and commands as well as virtual keyboards. Thus, users can--and almost always do--create virtual environments for themselves, so you can give any physical space whatever characteristics you like. More importantly, wireless Internet connectivity is ubiquitous, and people don't so much hang out physically with each other, but appear to each other in a way that is like a cross between virtual reality and Instant Messaging. That is, people pop virtually into the rooms of others--and can have whatever physical appearance they like. (Surprisingly, the book is entirely unbawdy. Even Ray Kurzweil has speculated about naughty matters in the age of the singularity.) People communicate through silent messaging, or a way of using a virtual keyboard to tap out messages meant for only one person, and those messages appear in big yellow letters in the receiver's field of vision.

More importantly, there is little real privacy, at least for people who are wearing. Sure, you can "go offline"--that is, take off your wearable--but when you're on, you're open to everyone, depending on how you have your security set. People can and do keep tabs on each other, often without the other knowing it, and people often pose as other people. Malware is abundant, and sometimes a person has to "fry-clean" their wearable.

Anyway, there's a lot more to it, but that's the general gist. What I like about the book is that Vince doesn't think all of this is wonderful. The general plot of the book hinges on the "bad guys" taking advantage of modern technology for nefarious purposes.

Now, I don't agree with a lot of this vision, but I do think wearable computer technology will be available (very primitive versions already exist) and certainly the constant connectivity is coming--assuming it's not here already. It's amazing (and often frightening) how much of our working and non-working lives are already conducted through Instant Messaging--or at the very least through e-mail. Taking it one or two steps further really doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me. Picking a VR avatar really isn't all that different from having a personal icon in AIM or Skype or whatever. Whether things in the real world will actually be even further along by 2025 is a perfectly fair question.

However, one of the major points of the book is related to one that I always use when I write or give talks about media and the future: people of my generation (late 30s) and older are not the future, nor are we going to be the ones who decide how technology and media will change. It's the kids--with their hula hoops, and their rock-n'roll, and their fax machines. In the book, the main character is a 70-year-old poet (who thus would have been in his 40s in the year 2000) who is recovering from Alzheimer's (which was just recently curable at the time the book is set). As a result (and I think this is a good plot device to ease us into Vinge's world without a lot of tedious exposition), the world he remembers is pretty much our world and thus he has to go about getting caught up on with new technology. (Amusingly, his 13-year-old granddaughter makes fun of his electronic paper as old-fashioned.) As he takes adult classes at a local high school, he hangs out with the kids--and thus we see how they are immersed in all of this stuff while some of the older folks use what they have to, but treat it all rather tentatively (sound familiar?).

There's also a fair amount about a nefarious plot by a Google-like company to digitize then destroy all the print books, which had been rendered superfluous by all the online content. While I think there's a certain legitimacy to the basic idea, the way it was handled in the book just seemed really dorky to me. (Maybe it will make more sense when I finish it.)

Some readers have complained (at least in the Amazon comments) that the vision of the future isn't all that different from today--and there is a point there. But think about 20 years ago (1986), the technologies that existed at the time, and the level at which they were used. There were computers--almost all my friends had a Commodore 64 or something similar, and in college the computer center had PCs or PC clones that ran DOS (I had a Mac--I've never changed). The Internet and e-mail existed, but were only used in government and academia. A friend of mine in high school had a summer job (for a computer company) around that time that gave him access to online message boards and he used to "IM" or e-mail a small cadre of connected friends. The cellphone was proposed as long ago as 1947, and the FCC approved cellular communications in 1982. The first cellular network was launched in 1983. Car phones have existed for years (they were a status symbol in L.A. long before cellphones became popular). It's one thing to have a technology in place, but quite another to get it to the point where it is highly usable (the exception being cellphones--they've never become usable), commercializable, and, more importantly, widely accepted and popular.

Anyway, I recommend the book more as a think piece about how technology and culture change each other. Half the fun, actually, is quibbling over the details or envisioning an alternate future. Or blogging at great length about it...