Caveat Cyberpunk!
by Joel Fluker

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
                                                  Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Take the 20th century as the most recently completed era of the advance of civilization. In that period (1900-1999), humans-- who fear and work incessantly to control nature-- killed 200,000,000 of ourselves, something between six and ten times as many as were killed by natural disasters.

Now we move forward in the new millennium as if all were well, as if our exponentially increasing brutality were not a matter of record. We act as if a new day has dawned. Actually, that's not true. We continue to act as we have always acted: blind to our own continuing barbarity.

On whatever lovely, sunny day, or calm starry night that you read this, you sit and think: He's crazy; we're getting closer and closer to paradise on earth. People have thought that, time and again. In 1912, people thought that, yet within a couple of years hundreds of thousands were dying DAILY in the trenches of Europe. Do yourself a favor and read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's gripping, terrifying account of how that happened in spite of everyone's best intentions.

War will come again simply because we have changed nothing, nothing in ourselves. Which means the upward moving curve of death and destruction will also continue. Which means that, come December 31, 2099, survivors will look back on a century whose statistics of belligerence will make that figure of 200,000,000 dead seem almost trivial.

More and better old-style weapons, based on injury to bodies, are in place. They have been joined by as yet unapplied biological and chemical weapons whose day, of course, is coming.

But, if we look at culture anew, evidence exists that we are about to add another dimension to classic human warfare.

1. Beyond the Big
When you think about it, one of the oddest things about the 1980s-1990s boom was this. It was the biggest, richest, longest-lasting boom in world history. The United States of course was at its center. But during the entire boom, 1982-1999, not a single skyscraper of great height was constructed in America.

The rest of the world was going highrise crazy. Thousand-foot-plus buildings sprouted all over Asia. Plans were made even for a few two-thousand-foot structures.

In America? Nothing. Oh, plenty of what these days would have to be called midrises, in the 30- to 60-story range. But no trophy buildings such as we had seen in previous boom eras. The 1920s gave us the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. The 1950s and 1960s gave us the Hancock Tower and the World Trade Center

In the past, if Big Capitalism got a few extra billions in its pockets, it built up. Way up. It was a way of saying, Kilroy Was Here-- Bigtime. Corporations put their visible mark on the skyline. The last American company to do that was Sears, whose 112-story tower in Chicago was completed in1974. (Houston, with its contrarian economy, kept building into the early 1980s, with Chase Tower and Williams Tower [photo]).

In the last 25 years, if you wanted tall you had to go to Shanghai, or Hong Kong, or Guangzhou (!), or Kuala Lumpur (!!!).

Oh, today you hear the occasional American Capitalist making noises about a mile-high building here or there, but nothing ever comes of it after a few initial sound-bites on the evening news.

What does it means, Alfie? Well, hold that thought and let's back up for a moment to the dear dread days of the turn of the millennium.

2. Dreams of Futures Past
One of the odd qualities of our reaction to January 1, 2000, was the way in which tended more to look back than to look forward (see my piece, "Future Tensed," in Magellan's Log 9). We tended more to glory in how far we had come. Big media reports about the glorious future that surely is right around the corner were few.

This was in marked contrast to the end of the 19th century, which spawned a whole industry of recurrent "world's fairs" as a venue for celebrating the glorious technological future. The focus on things to come became so intense that it created a whole new sub-genre of literature (science-fiction) and eventually a new academic discipline (future studies).

At the end of 1999, as I wrote, I was puzzled by the way we seemed to be turning away from thinking about the future. Now, with a bit more perspective, perhaps we can see more clearly what was going on.

The failure to splurge on new, very tall trophy buildings during the bull market is an important clue, indicating that in countries at the leading edge of cultural development, a true sea-change was occurring:

We were moving from immersion in the material world ("my building is bigger than yours!") to what is popularly called the cyber world ("my processor is faster than yours!", or maybe: "my memory is bigger than yours"). From physical reality to psychic reality.

You know where the Empire State Building is. If I want to visit it, you can give me directions and I can find and photograph it and buy souvenirs.

But where, please, is the Internet? Oh sure, it has outward and visible material signs that I can call up on my computer. But where, precisely, is it?

Past capitalist winners created cloud-touching monuments that we could all see and admire and be proud of. But where, please, is the evidence of Bill Gates's meta-Croesus wealth?

As January 1, 2000, approached we didn't celebrate the possible wonders of the coming future because we were already immersed in it. Instead, we delighted in reviewing the wonderfully quaint industrial and pre-industrial past. Like so many anthropologists visiting an Amazon tribe, we couldn't get enough of the primitive stories. They were so intriguing, so charming, so childlike.

Who needs a Chrysler Building when you've got the whole world at your fingertips? Who needs an Empire State Building when your logo is in front of a billion eyes every minute of every day?

And there's the key. After a long time of wallowing in the mire of the physical universe, we were just plain worn out and fed up with the recalcitrant predictability of m-a-t-t-e-r. Computers had opened a door to a world of TOTAL control (except of course for the occasional crash): You tell this data-bit to go there and wait and then go elsewhere, and it, by God, does what you tell it to. Every time. Well, almost every time.

Whoa! Now there's a world after all our playful but controlling hearts!

On December 31, 1999, there were no huge world's fairs, no huge artists' conceptions of things (except of course for the British, charmingly retro as ever, with their disastrous "Millennium Dome") to come because we were busy creating a new VIRTUAL world future, the likes of which nobody had seen or even thought about before. That's where our interest, our passion, and indeed our money was.

Which is why the Y2K bug, which seemed to threaten everything became top priority for a while. We didn't know what the cyber-future would look like but we knew we really, really wanted it and we would do anything to eliminate a possible threat to its earliest realization. Bye-bye, Y2K bug.

3. Dreams of Future Futures
Oh, we knew there was cause for concern as we hurtled toward this ill-sketched but no doubt glorious future.

Stories, some old and some new, lurked around the edges of consciousness. There was Frankenstein and those damn torch-bearing peasants (Seattle-WTO, anyone?). There was HAL 9000 and Dave Bowman patiently unplugging his golden modules (Karpov's bitter paranoia after defeat by Deep Blue). And there were dystopias aplenty (from Blade Runner to Neal Stephenson and beyond).

Those warnings were of little concern. If you wanted to see-- and be reassured about the coming future paradise, all you had to do was open the latest issue of Wired. Or just get online, fer chrissake, you dope! Or, for a more touchy-feely (or, as they say at the M.I.T. Media Labs, "haptic") experience, go wander the aisles at CompUSA.

THERE was the future on December 31, 1999. Not in the pages of the Times. Not on TV. And that's where it still is.

We're still, in spite of the little loss of $3 trillion via NASDAQ, agog, entranced, intoxicated from this planet-enveloping fog of future THINGS, super-gadgets which, if we can just get them all wired up and working at the same time with enough bandwidth are going to tell us where we are, how we are, what we are, and (pace, Ray Kurzweil) WHO we are.

The wired and wireless planet: that's OUR vision of the future. That's why there were no Buck Rogers predictions at the turn of the millennium. We were already living the cyber-future, or at least a tiny, low bandwidth version of it, and we could it all see it coming so clearly that we didn't need anybody (aside from the irrepressible cheerleaders at Wired) to tell us about it.

4. Blinded by the Pixels
Now, we look back at the imagined futures limned by thinkers and prophets and dreamers at the dawn of the 20th century. At best, we find small hints of the world as it actually developed. Otherwise, those old "futuristic" images seem at best quaint and at worst dangerously naive.

Nowhere in them do we find the slightest hint of a cemetery big enough to hold the 200,000,000 bodies, the victims of human violence in that futuristic paradise.

Here we sit, early in the new millennium, gliding smoothly forward on the slick cum our own futuristic wet-dreams. More bandwidth! More gigahertz! More resolution! More megabytes! Blithely ignoring-- just as those people a hundred years ago did-- the awful continuing reality of human violence.

Enraptured by the beauty of cyber-vision, we forget body reality. The curve of war deaths from 5,000 BCE to 1999 CE is geometric. What least shred of evidence is there, in the glorious new cyber-future, to indicate that the curve will not continue its devastating upward motion?

I look everywhere and can find no such evidence. None. Finding, on the contrary, abundant evidence that in fact nothing significant has changed. Greed? Supply your own examples. Weapons of mass destruction? The old ones are still there and we're adding new ones daily. Inequality (the true seed of conflict)? The greatest bull market in history increased the unequal distribution of wealth by several orders of magnitude.

Yes, we laid a foundation in the 1990s for a wonderful world of information-flow and information access: a true human Eden for a new age. But, alas, alas, alas, we failed to note that the old foundation of violence was still solidly in place and was being reinforced and added to.

Not to mention that the whole shebang is still being governed by the same old confederacy of dunces.

Caveat cyberpunk.

END

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