The Unbearable Lightness of Cyberspace

Frederick Turner

 "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."--Henry David Thoreau

 Thoreau's skepticism about the new electronic technology of the nineteenth century is not a Luddite rejection of progress.  Thoreau, a robust and self-confessed lover of the present, was a friend of technology and communication, and his remark is meant to help rather than frustrate them.   It contains two implicit questions about the nature of communication, which might well be worth bearing in mind as we consider the building of the information superhighway, the equivalent of the telegraph in our own times.  One question concerns transmitters and receivers of information: what counts as a significant communicator?   The other question concerns the information itself: what counts as a significant message?

 Boosters of the new communications and information technology like Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte tend toward the apocalyptic.  They praise its speed, ease, cheapness, volume, accessibility, flexibility, and egalitarianism, and suggest that once some quantitative threshold of realtime information exchange is crossed, something akin to a global brain will emerge, using individual terminals as neurons to carry thoughts perceived as such only by the transcendent unity of the worldbrain itself.  This is an attractive idea; but on closer examination it may not be as exciting as it sounds.  For such collective brains already exist, and have existed for thousands of years, albeit on a smaller scale and at a much slower rate of action.  What else is a culture, a language-community, the continuing practice of a natural language, but a sort of super-brain?  The disciplines of the humanities have been studying these brains since the Renaissance. Indeed, sailing ships and mule trains and semaphore and even telegraphy do not make very fast synapses, certainly not as quick as fiber optic landlines or satellite fax.  But in slow motion public opinion was formed, fragments of melody infected whole continental populations, visual styles and fashions replaced each other, scientific knowledge propagated itself, religions fired the collective spiritual imagination.   

And there may even have been advantages in the viscosity, the molasses-slow movement of collective thought along the sea-lanes and silk routes of the old world.  The very difficulty and expense of communication, the resistance of relatively isolated communities to fresh ideas, would have insured that the ideas that did win acceptance had some staying power, memorability, depth, and breadth of application.  If one must entrust to an expensive, slow, and risky camel-caravan the bundle of meaning one wishes to send, one will make sure that it is worth the trouble. 

 The advantages of our information superhighway cited by its enthusiasts can be summed up in three words: transparency, volume, and speed.  They in turn boil down to one deep metaphor, the medium of the technology itself: light.  The internet message is light.  It is light in that it does not get in its own way and thus huge volumes of information can be packed into a short burst, it is light in that it can move only where it is not resisted by an opaque body that casts a shadow, it is light in that it weighs next to nothing, it is light in that it is faster than anything else in the universe.  I wish to argue that without the opposites of lightness, in a complementary tension with the cited advantages, no significant message can be sent or received.   I shall argue that significance, or importance as Thoreau puts it, comes from the tension between transparency, volume, and speed on one hand, and their opposites--opacity, selectiveness, and mass--on the other.

 Two anecdotes may help explain what I mean.  I was talking recently to a friend who had just got an email message from an anonymous sender: "Have a happy Thanksgiving."  It annoyed my friend; it meant only the bother of having to read and erase it.  The message cost nothing to send, and without an identification of its author was meaningless.  Doubtless it had been sent out to thousands or even millions of victims, and had been received by them--or at least by their computers--a fraction of a second later.  It was a supremely light message.  If one's life were made up of such messages, being would, in the words of Milan Kundera, indeed be characterized by an unbearable lightness.  The other anecdote is my own; a friend, trying to convince me to activate my email address, pointed out that the advantage of email was that by convention there was no obligation to reply.  This for a moment seemed to me to be a convincing persuasion: I am overwhelmed by the volume of my ordinary mail, and my otherwise happy and fulfilling life is shadowed always by the monstrous guilt of the unanswered letters piled up on my desk and study floor.  Wouldn't it be lovely not to have to reciprocate?  But then the  question occurred to me that if it did not require a reply, how could the message have any importance? 

 So I returned to Thoreau's question.  What makes a message important?  One part of the answer is that it has a relevant sender and a relevant recipient.  The "Happy Thanksgiving" message was meaningless because it had neither.  But what constitutes a relevant sender and receiver?  The answer is one of the opposites of light: darkness, or opacity.  The sender of a message must be opaque; he cannot be transparent, for then he cannot be an authentic and original source of light.  If he is like glass--untainted silicon glass, let us say, the raw material of the computer chip--the only light that comes from him must have come from somewhere else, and he is merely the conduit or window through which the light passes.  He is not a significant sender, but only a medium.  Paradoxically, it is only the darkness in him, the opacity which resists the passage of light through him, that makes him an authentic source of light.  Even the chip in his computer is useful only in that it is a semiconductor, not just a conductor, of electric charge.

 But this was not all, I meditated.  Darkness was, if anything, an even more important qualification of the receiver of the message.  For without an opaque barrier to arrest the passage of the information, it would simply continue on in a bright, invisible beam at lightspeed toward the edge of the universe.  A genuine receiver of a message must get in the way of the information, stop it, cast a shadow, absorb it and transform it in his own unique and characteristic fashion.  And this process is not efficient; it is effective precisely to the extent that it is not efficient.  The brain registers and remembers what it receives as a delicate and complex scarring, a thickening of synaptic spurs and a broadening and thinning of the synaptic cleft.  To hold music, a CD disk must be burned with laser holes; the light that inscribes it must be arrested and transformed by its arrest into violent heat and mechanical damage to the disk's surface.  Presently the wizards of computer memory are playing with ways to store trillions of bits of information in a solid three-dimensional chunk of crystal, accessed by modulated beams of optical energy.  It is only to the extent that the light can be made to change the light-transmitting properties of the crystal, that the crystal can hold its information; what makes it a good transmitter makes it a poor rememberer.  Finally, it takes an eye to see: it is the retina, the "net" of the eye's inside surface, the opaque pigment of the retinal neurons, that traps the light.  And even these neurons do not truly see, for they are designed to transmit a faithful message.  It is only when the original light energy is translated, corralled, and cut off from all escape in the brain's labyrinth, that it is seen.

 Thus part of the solution to Thoreau's problem of how to make a messge important enough to be worth sending and hearing is opacity.  We need opaque senders and receivers; only thus can the splendid transparency, that internet enthusiasts like to praise, can possess any value.  And what is opacity, to explain the metaphor?  Opacity is the formed character and personal resistances of the sender and receiver.  It is the inherited, refractory nature of their genetic nature, activated by a family and school environment that can potentiate their inborn talents; the burned-in skills, knowledges, prejudices, habits, virtues, loyalties of their education and self-formation; the always tragic history of their personal identity.  Once Maine and Texas have a nature and a history, they may have something to say to each other.

 The second great advantage claimed for the new information technology by its admirers is its volume.  Light, the medium of its communication and storage system, takes up no space and cannot get in its own way.  Every year or two the BIPS, baud rates, FLOPS, RAM and disk memory capacity are doubled, and information pours through the Web like water through a firehose.  But again volume is no virtue in itself.  Standing in Grand Central Station I can hear a thousand conversations, but can attend to none.  Michael Polanyi rightly said that to attend to something, one must attend from everything else.  In the first heady days of the Net, when it was DARPANET and then ARPANET, its participants were self-selected, by their very access to the system, for imagination, technological intelligence, and proven professional responsibility.  Now the Net is open to all and is full of the braying of electronic graffiti artists and ego therapy.   Imagine a magazine with enormous circulation, no price, an instantaneous publication cycle, and no editors; what a temptation it would be for bores, blowhards, nags, ideologues, and foulmouths.  However easy it may be to riffle through the pages, finding the nuggets worth reading is increasingly like the task of the poor wretch who must comb the randomly typed gibberish of the proverbial thousand monkeys for the proverbial works of Shakespeare. 

Together with volume must come selection.  Selection involves prioritizing, hierarchizing, rejection--in a word, editing.  There can be no millennium of infinite communication; we are thrown back on the old arduous task of judgement and discrimination.  There must be a center where the ideas are most coherent, the information most relevant, the moral content most conducive to happiness and success, the aesthetic experience most valuable, the personal contact most deeply civilized and human.  And there must be margins to which the less coherent, relevant, valuable and human is consigned.  It is not a matter of censorship--one cannot abolish trash, and to attempt to do so is self defeating.  But one can separate the trash from the real goods, so that the trash is labelled by itself and thus marked so that one can avoid it.  Certainly there is the old political problem of who gets to be the gatekeepers.  But it is no tyranny that there are preferred editors, as long as none is denied the freedom of the press.  Let this be a call for a poetics of the net, for a general theory of information architecture, for a renewal of the quest for excellence of expression. 

 And let us be aware that such a poetics must involve a rejection of the anti-hierarchical ideas of the postmodern academy.  Deconstruction, radical feminism, multiculturalism, cultural politics are attempts at a non-discriminatory mode of thought, and as such are the chief obstacles in the way of progress in the new information technology.  Discrimination is the very function of the sensory cortex, and is the only beginning of any real grasp on the world.  Half of the brain's connections are inhibitory in function; the brain works only because half of it is telling itself to shut up, to pay no attention, to forget.  If, like Borges' fictional character Funes the Memorious, we had to remember everything--the only way we could avoid being discriminatory in our perception--we would have to carry our cortex around in a wheelbarrow, and even so could live only a few months before we ran out of memory capacity.  The monotremes, those strange furry warm-blooded duckbilled egg-layers that bridge the gap between the birds and the mammals, do not dream.  Dreaming is the way we forget the day's events, synopsize and abstract and edit them in the light of past experience, and clear the way for the next day.  The spiny echidna, a monotreme, has a gigantic forebrain, remembers everything, and is very stupid.

Speed is perhaps the most vaunted of the advantages of the new communications technology.  But again mere speed is no virtue in itself.  The universe is full of useless "trash" light whizzing through space at 186,000 miles per second and having no effect on  anything whatsoever.  Light can move so fast because it is, well, light, if I may be forgiven the pun.  It weighs next to nothing.  This is why it can stop so easily, and turn on a dime (with a mirror or a lens).  But anything that can turn or stop so fast is by definition inconsequential; it has no consequence, no consequences.  It has no gravitas, no seriousness.  It makes no difference.  For something fast to make a difference it must also have mass, as the laws of motion tell us: momentum is velocity times mass.  And momentum is what is of moment, what counts, what makes a difference.  Weighty matters do not easily turn on a dime, and when they do, large changes are made in the world around them.  Thus information transfers that are merely fast do not necessarily amount to anything.  We need to cultivate the mass and weight of what we send and receive.  And what is this heaviness that is so far somewhat lacking in the Net and that needs to be developed?  I think it is the weight of beauty, the dense involution of poetry and art. 

 Another way of putting this is that the speed of telecommunications has to be thickened and ballasted by significant time; time and matter are deeply connected, as the terms "consequence" and "moment," which we found necessary to talk about the benefits of mass, might suggest.  Light is timeless.  A photon is identical at the beginning of its million light year journey and at its end; it experiences no time, and thus undergoes no time.  Light knotted up into itself is matter, which has a more complex experience of time; and matter knotted up into itself in the self-recording helix of DNA has a more complex temporal existence still.  We, who are life knotted into self-awareness, so that we write and read essays about our own modes of communication, are dense and massive concentrations of time.  We need dream and downtime to thicken the brew of our souls.  We need telecommunications that enrich rather than impoverish the quality of time; and we must go no further than the experience of a great nineteenth century novel, a Beethoven symphony, a Rembrandt to know what "enriched time" means.  The way we complicate and thicken time is through story; narrative; whether as suspenseful fictions or as the tragicomedy of personal and national history.

 Why, then, bother perfecting the electronic telepresence, boosting the baud rate of the fiber optics, refining the resolution of the display, jacking cyberspace more and more subtly into our brains?  Why spend billions to create the hardware for interactive multimedia CD games and virtual reality systems when it costs you only a thousand dollars to go to Europe by old-fashioned jet plane, and experience a unique moment in a human life--your own--with a sensory verisimilitude that is overwhelming?  Why have friendships or love affairs on the internet when you can do it "in person," as we say--that is, in the amazing mask of our own faces and bodies?  Maybe we can save some time by doing it instantaneously, but aren't we all honestly living too fast already?

 There is, I believe, a good answer to these Luddite-sounding questions.  We are embarked now on a gigantic task of reconstructing the world.  Until the birth of civilization we experienced the world once-born and in first rehearsal.  What is happening now is a sort of immense retrofitting or retrodesigning of everything we are, as when the clever pirates of a corporation take its rival's product apart and design their own version, carefully skirting the patent laws and emulating rather than imitating the look and feel of the original.  Our scientific civilization is no longer content just to look at the world from the outside and make notes.  The test of knowing a thing is now increasingly whether we can make one.  This gigantic project provides a goal and reference point which is driving us all toward a new simplification in our worldview, one whose interdisciplinary unity will soon enable some Dante or Shakespeare to put the whole world on a single poetic stage.  We are bent on making a simulation of the world that is indistinguishable from the original.  When we have done so--if it can be done--we will be just at the very beginning, the dawn, of human history: we will then finally be acting as the principals rather than as the agents or puppets of our evolutionary past. 

 Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living; Nietzsche replied that the unlived life is not worth examining.  Both were right: we need to multiply life by itself, square it, cube it, raise it to a higher power, to really suck out its marrow.  For perhaps the uniquely human knack is to live iteratively, for our mental and sensory life to be tangled into a rich knot of feedback, what we call consciousness.  Evolution is biological iteration, the dizzy repeated cycling through variation, selection, and genetic inheritance.  Human cultural existence is an enormously faster cycling through innovation, criticism, and tradition, conducted at the conscious level.  And it has already been going on for a long time.  For after all, reconstructing the world is exactly what the arts do.  When we come out of an art gallery, we see with a strange naked directness--because we see twice--the street, the sky, the faces.  The Impressionists made us retrace the very work of the optic nerve and visual cortex, made us really inhabit what we saw.  When we dine (rather than feed), we authentically eat what we eat, it becomes part of us experientially, not just chemically.  Music retrofits sound with its own melody.  Drama makes us taste the souls of our fellow-humans directly, membrane to membrane.  Poetry is a way of making us experience our own experience--making us notice it.  This second-born existence is not the linear result of the sensorium's efficient work, as it is with a lower animal.  It is nonlinear, chaotic, unpredictable, generating new emergent forms of order.  Its "strange attractors" have an infinite fractal depth. 

 What, then, does the new electronic technology require to become a valuable addition to the human world?  In addition to the virtues of lightness--transparency, volume, speed--it needs the virtues of heaviness and darkness--opacity, selectiveness, mass and time.  It needs communicators who are educated in the traditional humanities and sciences, who have a "dark" inner process of moral experience and decision, and who thus have something to say to each other.  It needs editors, and a flexible self-organizing hierarchy of high-value center and low-value margin.  And it needs the weightiness and momentum of artistic form and story.  Maine and Texas may well have something to communicate over the Net; but that something is a function of their own darkness and weight, and the darkness and weight of their message, as well as of the lightness and speed of the communications technology.

 Cyberspace is just one more way in which we are creating a feedback loop in our experience.  It is a re-cognizing of our lives, a recognizing what was always there but which we could not see because it was staring us in the face.  Virtual reality is a tutorial in appreciating the depth of real experience.  The intense friendships of the Net are teaching us again what the letter-writing Victorians knew well, the addictiveness of another person's inner being.  The new technology is a rewiring, a regrafting, of the human spirit into the body of the world. The end of all our exploring, as T. S. Eliot said, is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.