The new bionic hand is impressive. The £8,500 prosthetic, unveiled today by British inventors, is extremely versatile: it can point, grip, pick up small objects with precision and perform the ‘key’ operation wherein the thumb is pressed against the index finger in order to turn a key or hold a plate. A caption to the graphics supporting the report in The Independent points out that the hand can also hold a credit card
The scientists are missing something here – if it can hold a credit card, could they not design one that can only hold a credit card? And if that were feasible – and it doesn’t seem that hard but then I’m not a prostheticist – could not a range of prosthetics be produced that would oblige the wearer to behave in socially constructive ways? A pair of bionic legs, for example, that will only walk to work then go to the shops. A set of bionic eyes that will transport to the visual cortex a landscape devoid of CCTV cameras. The mind boggles.
Rather than piss about with electronic monitoring via anklets and transponders, the feet of offenders could be amputated and replaced with feet that stayed at home.
The Guardian Media 100 is a list (published July 9, 2007) of the most influential media figures in Britain. At the top is Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google ($3.1 bn profit last year). In the photo accompanying his entry Schmidt sits at a table flanked by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Schmidt is in shirtsleeves and a tie while the other two wear black tee-shirts. The table is made of black glass or something like that and on it are arranged a number of figures and objects made from brightly coloured Lego bricks. The reflectiveness of the glass creates an inverted image of the scene so that everything seen is doubled.
One can discern among the Lego items some funny, smiley little men, a red and white panda, a steam engine and a clutter of what look like chickens or ducks. The Google founders are smiling too but absorbed in moving the Lego objects around. Eric Schmidt is not touching any plastic but he has a benign, amused and possibly hesitant expression. There might even be a hint of disgust there but this would be inappropriate.
Clearly the photographer has had an ‘idea’ for the setup and it has not been resisted by the subjects. But why? Why the imagery of the nursery? Do we believe that these guys are just big babies?
Maybe they are. The West Coast digital scene has, from its earliest days, had one foot in the playroom and the other in the business of creating order. The original Apple guys, Jobs and Wozniak, famously built the prototype in Jobs’ bedroom and garage thereby distancing themselves from the suits in corporate computing and aligning themselves with a notion of creativity as something that happens in a young man’s special place. The pioneers saw no basic antipathy between the digit and the plaything and wrested the computer from its chaste redoubt in the belly of IBM.
Smiley faces beamed from screens, in black on white, and the cute little beige box boinged, gonged or beeped when it wanted you. Young men, already engrossed in the stark facticity of line command PCs, were alerted to a new style of playfulness at odds with the visually drab medium of the Bulletin Board System (BBS). They didn’t flock to buy the box in 1984 but a novel quality, toyness, was detectable in the new machines’ potential for rendering graphics.
The computer as image generator, the programmer as manipulator of its graphical user interface. The images were crude but they sucked harder than text. Not only did they compel more compellingly, they made the screen into a window rather than a chalk board. Five months after the release of the 128K Macintosh, William Gibson published ‘Neuromancer’, a science fiction novel, providing a set of proposals that cast the computer as builder of virtual universes and the user as their author and explorer. The latter would connect his cortex to virtuality by means of an umbilical cable leading from the computer directly to a jackpoint in his neck.
Despite Gibson’s noir tastes, the cyberspaces thus accessed were boxfresh and edenic, they contained conflicts that were instantly neutralisable (you simply pulled the plug out ) and their microbes were, at the end of the day, only ones and zeroes. Toyland was open.
Anxious to be seen as hip while emerging into public consciousness from the worlds of code and control, the designers and programmers and money people all eschewed the pallor and asexuality of hackers and caffeinated kids and plumped for bean sprouts in gaily coloured corporate campus cafeterias whilst sporting chinos and deckshoe leisurewear. Nerd was the new black and then, a few decades later, primary were the new colours of the Google logo.
Given the occult association between digits and toys, is it possible that, in certain digital empires, there may emerge a sensibility so shot through with embedded childishness that the amassing of private data and the capitulation to censorious father figures will be seen just as a game, like Hide and Seek, Spies or Piggy in the Middle?
I’m in a sunny park with 20 minutes to spare. A local primary school is holding its Sports Day a hundred yards (make that metres) away. I sit down on the grass and idly watch the action. Much of it is team stuff with balls and bean bags and, given that my own children are not involved, I’m not particularly interested. Then I notice that a race has started: boys and girls aged about six or seven are trotting round a pegged-out track. At the front of the pack, at least 10 metres in the lead, is a boy, small compared to his fellows, running well, with economic armswings, his gaze trained on the grass a few feet ahead of him. I tell myself that the children are probably running a 220 (whatever that is in metres), which would be about right for their age group. When I look up again, they’re coming round a second time. The small boy has increased his lead and the competition behind him is looking dangerously puffed. The small boy shows no signs of fatigue at all. I remark to myself that 440 is quite a push for seven year olds. In my postal district the primary schools are concerned to soften the competitive aspects of Sports Day so that kids don’t feel bad. Obviously not the case here.
I watch more closely as the pack, now a ragged strung out crew featuring a number of pedestrians, moves round to the far side of the track. The kid is a little machine, pounding away out there on his own, still no signs of flagging. His determination is unsettling – how could one so young be so single minded? Perhaps this is what promising young athletes are like.
Then the kids come round for a third time. My God, it’s a 660. And given that 660s don’t exist, it looked like it had to be an 880: half a mile (in metres)! As I’ve remarked elsewhere in these posts, I’m not a big sports fan but I started to root for this kid – not that he needed it. By now the track is littered with the walking winded, many of whom were therefore candidates for the sentimental underdog vote. I find myself, however, regarding the kid as if he were the underdog. The kid, alone against the forces of antikid. The kid, runner for all kids, track pounder for the blue remembered hills of wet games days, the cross country, the sprints, the unpleasantness of the home stretch and all preceding stretches. But more than that, away from the smack of plimsoles and their successors the plimsolls upon balding turves, to the pluck. Such pluck. The pluck of the kid: plucking for kids past and kids to come.
While Paris was in jail she told Barbara Walters, in a phone call, that ‘I have become more spiritual. God has given me this new chance.’ While this may not prove to be an enduring conversion, the avowal does efficiently illustrate how very few options there are in the American personalityscape. If, for example, an infamous consumer of doughnuts felt the need to change their monodiet for health reasons, they might announce, to those entranced by their fortunes, “From this point on I shall eat only three doughnuts per day, the rest of my calorific requirements to be met by fruits, meats and lettuces. In a few weeks I shall reduce to two doughnuts per day and so forth.” Due to the drama attached to matters of dietary modification, the announcement will invariably take another form – “I have cut doughnuts from my life. Henceforth I shall eat only boiled rice.”
This is the ‘dry drunk’ style of withdrawal wherein the sufferer bounces violently off the wall of glut and is promptly impaled on the railings of abstemiousness without ever passing through an intermediate territory. When not only diet but personal psychology is viewed in this way then all change is violent and does not really constitute change – it’s a shift in tone rather than substance. In such a case the startling absence of psychological detail renders the subject a mythical figure – a cautionary, diagrammatic illustration of potential mishaps. Mythical figures are not people, they generally represent single human characteristics rather than the complex of qualities that comprise flesh and blood persons. We devise mythical figures for the purposes of instruction – they’re not supposed to be something you become.
In ‘Stop-Time’, an autobiography by Frank Conroy that I am enjoying, the young Frank spends a few weeks on the streets of New York working a fruit-stall with his mother’s unreliable partner, sometime in the early 50s. He describes his absorption in the most basic tasks: “…I approached even the smallest transaction with the élan of a headwaiter making crepes suzette. Without looking, I’d slip out the appropriate paper bag from a concealed shelf under the scales, lift it high in the air over my head, and snap it down like a whip to open it, at the same time selecting the fruit with my other hand. ‘One pound of fresh seedless grapes,’ I’d say with a certain amount of pride, gently lowering a fat bunch onto the hanging scales. My eye was good and when I missed the correct weight it wasn’t by much. In a single sweeping movement I’d lift the removable tray, insert the narrow end into the open mouth of the paper bag and transfer the fruit with exaggerated care. ‘Some cherries, ma’am? They’re very sweet today, very succulent.’ If they were deaf to my words and blind to my ballet they nevertheless came to the moment when they put money in my hand. At that moment I won the game, or so it seemed to me.”
The assembly line on which workers repeat half a dozen moves all day long is premised on the rejection of fluidity in favour of disconnection. Ergonomic analysts who design such arrangements will identify fluid sequences then dismember them so that no single worker is burdened with overly complicated manipulations and, consequently, acquires no valuable skill and can be readily replaced by a quickly trained substitute. A flow of movement is replaced by a punctuated repetitive cycle. Such cycles would resemble obsessive compulsive disorders if it were not for the fact that the compulsion is externally and explicitly imposed.
Frank is not on an assembly line but he brings to a potentially predictable job an inventiveness that he channels into choreography. We’ve all done it – just trying to toss a ball of paper across a room into a waste paper basket requires both concentration and fluidity – qualities often seen as mutually exclusive but regarded by, for example, dancers and athletes, as a natural package. Frank probably senses that unless he makes fruit wrapping an aesthetic event it will outstrip him with its meaninglessness.
The best job I ever had – I don’t include writing and making plays because they aren’t alienating – was driving a rescue van for Bike Events on the London to Brighton Bike Ride in the early 80s. I did it for a day. They gave me a portable phone the size of a house brick and told me to drive up and down the route picking up people whose bikes had broken down or who had succumbed to exhaustion or just fallen off. When, to my great pleasure, I came across a small human tragedy, I would phone the base camp in Brighton and they would tell me either to take the cyclists to a First Aid station or their bikes to one of the repair stations on the route. It was a lovely day and most of the route was confined, thanks to the skilled route-devising of the organisers, to leafy lanes. I drove carefully alongside columns of hundreds of sweating pedallers, keeping an eye open for mishaps and asking those who appeared to be bonking (a cycling term unrelated to penetrative sexual intercourse wherein the cyclist suddenly runs out of energy and becomes dangerously weak and woozy – a banana will often debonk the sufferer) if they were alright.
As the day wore on I became happier and happier. I experienced the following things: nobility – I was the selfless rescuer usefulness – the necessity for my presence was inarguable responsibility – I had to do the right thing never the wrong thing amusement – the short wave banter between myself and base camp got better and better. I particularly enjoyed composing florid reports in a clipped WWII pilot’s voice then saying, as required by law, “Over”. fluidity – the cooordination of hands, phone and steering wheel grew ever more polished health benefits – my right forearm acquired a pleasing tan
