©2000 David Schultz

"Nature loves to hide." Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE), Fragments

Photo courtesy of NASA

Technology cannot change reality. Technology can only reveal reality.

When it comes to reality, I am a realist. The danger of the web, however, is how it affects this realism. One danger of webbing (a verb, mind you), if there are any dangers at all, is that it changes the way we think about the world in ways that are not always good. Permanence is one example. It is fundamental concept we all have. We believe in permanence. If we catch a killer twenty years after a murder we still convict him. We do so with a clean conscience because we believe some things are permanent, like the killer's identity and guilt.

I think things remain permanent but how we think with the idea of permanence can become confused to say the least the more time we spend webbing. In fact, we grow scared of losing it, and this is seen in a peculiar behavior we all engage in. I will address this below.

This is one danger of webbing: How it affects our thinking about reality. How easily or how difficult our tools (and the Mac and the Web are such a tools) manipulate the world, affects how we view the world. The world will be thought of (if you will forgive the poetic language), as soft if our tools easily affect it; it will be thought of hard if our tools affect the world only after great effort on our part.

The web, if it does anything, makes the world seem soft, not hard. We zip around easily from place to place all over the world; we bounce from point to point as though we had wings and are as light as the air; we speak instantaneously to others thousands of miles away; we have fast access to information, and many times useful information; we can set up pages, web pages or print pages, with ease due to spectacular software. I can take a picture in a digital camera, move it to my Pismo, print it up on a photo-realistic printer, all within minutes. I can also send it to every family member in the world. It makes the world feel so soft.

But sometimes the hardness of the world breaks through. Servers go down, programs crash, DoS attacks occur, systems won't boot. Now ask yourself how you react when these things happen. So, how do you? Seems there are at least two options.

If you are one who pounds his fist on the table while singing melodic profanities, then maybe, just maybe, your sense that the world is soft has become part nature to you. The softer you see the world, the more angry you react when its hardness confronts you.

On the other hand, if you are one of those who resigns himself to these technological foibles, then the world's supposed softness has affected you too. Just the moment before you were free-spirited, and now you find yourself imprisoned. There is nothing left to do when the hardness of the world hits you, and you know it. You go do something else.

When technology reveals reality the thought that it has not actually changed reality can be disquieting. When one realizes that in the end technology has not changed a thing about the world our optimism fails us and our sense of control is betrayed. For some reason, a reason I do not fully understand, human nature attaches its hopes to things like science and technology. The content of the hope thus attached? Change. For some reason, we desire to change the world. This desire only makes sense if one assumes that the world needs to be changed. And the belief that the world needs to be changed only makes sense if we assume that changing makes it better in some way. So, we end with the view that for some reason human nature deeply believes that the world can be a better place than it is. We believe that the world is a pretty despicable place to begin with, don't we? But if technology can only reveal reality and not change it, then this is all a chimera, and a dream of a dream. This fully explains the reactions one has when the hardness of the world confronts him: His dreams of a better world are dashed. Anger or resignation follow.

Sure, there has been technological advance in history. It would be silly to deny it. Yet in the end technology has only advanced our understanding and our ability to manipulate the world. All else remains the same. If we discover that quarks are fundamental particles, then they were fundamental particles two thousand years ago too. Nothing has changed but our thinking. The world has remained hard and we show our softness. And it comes out in strange, ritualistic behaviors. To wit . . .

The superficial softness we try to impose on the world makes me worry. It makes me unbalanced sometimes. In fact, it seems to make a lot, and I mean a lot, of people worry. So what do I do? What do millions do to fight softness? Right: Back-up everything. Backing up is a multi-million dollar industry in the United States. Whole companies house huge storage capacities for us to backup to. We have Zip drives, extra hard drives, iDisks, redundancy precautions, all because we are afraid of losing data. The fear of losing data is actually the fear of the loss of permanence. One cannot lose permanent things after all. It makes no sense to back-up something permanent, does it?

Backing up is a worry about permanence, or the absence of it. The fleeting tangles of technology are a tightrope we balance with great caution. "Losing data" is a way of saying that data is transitory. Backing up gives it permanence if we do it right, if we do it hard. The only hard way to back data up is, basically, printing it. That is, we must remove data from the technology in question if t is to be safe. Why do you think we call it "making a hard copy"? Good old paper will outlast many a hard drive.

I have thousands of emails from the last few months sitting on my Pismo. I want to archive them. But it's difficult. There are programs that dump emails into folders or FileMaker Pro databases. But this only takes them from one soft technology to another soft technology. I want them saved hard. So I print them and file them away. This is hard backing up. It gives me peace of mind, unless my house burns down, which worries me sometimes. And then there are tornadoes. But I need to stop worrying.

Think along with me for a moment. Imagine that huge PhotoShop file which is your masterpiece, a masterpiece you worked on for months. You took great care and caution with it. The only problem is that it will forever be a PhotoShop file, and nothing more. Make as many backups as you wish. Go ahead, do so. They are still only PhotoShop files just as fragile as the first. So put it in a safety deposit box. Doesn't help, does it? Set it on four servers. That's scary. Place it in a safe, cool place away from magnets and ultraviolet rays. Pass it on to your children and they to their children. It doesn't matter. Printing helps in this instance, but maybe not as much as with emails though. So print fifty copies. That's a bit better. But just a little. For it seems that one would only have rest once he has an infinite number of copies.

What are you doing? You are seeking permanence. You are seeking the repose of the lasting. Anything, anything is better than bare data on a disk or drive. You know it and I know it. But we'll never have it, not with today's technology. Reach as much as you want, you can not reach to infinity. Permanence is so fleeting at times. well, until the hardness of the world breaks in to your party. But we don't like that that kind of permanence because it reminds us that little has changed in the world.

The emails sitting so precariously on my PowerBook remind me that I have entrusted a great deal to this machine. It contains my writing, my schedule, people I know (lovingly called "contacts"), and my memories in so many 1's and 0's. I've heard people scream, "My whole life was in there!" after a hard system crash. It's an overstatement worthy of a politician. I might ask, facetiously, "Then why'd you put it in there in the first place?" For of course it is impossible to put one's whole life in a machine. It can seem like it, not doubt. But the appearance that one's life is in a machine presents itself only if one is identified with data. If I am as digital as my machine, then the claim "My whole life was in that machine" might make sense. But I am not a digital thing. The only things we can invest a machine with are our attempted ties to the world. Technology is just a means of making contact with nature, much like a broom handle we use to reach something our arms are too short for. Losing data in a hard crash disassociates us with the world, and the Romantic dream of being one with nature collapses. It falls out of reach.

Permanence. We desire it gravely yet only seem to capture it once in a while. The Web is not helping. It makes the world seem so non-permanent. It keeps us chasing our tails. It keeps us moving, it keeps us dancing as we dodge bullets of hardness. And then the real worry hits us: Perhaps, just perhaps, non-permanence is the only permanent thing in the cosmos. This is Heraclitus' point: "everything comes to be out of strife." But the worry is real only if the non-permanant structures we've imposed on the cosmos are believed to be permanent. Which they are not. Thus to worry is not an option.

Next time we will examine further symptoms of the loss of permanence in our technological society. It is seen in many weird kinds (if you think about them long enough) of worries and the practices they produce. If you have ideas or examples about this let me know. Until then, keep backing up everything. We'll still be here . . .

David Schultz