ACID, ATOMS AND BITS

Dick Pountain/11:31/05 June 1996/Idealog 22

In the end Timothy Leary didn't actually die 'live' on the Web as he had intended to, but it would have been a fitting way for him to go. Leary's conversion from 60's Acid Guru to 90's Cyberspace Guru was a pretty seamless affair, because at root it didn't involve much of a conversion at all. The hippy's fascination with mind/body dualism lives on in the whole notion of Cyberspace, that disembodied realm where - in the words of the song - nothing is real.

I guess the Leary quote that most people will remember is 'Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out' but I much preferred his rather witty formulation that 'Acid is a new vitamin and reality is its deficiency syndrome'. Amusing, but almost the reverse of the biochemical truth. The solidity of what we call 'reality' is actually the result of a lot of complex processing and filtering of our raw sensory inputs, and what lysergic acid appears to do is to turn off the filters and integrators making visible the raw data streams. Try this for a dodgy metaphor; if reality is like looking at a Web page in Netscape, then taking acid is like selecting 'View Source', or maybe even doing a hex dump of the HTML file.

This mind and matter thing has been exercising the human imagination for the whole of history - the origins of all magic, ritual and religion are tied up with a fervent wish that thought could directly affect the world of matter. If only sacrificing a virgin would stop that hurricane coming this way; if only chanting could levitate the White House; if only praying would cure bubonic plague. An urban myth that surfaces with monotonous regularity has it that the Russians (substitute Americans, or Iraquis, or whoever) have a secret laboratory where they have made an amazing breakthough in telekinesis. My reaction is always to ask whether the Russians (Americans, etc...) still build fork-lift trucks, and if so why they bother. 

A more scientifically-minded guru of our time, Nicholas Negroponte is famous for saying 'move bits, not atoms' or words to that effect. This certainly makes a lot of sense when all you want to transport is information - why send a piece of paper in a lorry when you can send a stream of bytes along a wire? However in a less capable mouth than Negroponte's this can easily teeter into the same primitive philosophical idealism. Computers are now so good at manipulating bits that they can forge representations of the world that are more and more convincing - 3D graphics and immersive virtual reality will be coming to the Web before very long - and people may be lead to mistake representation for reality. This point is often expressed by saying that technology is making 'fantasy into fact' but that's just another example of the very confusion it attempts to describe. The 'fact' of virtual reality is that it consists of a bunch of illuminated pixels, which you can see but not touch or smell. In our culture the visual sense is coming more and more to dominate over the the other four, and that tempts us to settle for representations.   

Several US restaurants will now let you order a pizza off a Web page menu, but the image of that pizza on the screen contains precious little nutrition - it still takes a bloke on a bike to transport the actual calories into your slavering maw. Moving atoms is difficult and requires far larger inputs of energy than does moving bits, but the truth is you cannot eat bits and you never will be able to. All bits can do is tell someone, somewhere that you want some atoms (with extra pepperoni). Like the human mind, computers deal in abstractions from the world, not directly with the world itself. Certainly computers can be made to interface with the 'real' world, just as human hands can carve a tree into a chair, but it's a difficult business involving robotic arms, transducers and stepper motors - all the effortlessness of moving bits evaporates and you're back fighting the laws of physics again (for your homework, design a computer peripheral that transcribes smells, described by a new HTML tag <ODOUR KIND="new mown hay" INTENSITY=3 DURATION=2>).

I exaggerate of course - no-one is dumb enough to try to eat a screen pizza (unless they've been at the Leary's Special Dispensation) but things are not always this clear cut. It's very difficult to, say, learn how to play a musical instrument, or dance, or sing to professional standards. Computers can be very helpful in these pursuits by automating their more tedious aspects like editing musical notation, mixing sound, drawing choreographic diagrams or whatever. Such computerised tools also allow people who haven't done the work, haven't learned the skills, to simulate playing an instrument by sampling others' works. Now exactly what is 'real' art and what is mere representation here? Which are the bits and which is the pizza? Several critics have recently expressed concern about the rise of a 'quotation culture'; should they be worried? If everyone wants to become an artist by quoting, someone has to produce the stuff that gets quoted - someone has to move new atoms at some point if we are not to be maddened by repetition. Borges wrote a short story about 'The Library of Babel' whose infinite collection of books contained random permutations of letters - its librarians were not happy bunnies, and often ended up jumping down the infinite stair-well.

At this point two headlines from today's paper catch my eye - "Billions lost as European rocket falls in flames" (atoms moving in an unwanted direction) and "Granada to launch seven satellite TV channels" (at least two of those seven channels will be filled with re-runs).