The tablet computer is a blank slate waiting for you to fill it with the projections of your imagination. Its dark window recedes into infinity, beckoning you to inscribe yourself upon it. You buy one because, more than understanding it, you feel its promise. But shortly later, when an incredulous friend asks, “Why did you give in to the hype?,” you don’t quite have the language. You stumble a bit and say it will let you surf the Web, check your email, play games. It does do these things, after all. Yet your words feel hollow. Incomplete. For the time being, the tablet is like a thing pregnant, full of potential, yet to become real.
Inexplicably, this changes when you discover another silly bit of Internet fluff: an app that makes your tablet look and sound like the touchpads on Star Trek. You download it just to try it out – so that, sitting on the couch in the evening, you can show it to your partner and both laugh about it. But in a quiet moment, surprising yourself, you think: Now this empty screen seems somehow closer to a real thing. How odd and silly, you find yourself saying to nobody in particular. And yet a glimmer of a thought emerges: the technology of the present only becomes real when it lives up to our prior imaginings of the future.
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In 1949, philosopher Martin Heidegger presented a paper called “The Question Concerning Technology.” It is, like all of Heidegger’s work, dense and abstract, but in as much as one might sum it up, it argues that technology is not simply a tool humans use to perform certain tasks, but something with which we shape our relationship to reality. Technology, argues Heidegger argues, is akin to language in that it shapes us as much as we shape it – a phenomenon that led Heidegger to refer to technology’s effects as a “bringing forth” or “an unconcealing.”
Despite the arcane, almost mystical language though, in 2010 when The Atlantic’s technology editor Alexis Madrigal asked what should be placed on a canon of required technology reading, recommendations of Heidegger’s essay poured in. And when we remember how the car and telephone changed how we thought of distance, or how the book itself is a kind of technology, the odd approach of the German philosopher’s essay starts to make a lot more sense.
Perhaps strangely, it was just those ideas that lingered in my mind recently as I re-watched the BBC sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams’ now classic work, created in the late 70s, was full of seemingly far-fetched technological ideas, many of which that nonetheless came to be – none more so than the eponymous portable guidebook itself, “the standard repository for all knowledge and wisdom,” which web-connected smartphones and tablets have almost made a reality.
But then sci-fi has always seemed to predict the future. From the touchpads in Star Trek, to automatic doors in H.G. Wells, to Arthur C. Clarke imagining satellites, what was envisioned in the past seems to frequently become a reality, as if what the best of us dream up doesn’t so much predict, as shape, the present and future.
The importance of how the future is imagined is something that Matt Novak has obsessed over. He’s the author of the blog Paleofuture, where he documents past visions of the future, from strangely accurate visions of a skyscraper-filled New York, to a very out-there vision of “Canada’s drugged up dystopia” from the late 60s. It’s just that occasional incongruousness, however, that got Novak hooked.
“As a kid, I went to Epcot, the Disneyworld theme park,” he says. “But even as a kid, in this park that was supposed to be about futurism, it’s occurring to me that this isn’t the future: it’s what they thought the future would be in the early 80s.”
Years later, when a college project forced Novak to start a blog, he delved deeper into the topic and started to notice patterns by decades and broader eras. “These predictions were often more reflective of the time in which they were made rather than the future itself.” As an example, Novak points to depictions of robots in the economic desperation of the 30s. “There was not only a lot of fear about robots taking jobs, but there were also these racist elements that had to do with robots ‘taking your women.’ There were a lot of weird undertones where robots were a stand-in for all sorts of different ‘evils’ of the time.”
Yet our overlapped anxieties about both the present and the future can also be remarkably prescient in how they envision coming debates. Recently, Gawker linked back to one of Novak’s posts from a few years ago about a 1994 concept video by Knight-Ridder that showed a tablet newspaper that looked eerily like an iPad, complete with video and animations. But as Novak points out, what’s important about clips like it are not whether or not predictions about technology come true. “What’s interesting to me is what are they saying in this video,” Novak says. “It’s about the concerns in the time about how we would deliver news and how we would commoditize it. Why did people care about that?” The people in the clip are convinced, for example, that loyalty to a single, edited news source would persist. The idea of an adaptable, personally curated magazine newspaper that collected information from thousands of sources – like Flipboard or Zite today – was not quite conceivable.
But that’s just in the nature of how we imagine. Small, incremental changes to isolated bits of technology are comparatively easy to understand. But broad changes to whole infrastructures or systems of thinking are quite another thing. Novak gives the example of what was once a shining example of the future that was coming: the videophone. “It’s basically something we have today. But it’s not even close to the way people who were predicting it would happen,” he says. “Because the people who were making those predictions had their own agendas in the infrastructure that would be set up. So AT&T’s concepts for the videophone were that you would step off an airplane and then walk to the nearest payphone that would have video on it.” The communication of the future was, in the minds of AT&T, still attached to their vast network of landlines.
The past, then, continues bleed its prejudices into the present. But the problem with that is more than just the limits of contemporary technology or ideas. As Novak points out, visions of the future often focus on one aspect of change, but not another, presenting dystopia when they mean to be hopeful.
“I’m really interested in these ignored futures,” Novak says. “In some, there was no social change. They’d highlight the refrigerator of the future, but Mom is still going to be at home and be responsible for making dinner. That doesn’t change. And when times are bad, that trend gets much more fearful and reactionary.” As such, sometimes, to imagine the future is often to replicate the mistakes of the past. And yet, perhaps there is still cause for hope.
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The funny thing about getting an iPad is the strange, unexpected learning curve. No, you don’t “learn” to surf the Web or page through books. That, as the advertising will tell you, is intuitive enough. Instead, you find that using it destabilizes the meanings of words that used to be firm in your mind: magazine; book; Internet; even truth. Things that used to be closed, singular and solitary start to open up. What you begin to catch a glimmer of is that the tablet is a way of organizing your connection to an infinite network and then framing it within a 10-inch screen. That this hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy is not a book that contains all the knowledge in the universe, but is a device designed explicitly to parcel it out to you in small, manageable bites.
It is then that the often impenetrable fog in front of Heidegger’s poetic language starts to ever so slightly clear: “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth…It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another.”
We cannot envision the future fully not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because we don’t yet know how to imagine it. So we wait for time to manifest our dreams. But in the waiting is itself something, and that too shapes the future to come.
Our hope for the future is not the realization of our techno-fetishistic imaginings, but that it’s fundamentally mysterious and unknowable. And all we can do is gesture at it mutely while pawing optimistically at our tablets, hoping that in our wilful, resolute silence, we might one day witness the future unconcealing itself, and understand anew.
