The Bleeding Edge by Bob Hughes

Author:Bob Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780263397
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2016-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE VISIONARY TURN

Sales effort in the high-tech age has become a culture-wide force that embraces areas of the media, politics and academia previously assumed to be quite separate from the advertising industry. As citizens, we have never had the time, information or space we need to discuss and articulate our possible needs as technology advances; instead, visions of possible futures are thrust at us, all apparently worked out in impressive detail and ready to go (and likely to go with us or without us).

High-tech visions, and the people known as ‘visionaries’ (and even ‘evangelists’24) who produce them, have become such basic ingredients of the consumer and business media that we do not really think of them as sales effort – yet great effort and expense have been lavished on them by the electronics and computer firms and those around them.

The ‘visionary turn’ became institutionalized in 1985, with the creation of the MIT Media Lab by Nicholas Negroponte (wealthy and well-connected professor of architecture, brother of President George W Bush’s Director of National Intelligence and co-founder in 1993 of the influential high-tech style magazine Wired) as ‘the pre-eminent computer science laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human-computer interface’.25 Negroponte was able to engage major companies, eminent academics, famous artists and the military in lavishly funded, futuristic projects, ostensibly ‘inventing the future’ (the subtitle of a book about the Lab26 written in 1987 by Negroponte’s friend Stewart Brand, the founder of the ‘hippy bible’, The Whole Earth Catalog). Fred Turner’s 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture27 describes how the Catalog’s carefully modulated, cool but unchallenging rebelliousness became a supremely effective sales-script for big business – ultimately epitomized by Apple’s ability to present itself as an anti-corporate, ‘rebel’ organization, long after it had become one of the world’s biggest and most ruthlessly monopolistic corporations (strapline: ‘Think Different’).

The Lab made it its business to produce high-profile, eye-catching ‘demos’ of its projects, and to produce exciting new words such as ‘virtual reality’ (3D graphics), ‘telepresence’, ‘personal digital assistant’, and so on, and established the genre of ‘scientific visionary as showman’ familiar from the TED conferences, which were founded by another wealthy and influential architect, Richard Saul Wurman.28 The subtext is: there is no need to wonder about the future because brilliant minds are working on it, and it will be nice. Everything you could wish for is being taken care of.

The visionary promise is an individualistic, competitive, optimistic one, which comes with an implied warning that nasty things will happen if you don’t buy into it: ‘think different, or else’. It is hard to reconcile the fact that ‘the future’ is not quite the bed of roses that was promised, without questioning the massive societal consensus that the visionaries appear to represent. Crazier ideas emerge from the effort to square this circle.

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