The year was 1982, and I was sitting in a movie theatre in New York City with some friends watching a new science fiction movie. "Tron" starred Jeff Bridges as a programmer who gets sucked into a computer. There he finds that the bits and bytes he's been so casually moving around on the screen as motorcycles and people existed for real in a parallel world. Deleting was death, and inserting was life.
Some thought the story incoherent, others thought that the images, which combined live action and early computer animation, to be rough and unpolished. But I remember being mesmerized. Partly it was the technical wizardry of creating a world on the screen with live actors and a computer-generated universe. But it was also the concept, where inches away from the screen where we typed was an entire ecosystem that was constructed not of wood or metal but of keystrokes.
Not even two decades later the concept was pushed even further with "The Matrix." In this 1999 classic, Keanu Reeves plays a hacker who is recruited by a secret group that shows him that he is living a simulation inside a machine. Far more polished and sophisticated than "Tron," it showed both advances in the technical state-of-the-art as well as a leap of conceptional structure that was breathtaking, though Jeff Bridges' lightcycle still looked like more fun.
These two movies come to mind as it seems as though we are all living in some offshoot of those imagined worlds. To be sure, for the past dozen or so years our lives have been including more and more online elements, from shopping to entertainment to social interaction. We may not have been fully inhabiting those electronic worlds, but they moved from being an idle curiosity to a being a significant factor in our day to day existence.
Then came March. The pandemic forced us all to stay at home, interacting only through our screens. It's as if we inhabit them, and all of our relationships, activities, entertainment and more is just so much air. Yes, it was already under way. But Professor Scott Galloway of NYU postulates that the pandemic was a super accelerant, taking trends that might have taken years to manifest, and compressed them into a time frame no one imagined or even though possible. But here we are, talking not of being burned out by the commute, but stressing out over back to back Zoom calls. And our lament about limited bandwidth pertains both to the pathways in our brains and the electronic pipes coming into our homes.
In the early days of computers, some systems worked by ping ponging information back and forth between a pair of disk drives. One place I worked named all their drives after famous comedy duos. So you could have a project living on Lucy and Ethel, or Dean and Jerry, or Bob and Bing. I recall a conversation that went something like, "The graphic sequence explaining mortgages? If it's not on Bud and Lou, check out Stan and Ollie."
Now we've moved from disk drives in our homes and offices to everything residing in the cloud. Even if you don't understand how that actually works, you probably get that you when you save a picture or document or project, your local keyboard and screen are basically a window or remote control into some far away device. You send it all off into the ether, and somewhere there is a computer that makes it all happen. On a current project, the guy in charge has a number of his pieces of equipment configured exactly that way. Rather being physically in his studio they exist in some Amazon computer center somewhere. And in a nod to those ghosts in the machine, rather assign them numbers or colors, he has dubbed them after characters from "The Matrix" namely Neo, Trinity and Morpheus.
Are they just names? Or are they sentient beings, digital servants that actually exist, not in flesh and blood but in bits and bytes? Does Neo know Siri? Do Trinity and Alexa ever have lunch? Is Zoom merely a video conferencing platform or a yenta extraordinaire? Perhaps it is true, with a nod to Joni Mitchell, that we really don't know clouds at all.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is amazed what he can do in his slippers. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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