Steampunking Our Future: An Embedded ... - cdn.oreilly.com

16 | STEAMPUNKING OUR FUTURE: AN EMBEDDED HISTORIAN’S NOTEBOOK
is self-evidently accelerated. I just look at five years ago, ten years ago, before there
was an Internet in the way that it is now. You forget so quickly that there wasn’t a
Facebook not that long ago, or that e-mail wasn’t such a substantial part of your life
that long ago, where right now you carry that shit with you everywhere in your
pocket with you at all times and check it all the time. You can speculate very easily
based on technologies that are around or emerging now, that this shit is only to
get more so. It will probably be within our lifetimes easily and maybe even within
the next few years that you will have e-mail and communication access to the
internet at all times, right onto your eyes or whatever. Maybe within our lifetime
directly into our occipital and auditory nerves or whatever, who the hell knows? It
just doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary.
“It’s funny,” I said, thinking back to the beginning of my own journey into
counterculture and cultural change. “That’s the sort of thing Tim Leary was talking
about when I met him back in college—direct communication to the brain
through light waves.” Connecting steampunk with 1960s counterculture might
seem a stretch at first blush, but the historical patterns are connected. (My 1993
interview with Dr. Timothy Leary is in Vintage Tomorrows, Chapter 2. We also
explore the counterculture connection further in Chapter 12 at Burning Man and
Maker Faire.)
Greg didn’t blink an eye as I continued: “At that time, it sounded like the most
fucked-up crazy impossible thing, but also brilliant and insightful and kinda prophetic.”
“Yeah, totally,” he nodded, “and if everything around us has changed, it seems
like massive change and you’re trying to deal with it. I know that I’ve been struggling
these past couple years, trying to rationalize to myself—in my own personal
life—how do I deal with e-mail? E-mail had suddenly come to dominate my life in
just the space of like five years. And through a lot of that too, like I love Gmail, I
love that application, I love the way it works and yet I started to think: ‘fuck, how
much of my life is just spent here just trying to answer emails and deal with them
all?’
I often look at different people for examples and different models. I look at
people who are great communicators—I have some friends who are brilliant communicators,
who seem to answer every e-mail. And I have other friends who sort
of modulate their lives by just being brick walls. They only answer in the most pithy,
direct, ‘here’s the info you need’ way or by not responding at all. If it’s anything
that is not critical, then they just don’t say anything back. And I’m like: ‘fuck, which
one of those am I? Am I like this dude who is massively one way or massively the