DICK TRACY PICKS A WINNER_004

Dick Tracy captured our imagination with fantastic gadgets. Could Nokia flip phones be far behind? Image copyright by respective owner. 

My "old" flip phone reminds me exactly of a Star Trek communicator...

Is it safe? Would you be surprised if I told you that no matter how many locks on your door, encrypted passwords on your accounts, or how careful you think you are being with your digital life, if someone wants in, they are getting in. This is unsettling and yet consider American money. Examine the eye on the top of that pyramid and you will see it is winking at you and following you around the room like the eyes in a painting in an Abbott and Costello movie.

Data mining cleverness by digital companies and bad actors has been scooping up massive amounts of your raw, private data from all sources and then using algorithms and artificial intelligence to rebuild virtual avatars of you. Every photo you have taken and posted on digital media has been tagged with meta-data and cross filed in giant data pools. There is no hiding. No running away. No safety. And no security. And being "off the grid" is fairly impossible.  They track every key stroke and control all the gates.

I recall a time not that long ago when there was nothing on the internet but geeky chat rooms, places where actual computer nerds traded inside math jokes and deep thoughts about Dr. Who or Monty Python. Companies were not sure what to do with the new environment. Businesses began throwing money at the internet hoping for success in what came to be known as a tech bubble but there was no real business model for how to monetize clicks yet. Every day users had little in the way of actual content to surf. No one trusted electronic transactions yet, so shopping wasn't big like it is now. Encrypted payment transactions were not universal. The internet was a fancy new way to look up addresses and movie times and mess around in chat forums. Many people did not see what was coming around the corner: acceptance; massive migration; followed by ubiquity; and an incredible thirst for content.

Phones - or rather - the reinvention of phones as mobile computers that combined calling, text, surfing, music, and sharing photos on a device that fit in the palm of your hand is a relatively new event. You could connect to any piece of information or person from anywhere without a phone cord tethered to the wall. In a drawer, tucked away, I am keeping one of my old, clam-shell style flip phones for the sole reason that it reminds me of a Star Trek communicator. Two to beam aboard Scotty, now! 

When it comes to technological change, I think about my own father, growing up in a tiny town of two thousand people during the post-Depression era. They had radio, newspapers, and Saturday double features (with newsreels and cartoons) at the local theatre. Owning one phone - black, was something that not everyone could afford. People wrote letters and postcards and sat on porches to watch the world go by.

Travel was limited. The national highway system hadn't come into play yet. Eventually, we walked on the moon. My dad witnessed an incredible amount of advancement in his eight decades of life and at the end, although not fluent, he owned a desktop computer, a cordless phone, poked his head into video chats, and was learning how to access movies on his iPad. What he liked to watch were black and white classics that had been in theatres when he was a kid but now oozed out of every device at the click of a button. He liked technology but understood it less and less.

A Star Trek communicator represented advanced civilization - the ability to talk held in your hand. When this prop was introduced in the late sixties, could Apple iPhones be 40-50 years behind? Image copyright by respective owner.

I mention this because in his youth, Dick Tracy had a two-way radio/video wristwatch and my father lived long enough to see it turn from comic strip fantasy into fashion accessory fact. It is humbling. What is in store for us in the next eighty years?

Staggering advancements in communications in the last twenty years have exceeded everything up to this point in human history. It is hubris to think that we even begin to comprehend what a titanic impact this is having on the culture and the planet. Entering colleges now are kids who have no memory of phone cords or leaving messages on tape recorded answering machines. We have flattened everything out. There is only "instant" communication and everything else is unacceptable.

Computers and phones were meant to usher in new freedoms. Currently, we have the opposite - a massive, black-box, digital yolk. Apple's iPhone got popular in 2007. That is just enough time to train a generation of users to depend on it. Phones were once private monopolies, like utilities but you always knew you could ring someone at AT&T with a problem. Now, people have zero control over how their personal data is collected, stored, combined, packaged, sold, stolen, and who owns it. What will this do to the human chain of confidence people have in one another in real life? What has it already done? When you have a dispute - what power do you have against an algorithm tucked inside a proprietary computer system?

After the horror of 9/11 - America launched itself on a path toward large scale data mining in the guise of national security. Phone records got scooped up by the billions. We actually found ourselves to be less safe in digital terrain than in the physical world and it didn't take long for bad actors to figure out that digital tools could affect real-time, real-world havoc. Systems regularly get hacked, damaged, and held for ransom. Our trust, our optimism, our faith in each other as human beings had found itself outsourced to the digital realm and then quickly trampled upon. Who do you trust? 

When people talk about the end of the world (as we know it), the world ended (and now begins again) with the computer, the internet, and the phone. What is it that we are dreaming of doing now that will become accepted reality in the coming decades?

My father might have laughed, chewed on a piece of toast, sipped his coffee, and solved the New York Times crossword in pen. The future he dreamed about as a small-town kid with Dick Tracy wrist radios actually came to pass but it had a subscription plan, 50-pages of disclaimers in 5-point typography, and an unstoppable, data-mad algorithm behind it that was beholden to no one. At the end of his life, he did not recognize the world he lived in. Eight decades of progress had obliterated pretty much everything he knew right before his eyes. Are we in an unprecedented period of demanding people absorb too much change all at once, like compressing a thousand years of information into one lifetime? Information is not the same as wisdom as any eighty-year-old would tell you.

We long to belong. We long to be connected to one another. Covid has taught us, at least those who would listen carefully, that we depend upon each other in ways that we did not recognize. The world is smaller than we think. We are already chained together. Do we really have nostalgia for a time and place that does not exist anymore? Do we dream about recreating a sleepy digital town of two thousand villagers where everyone knows each other's names and personal business? 

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