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Paranoid Android: Life in a glass house

By Josh Ellis

Douglas Engelbart, the guy who invented the mouse, the desktop interface and a lot of other useful shit, has been talking a lot recently about what he calls liquid information. He says the problem with computers now is that the interface gets in the way--it prevents you from actually using the thing. And he's right.

Unfortunately, nobody's listening. At Comdex this year, the tech industry debuted a lot of new gadgets that were astounding in their sheer stupidity and pointlessness.

Handspring, for example, debuted Treo, which takes the "less is more" dictum to an incredibly irritating conclusion. Basically, it's a Palm Pilot/cell phone, which sounds cool--except they decided to make it the size of a cell phone. The keyboard and screen are both about two inches wide. You have to squint to see the display, and you have to use an electron tunneling microscope to type an e-mail message.

Another example of a stupid device is the Tablet PC, which Bill Gates debuted during his keynote. This is a laptop with a screen that swivels around so you can write notes on it while the laptop is closed. So it's a legal pad--a legal pad that takes two minutes to boot up.

I'm not even going to talk about stupid things like the MP3 player/digital camera or the digital camera/e-mail terminal. Watching these companies crossbreed consumer electronics is like watching Jeff Goldblum fuck around with those transporter pods in The Fly--you just end up with an ugly, vicious mess that nobody should ever have to look at.

Of course, there's a reason these mental giants have invested so much time and money in this crap: They're doing market surveys. Market surveys don't work in consumer technology, because the whole point of consumer technology is to design things that people don't even know they need yet. Can you imagine if, back in 1976, Apple had done a survey to see if people really wanted home computers? We'd still be writing letters to each other on paper, for chrissake.

Information needs to be liquid; you need to be able to access it whenever and wherever you need it. The ideal computer should be portable and fold away whenever you don't need it, with a full-size screen and keyboard, and should never have to be booted up unless you're updating it. You pull it out of your pocket, you open it up, you use it--maybe with a pen, maybe with voice control. Certainly not by dicking around with a mouse, which was a great idea a long time ago but is deadweight now. When you're done, you put it away and don't think about it.

The fact that this is still a science-fiction construct is one of the reasons the industry is in such turmoil today. People are getting tired of computer companies telling them that the future is now. Oh, yeah? Prove it. Let me get my e-mail, check the kids via videophone to make sure they're not vivisecting the cat with my new Ginsu knives, watch the news and do my dinner shopping...all on the bus home from work. No? Then fuck yourselves, technology industry. Let's go watch the tube, maybe find out exactly how those Angels get down like that.

And the public is entirely correct in this attitude, because that's how things should be. It shouldn't require a bachelor's degree to get basketball scores and order a pizza from anywhere in, at the very least, America. But we can't even manage that, because we're wasting all our research and development money on making digital camera/CD player/fax machine/vibrating benwa ball inbred pieces of shit that nobody really wants to pay three hundred bucks for, rather than inexpensive devices that do what we need them to.

Which is why I have no sympathy for the bastards at the top of the industry who are whining about falling stock prices. But I do have sympathy for everyone who's been let down by the futurist hype. Hell, I'm one of them--I just bought a used laptop so I could write this column from my local Chinese massage parlor, and I can't even get the thing to turn on. Talk about waking up from machine dreams.

So here's what you can do. Write the major computer manufacturers. Tell them what you would like to own. Tell them what you need, and how much you'd be willing to pay. Take the future into your own hands, because it's the only way it's going to happen.

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