Review of Steven Mann (with Hal Niedzviecki), CYBORG: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. Toronto: Doubleday Canada 2001.
An abbreviated version of this review (conforming to their 1000 word limit) has been sent to Amazon.com and Amazon.ca  on September 14 2002.
 

© Ronald de Sousa

Steven Mann describes himself as a Luddite. Come again? In the nineteenth century, Luddites were those enemies of technological progress who went around smashing the machines of the industrial revolution. How could Mann, an arch-geek, a professor of electrical engineering who lives, invents, builds, and wears the very latest technology, call himself a Luddite? The key to Mann's "cyborg philosophy" lies just here: as we live in an increasingly Orwellian world, the individual's only hope is to fight technology with technology, and to subvert the power of corporate and state intrusion in our lives with individualistic versions of the very devices that are used to control us. It is not the machines that Mann the Luddite objects to, but the monopoly of state and corporations on the power of machines. His own is designed as an anarchistic, individualistic antidote. Co-opting the title of Luddite neatly encapsulates this subversive project.

For a couple of decades, Steve Mann has lived as a cyborg: his view of the world mediated and enhanced by a computer that intervenes between the world he lives in and the world he perceives. Actually our clothes and our contact lenses, our false teeth and our heart pacers, and for that matter our books, our cars, and our planes have already made cyborg of us all; but somehow we never seem to notice, and so most of us react with shock at the experiments which Mann has been running on himself. Against the current craze for "artificial intelligence" that looks forward to a time when machines will be smarter than people, Mann wants to promote the idea of computers as enhancement of human intelligence. Thanks to "WearComp," an increasingly inconspicuous and elegant "wearable computer" of his own design, Mann is perpetually in contact with the internet, communicating when he wants to by tapping messages on a pocket device and better by projecting the view from his eye-level camera onto the web. His senses of sight and hearing (though not yet, one gathers, smell, taste or touch) are thus mediated and enhanced: does he want to see a face more clearly from a distance? just zoom in! Does he want to see who is coming up behind him? No need to turn his head: just switch to camera #2! Does he hate Coke ads? Get the computer to erase them. Does he want an instant replay in slow motion? He can get that too, with enough control to read the markings on the spinning wheels of a passing car. Better, he can potentially rig WearComp so that it monitors his own autonomic responses in order to detect when something he experiences is particularly interesting to him, and in those cases the computer can make sure that the scene is recorded in permanent memory so that he can return to it and re-experience it later.... And all the while he has the power of the internet literally at his fingertips, so that he not only can consult a dictionary, look up arcane facts to win an argument, but also bring the world to bear witness to what he sees -- and most important, turn the tables against the surveillance that state and corporations think it their right to monopolize. This fascinating book is about the consequence of this brave experiment, which Mann has been conducting with mainly himself as subject for nearly two decades.

One of Mann's most striking philosophical ideas is to distinguish between privacy and solitude. The first contrasts with other people's ability to become aware of you, while the second refers to your ability to prevent intrusions into your own awareness. Some people care more for privacy than others, but a case might be made for the view that a lack of privacy is essentially harmless unless it comes with a violation of solitude. It wasn't lack of privacy but lack of solitude that killed Lady Di: for if the paparazzi had never intruded on her life -- if, for example, she had been using Mann's wearable computer to suppress any information about who was photographing her and what appeared in the press) she wouldn't have had to flee in haste and crash to her death.

Mann's wearable computer serves to protect his solitude more than his privacy. (He quotes Scott McNeally of Sun Microsystems: "You already have zero privacy. Get used to it."(145).) For several years, in fact, you could see what he saw at pretty much any time, as the computer output line that provided his window on the world was also constantly fed to the Web. "When I post what I see every day on the Web, I am deliberately violating my own privacy. When I send an e-mail, I am knowingly violating my own privacy and sometimes the solitude of the recipient. However, in living in symbiosis with WearComp I increase my solitude, insomuch as I can control the kind of information to which I am open." (147)

This affords all kinds of opportunities for what might be called guerilla theatre, or performance art, in the service of subversive awareness of the constraints under which we increasingly live.

Mann describes with hilarious deadpan irony a number of devices he has actually patented. One is a chair that requires you to purchase a seating licence by swiping a valid credit card through a slot, causing forty-nine sharp spikes on the "service reception interface which is the seat" to retract and allow comfortable seating for the duration of the seating license. This philanthropic invention is designed, by restoring seating to private profit-making initiative, to forestall the disastrous excess of seating which might soon cause seating to become extinct, "in the same way that Napster has created so much music that music will soon be extinct since all musicians will soon starve to death causing there to be no more music." (254) There is also a wallet that requires anyone wanting to check on your identity to pass their "government issued ID card" through a slot before it can be opened to show your ID ("Owner cannot open").

Particularly timely, in these times when all loyal Americans seem to think it obvious that all loyal Americans must be prepared to give up American freedom for the sake of securing American freedom, is the plan for a "Mass Decontamination facility" in case of an anthrax attack or civil unrest. Visitors are stripped and required to pass through hexagonal rooms equipped with internet-connected showers combined with body scanning machines. The routine -- which Mann has demonstrated in various art galleries -- is inspired by the availability of surveillance equipment as well as by reminiscences of Nazi concentration camp procedures. It is designed to inspire a meditation on the nature of all the insults to our dignity daily perpetrated for our protection and greater security.

All this is a bit reminiscent of Dada, the subversive "anti-art" art that ushered in Surrealism at the beginning of the last century. Many of Mann's inventions, modulo techie sophistication, might have figured among the performances staged in Paris or Zürich circa 1910. Was it accidental that 1910 was 25 years away from Nazism? Should we infer that the spark of anarchism expressed in Mann's "cyborg philosophy" antics, like that of the Dadaists and their followers in 1910, are as the voice of the canary in the mine? Perhaps the anarchist impulse arises mostly when fascist power becomes genuinely threatening -- especially the consensual fascism which best describes the present climate in America. (Remember that Hitler, like George Bush, was almost democratically elected.)

The thought is worth considering that an anthrax scare, requiring that we prepare to submit to the "decontamination" process and all such attendant measures, is potentially far worse than the risk of an actual anthrax attack. This is nothing new: consider the absurd and destructive "war on drugs" that sends a million young people to violent and overcrowded jails for their protection. Their crime is inhaling a fragrant flower that makes them giggle and has never been known to cause a single death -- except by means of gang or police gunfire stemming from its legal prohibition. Any sane person can see that this "war on drugs" causes far more harm that would result if all drugs were made easily and legally available on demand. Similarly, we have all received those e-mails that breathlessly warn of a virus and insist on the urgent need to forward the warning to everyone on your mailing list. The virus, of course, is the message about the danger of the virus. Other than that, there is often no virus at all. In sum, then, the best way to describe the present situation, in which our liberties are every day further eroded by the attitudes of fear put in place by the political exploitation of fear itself, is as a kind of psychosocial autoimmune disease. As in lupus or simple allergies, the defense system turns against the very host it is designed to protect.

Is there any way out? Surely, one might hear, you don't want us to just open ourselves to attack; surely we don't want to be unprepared.... No, of course: but we do, after all, react with remarkable equanimity to the fact that more people die in the USA each month from car crashes than all the victims of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, we react by subsidizing the oil industry. So it may be that the price we are paying for "security" is too high. And just as in the case of drugs, the political ratchet will never let go, secured by the huge and complex interests that have fed on the national hysteria, so here too the political and economic interests at stake will have instilled the fetters of willing submission for good into the American public.

In this gloomy picture, Steve Mann's light-hearted and brilliantly inventive "Luddite technology" is a ray of hope. But where do we go from there? Will we buy his devices off the shelf any time soon? And if so, how will he avoid being swept into the dynamic of the market -- the need for hype, the struggle to stop Microsoft or Dell from muscling in with cheaper, neater models? When the big corporations move in, their products will come with many advantages, they will be user-friendly in ways for which most customers will gladly trade both solitude and privacy. Microsoft's wearables will doubtless come equipped with GPS trackers that will signal your position at all times and Congress, in the name of public security and protection, will quickly legislate a feed from Microsoft headquarters to the CIA. Mann points out that customers are already welcoming the incorporation of GPS devices into their cell-phones, oblivious to the potential for them to be monitored in their every move.

Meanwhile, at least we are still free to read the book. It is printed on real paper and includes no chip or GPS tracker.