Changing the way we think about technology as a solution.
I spend a lot of my time researching/thinking about systems and technology and how they impact us both on a global and personal level. There’s been a lot written about what’s wrong with existing structures, but we’re a bit starved for practical solutions for those without political power or tremendous social clout. I want to talk about a shift in how we think about problems that yields some interesting results.
The People Problem
There is a tendency in modern society to treat people as the problem and technology as the solution. In education for example, an under-performing class is more often “treated” by the purchase of more computers, iPads, or learning software instead of the hiring of additional teachers, aids, and specialists.
In healthcare, instead of giving doctors more time to dedicate to patient care, hospitals are more likely to invest in updating databases to reclassify ailments and the people who have them. Very often patients themselves will be blamed for their illness. The prevailing view is that it is not the technology of drugs or diets or workout routines that has failed the patient, but the patient who has failed the technology.
Not-So-Adaptable Technology
One of the results of this thinking is that we have adopted a mindset which dictates that humans adapt to technology, instead of creating technology properly adapted to humans, their context, and their environment.
(This paradigm is also a natural consequence of what Ursula Franklin called “prescriptive technology” and our modern concepts of scalability, but that’s another discussion for another time.)
One famous example of humans-adapting-to-tech is the keyboard layout. Ever wonder why the letters are laid out in a fairly nonsensical manner? Early typewriters suffered from a problem where the keys and hammers would jam if a person was typing too quickly. The typewriter manufacturer did a study to find out which keys were used most sequentially from one another and then split them up as much as possible.
This made typing slower, harder to learn, and required more effort on the part of the user, but it solved the technology’s problem. Ironically, the problem of keys and hammers has long since vanished, but we are still stuck with the same nonsensical keyboard.
The modern office space is another example of this. It is not good for a human to sit at a desk 8+ hours a day staring at a screen in 70 – 73 degree temperatures carefully isolated from any change in season or sunlight. It is, however, ideal for the computer and especially for the corporate system profiting from the human’s labor.
(There’s a lot more to be said about the office space example, but if I get going on corporations, I will never stop. I write cyberpunk for a reason.)
A Practical Approach
I propose to you instead that when we are trying to solve problems, we consider instead the human, with as much contextual specificity as possible, and then begin to build our solutions around that.
Obviously the way we do work in the broader sense is long-overdue for an overhaul, but I mean specifically in the way we look in our own lives — the things we do have control over.
Let me give you an example and then we’ll wrap up this post. A friend of mine hated doing the dishes. Her husband did too, so the dishes piled up. Dealing with the clutter was stressful, took up space, and a huge energy drain. They tried setting up schedules, taking turns, looking into better storage options, etc. Money was tight so buying off the problem (capitalism’s favorite solution) wasn’t an option.
In an act of frustration and brilliance, my friend looked at herself, her problem, and the dishes. She didn’t want to do the dishes. So, instead of trying to force herself into another energy-consuming system, she simply got rid of the dishes. They kept two plates, four cups, and a few silverware.
The solution struck me as brilliant on several fronts.
1) When it was time to eat there was a maximum of two plates that needed washing.
2) The extra plates were donated so instead of a new plate being made — consuming resources and encouraging a giant plate company somewhere to make more — the plates (the resources that had already been consumed) were re-used.
3) The plates went to a family with low resources, freeing up resources they would have otherwise spent on plates. So in other words, the plates helped out the local community.
4) When friends came over, they brought their own plates, which made everyone feel closer and like they were more a part of the evening.
5) My friend has the extra energy to deal with everything else that came her way in the day. More spoons, if you will (hah hah).
The Point
The point is not that everyone should embrace minimalism. Quite the opposite. This is not a good solution for everyone, maybe even most people. The point is this: when faced with a problem, consider the human in the context of the problem. Do not assume the human is the thing that needs to be fixed or side-lined. New tech, or conformity to existing tech, is not always a good solution. People first.
There’s so much more to be said, but I’m gonna wrap this up here. If you have further examples of the principle in action, I want to hear them. Also, if there’s a particular application of this idea to your field of expertise, tell me about it.
Seriously.
I’m still deep in the research trenches pulling everything into a coherent, useful whole. Fresh insights from outside my fields of expertise are incredibly welcome.
It’s an exciting time as writers come out of the woodwork at the end of the year to list their completed works for consideration, and celebrate everything they accomplished. It’s also a time to reflect on everything that’s happened this year, before the demands of the new one take hold.
For me, it’s been a crazy year. The first two books of the Glitch Logs series are out in the world. I tabled at conventions, sat on panels, and learned a lot about AMS ads. I started reviewing for Dread Central, gave talks on writing, and played an unprecedented number of tabletop RPGs. I made so many new friends.
I learned a lot this year: about writing, about marketing, about people. As I was pulling together this post, one lesson stuck out to me. I met a lot of creators this year – artists, game designers, writers. For those at the beginning of their journey, there’s sometimes a lot of fear there. Will people like it? Will they judge me for it? Will anyone even know it exists? That fear is often paralyzing. It stops good creators from hitting the “publish” button, or telling people that their work exists. What I learned this year though is this: if you are too afraid to try for your own sake, then try for the sake of those around you.
Statistically, 81 percent of Americans say they want to write a book someday. Only a comparatively tiny number of them ever see that dream through. But if someone close to you publishes a work, you are much more likely to finish one yourself. Basically, if you prove it is possible for yourself, you’ve proved it’s possible to someone else too. It could be the nudge that other person needs to finally sit down and write someone’s favorite story.
What I’m saying is this: if you published something this year, and told someone about it, you’re a damn hero. I’m proud of you. I wish you many more victories in the coming year.
Speaking of victories, here are my award-eligible publications for this year. I hope you enjoy them. They were certainly a lot of fun to write. Enjoy!
Defrag
Genre: Science Fiction > Cyberpunk
Word Count: 20,730 words
Blurb: There are two kinds of Runners in Neosaka – those who believe in luck, and those who survive. Glitch, a hacker with more talent for computers than people, is one of the latter but when she is hired for a simple data-grab from the 189th floor of the Eyes in the Sky corporation, all her preparation can’t avert disaster. Caught between a deadly security force and a rival team of Runners, Glitch’s loyalty to her own puts her survival in jeopardy. Forced to ally with her enemies, she struggles to pull together the fragmented pieces of the job and make it out alive.
Blurb: Glitch escaped from Eyes in the Sky with blood on her shoes and a broken watch. It should have ended there, but mere hours later the faceless corporation that hired her is suddenly, inexplicably out for her blood. Driven deep into the underbelly of Neosaka, Glitch is caught up in a fight between the city’s gangs and a Runner relentlessly searching for answers. Haunted by the deaths of her crew and dogged by her past, Glitch will have to push her already-exhausted body and mind past their limits to survive and pay off her debts to the dead.
A friend of mine and fellow writer, Matthew Edwards, recently brought the Nike controversy to my attention.
“Are you following the Nike stuff?” he DM’ed me. “Is there anything more cyberpunk than turning social protest into a marketing and advertising strategy?”
For those of you who, like me, were unaware of what’s going on, here’s the tl;dr. Nike released an ad featuring Colin Kaepernick, a football player famous for kneeling during the national anthem in peaceful protest of racial injustice in the United States. The ad showcases a series of inspirational stories of a diverse number of athletes. “It’s only crazy until you do it,” the ad concludes. Some people, including President Trump, took to Twitter to condemn the ad, and also to post pictures of them burning Nike shoes or chopping up Nike socks. Others have responded by expressing support for Nike and vowing to buy only that brand in the future. Still others are pointing out that the shoes being burned would be better off being donated to needy veterans, and the homeless. As of the writing of this blog post, it’s not clear whether Nike has actually made or lost any significant money since the ad broke.
In browsing through articles on the story from news sources on both sides of the political aisle, I agreed with Matthew. The line between corporation and government, politics and profit is extremely blurry right now. We chatted back and forth about whether we thought the tactic would work. Would consumers go for the ad and buy Nike, in an effort to reward the company for backing what they believed to be important social and cultural issues? Would they identify it as a marketing scheme using social protest for profit? Surely people were becoming well-practiced at spotting brands using social issues to buy customer loyalty by now.
“The reason I think the Nike thing might work is that most millennials have been trained to the idea that they vote with their dollars more than at the voting booth,” I told Matthew. “So a lot of what I’m seeing is people deciding to support Nike right now because they want to reward that kind of behavior.”
The Nike situation is an example of how strange a world we’ve come to live in. Marketing shapes our culture and our way of life here in America. As a result, diversity in advertising is just as important as diversity in books, movies, career paths and so on. The Nike ad is just another brick building towards that goal. If I want Nike, and other giant corporations like it, to continue to this end, then it follows that I need to reward it in the only way companies can understand: increasing their bottom line.
This is, however, a dangerous proposition. A vote is a voice, and whenever we equate money to votes, so called “voting with our dollars”, we are necessarily reinforcing the idea that the rich have more of a right to be heard than the poor. Those without buying power have no voice at all. In the short term, it might serve the purposes of social reform to reward brands that fall in line with the change we as consumers would like to see. In the long term I worry that we are only reinforcing existing power structures that value money over humanity.
We have a pretty problem on our hands. If we want to see positive change, we must pay for it. If we pay for it, we reinforce the structure that values money over people, the very system we seek to unseat. If we do not pay for it, we do not see change. So we pay. And the dizzying circle continues.
I can see the problem, but I don’t have a solution.
Today, Facebook reminded me that it’s been exactly three years since I quit my old cubicle job and started a new chapter of my life. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. In no particular order, three things I’ve learned in those three years:
1. Change often does not announce itself.
Sometimes you get the heads up that change is coming, like when you decide to move, or start applying for jobs. Often though, it comes without warning, for better or worse. Sometimes it’s the opportunity that catapults you into something new and exciting. Sometimes it’s an uninsured driver totalling your car.
The point is, just because something is happening right now, doesn’t mean it will continue to happen that way forever, no matter how much it feels that way. Case and point: four years ago, I jerked to attention in my cubicle because I suddenly realized I had been trying to work out if the fall from the overpass by my job would be enough to kill me. I felt trapped and could see no way out or forward. I was staring down the next forty years of my life and seeing nothing to look forward to. A year later I was out, and starting what has been to date the best chapter of my life.
2. Learn how to rest.
I’m still learning this one. There’s a lot big changes when you start working for yourself, but one thing stays the same: your boss is still riding you about that deadline. The biggest change is now you have to look at them in the bathroom mirror every day. It doesn’t matter how much you love what you do. If you do not take time to rest, you will burn out. I learned that the hard way. These days, I try and take evenings off, even if I still kind of feel like I “could” be working. Being disciplined about taking breaks means I have the stamina to stay in this game for the long haul.
3. Prioritize people.
In my experience, money come and goes. Sometimes you land a good gig, and sometimes you get hit by an unexpected medical bill. Sometimes both happen in the same week. In my experience, the people in my life are more reliable than any insurance company and a better investment of my time than nearly anything else. We get each other through the tough times. We give rides, cook meals, pool skill sets, consult, collaborate, refer work, and sit up waiting for each other in the emergency room. The list goes on. Maybe there is such a thing as a truly “self-made man” out there, but I haven’t met one yet. I didn’t get this far alone, and I don’t intend to change that now.
Adam Myhr can’t recall if it was the book Neuromancer by William Gibson or the video game by the same name that first introduced to him to cyberpunk. Either way, it was Shadowrun that ultimately sealed the deal for him, and drew him into the world of digital matrixes and men melded to machines.
Download Initializing
It was the tech-human fusion in cyberpunk that most appealed to Adam. In cyberpunk he saw a future where the common people didn’t have the power they should, the corporation had too much power, and the government was unable to intervene. It made sense then that people would turn to tech, even go so far as to embed it in their bodies to balance the scales, or at least give themselves a chance.
It made sense then, that Adam’s first foray into cyberpunk creation was digital.
“The first thing I created for cyberpunk was an AmigaBASIC game,” Adam recalled fondly. “I uploaded it just because, and it was horrible, but it was something I did out of the love of the genre.”
Fast forward thirty years, and Adam is now an author. His book, Download Initializing, focuses on AI and the singularity concept.
“As soon as I started working on it the entire world opened up to me,” Adam related. He wanted to explore a post-AI world, one where humanity had a brush with the power and danger of true AI, overcame it, and banned it. He wanted to explore what the world might look like with a fully functioning AI – what its goals would be and how society would react to it.
He found books to be the perfect medium for the story.
“There’s something about that near future cyberpunk that’s hard to get right in the details,” Adam explained. “In books, the reader’s imagination fills in the gaps.”
Double-Edged Technology
To Adam, cyberpunk is a genre that features dominant, oversized and power-hungry corporations, but he doesn’t quite qualify it as a dystopia.
“Most dystopias aren’t quite techy enough,” he pointed out. “Because if people had that tech, they’d do what Runners do – fight back.”
Tech then, for all of its dangers, is the tool that stops corporations from completely dominating and consuming society. It’s an interesting catch-22: technological advances are what give mega-corporations the power to surveil, manipulate, and even outright hunt the people they prey on, but those advances may also be the only weapon against them.
Adam doesn’t see cyberpunk as an optimistic genre, however.
“There’s a lot of hopelessness to it,” Adam observed. “People compare cyberpunk to noir stories because there isn’t a happily ever after, just an after.”
It’s a gritty world without perfect endings. At the end of the day, the best a protagonist can do is turn up their collar against the rain, and disappear into the night.
The Future’s Coming Faster
As he looks at cyberpunk as a genre to create in, Adam voiced the same rueful observation I’d heard from other creators: the future keeps getting closer.
“The interesting thing about cyberpunk as a science fiction, and also one of its limitations, is that it’s near-future science fiction,” Adam explained. “It can start to feel dated… The near future is in two years now, instead of ten or twenty.”
People are looking to cyberpunk to predict what’s going to happen next, but creators can hardly turn it out fast enough to keep from writing current events. That being said, Adam still believes the genre has a lot of value for us. It has an advantage over broader science fiction in looking to the future.
“Science fiction has always been about examining the problems of today by taking ourselves out of it and putting us in the far future,” Adam pointed out. “Humans are messy though, and cyberpunk keeps us in the equation.”
As he looks at the future of the genre, Adam wants to see cyberpunk continue to break out of literature into other genres.
“Movies have done ok but we’ll see” said Adam. “I’d like to see more cyberpunk games, and especially in VR…. Books are great and I love them, but other mediums can be easier to share and feel a lot more real to a lot of people.”
Whatever the future holds for cyberpunk, and its creators, the world won’t have to wait long for it. The future is closing with us too quickly.
To learn more about Adam, visit his websites at 
