How I found safety in numbers
Some notes from an ongoing novel:
Had I only listened to Mom. "Don't take chances. Go with the crowd. Stick your head up and it will get chopped off." Live and learn. Or, in my case, "Die and forget," perhaps.
It started with the font wars. You recall when fonts broke free of simple 2D shapes of a single color. Oh, yes, of course there were early foreshadowings, like the color fonts on the old Amiga system, and, yes, I know, people crafted commercial color fonts for a little while, such as the famous KaraFonts. Gold embossed, waterfall, you name it. But these were still just images. Static images, in fact. I don't think that anyone ever solved the problem of animfonts, or perhaps it was the mindset, pre-WWW, that the screen was just a tool to create something for paper.
And a static image only conveys a static link to an idea. But ideas have weight and depth and other dimensions unique to themselves. And, to be fair, there was also a counterargument, to the idea of extending fonts, that is. If a font carries with it an implicit tonality - and, of course, even static fonts do, to a limited extent - then isn't this like the pre-platonic Greek orators?
You recall Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," where he discusses what he considers to be the great underlying secret and conspiracy of Western thought and culture. Before Socrates and Plato, there were the great orators, who used imagery and vocal intonation, poetry (think RAP), even song and dance to sway audiences to their point of view or artistic vision. Socrates and his pupils, Plato and Aristotle, decried this "rhetoric" as unwholesome and perverse, degrading the true worth and weight of an idea by inappropriately attaching it to the orator, or the quality of the presentation, rather than to the logic and facts that should be the determinant of credibility, belief and commitment.
Like the blond bombshell selling the sportscar, the customactor today buys not just the car, but the vicarious thrill of experiencing that warm, smooth, young flesh, jacked on synthormones to the nth degree. Who buys plastic and nanoflywheels and living leather or minkskin? How material and boring! Compared to the promise of experiencing what SHE felt, and the possibility that SHE might notice just how totally synched you are to her evocation... And decide to pay you a personal virtual visit.
So, runs the argument, fonts are like the bare words, simply pointers of a concept, a mental integration of an infinity of possible instances united by common attributes. How can a font carry emotional weight without distorting the message, without forcing an attitude down the readers mental throat?
But then there were the kids with the instant messaging, and a new style of language was born. Like certain poets of the TwenCen, who had pioneered the use of the written character used graphically to add a new dimension to the poem, so the kids became habituated to a Shakespearian mode of condensed talk.
Naturally then, the use of color and inflection beyond bold and italic and underline, etc., lent the possibility of wrapping a complex nuance of thought and feeling in a tiny bundle entered with a few key stokes. But if one can do so much with color and weight, then why not go further? The technology was not lacking. Why not have a foggy font that crept stealthily behind a message? Only to
LEAP! off the page, entangling the reader in a whole alternate dimension.
As in, "We must demonstrate to the world that America is not lacking in the will to defend its legitimate interests against those who would destroy civilization itself in the name of their faith. " And the blood red fog of denial creeeeps between and behind the upright stalward helvetica, rotting the characters at their base, spelling out in the background, "E tu? Brute?"
Or the lover's mere prose, bedecked with voluptuous flowerings, secret nooks and disturbing protuberances, inviting one in or on, promising incandescent, infinite lust, if one but only accepts and trusts.
Oh, the wonder of touch screens, not just to register the xy of a stylus, but to feel the fevered adolescent fingertip, it's temp and pressure and conductivity, entering an emotive response right back at the sender, to whatever device, whereever positioned on the senders' body. Or, forget the text and go right to the image.
And that, or course, was just the beginning. In the background, the giant corps fevered and fretted over the loss of share in the market of souls. Who among the new literati needed a mere spell checker, much less the constraint of grammar and syntax, dull conformaty, ignorant and spiteful toward the newspeak?
But eventually the kids moved into the positions of power themselves and so the battle was joined. The new grammar employed the relationships of thoughts and feelings, measuring passion's sweep and depth and adding infinite complexity to the simplest thought. It became a contest to see who could drive the system best, no longer hand crafting word by tedious word.
Transclusion, a long term for a neato concept from that legend in his own time, Ted Nelson, shortened, of course, to clued, as in "clued to Jack.com." Included by reference.
But, once the model of the MicroSloth Xploiter had been finally broken, who was not "clued?" Six degrees of separation became .6 degrees and then .006 degrees. Included by reference in every discussion, back-linked to the universe, to every thoughtful or snarky comment, embarrassing goof, charitable act of random kindness, never to be forgotten, or so it seemed.
The breakthroughs, once the kids tore themselves free of the Borg, came fast and furious. A translator for podspeak bypassed spoken language and instead referenced universal imagery and definitions by set theory and semantic webs. "Bad" might have been "Fashionable," "Tough," "Wretched," etc., to be guessed at by the reader, a useful ambiguity if one's msg is private, but seriously challenging for the Englich-challenged of the Terasphere. But when typing "Bad" instantly evokes the several synonymouse links, forcing one to choose of which meming one intends, then the true thought is clued for anyone, anywhere, and suddenly, real auto-translation becomes possible.
And the possibility of accurate translation was again just a beginning. The word, once clued, can be semanticized, evaluated in context, expanded in meaning. Further finesse can be called up on demand.
"Jack and Jill went up the hill."
We know in contect as Englichers that "Jack" is a man's name and "Jill" is a girl. But Jack is also a name of a tool. Perhaps Jill needs to change a tire on her car? To us, knowing the nursery rhime, the meaning appears clear. To the non-Englicher, it rezes only because "Jack" has been clued to "A man's first name."
But we could also clued "Jack" to "a young boy." Or, "a young boy with curly brown hair, wearing blue trousers, with a mother who has a drinking problem, and a father who is having an affair with the milkmaid, owner of a red skateboard with a sticky right front wheel." We could clued a picture of Jack - and Jill - a mere stick figure or a N-Dimensional rendering with enough artificial intelligence to fool other AI's and most people into believing in him, with proportions, accent, ethnicity, to maximize the match of artvertisement purpose and consumactor Ivestment.
Instead of the top-down link-to, the link-from clueds allow the source to respond and mutate. Like the infuriating deerflies that are just smart enough to stay behind your head and bite when your hands are busy doing something else, so the gadsites began spawning, continuously adjusting vectors to maximum destructive effect. Heaven help the infected who had accidentally clued their messaging to one of the viral pathomemes.
And, of course, on the other end of the scale, the blockbots, and verimemes fought to keep the user tuned to the best and brightest, the clearest and most cogent thought and feeling. Some people were better or luckier than others, as always. And the corps had their say, as well, attempting to substitute top-down tyranomemes, prepackaged, powerful and well-suited to the dynosaurs among us, in place of the metavolving networked systems of credibility and coherence, grass-roots revolutionals. Those who bought in were swallowed whole, usually never even realizing...
Still, the focus of all this frantic evoluting was - ostensibly, at least - the enabling of humans in their lives, both on and off the net. However, humans were making fewer and fewer of the real decisions, and it is the decision makers and breakers who decide what systems live or die.
It used to be said that AI's could never truly attain consciosness, because they were heuristically based systems, designed by a real consciousness, but limited to what that source was able to condense and bottle as a set of rules, principles and behaviors. However, as the fonts evolved to become the true voice of thought and desire, so the memetic systems took on whatever attributes would give them advantage, until the word truly became flesh, first in the ubitquitous Avatars of 2nd, 3rd, Nth Life, hungry ghosts or triumphant evocations of something that became almost human and then, one day, more than human.
What can I say? I only want to be myself... But I see the world as my implants think I want to see it. If I somehow disabled them all, would it matter any more? If I ultimately succeeded, then I would be merely a lonely shadow, ignored and barred from everything.