dream machines

This is the flip side of Computer Lib. (Feel free to begin here. The other side is just if you want to know more about computers, which are changeable devices for twiddling symbols. Otherwise skip it.) (But if you change your mind it might be fun to browse.) In a sense, the other side has been a come-on for this side. But it’s an honest come-on: I figure the more you know, the readier you’ll be for what I’m saying here. Not necessarily to agree or to be “sold,” but to think about it in the non-simple terms that are going to be necessary.

The material here has been chosen largely for its exhilarating and inspirational character. No matter what your background or technical knowledge, you’ll be able to understand some of this, and not be able to understand some of the rest. That’s partly from the hasty preparation of this book, and partly from the variety of interests I’m trying to comprise here. I want to present various dreams and their resulting dream machines, all legitimate.

If the computer is a projective system, or Rorschach inkblot, as alleged on the other side, the real projective systems—the ones with projectors in them—are all the more so. The things people try to do with movies, TV and the more glamorous uses of the computer, whereby it makes pictures on screens—are strange inversions and foldovers of the rest of the mind and heart. That’s the peculiar origami of the self.

Very well. This book—this side, Dream Machines—is meant to let you see the choice of dreams. Noting that every company and university seems to insist that its system is the wave of the future, I think it is more important than ever to have the alternatives spread out clearly. But the “experts” are not going to be much help; they are part of the problem. On both sides, the academic and the industrial, they are being painfully pontifical and bombastic in the jarring new jargons. Little clarity is spread by this. Few things are funnier than the pretensions of those who profess to dignity, sobriety and professionalism of their expert predictions— especially when they, too, are pouring out their own personal views under the guise of technicality. Most people don’t dream of what’s going to hit the fan. And the computer and electronics people are like generals preparing for the last war.

Frankly, I think it’s an outrage making it look as if there’s any kind of scientific basis to these things; there is an underlevel of technicality, but like the foundations of a cathedral, it serves only to support what rises from it.

THE TECHNICALITIES MATTER A LOT, BUT THE UNIFYING VISION MATTERS MORE.

This book has several simultaneous intentions: to orient the beginner in fields more complex and tied together than almost anybody realizes; nevertheless, to partially debunk several realms of expertise which I think deserve slightly less attention than they get; and to chart the right way, which I think uniquely continues the Western traditions of literature, scholarship and freedom. In this respect the book is much more old-fashioned than it may seem at the gee-whiz, very-now level.

The main ideas of this book I present not as my own, but as a curious species of revealed truth. It has all been obvious to me for some time, and I believe it should be obvious as well to anyone who has not been blinded by education. If you understand the problems of creative thinking and organizing ideas, if you have seen the bad things school so often does to people, if you understand the sociology of the intellectual world, and have ever loved a machine, then this book says nothing you do not know already.

For every dream, many details and intricacies have to be whittled and interlocked. Their joint ramifications must be deeply understood by the person who is trying to create whatever-it-is. Each confabulation of possibilities turns out to have the most intricate and exactly detailed results. (This is why I am so irritated by those who think “electronic media” are all alike.)

And each possible combination you choose has different precise structures implicit in it, arrangements and units which flow from these ramified details. Implicit in Radio lurk the Time Slot and the Program. But many of these possibilities remain unnoticed or unseen, for a variety of social or economic reasons.

Why does it matter?

It matters because we live in media, as fish live in water. (Many people are prisoners of the media, many are manipulators, and many want to use them to communicate artistic visions.)

But today, at this moment, we can and must design the media, design the molecules of our new water, and I believe the details of this design matter very deeply. They will be with us for a very long time, perhaps as long as man has left; perhaps if they are as good as they can be, man may even buy more time—or the open-ended future most suppose remains.

So in these pages I hope to orient you somewhat to various of the proposed dreams. This is meant also to record the efforts of a few Brewster McClouds, each tinkering toward some new flight of fancy in his own sensoarium.

But bear in mind that hard-edged fantasy is the corner of tomorrow. The great American dream often becomes the great American novelty. After which it’s a choice of style, size and financing plan.

The most exciting things here are those that involve computers: notably, because computers will be embraced in every presentational medium and thoughtful medium very soon.

That’s why this side is wedded to the other: if you want to understand computers, you can take the first step by turning the book over. I figure that the more you know about computers—especially about minicomputers and the way on-line systems can respond to our slightest acts—the better your imagination can flow between the technicalities, can slide the parts together, can discern the shapes of what you would have these things do. The computer is not a limitless partner, but it is deeply versatile; to work with it we must understand what it can do, the options and the costs.

My special concern, all too tightly framed here, is the use of computers to help people write, think and show. But I think presentation by computer is a branch of show biz and writing, not of psychology, engineering or pedagogy. This would be idle disputation if it did not have far-reaching consequences for the designs of the systems we are all going to have to live with. At worst, I fear these may lock us in; at best, I hope they can further the individualistic traditions of literature, film and scholarship. But we must create our brave new worlds with art, zest, intelligence, and the highest possible ideals.

I have not mentioned the emotions. Movies and books, music and even architecture have for all of us been part of important emotional moments. The same is going to happen with the new media. To work at a highly responsive computer display screen, for instance, can be deeply exciting, like flying an airplane through a canyon, or talking to somebody brilliant. This is as it should be. (“The reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions.”—Bertrand Russell.)

In the design of our future media and systems, we should not shrink from this emotional aspect as a legitimate part of our fantic (see p. 317) design. The substratum of technicalities and the mind-bending, gut-slamming effects they produce, are two sides of the same coin; and to understand the one is not necessarily to be alienated from the other.

Thus it is for the Wholiness of the human spirit, that we must design.