Tangled Wires

By Eric Roston

Flashy gadgets humble us all sooner or later. My eureka moment came last fall while I was attending an emerging-technologies conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I walked into the pressroom, ready to plug my laptop into the Internet, only to find the room completely devoid of electronic equipment.

Embarrassment needled me in the head like a virtual noogie. Wireless computing, it dawned on me, was no longer emerging. It's here. The gap between what I cover as a journalist and how I live widens daily. Despite a long-held fascination with the shine and beep of all things high tech, I'm becoming more of a fumbling Luddite. And that's a bummer, because any digiratus will tell you that not only does technology change quickly but the pace at which it changes is accelerating. According to this logic, in 10 years we'll be buying newer models of obsolete gadgets still in development.

Have you gone wireless? Should you? I haven't, despite my moment of digital embarrassment. Do I really need to look up something on the Internet Movie Database from my bed? Here's an even simpler question, worth addressing in this first column: What is technology? A handy definition goes like this: if something breaks or crashes, it's technology; if you don't notice it, it's no longer technology. Consider the car. Cars were probably a new technology until the 1950s, when they became reliable enough not to fall apart at high speeds. Microsoft Windows is clearly technology because it crashes all the time. Cell phones are technology because you can't hear the person you're talking to and also because we, as a society, haven't settled on etiquette for using them in public. Certainly, the richest area of innovation in American revenge fantasy must involve public gabbers.

Now the "invisibility" touchstone for high tech is itself quickly becoming obsolete. The stuff coming out of government and corporate R.-and-D. labs is designed to be invisible from the start: "smart dust" distributed in the wind that instantly forms a scattered monitoring network, computer systems that manage computer systems, micro spy cameras designed to look like insects.

While many people are unplugging to get connected, there are still plenty of wires to go around. Sure, many of us were taken with the first Matrix, when Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss jabbed barbecue skewers into their heads and played video games on their postapocalypse Internet. But to a handful of brainiacs at the start-up Cyberkinetics Inc., it's not science fiction. It's a business model. Using Brown University research, scientists are studying how electrons that shoot through our neural superhighways control movement. Eventually, they hope to build devices that will enable victims of paralysis to communicate with digital gadgets--or their own limbs--via brain implants. Cyberkinetics is a concrete example of the crumbling wall between life and technology--and a useful symbol for everything else.

The boundaries we have drawn around ourselves for decades are unwinding. When so many consumer products--cameras, books, music, phones--are simply delivery mechanisms for digital code, 0s and 1s, even the companies that manufacture them get confused. So Sony, maker of digital hardware and digital entertainment, finds itself peddling computers that customers can use to rip off Sony music over the Internet. The hard-and-fast physical boundary between your television and your stereo is gone because they're both your computer.

Back in that pressroom in Cambridge, I realized I was free from technology, visible and invisible. No Ethernet connection, no wireless service--and fortunately no deadline. I had a couple of beers with another technophile before getting on an airplane to fly home to my wonderful fiance, whom--I had nearly forgotten--I met on the Internet. By the thumbnail definition, maybe the Internet already isn't technology anymore.