Whose reality are you in right now?

Steve Mann and the possibilities of existential technology

Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff

“All my life, I’ve sought to have control over my reality. In my early years, this control was about keeping things out, creating boundaries between myself and aspects of the outside environment that I thought of as hostile, it was only when I realized how much better it would be if I could alter or challenge aspects of reality that infuriate me — as opposed to completely blocking out my senses and leaving me with little or no input — that I began to understand the true potential of a wearable system that could also function as a reality shaper.” – Steve Mann, Cyborg: digital destiny and human possibility in the age of the wearable computer.

“Life is what you make it,” goes the saying. It doesn’t matter who said it, it’s just one of those maxims that through repetitive, communal chanting, has penetrated down through the skin into the very pulse of Western consciousness. People love to watch that same movie again and again; you know, the one where the underprivileged sports team rises up from far below last place, right up and over the top, shouting with raised fists, “You can do anything if you put your mind to it!”

Motivational and inspiring, yes, but unless the self-actualizing dreams of the majority include jumping to the pump at Domo, taking pride in a quick and efficient double-double at Tim Hortons, or being the best damn desk jockey in the skyscraper, it’s also more than a little disingenuous. Six billion plus people can’t be Wayne Gretzky, or Tchaikovsky, or Stephen Hawking; there’s just not enough time, money, skill and intelligence to go around.

Yet still, the pseudo-inspirational messages continue to circulate, which could be taken cynically as an indicator of some form of mass cultural schizophrenia. But then, of course, if everyone is crazy, nobody is crazy, because who else would be able to provide the standard of normalcy to judge mental stability against? Nobody, that’s who. This is the point of the message that’s so deeply interwoven into our fundamental cultural beliefs about personal identity and meaning: that it’s up to us to determine who and what we will be.

When the Enlightenment broadsided Europe in the 18th century, the individual emerged from the great church-helmed wreck for the first time, bewildered, holding the same blank map in his hand that’s in ours today. “Before you come alive,” proclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945, “life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.” Sartre said this in his seminal lecture “The humanism of existentialism,” in which he defended the doctrine of absolute human freedom against attacks that it is fundamentally a selfish philosophy that could lead nowhere other than to total inertia, both morally and socially.

“There is no doctrine more optimistic,” he counters, “since man’s destiny is within himself; nor for an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only hope is in his acting and that action is the only thing that enables a man to live. Consequently, we are dealing here with an ethics of action and involvement.”

If God did exist, he also claims, then people would still be in the same position, trying to make sense of the world while determining their own means of living in it. Metaphysically, Sartre’s words ring the familiar bell of experience, but, as he points out, social construction and individual self-determination don’t take place inside a vacuum. A person cannot be an astronaut or murder 350 people just because they want to. Every decision involves other human beings as well as extremely complex systems of politics, beliefs, relationships, education, resources, economics, and so on.

Although every age wants to make a case demonstrating why society is not what it used to be, it is arguable that with the advent of multinational corporations, individual freedom of self-determination is in the later stages of being taken as far out of our hands as it was in the dark ages. At least, this is one of the existential anxieties that drives Steve Mann, inventor of the wearable computer and a professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of electrical and Computer Engineering.

When I met Steve at the front door of his apartment above the Existential Technology Research Centre, located at 330 Dundas St. in Toronto near the Art Gallery of Ontario, he ignored my extended hand and looked at me as though I may have come there to lock him in a small cage to take him back home to Winnipeg and show him off as some strange artifact of the technological age. It’s not surprising, given that Steve’s faced some harsh criticism over the last 30 years for choosing to fashion his public and private identity after an idea that most people are only familiar with from science fiction, that of the cyborg.

“The media,” he says in his book Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer, “occasionally latch onto my wearable computer project and write articles that manage to at once combine an appreciation for what they suppose is my entrepreneurial daring with a blanket dismissal of my efforts as the work of a ‘freak’ or a ‘weirdo.’ ” But he’s not doing what he’s doing just to be different, there are serious concerns driving him; about the nature of existence in a technological age that he sees quickly careening out of our control.

Needless to say, he didn’t invite me in. But he did invite me to sit in on a lab he was leading later that day at the university.

Surrounded by piles of hacked and modified electronic equipment in a small room in the Engineering Annex, students in Steve’s lab were demonstrating projects they’d been working on this semester. Two girls in the lab had been working on a personal safety device that had something to do with a dome camera worn on the front of a person’s body that would output to a VGA monitor but they were having difficulty solving a particular problem relating to the VGA format. Not wanting to simply tell them the solution, Steve suggested that they try an experiment to learn more about how VGA works.

“Put the oscilloscope on the red and on the green and on the blue and try putting on the H-sink and V-sink. Sketch out the H-sink, sketch out the V-sink, and put a dual trace oscilloscope on the H-sink and one on the red, and then put one on the V-sink and on the red, and draw out the wave forms of the V-sink together with red, and then the H-sink together with the red, and its half-red and half-black this way, and its half-red and half-black this way. Then take a white image — half-white, half-black — and try that to see how it differs. Definitely do that and tell the other members of the lab what your findings are because that would be great.”

For all I could tell, he had just explained the elusive alchemical formula for turning lead into gold, the difference being that the process he described results in an actual, quantifiable outcome: the transmutation of electricity into visual output. There’s a good reason why the language of computer and mechanical engineering sounds esoteric to the uninitiated, the reason being that, in a sense, it describes an esoteric practice.

Steve continued, “You want to learn more than just why it doesn’t work, you want to sort of really understand how video works, just a little bit. I mean, obviously, none of us are ever going to understand how video works completely, because TV’s a little mysterious.”

People sitting at home snacking and watching Desperate Housewives would probably snort root beer out of their noses if they heard Steve say that, since, apart from the whole HD craze, TV seems to be about as mundane as the couch they’re sitting on. The philosopher Bertrand Russell noticed this normalizing tendency toward technological innovation already in the mid-20th century, noting in his essay “Let’s Stay off the Moon” that “those who are still young do not easily apprehend how much that is now commonplace in daily life is of quite recent invention.”

What’s possibly more illuminating about Russell’s essay is that he records the remarkably quick progression of technological innovation that took place during his own lifetime, which began only 136 years ago, in 1872. “When I was a boy, electric light had just been invented and telephones were still regarded as a rare curiosity. The fastest thing on the road was the push bicycle, which was regarded with apprehension as a danger to pedestrians and a cause of terror to horses. I was grown up when I saw a motor car, and nearly forty when I first saw an aeroplane. In World War I everybody marveled when the Germans constructed a gun which would carry a shell some seventy miles.”

Continuing with this progression, two weeks ago the U.S. government fired a single explosive rocket up through the earth’s atmosphere into space, directly taking out a single spy satellite orbiting at a speed of 27,000 kilometres per hour, which had been recording information about the United States from its orbit and sending the information to a computer in China. The invention of such profoundly advanced technologies represents the amazing and ostensibly limitless wonders of human creation. Yet, it is this very ability of organizations, such as a government or a corporation, to harness and deploy technology in the constantly shifting interests of nationalism and economic power — in the forms of weaponry, security and surveillance — that worries Steve Mann and drives the interventionist machinery of existential technology.

In the essay “Existential Technology: Wearable Computing is Not the Real Issue!” Mann explains the problem he perceives with what he calls ““covernments” (convergence of multiple governments corrupted by interests of global corporations).

“Bureaucracies spanning several countries provide layers of abstraction and opacity to accountability for the functionaries involved in such official machinery. Thus, policy affecting our everyday life is moved further from our ability to influence, affect or even understand it.”

Corporations can set and standardize prices for groceries, gas, housing, clothing; they can hire and fire hundreds of thousands of people at will; they can cut down rainforests that necessarily create oxygen for humans to breathe; they can decide which pop groups are going to be big by paying for them to be played in continuous rotation on every radio station; they can force us to mentally register advertisements every time we want to walk outside without staring at the ground; they can determine what kind of news we see and hear from around the world; they can buy out or shut down by out-pricing any small businesses that are not paying them like feudal lords; and they can monitor nearly every move we make in public spaces with surveillance cameras and security guards. We can say “boo,” but since the corporation is a disembodied entity, it can rarely hear us.

This is where Mann’s work steps in to attempt to restore the dignity of the individual, by balancing out, or in some cases reversing, the top-down flow of power and control in modern societies. “I propose the concept of ‘existential technology’ as the technology of self-determination and mastery over our own destiny,” he says. The primary means of this self-determination and mastery is through his creation of the wearable computer: a device that can mediate and transform the sensory reality experienced by the wearer and also that can jarringly force accountability back onto the people that have displaced it into the seemingly bottomless trenches dug and fortified by corporations.

One form of existential technology developed by Mann to confront the top-down authority of corporations is the creation of “glogging.” Similar to blogging — in which individuals record their personal thoughts and experiences — glogging happens when an individual is outfitted with a camera that constantly captures the world as it is seen by the wearer and instantly transmits the information to the glogger website, where it can be seen by anybody with Internet access anywhere in the world. Mann refers to this as “sousveillance,” which “involves the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity.” In his experience, Mann has found that sousveillence can be a particularly effective means of engaging with intrusive surveillance in public spaces.

“The increased use of surveillance and monitoring technologies makes the individual more vulnerable to, and accountable to, these very organizations that are themselves becoming less accountable to the surveilled populace,” Mann says; and that’s a problem that most people don’t seem to recognize or even care about.

A common confusion about the purpose of sousveillance can be crystallized in the question: “What’s the difference, isn’t it still just surveillance, too?” The answer is that it sort of is but not exactly.

The thing to keep in mind is that the Tim Hortons one block down from Mann’s apartment has eight security cameras, which exist for the sole purpose of protecting the interests of Tim Hortons, not the interests of the people being watched. And it’s not that Tim Hortons is an evil juggernaut subjugating the masses, but that it could be, and we might not be able to do anything about it because we’ve already relinquished technological control and regulation over the public sphere. So, while surveillance systems may help to deter criminals and protect individuals from those criminals, “Public safety systems may fail to protect individuals against crimes committed by the organizations that installed the systems.”

Though it may sound paranoid, a quick perusal of nearly any history book can be a good reminder of the swiftness with which governments and other organizations can turn against their own people. Instead of crossing our fingers and hoping that such abuses of authority won’t happen again, Mann wants people to be proactive and take steps to help ensure that it won’t happen. “We are hoping to build a system of ‘equiveillance,’ ” he says, “That is, the possibility that these two very different social practices might somehow result in some kind of equilibrium.”

Existential technology is not only about confrontation and intervention, but Mann claims that it is equally about empowering individuals to take an active role in shaping their individual realities, rather than having it shaped for them. “This is accomplished, metaphorically and, actually, through a prosthetic transformation of the body into a sovereign space, in effect, allowing each and every one of us to control the environment that surrounds us.”

This feat of control is achieved through visual computer mediation between the outside world and the individual. Mann wears a headset that captures the world in front of his eyes, sends it through his wearable computing unit, and then projects the mediated images onto his retinas using laser projection. Through this mediation he can block out advertisements on the street, change his perception of colour, insert shopping lists onto his field of vision in the grocery store, play interactive video games, or switch perceptual places with another person wearing the same headset, essentially seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

The potential dangers of the technologies developed by Mann are multiple and obvious: total detachment from reality, vulnerability of individual realities being hacked into and remotely controlled, government-controlled cyborg subjugation, The Matrix, upping the technological ante on militaristic and surveillance endeavours, and unknown psychological effects from forcing the human brain to constantly process information in ways that evolution hasn’t necessarily prepared it for. Mann admits that he has suffered on occasion from flashbacks and visual confusion disorder.

If something intended for good purposes has the potential to be used for the exact opposite, does that mean it shouldn’t be attempted? Heroin, for example, is a synthesized product of pharmaceutical research into effective opoids that can be used in hospitals for effective means of alleviating extreme bodily pain, but it can also send a person into deep euphoric states, it can cause the worst withdrawal symptoms imaginable, and it can make your heart stop beating for good if used too much for dependant fun. Medicine can kill people, transportation can kill people, and also utopian systems — political or religious — can kill people.

Sartre points out that given the changeability of human nature, it’s not possible for individuals to control what others might like to do with their work after they’re gone. “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to set up Fascism, and the others may be cowardly and muddled enough to let them do it. Fascism will then be the human reality, so much the worse for us.”

Mann has recognized what he sees as a very serious problem with the ways in which modern technologies are being used to actively shape individual and social consciousness. In response, he’s trying his best to do something to make them more accountable to the individuals they’re supposed to be serving.

To some, these different forms of existential technology and computer mediation may just sound like novelty, or escapism, or the awesome thing ever, but Mann insists he’s not doing it for any of those reasons. Fundamentally, he believes that he is taking control of his own reality, instead of letting it be determined for him by a society that is being shaped by the consolidating interests of a very small number of rapidly expanding global corporations.

By volunteering himself as a test subject for new modes of human-technology interfacing, Steve Mann’s hope is that through his work, people will learn to ask questions about the way our reality is becoming increasing shaped and determined by technology. One way people could begin to do this would be by questioning the work that Mann himself is experimenting with, because as he says in his book, “We are all already cyborgs. That much, though many might not think of it as such, is a given. The challenge is to discover what kind of cyborgs we are: voiceless, passive cyborgs cowed into blindly responding to corporate authority? Or proactive cyborgs who know how to harness and use technology for the purpose of individual and community sanctity and interaction?”