A tech entrepreneur has been called to testify in front of Congress – a gathering of old lawyers who barely understand the thing they’re discussing, except that it’s changed everything. One senator remarks:
“We are inquiring into a practice initiated by… a firm which also happens to be fast becoming one of our largest vendors of computer services. Many of the witnesses who have appeared before this committee believed that the economic life of our country is gravely endangered…”
“A great many people consider the practice immoral,” another senator interrupts. The man under interrogation has invented an online network that allows people to form relationships across distances and in spite of physical constraints and circumstances. This has caused a moral panic.
This isn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 congressional hearing – it’s the plot of “Of Relays and Roses (Valentine’s Day),” a science fiction short story written by Gene Wolfe in 1970, half a century earlier.
Decades before social media, science fiction writers have imagined how technology would shape the human mind. Writers like Gene Wolfe predicted a prototype Zuckerberg with chilling accuracy. Others, like Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), sculpted the dreams of the Zuckerberg, among tech’s most influential venture capitalists. (Snow Crash is, in fact, required reading at many of Silicon Valley’s startups.)
Since web 2.0 brought the internet into every household and eventually every palm, writers, thinkers, and scientists have had much to say on the subject. But this article examines stories that predate social media – and prophesied its implications long before it ever existed.
On Beauty
Augmented reality, Instagram filters, and Ted Chiang’s “Liking what you see: a documentary”
Augmented reality is a term that conjures up an immersive and limitless user experience, from mythical creatures an arm’s length away to eyeglasses that allow users to manipulate holograms with their hands. But despite the boundless possibilities of “mixed-reality” technology, its most widespread application is facial filters.
In 2002, eight years before Instagram, Ted Chiang wrote a novelette called Liking What You See: A Documentary. In this near-present sci-fi story, doctors have invented calliagnosia, a technology that switches off a person’s recognition of facial beauty. Calliagnosia’s purpose is to democratize the supremacy of physical attractiveness. Whereas facial filters like those of Instagram and TikTok reinforce beauty standards – enlarging eyes, smoothing wrinkles and blemishes, pinching noses, and inflating lips – calliagnosia undermines them.
Although beauty is considered abstract and subjective – a sentiment summarized by the aphorism, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” – its hegemony over human sympathy has concrete effects. Chiang’s inspiration for this novelette was a study conducted by psychologists that found people were more willing to help someone they considered beautiful, even people they would never meet. Chiang’s story explores these kinds of injustices and advantages – inequities that can be witnessed in the popularization and monetization of social media.
Chiang says, “I expect physical beauty will be around for as long as we have bodies and eyes. But if calliagnosia ever becomes available, I for one will give it a try.” The bleak reality is that, although we could have turned towards equalizing beauty standards, science and technology have instead moved towards enforcing them. Without a doubt, apps like Instagram and TikTok favor beautiful people over everyone else. The democratization of beauty in Chiang’s story is turned on its head in reality; anyone can be a celebrity as long as they’re beautiful enough.
web 3.0 and the Metaverse
How Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has shaped the latest movement on the web
If web 2.0 was a haphazard movement inevitably born out of online forums, filesharing, and simple commerce transactions that dominated web 1.0, then web 3.0 is far more orchestrated. Web 3.0 is a movement defined by revenue (blockchain investments), distinct from web 2.0 because now even the most conservative investors believe in its power. And its marketing campaign draws explicitly from the pages of Snow Crash, a 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson.
You’ve probably heard of the Metaverse (and Facebook/Instagram’s parent company, Meta), and Snow Crash is the novel from which it originates. In this story, the Metaverse is a layer apart from the physical world, a Cyberspace in which celebrities are still celebrities but hackers can be samurai. The dangers of the Metaverse permeate reality – which is where the drug “snow crash” fits into the plot.
In Snow Crash, the Metaverse’s currency is a user’s ability to trade, trick, and test the limits of the platform. This is perhaps how it’s most similar to Silicon Valley’s Metaverse championed by the vanguard of web 3.0. But whereas Snow Crash’s Metaverse was tongue-in-cheek, sexy, and threatening, web 3.0’s Metaverse is a libertarian Ponzi scheme. It offers nothing that immersive MMORPG video games haven’t offered for years (and might I add, with better graphics), and it only distinguishes itself with unregulated investment and gambling practices. On this point, Stephenson himself remarked, “I don’t quite see what the new is.”
Of Relays and Roses
Forging human connections across distances
As I’ve mentioned earlier in this post, social media has been the subject of much criticism and speculation since its inception. The Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” is among one of the most infamous critical portrayals of social media. But much of what’s written about it is a backwards-looking condemnation, often downright insulting to the billions of people that use it. A 2020 article on sci-fi and social media opined:
Social media users are perhaps the best example of modern-day robotic prosumption, mindlessly producing and consuming content, while social media firms sell their data and target them with ads that feed back into the cycle. Users struggle be break free (Source)
In hindsight, it’s easy to reduce social media to an addiction shared by hordes of infantilized masses. But this blog post is about stories that came before social media. And stories that came before seem to focus on a similar theme: the ability to define oneself and one’s relationships beyond skin-deep (“Liking what you see: a documentary”), beyond social norms (Snow Crash), and beyond distance and circumstance. This last point brings us back to the first story in this article, “Of Relays and Roses” by Gene Wolf.
In this story, written over fifty years ago, a social network has been created that allows people to find their ideal partners. This has caused a moral panic – “destroying the fabric of society as a sort of side-effect” – particularly from employers, whose once-diligent workforce now seeks fulfillment in relationships and hobbies. The biggest outrage is that the service is offered for free. Think quiet-quitting and unlimited time off; these are all themes explored in this hauntingly prescient ten-page short story.
I think it’s impossible for us to understand exactly how social media has changed humanity at this point. But I think it’s important for us to imagine what it could look like in the future – for better and for worse. If you have any thoughts on this, please sign the guestbook (fuck comment sections) and maybe there will be a part 2 (because we haven’t even talked about Serial Experiments Lain!)