__ "First we shape our tools, thereafter they shape us." That's Marshall McLuhan on how we converse with technology. We invent a computer, it alters our minds and emotions, and then we - the computer and us - head off in an entirely new direction. To where? That's the question we recently asked some of the brightest people we know. It's a question with more relevance than ever: We're entering a new era, when digital technology must answer first and foremost to the consumer. __
__ As soon as we hit the Send key, we knew we'd hit a nerve. The responses that flooded in were exuberant, disgruntled, sentimental, demanding - sometimes all at once. From cinematographer to gourmet chef to gearhead, each of the contributors to "The Wired Diaries" reveals that the line between our technological creations and ourselves is fundamentally fuzzy. We may differ in what tools we use, but the portrait of humans at the turn of the millennium is clear: We are beings entangled in our inventions. Like all relationships, this intimacy is full of passionate contradictions and unending surprises. And the conversation has only just begun ... __
Francis Ford Coppola, director: When I was a boy, I was paralyzed with polio. I became interested in remote controls; I built television sets; I invented things. The first technology I was attracted to was a good workbench with a vise and dry-cell batteries and a lot of wire. I built motors, radios, remote-control devices. I still have one of those remote controls today.
Nicholas Negroponte, digital guru: The simplest technology that gives me the greatest pleasure is a coat hook in the right place at the right time.
P. J. O'Rourke, humorist: When you had to carve things in stone, you got the Ten Commandments. When things had to be written with a goose quill and you had to boil blood or whatever to make ink, you got Shakespeare. When you went over to the steel pen and manufactured inks, you got Henry James. You get to the typewriter, you get Jack Kerouac. When you get down to the wordprocessor - you get me. So improvement in the technology of writing hasn't improved writing itself, as far as I can tell.
Bill Joy, founder, Sun Microsystems: What I want is a pocket-sized wireless 1- or 2-Mbps PDA plus phone, weighing 250 grams and connected to a pervasive digital wireless network. I'm willing to accept lower baud rates in rural environments.
Arthur C. Clarke, author: When I was a boy, I had the world's finest toy, a Mechano Set - you call them Erector Sets in the US. It's wonderful for engineers. The perfect toy. I dreamed of having the biggest of all the sets. It cost some incredible amount of money - I think about £20.
David Filo, cofounder, Yahoo!: I remember looking at the Erector Set catalogue and wanting the fancy pieces - the three-speed motor versus the little one we had. But we had a really big set. We could build cranes; we could build bridges. When I was in the fifth grade, my family built a house. My brother and I helped with the roofing, nailing shingles down; we held things. We put up sheet rock and did electrical stuff. I was always fascinated with tools - table saws, routers, lathes. There are eight of us in the family, and the house originally was only about 1,400 square feet. Our bedrooms were 7 by 8 feet, but we each had our own. Engineering in general is about building things, solving problems. To this day there are so many problems with what we're doing at Yahoo! - things still need fixing. What motivated Jerry and me all along was really simple: You try to come up with nice solutions.
Kevin Kelly, executive editor, Wired: I once built a house with a friend. We started one autumn day with a picture of a large home - stone walls, wide porch, oak beams in the living room - held in our minds. Every invention begins that way - as an idea first. While technology is brought to life by the work of our hands, it is essentially the mind made visible.
David Crosby, singer-songwriter: I want a computer I can talk to. One that would follow me around with a part of itself and wouldn't forget anything. Very intelligent, highly opinionated, but slightly antagonistic - a curmudgeon. I want a computer that won't necessarily agree with me, but will have enough emotion so that I suspect that underneath it all, it likes me.
Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors: A computer cannot become self-aware unless someone gives it the spark of life - not unless it can ingest psychedelic substances on its own. But computers don't want acid. They have too much logical thought to do.
Judy Estrin, CTO and senior vp, Cisco: I was born into technology. My parents were both computer scientists, and my dad worked with John von Neumann at Princeton and helped build one of the first computers. Then they moved to Israel and built the first computer in the Middle East. They built me at the same time - and I claim that I have the better architecture because I'm still running. The main benefit of being a second-generation computer scientist is that you grow up at ease with technology. On the other hand, doctors make the worst patients, and in some ways, people who design computers understand too much. I don't do online banking, for instance, because I sit there and think about everything that could go wrong.
Kevin Werbach, managing editor, Release 2.0: I purchased an Apple IIe the first day it went on sale, marking my passage into technological adulthood. Appropriately, I paid for it with my bar mitzvah money. Looking back, though, I see it not as a break with the past but as one step on a continuum: Speak & Spell, Merlin, Pong, Atari 2600, all the way through the Macintosh clone, Windows laptop, and handheld computer I depend on today. Technology fools you that way; it moves to its own rhythms. It's hard to believe the Web didn't exist when I started college, but then again, my grandfather began life in a Ukrainian village with no electricity, cars, or telephones. Who is to say that technology moves faster now?
Jon Carroll, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle: I don't do funny phone-machine messages anymore. I don't think anyone does. People don't name their cars anymore, either. Did you ever ride with a person who would pat the dashboard and say, "Come on, Matilda"?
Richard Sclove, author: Long ago, I owned a '71 Dodge Dart. For a while in 1982 it took on a life of its own: The radio kept playing "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, even though the song had been a hit more than a decade earlier.
The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader: The 13th Dalai Lama left me many things. One very important item was a movie projector that ran manually. The projector was old and very often became damaged. At that time, our great technician within the palace was an old Chinese monk. He knew everything. But after he passed away, the whole responsibility of doing the repair work landed on my shoulders. So I developed an interest in that movie projector and electricity. Generally, I like movies. But the types of films I like are mainly documentaries - about animals and nature. What you call feature films, well, I am not much interested in them because I know they are artificial - just acting. But one thing I liked was the late Kojak. He looked just like a monk! On the few occasions I saw him, I thought, "Oh! Very beautiful. Very beautiful!"*
Jenny Holzer, artist: I have a long-term romance with electronic signs. It's one of my better relationships, so I like to characterize it as spiritual.
Craig Mundie, senior VP, Microsoft: In 1995, I gave all the principal relatives in my family, who live all over the world, a PC with email and a network connection. It had about a 30 percent take rate. My dad got into it. My mother used it to make Christmas cards. Then, last summer, for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, I went out and bought WebTV boxes for all the family. That had an 80 percent take rate. Now everyone emails. I've communicated more with my mom and dad in the three years since I gave them a computer than I did in the 25 years prior to that.
William Schulz, executive director, Amnesty International USA: My father would have loved an electronic listmaker. He kept lists of everything he had to do in a tiny yellow spiral pocket notebook. He so loved making lists and noting accomplishments of tasks that he would sometimes write down something he'd already done just to be able to draw a line through it. But sometimes the pages of the notebook would detach prematurely or the ink would smudge, and God forbid if he ever misplaced the notebook - his life would be out of sync for weeks.
Halsey Minor, chair and CEO, CNET: I wish my mother had had one of those GPS guidance systems and air bags, because she got lost all the time and was a terrible driver. When I was 16, my mother was uninsurable.
Jenny Holzer: What technology should my mother have had? A stun gun. Not to use on me, but on other people in her past. My father? A shock collar. For himself.
Cynthia Heimel, humorist: ATMs are like my mother. I think they're judging me: "What are you doing taking out money? You hardly have any left. What are you going to spend this on?"
Dan Wieden, cofounder and chair, Wieden & Kennedy: This is the truth: I have never in my life used an ATM machine. Talking to me about technology is like talking to a fish about architecture. When Time magazine listed me as one of the 50 Cyberélite - I was number 50 - people in this agency went into hysterics.
Pico Iyer, travel writer: I am probably the worst kind of modern being: a Luddite who relies, every other moment, on technology. I live 8,000 miles from my bosses, I communicate with my loved ones mostly by international phone lines, and I get on a 747 every time I need to see the dentist. Yet I harbor nearly all the superstitions - the uneasy questions - that make me write with pen and paper.
Matt Groening, creator, The Simpsons: I was the first person to buy a Newton and throw it across the room.
Richard Powers, author: Technology has increased the throw weight of my life beyond imagining. I'm dictating this into a 2-ounce headset while lying in bed underneath a down comforter and watching the words appear on a 3-foot screen across the room. (The arrangement also depends on a 13th-century bit of high tech called eyeglasses.) I make the occasional correction to my words via a wireless keyboard and mouse. My thoughts materialize before me with a stunning transparency. Two keystrokes take me out to the global network. All time and space are mine without lifting from the horizontal. Life is terrifyingly good.
Arthur C. Clarke: I have several computers - all Compaqs. I have a satellite phone, courtesy of Inmarsat. I have seven secretaries on three continents, with one who specializes in email. I also have an AT&T videophone.
Jeff Gordon, Nascar Winston Cup driver: I've got laptops, PalmPilots - anything I can get my hands on. Videogames. GPS systems. I bought a boat not too long ago; it's got autopilot and GPS and a satellite TV.
Cynthia Heimel: I've got two computers (a laptop and a desktop - both Macs), a treadmill, two televisions, caller ID, several phones - somewhere in this house there's a PalmPilot, but I can't find it so I'm using a Casio Boss - an electric toothbrush, and my dog. He's a big black lab mix and very intelligent; he's my best piece of technology. And of course I have a VCR and cable TV. And I love all this stuff, I love every moment of it. I like getting a new fax machine; I like researching it forever. Talking to the television is also fun. Right now I'm screaming "Fuck you!" at the television all the time. I'm so sick of everyone on TV, and I want them to all die. Pundits, please take a vacation. I often watch TV while I'm on the telephone with someone and say, "Look at that dress, look at that dress." I actually made a phone date for Sonny Bono's funeral. I was so afraid that there would be things to discuss and no one would be there. Now what I want is a pet locator. I have six dogs, but no dog technology. It would have to be a teeny-weeny chip on the collar or implanted, which is yucky to think about, but it's supposedly good if they get lost. I have one dog - she used to be able to jump over the fence. One day she took another dog with her and they were gone for two hours. I was sobbing. Now I know she just goes to Trader Joe's. What I hate is automatic phone systems. Worst is Macintosh support. I have spent an entire season waiting for tech support to pick up the phone. Now I've got the G3 and I feel incredibly cool. I like to whip it out on airplanes and pretend I'm writing.
David Brower, chair and founder, Earth Island Institute: Without technology, I wouldn't be here. The month before I was born in 1912, my mother had a mastoid operation. So if it hadn't been for some sort of technology then, I would never have made it. I also have to say I'm fond of my pacemaker.
Sky Dayton, chair and founder, Earthlink: When I was about 4, I was fascinated with the button - anything I could push to make something happen. It's a powerful concept, the button - it's a trigger - and I used to draw pictures of myself pushing buttons. Both my parents were artists; we had an extremely analog household. But when I was 9, I went to live in Los Gatos with my mother and grandparents. My grandfather was an IBM fellow. I remember him taking me to where he worked and showing me the giant computer systems in air-conditioned rooms. That was a watershed event: I was able to connect my interest in buttons with these huge machines.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher, The New York Times: I love the fountain pen. Here's why: The fountain pen takes on the characteristics of its owner - the nib adjusts to the pressure you put on it. Your pen becomes part of your own personality. And when you pick up someone else's fountain pen, if they've used it for some time, you can't use it.
Isabel Maxwell, president and CEO, CommTouch Software: My first bike was stolen right out of my garage. I mourned. I thought, Oh God, it was never going to come back. My new bike is a Trek, though. It's more me.
John Markoff, technology reporter, The New York Times: For all the time I spend writing about the consequences of Moore's Law, the technology evolution of the lowly bicycle leaves me awestruck. I was passionate about my first Cinelli, which I bought for a paltry $100 in 1965. There was a tremendous amount of technology in that bike. Three decades later, the refinement continues unabated.
Timothy Ferris, science writer: A good car tells you how it ought to be driven, if you pay attention. Porsches speak pretty clearly. Give a Porsche perfect input - exactly the right action with the brake, throttle, and steering, and it will reward you with a nearly perfect result, a sensation as gratifying as hitting a proper golf shot. On the other hand, bad inputs produce bad results, and when this happens at high speed you want to pay close attention to what the car is telling you. The best drivers don't just listen; they ask questions. Hurley Haywood, an endurance-race champion who's won Daytona five times and LeMans three times, stresses adaptability - a readiness to modify your behavior in response to what the car is saying. Recently I took a spin with Hurley at Thunderhill Park Raceway in a street-legal Porsche C4S he'd not driven before. He spent the first lap interrogating the car, exaggerating his use of the throttle, brakes, and steering wheel to see how it responded. During that lap he was hitting the apexes and exit points of turns to only within about 1 meter, which is good for somebody like me but sloppy by professional standards. By the second lap everything was smooth and very fast, and Hurley was nailing the apexes and exits of every turn to within a palm's width of perfection. Hurley was in full communication with the car. Computers have improved the communications skills of many high-performance cars. In Italy last spring I borrowed a Ferrari 355 F1 for a couple of days. The F1 has a clutch but no clutch pedal. A computer changes gears, using data downloaded from Michael Schumacher's Formula One races. Floor it and you experience Michael's greatest hits - shocking, slamming shifts that expand one's sense of the possible. It was a thrill, and I learned from it. But in much learning is much sadness, and the main thing I learned is that I'm not Michael Schumacher.
Jeff Gordon: I love videogames; I'm designing my own. It'll be called Jeff Gordon Racing, and it's going to be like racing in the year 2012 - 300 miles per hour, 60-degree banking, and cars with little wings that come out when they get airborne so you can control them in the air.
Isabel Maxwell: My other car - not my Volvo tank, which makes me a road warrior - my other car is a Mercedes 280 SL. That car I really care about - it's silver, it's pretty and fun. There's an aesthetic about it. It's one of a kind. But it's not about status and all that. It's about pleasure.
John McPhee, author: My computer is my closest inanimate friend. It's a machine, and if I had to kick it out tonight, I could get another one. But I couldn't do without what it does. I don't feel I'm there unless I turn it on.
Nora Ephron, screenwriter and filmmaker: There's a moment in You've Got Mail when Tom Hanks turns off his computer because he doesn't want to email back to Meg Ryan. He walks out of the room, then he comes back to the door and stares at the computer, and the computer stares at him, and there's this musical theme that starts playing - that song your computer sings to you, which is, "Come to me. Sit with me. Log on with me." There's no question email becomes a type of mild and harmless addiction.
Jon Carroll: Within five years of first learning the computer, I was seriously worried about becoming addicted to conferencing. I was spending seven hours a day online. Partly as an antidote to this looming disease, I purchased a well-regarded computer game called Civilization. Pretty soon I was spending seven hours a day playing that. Through the years, I have greeted every technological advance with sarcasm. The sarcasm was always presented as a defense of humanistic values against the encroachment of soulless technology. The truth is that I am a huge fan of soulless technology; I just hate change. Indeed, it might be possible to trace the history of successful industrial advances by betting on those products and services that I have disdained in conversation and in print.
Jerry Yang, cofounder, Yahoo!: I'm not addicted to connectivity. Yeah, I can picture myself surfing the Web at 60 - as I get older, I'll depend more on communications technologies - but I won't go overboard. You have to have physical balance. If I'm on vacation, I don't take a cell phone, I don't turn on my pager.
Edmund White, author: I write my fiction in very beautiful notebooks, which have the advantage that you can sell them to Yale for its archives. You couldn't sell your disks. I use notebooks that are made by Papier Plus. The pages are very thick handmade paper, unlined, and are sewn into these buckram covers that are covered with different-colored cloth.
Robyn Miller, cocreator of Myst and Riven: The birth of my creative thoughts is always aided by the lowest technologies.
Alice Waters, chef, Chez Panisse: My favorite tool is a big, heavy, marble mortar and pestle that I carried back from the south of France. It's a technology as old as fire. When you're crushing and grinding, you feel like you're connecting in some primal way with the food. We get very lost in the unreality of lots of equipment, getting in the way of what's important: the person who's eating, the person who's cooking. My mortar and pestle is something that's been used since the beginning of time, and is still beautiful and elemental. It will never get tired, it will never get old.
Edmund White: A slowly crushed piece of garlic is very different from one that's been thrown into the blender. To make a vinaigrette with a mortar and pestle is the best thing in the world.
Rick Moranis, actor: My Metrocard! This digital mass-transit pass to New York City is the proletarian badge I wear proudly - it's my personal assault against the above-ground hordes of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's tourist bonanza. And I can transfer anywhere, get off anywhere, go unlimited distances in complete secrecy. There are no cookies and no crumbs. My automotive EZPass leaves a trail as long as the New England Thruway. Credit cards now have software-monitoring programs that can warn you if they detect any aberrational spending. The Metrocard is a piece of digital technology that has all the conveniences of the state-of-the-art, but without the Big Brother effect. It's the first step in the no-cash world, a New York card so smart, even Disney has no connection to it. Yet.
Paul MacCready, aeronautics engineer: My brain: The memory bank was limited and unreliable, the programming based on prior experience was inadequate, and the processing was very slow. But somehow the complex parallel processing, combined with some unexpected inputs and connections that perhaps emerged from the electrochemistry of attitude, let this computer do a job that another computer could not.
Robert Sullivan, author: I have very little in common with the Unabomber. That said, I must now confess that I am sitting in a cabin in a remote corner of the Great Northwest with no heat, no running water, and only one electrical outlet, which I'm using to power my cell phone recharger. And I am typing on a manual typewriter. The particular typewriter I am typing on is an Olympia Traveller de Luxe. The great thing about this typewriter is that it is small, about the size of a large urban area's phone book, and so I can use it wherever I go. I have two other typewriters: a Smith Corona Coronet - a portable electric typewriter - and an IBM Selectric, a gift that I have yet to really bond with. Typing reminds me that I am working. If I don't sweat words, then they might just get ahead of me and themselves, and run out in front of the idea, which is a scenario I am prone to in Internet communications: Imagine a saxophone player drowning in a pool of chromatic scales or a fisherman tangled in his line and you've got a good idea of what it's like to receive email from me. I don't think that people who only write on computers ought to change. I'm saying that technology doesn't come with an expiration date. I am of the opinion that computers and typewriters can get along. That's why God invented optical character recognition. I fax typed pages to my computer all the time, in lieu of purchasing a scanner.
Paul Fussell, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania: The emphasis on electronic contributions to writing is typical of the American obsession with the means rather than the ends. But it's a fad that will pass, like plus fours in golf.
Robert Sullivan: Hear the sound of the steel hammer striking the paper! A sound made even more echoingly staccato, by the way, when the metal bar with the rubber rollers is lifted, freeing the paper, even if this risks a tear. Savor that hail-on-my-cabin's-tin-roof sound. Admire it! For the sentences that a typewriter produces are actual. They are impressed and impressive, as if wrought in steel.
John McPhee: I don't use WordPerfect or Word. I have Howard. Howard Strauss. He wrote a program - an editor, created for IBM mainframe programmers to use at home on their PCs - to imitate what I do when organizing my work. And if Howard Strauss leaves Princeton, I do too. I used to type up my notes, and I'd have 150 pages of notes and the only organization they'd have is the order through time in which I scribbled them. I would make a Xerox of the whole set, code them all, then assign each note to one or more sections in the structure of my story. I would then literally cut the notes apart with scissors and put the whole thing in 36 separate manila folders. Then when I'd pick up envelope number one, I could forget the other 35. The purpose of all this mechanistic monkeying around was that it freed me to write. Now, I still type up my notes myself. But what Howard did was write a program where the machine chews it all up and reassembles it automatically. One file becomes 36 files, each with its own new name.
Edmund White: If there was ever a writer who needed a computer it was Proust. He wrote by making insertions and additions. In other words, he wrote the whole book straight out pretty much and then began to fatten it by adding. He used something called paperoles, which were handmade: He would paste new pages onto the margins of existing pages so he could then move out laterally and just add paragraphs. Then he would dictate everything to a secretary, which would allow him to play with the form even more. Then, being very rich, he used typesetters the way we might use a typist. And with the newly fattened draft, he would start rewriting compulsively.
Francis Ford Coppola: I was an early network advocate. When I had my movie studio in Hollywood back in late '70s and early '80s, I visited Xerox PARC and got the idea to create a network, an Ethernet network, through my studios for all the writers, the art department, and the casting department. I used to describe it as a clothesline running through every office in the studio. You could take a clothespin and put up a little card with an idea and it would go into the writers' department and they would turn that into a story. Then it would go into the art department and they would turn it into storyboards. And step by step, that card on a clothespin would come out as a movie.
Craig Mundie: I wanted my wife to use email, so I put her computer together and put it at her desk in the kitchen. And she hated it. Only later did I find out that what she really hated was the way it looked. So one day I got a prototype of the first Samsung flat-panel display, and she loved this thing. It completely changed her view of computing - not because it did anything different, but because it fit into her space.
John Chambers, CEO, Cisco: Five years ago, my chief technology officer was talking about multiple data lines into the home and putting switches, routers, and hubs into each room. I laughed and said only nerds are ever going to do that. And he said, John, you're going to be a nerd faster than you think. A year and a half later I had my house wired with switches, routers, hubs, and multiple data lines.
Isabel Maxwell: Ah, subject lines. I'm very good at subject lines.
David Brower: My goal is to learn more about the astute technology of the earth. Amory Lovins, who has become the guru of energy efficiency, used to use the example of cement: A hen makes its shell at 103 degrees Fahrenheit. A clam can do it at the temperature of seawater. But our technology needs to heat cement to 1,800 degrees before it will bond. So what's our problem?
Nicholas Negroponte: Why can't laptops capture the power of my typing on the keys? When my cell phone runs out of power, why can't I shake it to charge it up enough to finish the call?
Ira Flatow, radio host, Science Friday: Yes, I have pulled my hair out over not backing up my data, but more often, I have found myself screaming at technologies that are poorly designed. In the old days, car radios had four controls, and each knob was uniquely shaped and positioned so that one could play and tune the radio by touch. One needed never take one's eyes off the road.
Patrick Naughton, CTO, Infoseek: I won't use tools that force a cascade of other decisions. I won't use a Swiss Army knife. I like tools that do one thing very well. Get me a DeWalt 14.4 battery-operated power drill.
Donald Trump, real estate mogul: Any technology developed solely because it can be developed should not be developed - like light switches that do six or seven things but do a poor job of turning the lights on and off; caller ID on phones, which leads to blocking caller ID, which leads to getting past the block on caller ID; and especially machines that answer phones or even make phone calls and ask you to hold on for an important message from another machine. They may as well say, "Your call is important to us. Please hold on while we ignore it."
Nora Ephron: To say hello to a digital effect is $35,000. The littlest thing - removing an unsightly pimple from an actor's face in a close-up? $35,000. You want to change the color of the leaves on a tree? $35,000. You want to change the color of the sky? $35,000.
Ani DiFranco, singer-songwriter: I mean, the last thing I want to do in life, other than have my toenails pulled out one by one, is to look at any of those Internet sites about me. On occasion I'll sort of sidle up to one of my friends who's Internet savvy and try to find out some information about something. But I generally don't use it at all. I plan on dropping out of society at any moment now, anyway.
Ira Flatow: On the Metro North train, heading from Connecticut to New York, I saw a gentleman doing business on his cell phone, going down a list of clients and calling each and every one of them, all the while chatting out loud about the most private issues in public. I learned that he had just had prostate surgery, his boss was a drunk, his colleague's business trip to Europe was a waste. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I didn't want to hear any of it, and at that moment I swore I would start a campaign for "cell-safe cars." Let's banish cell phone users to the alcoves and doorsteps with the smokers.
Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor, NBC Nightly News: I once watched a 400-pound guy walk down Madison Avenue with a stiletto-heeled blond on one arm and a cell phone attached to his ear. And he kept yelling into the phone, "NO! Next? NO! Next? NO! Next?"
Stanley Bing, Fortune columnist: Cell phones take over their owners like parasites. They attach themselves to users' ears and suck out their brains and sometimes make them grow tiny ponytails.
Patrick Naughton: What technologies do I wish had never been invented? The airplane. What technology could I not live without? The airplane. What technology do I dread? The airplane.
David Filo: I go coach. When you can sit 10 feet back and save $1,000 it's kind of a no-brainer.
Isabel Maxwell: While air travel has split families asunder, email has truly brought us together. And the thing with email is it doesn't get jet lag.
Gary Wolf, Wired contributing editor: When I first sent email 10 years ago, the risk seemed small. I didn't understand the consequences of promiscuously exposing myself to tens of millions of potential correspondents. Now the situation has become more clear. When you begin to send email, you are deciding to be tied to your computer for the rest of your life, except for carefully arranged and preannounced vacations. The tie's strength comes from polite regard for the feelings of others; except "polite regard" doesn't quite do justice to the anxiety caused by a screen full of unread emails. They are like a string of bad debts, and while some people have a marvelous ability to breeze through bankruptcies unscathed, most of us don't. When my computer broke down recently, my first feeling was relief: Nyah, nyah, nyah, they can't find me now. I had a burst of antisocial passion, and if it had stayed broken for a few days I probably would have moved quickly from unanswered emails to passing bad checks to breaking and entering to battering some poor old lady to death with a candlestick. But I went downstairs to the little computer-repair shop and begged for assistance. I am now safely back inside the pale. I suspect that the minute daily obligations of email, which will grow ever more frequent as computers shrink and become part of our clothes and our bodies, offer a preview of the real-time social surveillance that will one day be not only normal, but necessary to sanity. Turn off the flow and people will go mad.
Cynthia Heimel: An evil thing follows me all over the world, and that's a jackhammer. In New York, there is always a jackhammer when I don't want one. Once I traveled to Europe, and every hotel I stayed in had a jackhammer outside.
Pico Iyer: Wherein lies my doubt ? In many of the obvious fears, I suppose: that technology, accomplishing everything so fast, prompts us to prize speed as an end in itself, even in those affairs of the heart and soul where slowness is far preferable; that the data computers make so wonderfully available to us move us sometimes to crave information more than we have the capacity to make sense of it; and that the Internet, which, among other things, seems an antidote to loneliness, has little to offer to someone who craves more loneliness in his life, and more freedom from the moment and the pressure to communicate. What I am saying, of course, is not that I don't trust machines, but that I don't trust myself with them; that I'm not convinced of my own ability to make the highest use of my toys. The very fact I can tabulate references and calculate sums so quickly on machines makes me less patient with questions that don't have answers; the very fact I can access so much knowledge makes me less interested in mystery. After all, it was Marshall McLuhan who said that video-related technologies "will invade our inner peace, occupying our every waking moment. We will need a place to hide."
Stanley Bing: People are slaves to email. They go to Hawaii or Fiji and spend time answering email - questions like "Will you be at the sales conference next month?" - while they're supposed to be on vacation.
Richard Powers: Say Korea melts down and your Pacific Rim IRA funds start to go the way of cold fusion. You call your broker. While you're ordering the fire sale, he gets another call. He cuts back to you to ask if you'd mind holding just a minute. Someone with a real portfolio is on the other end. He dishes you off to stew in limbo as the market heads south. Another call comes in on your line, rescuing you from your teleprosy. It's your mate, thick voiced, in tears. You try to talk her down, but the more you talk, the cagier she gets. You ask her if she can hold, just a second, and you click back to the broker. He's waiting there, miffed, wondering what happened to you. The fund is now doing the rough financial equivalent of Waco. You name a selling price and he giggles. You cut back to the other line, but instead of your lover, it's someone from the Elks Club who desperately needs to send immigrant Bosnian youths to the county fair. You find your mate with a few more clicks, tell her that you're hanging up and hopping in the car, that you'll be right over. But while you're saying this, she gets a call. She call-waits you. She switches back after an agonizing two minutes. She refuses to say who was on the other line. You hear yet another call come in, which of course you don't take - no doubt your mother, who, getting a ringing sound and no answer, and knowing that you have both answering machine and call waiting, decides to call the police.
John McPhee: Call waiting is something for which one might even wish that certain members of one's own family could be indicted. My beloved daughters - I have four of them - call up and get me on the phone and get me up to some high pitch of emotion over something that they're doing and I'm trying to give them counsel. Then they say "Hold on," and I'm hanging there for the next minute and a half. This is an advance in technology?
Adam Werbach, former president, Sierra Club: Electric can openers. I find them appalling. Four pounds of plastic and metal twisted into a contraption that emulates a wrist. Is this the apex of the human quest for shelter from the elements? It's time for us to toss our electric can openers, along with every other technological marvel that serves no discernible purpose. Do we really need talking key chains? It's time to take a break, go organic, go human powered. As for me, I'm typing this on my 2-pound, Pentium-powered, full-featured Toshiba Libretto 100. And with the exercise that my wrists are getting on this microkeyboard, I'll definitely have the strength I need to open my own can of martini olives.
Stanley Bing: A business technology that has yet to be improved upon is the martini. It works like this: You go to a central location with another person, and you order. I prefer to order Bombay gin straight up with some olives in it. And you drink that, and then you make a deal. People who use martini technology generally do a lot better than people who use beepers.
Gary Ross, screenwriter, director, and producer: This was my dream technology when I was 8: Wouldn't it be great if I could drive my bed to school? I imagined a small gizmo in my hand that could control the steering, while my other hand worked a part of the bed frame that I imagined as the throttle. The fantasy went further: I imagined myself lying in bed in the classroom; while all the other students were crammed into little formica desks, I could luxuriate under the covers and nod off whenever class got too boring. I had a nighttime fantasy, too - that I had a spaceship roughly the size of a small planet, which I controlled through a toy dinosaur I could hold in my hand. But that one just didn't seem practical.
The Millionaire, aka Michael Cudahy, founder and leader of Combustible Edison: Raymond Scott, the electronic-music pioneer from the 1930s and '40s, used to dream about what he considered the ultimate invention: a device that would beam music directly from the composer's head into the audience, without the need for performance.
Arthur C. Clarke: The ultimate invention would be direct mental communication.
John Chambers: I'd love to see time travel.
Craig Mundie: The transporter from Star Trek.
Steve Rattner, deputy chief executive, Lazard Freres: Something that could organize me. Tell me what I'm supposed to do.
Patrick Naughton: The Star Trek transporter.
William Schulz: Something that would allow me to pee in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed - the older I get, the more I yearn for it!
Hank Hill, star of FoX's King of the Hill: A time machine - I would use it to take me back to 1985, when Ronald Reagan was in office and all was right with the world.
US Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California): The transporter from Star Trek.
Bruce Wagner, Hollywood satirist: (a) A 50-year lasting skin patch that responds to the emotional vicissitudes of a normal day by releasing a subtle yet extremely effective narcotic to which the body never develops tolerance; and (b) a global positioning satellite that tells me the constant locus of my mother-in-law, P. J. Harvey, and any number of on-call psychofucking pharmacologists.
DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, aka Paul Miller, musician, writer, conceptual artist: We've always had technological extensions. My upright bass is a prosthetic. My PowerBook 3400 is a prosthetic. The sampler is probably the most important prosthetic I use. It's an extension of my own memory. I have about 20,000 records that I've been collecting since I was 3. If I had to filter through that all the time, I'd be lost in a daze of memory.
Kevin Warwick, scientist, lived for eight days with a computer chip implanted in his arm: At first I felt a sense of relief, because we had to sterilize the transponder in an oven, and we weren't sure it would actually work in my arm after the surgery. Then it was fun for doors to open, computers to turn on, et cetera, as I got near. But very quickly I realized the potential power that had suddenly been directly linked to me. We did the experiment partly to see if one would react negatively. But doors opened, computers came on, hence I felt positive. If the building had started shutting doors, turning off lights, it might have been different. The biggest surprise was that I actually felt very close to the computer operating the building. I felt a strong link, a bond, a bit like a Siamese twin. When the chip came out, I really felt something was missing, as though a close friend had died. As a scientist, I was shocked that I felt this affinity with a machine.
Aliza Sherman, president, Cybergrrl: Then one evening in 1990, while I was alone in my New York City apartment, spending my usual hours online, a message popped up onto my monitor: "Do you want to chat?" I jumped out of my chair, my heart pounding, and looked around the apartment, ran to the window to shut the blinds, convinced someone was watching me. Either that, or my computer had come alive and was in the mood for a late-night chat. Finally, I realized that while I was logged into a BBS, someone else was logged in at the same time, and we could chat if I wanted to. I said my first tentative "Hello" through the Internet: My voice across the matrix.
Kevin Kelly: The other day I counted about a thousand different species of manufactured things in our house. When I was born, there were only hundreds. Technology is an active virus trying out all possible shapes and functions. It will try anything. It continues to shrink to invisibility in chips and expand to gargantuan scale in cities. And once present, technology rarely retreats.
The Millionaire: It stands to reason that within our lifetime, computers will actually start designing themselves, and actually start thinking, at which point humans - just like in the Terminator movies - will become completely irrelevant. Some people might think this scary, but I find it a consummation devoutly to be wished for. Think about it: If humans are vain enough to want to continue living, we can figure out how to upload our personalities into a computer. Get rid of the organic hull! At that point, there won't be an overpopulation problem, because you won't be taking up space. We won't be polluting the earth. We won't even need Earth: Humanity can exist as a robotic planet orbiting in space.
Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2: I've been told by various directors that George Lucas likes the robot when I am in it because it comes to life more. It becomes more realistic. Without somebody inside them robots might become a little bit rigid. They don't bend, do they? I mean, unless you are inside the thing and you can wobble it around like I do, it's very smooth and very mechanical. I try and get as much movement in it as I can. And it's the same with C-3PO. He moves like a robot, but you can tell that there's somebody in there. Whereas a robot, strictly speaking, is a cold creature.
Ira Glass, radio host: The most vexing piece of technology I ever bought was a wireless microphone. In documentary production, you have to warm people up and spend time with them before they reveal themselves and forget about the microphone - especially a 2-foot-long shotgun mike, which I used to use. With the wireless setup I realized you could attach this tiny thing to somebody's shirt and it would feed you everything they said. Within minutes of pinning it on a complete stranger, the person forgot about me and wandered around, all the while giving me this incredible tape that normally would have taken days. The problem is the interference. I'd be listening with my headphones, and there'd be this shwooooooo sound with huge static pops. Then I'd spend the entire tape-gathering process worried that some sort of weird interference would kick in. It was as if someone gave me superpowers that could be revoked at any minute. The mike was a roller-coaster of I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you.
Robert Pinsky, United States poet laureate: I love my broadband connection at home, and my little Libretto when I travel.
Zoe Lofgren: My microwave oven.
Tom Brokaw: My new Porsche Boxster.
Tom Tomorrow, aka Dan Perkins, cartoonist: My sweet little copier, a Toshiba 1550.
Norman Fischer, abbot, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center: The real technology - behind all of our other technologies - is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.
Andrei Codrescu, author and radio commentator: We're still enthusiastic about the Net, the way Walt Whitman was about trains and the telegraph. He thought they would unite us, make us all a community. He couldn't predict the trains would go to concentration camps.
Robert Pinsky: I find the computer utterly a human artifact. It reeks of us, as do our trombones, and cars, and scissors, and parades, and pizzas. Technology is exactly like humanity. It is our baby, and we are its.
Jessica Luza, kid tester, Purple Moon: I like how everything is right now, but maybe in the future it would be nice if instead of going to school, you could talk to your teachers over the computer and then email or fax your assignments in. It would be more interesting and comfortable. You could still be wearing your pajamas.
