The Utopian and the Arcadian, Part One
Buckled up and under a blanket sailing seven miles above the sea, I took out a green spiral-bound notebook. With my shoulder propped up against the plane's window, I could see my dad reading a Star Trek novel while my mom flipped through an in-flight magazine; my sister, a few years older and content to be in her own row, was engaged with an off-brand, industrial-looking MP3 player.
In the notebook, I began to scribble the concept for a new video game I had started to conceive in the San Jose airport: It was the early 2000s, and my ardent desire to build software was apparently unabated by the dot com bust, my complete lack of programming knowledge, and the fact that I was 13 years old.
The concept of the game was, like all beautiful things, at once perfectly simple and intricately complex. It would be called A Life, and whoever played it would take on all of life's challenges in a virtual world. What would distinguish this game, I explained to my dad after sketching out the rough premise in my notebook, was that it would include everything: a 1:1 scale replica of life with all of its pain and pleasure, joy and drudgery. I proposed that he leave his job at Tandem to help me make the game since I knew little about what life was actually like and less about how to convey that experience in a sophisticated 3D graphical user interface. My dad laughed and told me the game sounded rather boring.
Recalling my three-hour obsession with A Life recently, I felt both impressed and disheartened. Certainly there's something to be said for my idea, which echoes the absurdity of Borges' "On Exactitude in Science,"1 which captures the futility of Kaufman's "Synecdoche, NY,"2 which perfectly articulates the perspective of a prisoner from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave,"3 and which anticipated the soon-thereafter-to-be-released virtual nightmare known as Second Life4. On the other hand, the entire project was misguided, ridiculous, and more than a bit depressing: What kid wants to design a virtual retreat if not the one who is in despair?
My zeal for technology to push the world toward greater perfection was rekindled during years living in San Francisco, where good people harbor earnest enthusiasm for the notion that most problems are just an app idea away from solutions.
The apps I sketched out addressed a variety of concerns. Laundromatchmaker, for example, took the banality out of washing clothes and the guesswork out of making friends or finding romance. By pairing up people with similar interests to do laundry at the same time, we'd turn a routine chore into an opportunity for meaningful conversation.
I soon realized that most of my ideas were predicated on a paradox: I was trying to get people off their phones... on their phones.
Eventually, my technological compulsion morphed into a fancy for optimization. If I could not create a perfect world for myself, I mused, perhaps I could create a shred of perfection in the world through careful calculation and meticulous recording. I yearned for a quantified self before that term was widely used, so I began to track details of my life with administrative precision. Or, at least, I tried.
You see, I wanted to track everything: How much water did I drink? How long did I sleep? How did I spend my free time? How many books did I read? How many new German words had I learned? What was I eating? How often did I wash my dishes? How many times was I going to the bathroom?
Each of these data points could have branching possibilities and permutations that I also needed to track. Were those bathroom trips in private or public spaces? What genre were the books? Was the sleep fitful?
Of course, I ran into the meta-problem: How ought I track my tracking? And then a more potent issue emerged: I was so concerned about tracking everything that I had mostly stopped doing anything. Maintaining the apparatus necessary for constant and universal archiving is a lot of work, after all. And why was I keeping track of this again? I had forgotten what made me believe that the data was imbued with meaning, so in the end I gave up.
All of my efforts arose from a simple and indisputable fact: Things aren't as good as it seems they should be.
Let's make a new world that works better than this one. Let's build something that makes all of this tolerable. Let's use data to improve ourselves.
But do we have a vision of the good that we're working toward?
In which a mapmaker, desiring perfect representation, creates a map the exact size of the country it represents.
In which a playwright, desiring perfect representation, creates a warehouse that contains a full-scale replica of New York City, including a warehouse that contains a full-scale replica of New York City, including...
In which prisoners with torches behind them believe that the shadows on the wall in front of them are more real than the things which cast the shadows
In which Daniel builds a boat, I guess.