jaron lanier: minority report report

an interesting article about imaging technological utopia and/or angst by
Jaron Lanier, in 21C Magazine:

http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html


A Minority within the Minority
By Jaron Lanier

A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science
fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story
"Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world
might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two
scientist/technologists on the team. The other team members included an
anthropologist (Steve Barnett), a city planning expert (Joel Garreau), and
so on.

Various past and present demos I've worked on were given design makeovers
and portrayed in the film, such as the advertisements that automatically
incorporate passers-by, the interface gloves (which are already considered
out-of-date in 2002!), and so on. I also seem to have influenced the
script, by suggesting the idea that criminals might gouge out eyeballs to
fool iris-scan identity-matching machines (though in fact such machines
can already tell if an eye is alive or not).

I did NOT come up with the transportation system, by the way- that was
mostly influenced by Neil Gershenfeld of the Media Lab, who was the other
science/tech person.

The movie seems to me to have turned out really well, and it also seems to
be well-liked by critics and my friends who have seen it. I wonder if I'm
biased. I feel myself to be part of the Internet Age, which at its best is
a period of participatory culture, so I probably find this movie easier to
appreciate because I participated in making it. I usually find "big"
movies terribly distant and alienating because they are produced so far
away from me and relegate me to such an extreme position as a consumer.

What I'd like to comment on here is the nature of optimistic imagination
in science fiction. Spielberg was intent on finding a positive message and
a happy or at least happy-ish ending, which on the face of it was not a
viable idea. Philip K Dick was not a happy ending sort of guy.

The Dick-to-Spielberg bridge in the last reel ended up working more
successfully than I had imagined it could. The script seems to me to make
a classic existential point. Here, approximately, is the message I think
the movie ends up expressing: "Belief in free will makes itself so, but
also makes so a certain level of uncertainty, danger, and chaos, which is
a worthwhile and noble price to pay." There's also an assertion that
American civic traditions, like the Miranda rights, will take on even
greater significance as technology moves forward, defining a sense of
personhood beyond the reach of technologists.

I say "ends up expressing" because big movies are made collectively, even
in a case like this where there's an extremely powerful director in
control. So the meaning of movies can't be fully premeditated. A movie
isn't a person.

I remember one afternoon when an almost tangible transition occurred in
the room. Before that moment the movie's identity had seemed elusive and
convoluted, twitching between Dickian ennui and paranoia and Spielbergian
fascination and idealism. The early visualizations of Minority Report's
world even looked like classic 1950s science fiction illustration, the
very sort of idealized future that Dick was reacting against.

After a sudden, curious, and magical moment, the movie's identity somehow
coalesced, and even though it was still early in the process, it was clear
that the project would gel as a whole. Suddenly everyone was seeing the
same imaginary world.

This was a thrilling experience for me, but one that was tempered by some
disappointments.

Let me get a personal one out of the way first. It's annoying to fall
through the cracks of the Hollywood ontology and not get a screen credit,
even though we experts have been prominently acknowledged in the film's
publicity. Caterers are part of the Hollywood machine, so they get screen
credits, but "futurists" are not. Oh well.

A more important disappointment for me was that I think there's an
essential kind of optimism that ought to be portrayed in science fiction,
but it seems to be beyond our imagination at present. Instead of making
existential points by pitting people against technology, why not portray
people using technology beautifully and creatively?

I presented all sorts of ideas for what information technology might look
like in fifty years, but the least noble of these were the only ones that
stuck.

Nowhere in Minority Report do we see people interacting with each other
creatively using technology, nor do we see people inventing wonderful
virtual things for each other. We see no children inventing their own
technological culture, as is already commonly happening today. Philip K.
Dick didn't live long enough to see that, and I want to believe that if he
had he would have been forced to write a different kind of science
fiction.

The characters of Minority Report are uniformly either consumers (who are
used by the advertisements, the animated cereal box, etc.) or elite
controllers (the precrime officers who get to use a zippy interface.)
Three-dimensional displays are used for recorded images, but not for live
contact.

The optimism I longed to see at the end of Minority Report was not only an
assertion of what it is to be human, but also a synthesis in which those
empowered humans would then use technology well. I would have loved to
have seen Tom Cruise's character use that fancy glove-based interface to
make a warm and charming virtual greeting for his pregnant wife, instead
of posing with her with no technology in sight.

This is the happy ending that Hollywood seems incapable of portraying.

Here are some of the reasons this might be true:

One is that movie people as a whole have trouble understanding the joys of
interactive media. It's just a different culture. A distopian movie about
virtual worlds, like The Matrix, can make its way through Hollywood and be
distributed, but a utopian movie about an interactive future seemingly
cannot. Movie people are subliminally terrified by interactivity. It
spells not only a loss of creative control, which movie people would miss
more than you can imagine, but also a loss of business model. Napster
lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that's under the
control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is distopian to
Hollywood.

To be fair, there's another problem. The utopia I dream of is a world we
are in the process of inventing. I don't yet know how to describe it
myself. I find this exhilarating. Could Les Paul have imagined the Beatles
when he made the first multitracked music? Could early digital sound
experimenters like Max Mathews have imagined Hip Hop? I hope to be
massively surprised some day by cultural invention inspired by virtual
worlds and fancy interfaces. I can hardly expect movie people to fully
imagine this stuff today.

And yet, I still feel we all ought to try. Even a partial result would be
joyous.

The fact that the task is hard masks the fact that it's also taboo.


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