We were once creatures of God-like capability.  Now we are more like small, forest-dwelling animals.  It’s devolution…in a good way.

Technology was the secret of our Godhood.  Machines amplified us.  They let us see better.  Go faster.  Communicate at distance.  Find our way.  Travel on water.  Travel in air.  Escape hunger, cold, and danger.  Machines allowed us to defy our mortality…for awhile.  With technology, we became if not quite gods, far more than mere mortals. 

We are augmented beyond anything that an average hunter-gather would recognize as human.  The glasses on our nose, the cell phone at our ear, the PDA in our hand, the TV in the living room, the computer on the desk top, the car at the curb, the GPS in the car, all of these plugged into grids electrical, electronic, digital, vehicular, and locational.  Man, we’re it.  Our machine-assisted evolution has been a triumphant success. 

What Nye says about Americans applies to everyone.  (OK, not everyone.) 

For Americans, machines were the concretization of reason.  They were  a representation of man’s ability to construct an infinite and perfect world.

I believed all of this (or most of it) until I bought a C. Itoh printer in the early 1990s.  This technology promised to be extend my abilities but the price was high.  It also  demonstrated with sudden clarity the modesty of reason, my reason.

Before long I was stuck.

Was that:

"push the 3rd button once and the 1st button twice while holding the CTRL button"

or was it,

"push the 1st button once and, while holding the CTRL button, the 3rd button twice"?

The fix for this is the escape button with which some technology now comes equipped.  Pam’s iPhone has a button like this (as above, at the bottom).  Whatever happens, however lost you are, you just hit this, and it takes you back to "start here."  I no longer stop to think "damn, where am I and how did I get here."  At the first hint of trouble, I just bail.  I just keep hitting that escape button till I am returned to the reassuring familiarity of the first screen.  I will try again, taken wilder and wilder risks, guessing ever more implausibly, because I have the reassurance that I can find my way home.   

Take the control panel created by Sam Lucente for HP (eyes right).  When Sam joined HP there were lots of variations at work of a printer’s "steering wheel."  Sam came up with this. HP calls it the Q panel. 

That button on the lower left.  It’s a back out key.  It’s an escape hatch. Get into trouble and we can use this button to sound the alarm.  Every time we hit it, we climb a little higher in the feature hierarchy, and until, hey presto, we bob to the surface like a NASA space capsule. 

It’s a glorious thing, the ability to just get out. So much better than having to master the whole of the C.Itoh manual, hold every option in your head, and divine what to do next.

Very helpful, but a little humiliating.  Doesn’t this sound like the way complexity theory explains how stupid animals do intelligent things. They follow a really simple instruction set.  As in: "Try this. And if that doesn’t work, stop trying that, and hit here."

What happened to that grand idea that cast us as masters of the machine, and through the machine, of a infinite and perfect world.   Now we are much more like pigeons.  I mean, really, that Q panel sends a message.  "We know you are going to fuck this up.  We expect you to fuck up.  When that happens, peck here."  That button is an embarrassment, our declaration of defeat.

People used to brag about their knowledge of machines.  In the post war period, they were always going on about how cars worked.  (Cars were then what digital is now, the most important enablement of human powers.)  I couldn’t actually follow this talk, but this didn’t stop me from hurling around terms like "camshaft" and "carborator," to suggest, occasionally, that I too might be a master of the machine.  Machine talk was triumphant talk.

And there was awhile in the 1990s when people would roll out talk of mother boards, chip speeds and baud rates.  But that’s over now, isn’t it?  We now understand that every new advance in technology will be yet another measure of how little we understand and far we are falling behind.  Now mastery is finding the escape key and the willingness to use it early and often.  I’m using mine now.

References

Breen, Bill. 2007. Streamlining HP.  Fast Company.  October.  134-140. 
(for the story of Sam Lucente.)

Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime.  Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 287. (This quote is approximate.)

I have a problem.  It’s the way I talk.  I speak in full sentences.  I speak in long sentences, sometimes, not at the moment, but in some cases, I do go, like, on and on.  I go for complete thoughts.  I sometimes throw in parenthetical passages.  (I do this by lowering my voice slightly.)  I will "indent" my talk when starting "new paragraphs"  in speech.  (I do this by tilting my chin and raising my eyebrows to let you know I am moving onto something new.)

It’s a very real problem.  The only one with any real patience for it is Molly, my cat, for whom everything I say is "blah, blah, blah," in any case, (in the immortal words of Gary Larson).

My wife, Pam, finds this a challenge.  For most purposes, she prefers an Italian American model of speech, where speech is made to overlap. I like to think of this as the "baton" model of talk, where the new speaker runs up beside the person currently speaking so that the conversational lead can be transferred at speed.  For Pam, overlapping speech is a good thing.  It gives talk brio and animation. 

I prefer to take turns.  You speak.  I listen.  I speak.  You listen. Otherwise, it feels like we are trapped in one of those play areas at McDonalds, with things flying in all directions.  I am trying to listen to what you say ever so carefully.  That’s my job.  If you have several topics going at once, my head feels like one of those play areas at McDonalds, with things flying in all directions.  Look out!

I have to change, I know that.  The world is speeding up.  My style of talk slows things down.  All of us are obliged to increase our baud rate, and I have noticed that a lot of people at MIT tend to speak really fast.  At least, they don’t stutter.  This is an Oxford affectation meant to show the sheer velocity of the thought behind the speech.  I just had a conversation with David Edery (first of the Sloan school, now at Microsoft).  I swear I clocked him at speeds in excess of 200 w.p.m.  What’s weird is that every word was perfectly formed.  A miracle of speech production!  Subject to this kind of competitive pressure, I just start saying anything, the faster the better.  I don’t think he noticed.  It’s "blah, blah, blah" here too. 

I don’t think I’m plodding.  But then of course I wouldn’t.  It’s for the rest of the world to think "when is this guy going to get to the end of the sentence?"  I have a laborious style because I believe that’s what I owe you the listener.  I am obliged to think it through and serve it up not as a fragment, an idea facsimile, but to nail it down as something that has the properties of a proposition.  I am quite sure that myself has something to do with my Victorian boyhood.  Good speech is complete speech, the way we show our respect for our conversational partner. 

Ok, so this is totally wrong.  Denotative speech just isn’t as much fun as connotative speech.  It’s kind of fun carrying on several conversations at once.  Like being caught in a salad spinner. Communication works as speakers point briefly at semantic  fragments spinning around them.  You can’t really say at the end of the conversation what the conversation was about, but a good time was had by all, and it is remotely possible that you and your partner managed to canvas ideas never before thought or, and I now use this term advisedly, said. 

My favorite conversations are intellectually athletic.  Both partners talk and listen simultaneously.  After awhile there are two streams of speech that intersect over and over again. Talkers leap from their stream to the other and back again.  It’s daring stuff.  Stunt training is highly recommended.  (I sometimes use a stunt double.) 

With our favorite conversational partners, a trajectory becomes clear. We are now "on to something" and the thrill of the chase is upon us. Now we can take up positions on the far horizon to the speech event. "Yes," says the other speaker, "that’s exactly where we are going!" Or, "no, not there, but how about this?" These acts of anticipation obviate great stretches of talk, and momentum grows. 

There are two kinds of movement: "side to side," as speakers leap from one conversational stream to the other, and "well forward and back around" as they race forward and then return to the conversational moment.  Joy comes from the locational agility these conversations both require of us and confer on us.  We are all now circus performers, athletes, that is to say, who are actually paid to show off. 

Oh, but I digress.   Sorry.  Your turn.

Tom Guarriello and I had a good conversation at the Stamford Diner yesterday.  As all diner conversations must, it turned eventually to Sunday’s game.

Sunday will see the clash of the titans. The unbeaten Indianapolis Colts will play the unbeaten New England Patriots in Indianapolis at 4:15 p.m.  It is being billed as a contest between quarterbacks Payton Manning and Tom Brady.  But it is also, of course, a contest between coaches Tony Dungy and Bill Belichick. 

The thing I like about Belichick is that sweatshirt.  Coaches are inclined to make themselves presentable.  But Belichick has taken on a monkish quality, cowl and all.

When you are as successful as Belichick, you can dress anyway you want. In 7 years at New England, Belichick has delivered three Super Bowl championships, three conference titles, five division crowns and 12 playoff victories, posting a record of 87-39.  Everyone seems to think there’s a good chance he could win all 16 games this season.  (This would take his win-loss to 103 and 39.  Crazy good, technically.) 

Mr. Belichick is a little like a God.  To be this good in a game where no one gets to play unless they are extraordinarily talented…that’s very good indeed. 

So what’s with the sweatshirt?  Tom thinks it’s posturing, an ostentatious gesture, a way of saying "I’m special."  Belichick is telling us the rules don’t apply to them.  For Tom, Belichick is a faux bohemian, someone who insists on an outsider status that does not truly belong to him.  Tom says that Belichick is a football coach, plain and simple.  The fact that he is a very good football coach does not warrant posturing.   (See below for a more nuanced statement of Tom’s position, taken, with his permission from an exchange of emails we had this morning.)

I don’t know.  Tom could be right.  But I like an interpretive alternative.  What if Belichick is charting new ground?  What if we are looking at the evolution of American culture here on its most hallowed ground, the grid iron? 

Bill Belichick was born April 16, 1952.  His Dad play played fullback for the Detroit Lions and coached at the Naval Academy for 33 years. Bill went to Annapolis High, attended Phillips Academy, and graduated from Wesleyan with a degree in economics. 

This guy is second generation football.  He grew up in a household steeped in the game’s strategy and drama.  In the right life, this kind of exposure can do interesting things.  A deeply intelligent kid can take possession of the game, master it in ways previously impossible. In the cliche, he can take the game to "a whole new level."  And we know what happens when this happen.  Those who serve as vehicles of transport are changed by transport. 

Call it the Cambridge Don effect.  If you devote yourself to the study of something, there is an inclination to remove yourself from the world.  You forget your car keys.  You might even forget to take a bath.  (At the Royal Ontario Museum, we had a curator who relied on his secretary to tell him when this was so.)  You dress in whatever is at hand, because even first thing in the morning, you are already scheming on the best way to take the long pass away from Payton Manning.  You don’t so much renounce the world as have it taken away from you. You are turning the gaze inward.  You put your hood up.

Tom’s model is a bohemian one.  Belichick is located at the center with pretensions of alternative standing.  My model is something like a cultural involution.  Belichick is burrowing into the game.  He is find new ways to think about it, new ways to explore its complexities.  In this interpretation, we are looking at an excavation of our culture at the very center of our culture.  By a coach, for crying out loud. 

Coaches are that most elemental of creatures.  He’s the one charged with taking dreamy kids and introducing them to the harsh realities of the world.  Coaches are supposed to be what they are and not another thing.  They are our reality principle, or, better, our reality principles.  If there is a fundament in our culture it’s a guy like Mike Ditka, force of nature, arbiter of culture.  If Coach is changing, something is happening. 

Tom might be right.  Bill Belichick might be a poser.  But I wonder if we are not looking at a man who went looking for a better way to play football and stumbled out of our culture into something…else…new…next? 

Post script by Tom Guarriello:

Which is where my charge of ostentation comes from. This kind of willful symbolic rejection of the fundamental economic infrastructure of pro sports, by cutting off his sweatshirt and pretending he is above  the cult of celebrity (by dressing as if below it), is just too cute by half.