Prejudice of Technology

We used to have this robotics class at the 11th grade. It was extraordinary as the class had only four students and it was our gang: Me, Armin Tabesh, Hamidreza Aslani, and Arman Izadi. The four best friends of my school. We used to have school till 4PM, then the robotics class till 6PM in Wednesdays. In Iran you have the Thursdays and Fridays off, so it would have been the last day of our week, and the last class we had, exclusively for the four of us. I would come back home, watch teh Top Gear with family, and binge watch FRINGE till I go to sleep.

In one of these classes, our teacher was showing us how to use the pins of a micro-controller and so he attached a diode to each of them and said we are going to light them one by one in sequence. The famous Las Vegas light animations you see everywhere.

So you see, my mind instantly began thinking about the algorithm: We would create an array of pin addresses, then we would iterate on the array, one by one lighting up the diodes, wait a bit, toggle them, and off we go to the next diode. Then we put the whole logic in an infinite loop. But the answer was far more elegant. Our teacher had a binary number with each of its digits representing a pin. He would have started with 0000 0001, then shifted the number (x << 1), so it would have looked like 0000 0010, then 0000 0100, 0000 1000, and so on… When the shifting overflows, it becomes negative. So you could just do: x = if x < 0 then 2 otherwise x << 1 on repeat.

Once I understood the animation, I had a millisecond of admiring the elegance before I realized “oh wait, that is why the animation is everywhere”. The environment favors it over other animations. When I used to create compilers I always felt what I’m making is perfection. It felt like the computer was meant for this algorithm, and it basically was. But then rudimentary parts of the graphics of this website, I always feel like as if I’m exploring the dimensions of my masochism. This is exactly why Maestro Postman wrote this:

[…] every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments. In a culture without writing, human memory is of the greatest importance, as are the proverbs, sayings and songs which contain the accumulated oral wisdom of centuries. That is why Solomon was thought to be the wisest of men. In Kings I we are told he knew 3,000 proverbs. But in a culture with writing, such feats of memory are considered a waste of time, and proverbs are merely irrelevant fancies. The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. Indeed, in the computer age, the concept of wisdom may vanish altogether.

Reading this was when I realized I will admire him, and keep him to my heart for the rest of my heart. And the moment he became one of my maestros, and for honoring him I will call it the Postman Prejudice.

Understanding The Prejudice of Humanity

Once you understand the Postman Prejudice, it becomes a whole different lens to see the world. In my previous works, I have explored a few curious ideas:

• In “To Kill Math We Must Wire The Brain”, it was revealed to me that pink is a color our brain invents to visualize light and it completely shocked me. We are facing the world with a random set of survival sensors: Two ways to see the lights coming, two ways to sens the pressure change in the air, ways to sense contact on all our cells, ways to understand portions of our body that requires attention, ways to sense our stasis, … What we understand from our environment is not quite right as well. We don’t see much of the light spectrum, and for the portion we see, our brain has transformed a linear progression to a closed ring by inventing pink.

• In “Musings Around My Notation Of Embedded Media”, I realized that our media are tricks to embedded information into these somewhat correct, somewhat buggy senses. For all the two dimensional/three dimensional information we have, we must encode them in color somehow that they can be smuggled into our brains.

• And in “Prison of Progress Linearity”, I thought about how our previous collective work, forces a path onto our next generations. It is as if we are all living in a giant vessel where generations can live and in the middle of the vessel’s journey, generations come and go, and the vessel still continues to move forwards.

When we think about human society, it is still the animal form but evolved. Think about much of the problems and motivations in a workplace. People bullying and assaulting others. Motivations? Money, Fame, A place in history, Beautiful Partners. These are all animal desires. The world moves on animal desires.

Why? Because each of these desires have an exclusive feeling in our bodies.

Almost all of our society operates to satisfy our sexual feelings. The biggest motivations a person can have are money, fame, and beautiful partners. Much are in the opinion that the two first reasons are themselves instruments in maximizing the latter. All visual arts, the music industry, yoga and massage, these are directly there because of our senses. If we had a body part that had a feeling, lets say for sensing magnetism, we would have had art branches for it, industries like hollywood, in our stories we would have written volumes about how the light came through the leafs, how their contact with each other sounded, what was their magnetism.

And thus when I think about the three of these works, and the Postman Prejudice, I think the track of our progress is itself controlled by something like Postman Prejudice’s, only this is not technology, it is a natural prejudice imposed by our evolution. We don’t explore the whole of knowledge, mathematics, and science. We only explore the portions that our evolutionary prejudice heads us towards them.

We only explore and care about a very small, constrained, portion of the science because of a random set of feelings, a random set of motivations based on these feelings, and a random set of representations of these feelings. If you could have seen your gut feeling, maybe we would have had different sciences, but that does not compare the vision or fear senses for example.

Since high school, for around fourteen years now, I have been thinking about what our world would have looked liked should we have not been constrained by these hardware designs.