Gary Wolf

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“He Has Become A Poster Man For The Medical Strategy Of The Future”

February 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Soon our vital signs will be tracked continuosly and automatically, with predictive data allowing for preemptory strikes against oncoming health problems. The opening of “The Patient of the Future,” John Cohen’s excellent new MIT Technology Review article about Larry Smarr, a computer genius at the forefront of the “self-quant” movement;

“Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald’s. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. ‘In Illinois they said, ‘We know what’s going to happen when you go out to California. You’re going to start eating organic food and get a blonde trainer and get a hot tub,’ ’ recalls Smarr, who laughed off the predictions. ‘Of course, I did all three.’

Smarr, who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in La Jolla, dropped from 205 to 184 pounds and is now a fit 63-year-old. But his transformation transcends his regular exercise program and carefully managed diet: he has become a poster man for the medical strategy of the future. Over the past decade, he has gathered as much data as he can about his body and then used that information to improve his health. And he has accomplished something that few people at the forefront of the ‘quantified self’ movement have had the opportunity to do: he helped diagnose the emergence of a chronic disease in his body.

Like many ‘self-quanters,’ Smarr wears a Fitbit to count his every step, a Zeo to track his sleep patterns, and a Polar WearLink that lets him regulate his maximum heart rate during exercise. He paid 23andMe to analyze his DNA for disease susceptibility. He regularly uses a service provided by Your Future Health to have blood and stool samples analyzed for biochemicals that most interest him. But a critical skill separates Smarr from the growing pack of digitized patients who show up at the doctor’s office with megabytes of their own biofluctuations: he has an extraordinary ability to fish signal from noise in complex data sets.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Gary Wolf with more about the Quantified Self at TED, 2010:

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“Concerns About Privacy And Anonymity Are Outdated”

November 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of Marshall McLuhan, in the 1996 Wired article, “Channeling McLuhan,” Gary Wolf interviewed one of the Canadian media philosopher’s doppelgangers, a shadowy person who posted to a computer mailing list under the McLuhan name. It was an odd gambit, but the exchange elicited a contrarian idea about the invasion of privacy in the digital age, which seems an even more apt point of discussion now. An excerpt:

“Wired: Do you think privacy and anonymity are being eroded in the digital age?

“MM”: Don’t be fooled by ‘anonymity.’ There is no such thing, since every node in a communication system must have an ID. Concerns about privacy and anonymity are outdated. Cypherpunks think they are rebels with a cause, but they are really sentimentalists.

In the ’50s, men were crying about the ‘mass’ man and spilling tears over too much anonymity. And they were right, or more right than the cypherpunks. Factories and corporations gave men roles, not souls. Industrial society was anonymous. Cities, factories, secret ballots with mechanical polling booths – that’s anonymity. The Big Brother bogeyman of the machine age used technology to enforce anonymity and prevent anybody from doing his own thing.

The era of politics based on private identities, anonymous individuals, and independent citizens began with the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies (a product of the popular press) and ended with Hitler (the product of radio). The cypherpunks are still marching to the same martial music. You think private individuals and mass industrial society are opposites? They are part of the industrial configuration. Instantaneous electronic society gives everybody an identity – which we all want, and which we all also want to lose – while putting almost intolerable pressure on our sense of privacy.

Privacy disappears in the simultaneous stimulation of our patterns of thought.”

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“McLuhan Did Not Want To Live In The Global Village. The Prospect Frightened Him.”

March 7, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Gary Wolf’s 1993 Wired article about Marshall McLuhan, “The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool”:

McLuhan did not want to live in the global village. The prospect frightened him. Print culture had produced rational man, in whom vision was the dominant sense. Print man lived in a world that was secular rather than sacred, specialized rather than holistic.

But when information travels at electronic speeds, the linear clarity of the print age is replaced by a feeling of “all-at-onceness.” Everything everywhere happens simultaneously. There is no clear order or sequence. This sudden collapse of space into a single unified field ‘dethrones the visual sense.’ This is what the global village means: we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums. For McLuhan, this future held a profound risk of mass terror and sudden panic.

The current idea of a global village as a place of universal harmony and industrious basket-weaving is a tourist’s fantasy. McLuhan gave in to the intoxication of this hope for a few years in the early ’60s, and it is evident throughout Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, his most optimistic work. In that book, McLuhan sings of the furthest reaches of electronic culture, when computer technology has replaced language with instant nonverbal communication. He compares this mystical unification of humanity to the Christian Pentecost. But McLuhan soon realized that before the Pentecost comes suffering and crucifixion, and while we are all waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend, Jerusalem is likely to be scary as hell.•

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“Xanadu Has Set A Record Of Futility That Will Be Difficult For Other Companies To Surpass”

February 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong." (Image by Tim Brailsford.)

To dream big is to risk failing big, and nobody in the computer world dreamed bigger than visionary Ted Nelson. The information pioneer and philosopher coined the term “hypertext” in 1963 and spent the majority of his life frustratingly, unsuccessfully working on Project Xanadu, a system that attempted to link networked computers with a simple interface decades before the invention of the World Wide Web. Nelson’s tilting at virtual windmills was the subject of a devastating Wired article in 1995 by Gary Wolf. An excerpt:

“Nelson’s life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson’s glass house from windows. He has written an unfinished autobiography and produced an unfinished film. His houseboat in the San Francisco Bay is full of incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He founded a video-editing business, but has not yet seen it through to profitability. He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes.

The Hypertext Editing System (HES), seen here being used at Brown University in 1969, was developed by Ted Nelson and others. (Image by Greg Lloyd.)

All the children of Nelson’s imagination do not have equal stature. Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which he has finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood. During one of our many conversations, Nelson explained that he never succeeded as a filmmaker or businessman because ‘the first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu.’

Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass. The fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his reputation as the king of unsuccessful software development makes Xanadu interesting for another reason: the project’s failure (or, viewed more optimistically, its long-delayed success) coincides almost exactly with the birth of hacker culture. Xanadu’s manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales of billion-dollar companies born in garages.”

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“We Can Turn Out Amazing Human Beings Without Technology…We Can Turn Out Very Uninteresting Human Beings With Technology”

December 10, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology.” (Image by Matthew Yohe.)

In a 1993 Wired interview conducted by Gary Wolf, Steve Jobs discussed the intersection of technology and education. I think what he said then about education in America is just about as true now, which is sad because it speaks to how little progress we’ve made. An excerpt:

“Wired: Could technology help by improving education?

Steve Jobs: I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

 

 

 

“Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting.” (Image by Henry F. Warren.)

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, ‘Let’s start a school.’ You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older – yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school – none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s – that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.”

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