Each event is composed of an A) early, developmental phase, B) a production up-ramp, C) a maturation peak and D) a down-turn as the technology and products based upon it are superceded by a more novel invention.
So, each of these events represents a cycle of boom and bust -- the life cycle of a technological product. It is thought that marketing frenzies, such as the deregulation of telephony, and the Internet, are only going to increase in intensity as their lifespan shortens.
It is projected that the slope of the Moore's Law curve will approach infinity at around the year 2036. Extropians and others call this event the Singularity or the Techno-Rapture.
In Varley's story, in response to this economic turbulence, the story's main character embarks on a nomadic journey across the Southwest. On this journey, he discovers a society of, by and for the blind-deaf.
The story shows the evolution of such a hypothetical society. Given the necessary mechanics for a functioning community of any kind, how would blind-deaf people manage it?
First, the sidewalks are encoded with information to be read by people walking barefoot. The people read where they are and where they are going with their feet.
Similarly, person-to-person communication has evolved from the manual alphabet applied to a person's palm into more efficient, shorthand methods. He writes, in the voice of a sighted man observing the society:
"[I] soon saw that lively conversation was flowing around the table. Hands were busy, moving almost too fast to see. They were spelling into each other's palms, shoulders, legs, arms, bellies; any part of the body. I watched in amazement as a ripple of laughter spread like falling dominoes from one end of the table to the other as some witticism was passed along the line. It was fast. Looking carefully, I could see the thoughts moving, reaching one person, passed on while a reply went in the other direction and was in turn passed on, other replies originating all along the line and bouncing back and forth. They were a wave form, like water."
Also, it's a bit like store-and-forward behavior in a wide-area computer network.
Layer-by-layer, Varley explores the nuances of this culture of touch. He describes the first three layers of communication:
"I had learned handtalk in a few easy lessons. Then I became aware of shorthand and bodytalk, and of how much harder they would be to learn. Through five months of constant immersion, which is the only way to learn a language, I had attained the equivalent level of a five- or six-year old in shorthand. I knew I could master it, given time. Bodytalk was another matter. You couldn't measure progress as easily in bodytalk. It was variable and highly interpersonal language that evolved according to the person, the time, the mood. But I was learning.Then I became aware of Touch. That's the best I can describe it in a single, unforced English noun. What *they* called this fourth-stage language varied from day to day..."
This special language of Touch was used in a nightly gathering of the community, called the Together. Through exploration of the workings of the community, of various aspects and at many levels, Varley comes to refer to the community not as a group of individuals, but as an organism.
"The nightly Together was the basis of the organism. Here, from after dinner till it was time to fall asleep, everyone talked in a language that was incapable of falsehood. If there was a problem brewing, it presented itself and was solved almost automatically. Jealousy? Resentment? Some little festering wrong that you're nursing? You couldn't conceal it at the Together, and soon everyone was clustered around you and loving the sickness away. It acted like white corpuscles, clustering around a sick cell, not to destroy it, but to heal it. There seemed to be no problem that couldn't be solved if attacked early enough, and with Touch, your neighbors knew about it before you did and were already laboring to correct the wrong, heal the wound, to make you feel better so you could laugh about it. There was a lot of laughter at the Togethers."
It is like the myth of Internet Pronoia -- that lurking feeling that people are conspiring to help you.
Imagine a Together, electronically networked, on a global scale. It is a concept of culturally transformative potential.
Copyright 1999 (c)