Nipkow's Ghost (continued)

Disk 9

DISK 9

—Summary presentation to the TMA on Emerging TV Environment (JS) 

A wall of light crushed down on me as I heard the heavy curtains rapidly pull aside on the old railings to the accompaniment of Dulcinea announcing in her siren and heavily-inflected voice, “rise and shine, rise and shine!” It was not quite 6 AM  and the nightmare which I was in the midst of prior to this unexpected intrusion was still present to me in some unconscious register.  The psychic scrubbing function that so efficiently wipes our dreams from our nightly mental dreamscape had not yet had time to do its job and what could be recollected was quickly stored into some kind of temporary cache memory of my wakeful  mind.  Had I not gone to sleep thinking about electric sheep, I would not have woken up to these frightful and grotesque images of biological ‘slimes’ and amorphous palefaces floating around in some kind of Cyberiad vision of Stanislaw Lem. 

“Come on Nathan, get up,” Dulcinea said. “We've gotta get going. You’ve got a big day ahead of you.”  My head was heavy, groggy and confused, full of terrible nightmares induced by a weekend of science fiction binge-reading and ruminating over things.  “Come on, come on, it's already 6,” I heard Dulcinea implore. She had neatly laid out my whole wardrobe over the back of a chair; a complete ensemble including a very conservative Ermenegildo Zegna single-breasted suit, dark blue with gray stripes, a fine Egyptian cotton shirt, a red patterned silk tie, a Gucci reversible crocodile leather belt, Amedeo Testoni shoes, silk socks, a Burberry overcoat and another special surprise present to buoy me up—a briefcase made of the finest Italian leather with an accompanying notebook, day-timer and Mont Blanc pen. It was an extraordinarily generous gift on top of the wardrobe, and everything together maybe added up to a further expenditure of a thousand dollars. But I didn't really know the value of any of these things at the time. 

Dulcinea had a huge smile on her face and was dressed very atypically in a matching tightly fitted three piece Chanel pantsuit. The only incongruent element was her diamond and sterling silver studded four inch wide throat choker and her matching wrist restraints which she never took off for reasons that I suspected but would only confirm years later. Before I could say anything, she said, “I am going with you. I'll be there for you.” I was left wondering how that might go down with all of the security and protocols at the TMA, but I suppose she had some special privileges ala Campbell. “No worries, I won't go into the boardroom meeting, I'll listen in from the control room up above.” That artificial distance hardly allayed my fears or calmed me down.  The very mention of the pending boardroom caused me to have an internal conniption and a panic attack.  Rather than working on getting a presentation together as Dulcinea and any reasonable or half-reasonable person would expect, I had spent my entire weekend reading through Dulcinea's eclectic collection of science fiction novels, books and other bizarre and obscure materials. What in the world was I going to do? I had nothing prepared or thought through and I spent my time aimlessly procrastinating rather than making concrete or serious notes.  I'm a high school dropout and I had to basically face off against some of the most educated, most experienced minds in military intelligence,  computer science, geopolitics,  TV technology, encryption and security.  All I had to show for three days of preparation time were some indecipherable notes and scribbles. I felt an anxiety attack coming on like the way I felt prior to school proms and dances, a complete collapse of my ego and confidence. 

Dulcinea, without losing a beat, however, kept rushing me to hurry up and get dressed, telling me, “come on, let's see what you look like.” She had made me a giant cup of coffee, something that I was not quite used to and which would cause me to become jittery and mentally jumpy. With great effort, I got myself dressed in my new suit. The dressing experience was itself therapeutic. Not only did the clothing have a special sheen and look like something I'd never seen before, but the fabrics, and their textures and the way they balanced the body was very effective. The clothing just felt good. The perfect tailored fit. It was like I was putting on a new skin, a new protective shell. Dulcinea had pulled a full length mirror from her room and set it up for me.  I could barely recognize myself. To which she said in German--“Ein sehr attraktiver mann, fantastisch.” It was putting on the shoes and the overcoat that had the final effect of allowing me to imaginatively step into another personae, the person, in fact, who I would become.  I was no longer the kid from Long Island but an up and coming intelligence and TV analyst, a player at the center of the media universe in Manhattan and I was not alone since I had Dulcinea covering my back and cheerleading for me. I finally sat at the table, it was only 630 AM and I had another hour to think through my ideas. 

Weeks before this fateful meeting, I had discovered on Dulcinea's bookshelf some German translations of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, whose film Solaris I had seen. Lem would have a huge influence on me along with Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark and Charles Fort. They had influenced my early thinking on technology, media, television and the world. Lem was a mystery to me when I first found Dulcinea's collection.  Why had he never crossed my radar, I asked myself. I was a sci-fi junky. How was this possible?  I devoured the books, many of which Dulcinea had marked up and annotated in the margins. I was embarrassed that she had so extensively read these books that I had only just now discovered. Each book sent my imagination soaring. Solaris, a book about a living sentient planetary ocean, The Man from Mars, Dialogs, Summa Technologiae, and His Master's Voice. The underlying theme was the inability to communicate, the impossibility of alien civilizations ever truly communicating or ever seeing each other, and the terrible cosmic tragedy that could arise by our failure to understand or comprehend a message from space or visitation from a far off world that we cannot recognize. The whole technoscape also tantalized me, the science of phantomatics which we would later dubb Virtual Reality, moletronics, basically an outline of the future technology of nanotechnology, what Lem called intellectronics and we today call AI; aridadnology, which was essentially a sketch of the future theory of search engines. And most intriguingly, what Lem called phantomology, which involves the creation of worlds, and the idea that we might be able to “grow” new information, like we grow corn or wheat. It was Lem, perhaps more than anyone other than maybe Philip K. Dick, that shaped my perspective on TV and media and the future of technology.

 I had been reading for the umpteenth time Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before I went to bed the night before. I was thinking about the Dickenian religion of Mercerism and its relation to TV, the deep yearning for immersion, and the great television sensoria; Dick's strange and constantly broadcasting talk show Buster Friendly who is constantly attacking and attempting to debunk Mercerism. More than any single idea, it was the statement  that if  “God manifested himself to us here, he would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV.” It was this bizarre and prescient statement that preoccupied me and that I would spend decades thinking about. It was the irony of ironies that I would no sooner start working at the TMA than find myself working on a top secret national security file, awkwardly disposed of between none other than Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. The file was based on a high-level FBI request to investigate a complaint made about Lem by Dick.  The complaint was sensational but not to be discounted.  In 1974, Dick wrote a highly-referenced letter to the FBI with the shocking accusation that there was a Communist conspiracy to destroy the hearts and minds of America and The West by a propaganda campaign that was disguised by science fiction and that sci-fi was riddled with mind-bending and destructive concepts. 

The codename for this operation was, according to Dick, none other than the acronym L.E.M. Dick stated that Stanislaw Lem in fact did not exist but was in reality a collective personality of a group of propagandists and writers.  The West had been entirely infiltrated by this conspiracy and that only a complete uncovering of this diabolical plot and the destruction of these books could stave off this veiled attack which he thought amounted to a declaration of war. None of this would come out into the open until 1991, but it would send shockwaves through the science fiction community and the television and film worlds. It was a complicated file to be thrown at me so early in my career.  I was highly skeptical of Dick's allegations, although other writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, who I went up to Toronto to meet with and interview, tended to support Dick in the so-called Lem-Dick imbroglio, which upset my effort to quickly write off the complaint. We would run hundreds of thousands of trajectories from the science fiction world into many television shows, a big dedicated Star Trek team was established and we delved deeply into the Roddenberry scripts.  My final report would exonerate Stanislaw Lem, but Philip K. Dick was another story.  

Dick had made another allegation which despite its bizarre nature gained some traction, which was his claim that an international Nazi conspiracy was forcing Dick himself to incorporate coded messages into his novels and that he was being extorted, threatened and blackmailed into doing this. Dick was essentially leveling an accusation at himself and actually citing passages that were coded messages directed at lingering elements of the Nazi party, Nazi ideologues and Nazi revolutionaries that lurked among us. I was open-minded about this claim, although this sort of thing was lapped up by the likes of Campbell and Dulcinea, obsessed as they were with the continuation of the Second World War by other means. As time went by, I began to take some of Dick's other claims more seriously, particularly the so-called Revelation of 2/3/1973, the contact date between Dick and the vast active living intelligence system referred to as VALIS in Dick’s Exegesis. I would retain an open and active file on Dick and VALIS until the end of his life. Without giving too much away, I can confirm that a special deep investigation into the 1973 incident remains open and there are aspects of which have remained sealed as State secrets. 

This was all so long ago. Yet, after so many astonishing events and after so much has transpired, the board meeting is still pivotal and fresh in my mind.  We got there early. I was dressed like a Madison Avenue advertising executive and would have felt like an ostentatious show-off under any other circumstances, but Dulcinea was by my side and telling me to not worry what others think about you. Assert yourself, separate yourself and express your views strongly, she told me. I tried to maintain a nonchalant and insouciant attitude, not showing off, not being arrogant, just trying to get a hold of myself psychologically.  Anyway, Dulcinea went upstairs to the viewing room and was conversing with Campbell intensely about something that escaped me.  I still couldn't quite figure out their relationship. I knew it was definitely not romantic or illicit so it had to revolve around her obsession with hunting down Nazis.  At any rate, everyone started to file into the boardroom, each executive carrying large stacks of briefing papers and copies of their presentations for everyone's perusal.  I only had a few notes that I made in the Italian leather notebook with my new Mont Blanc pure sterling silver pen. It was a very incongruous sight.  

The presentation proceeded for at least three hours, talks on perimeter security,  new sensors and alarm systems, an overview of new mainframe computers, back-up fault tolerant systems, new uninterruptible power supplies, the latest IBM high-speed memory banks, emerging video recording technology, emerging optical disc systems, and on and on. Detailed reviews were given on the new content analysis programs, the new dedicated teams, hidden message analysis, encryption of secret messages, the state of our intelligence and investigation of the content creation stack from conceptual writers, to script writers, to editors and producers. And then a big rundown of various state subversion efforts, attacks by commercial interests, rogue operators, and suspected conspiracies. Many of the presentations were brilliantly succinct statements but none of them particularly grabbed the imagination or painted a new way forward which is what Campbell had asked us to think about. 

Then came my turn. I was practically frozen with trepidation and fear of saying anything, never mind uttering those thoughts that were quickly organizing themselves in my mind. I began, “Gentleman, I compliment you on your presentations and analysis. We have some extraordinary resources here, perhaps some of the best intelligence and analytical abilities in the world. That said, my sense is that we are ill-prepared for what is coming and that we are making the classic mistake that all military establishments have always made. We are fighting the last war not the war that we will be facing next.” With the statement, I could see that the mien of everyone in the room had quickly changed from one of indulgence to who in the world does this kid think he is talking too? How dare he challenge us on our domain.  “Please,” I said, “I do not mean to attack anyone here or impugn any of the incredible work that is taking place here. But let's look at some things. First, has anyone here in this room read anything about Moore's Law?” Something I had just read about in Scientific American the week before. Not a single head nodded in assent. “Well,” I said, “it's something you should all know about in that it is going to define everything we are going to be doing here, every budget and every analysis of our future requirements.”

“Basically, Moore's law, named after the Stanford professor and co-founder of Intel, states that the density of semiconductor circuits doubles every eighteen months. So what does that mean?” With that I took about two dollars in change in my pocket and said, “Well, what that means is that the ten million dollar IBM mainframe over there is only going to be worth this much in twenty years.”  

With that statement, there was an orchestra of groans and eye-rolling and a look on everyone's faces like, O.K. time to get him out of here. He's crazy.  At which point Pusateri chimed in with, “Your talking nonsense.” Genieve was meanwhile doing some quick back of the envelope calculations.  She interjected, “no, no, I think he is basically correct. I would calculate that the computational value of the IBM machine would be slightly less, maybe 90 cents, less than a dollar in any event.”  At that point there was a collective expression of “What?!”  “Yes, Genieve is correct, that would be the value in semiconductor power terms. Of course the machine would have some scrap metal value but this would have to be offset against the cost of moving it and shipping it out for scrap,” I continued. 

“The bigger problem is that content creation is doubling every six months, which means at an exponential rate of 3x our theoretical computational capacity to absorb the information. So we are basically going to need hundreds of millions of dollars in new hardware to keep up.  Now our filing systems look like something from the Jurassic period  and not something appropriate to the early Anthropocene.  We are still printing paper files and tucking them away in old metal filing cabinets. This is absurd and close to useless.” My use of the word  “useless” was received as an insult by the senior facility librarian.  The temperature around the table was growing and I could see looks of hostility from the old-timers. I was breaking their code of collegiality.  It was out in the open now.

“These are however not the serious problems I would like to address today.  These are, in comparison, somewhat trivial. The technology landscape is about change and change fast.  Technological change is going to accelerate and accelerate until we reach a  ‘singularity’  to use Lem's term.  The term caused everyone's heads to shake except Campbell’s who was clearly relishing these heretical statements. “Yes, a singularity. And the technologies that will drive this singularity are just emerging now.”  I then listed the technologies that I had read about in Lem's Summa. “You see these technologies are photomatics, moletronics, intellectronics, phantomology and ariadnology.” The listing of these technological realms now caused everyone's expressions to metamorphosize to a look of utter puzzlement. I then elaborated and explained exactly what each technology entailed and how it would affect what we were doing at the TMA.

I then came forward with the real shocker.  “What we are in the midst of is the growth of a new life-form, called media. It has been corrupted with messages from its beginnings, all of the early scripts contained hidden information, and subtexts and hypertexts, it is inherent in communication. But what we are in the midst of is something much greater. We are witnessing the birth of a new life form, a new exuberant, rich, rapidly evolving ecosystem, an ecosystem that is evolving so quickly that it will subsume all other ecosystems.  And like any ecosystem, it will attract its parasites, its symbionts, and other life forms that will live on its nutrients. These elements have likely already infected our media and our content streams. The rich nutrient flows that we are creating will attract predators. Make no mistake, their ghostly presence can probably already be detected. And what should we  call these infections, ghosts, ghoulies, fairies, spirits?” I asked, rhetorically. 

“I don't know, let's just call them Nipkow’s ghost.  Although we can't observe or see them, it's something like the great algae bloom off the Atlantic seaboard, visible from space and possibly across the entire universe and perhaps other universes too.  It's a radiating life-form that is sending out signals to the deep dark beyond. Those signals will be received and there will be a reply, you can count on that happening. The reply may be friendly or maybe it won’t be friendly.  I don't know.  Are we ready for that reply? Will we even be able to recognize the message?  What I would say to my esteemed colleagues here is that we are not just defending the minds of the American TV audiences or defending our democracy from ideological subversion but we are very much involved in defending our planet, our galaxy and maybe the entire universe.  The world is a lot more mysterious and complicated than we can imagine.” With that, I concluded my delivery as I recall it after all these years. Everyone around the table had a look of stupefied shock except Campbell who sat silent and momentarily motionless, thinking.  After about thirty seconds he rose and began to clap his hands. And with that cue so did everyone else, everyone stood up and gave me an ovation. My stature at the TMA was sealed that day.